← THE Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:00]
NVK
I think people just need a reality check. I love the meme is like, I don't matter because you don't fucking matter. It's literally the whole point of the system is to make individuals matter less, be less effective at disrupting the network on a positive or negative. The democratizing meme, all those kumbaya things, leave them behind. All the democracy thing, leave them behind. It's like Bitcoin's anarchy, right? It does not have religious attribution. It does not have political attributions. It doesn't have anything. It's just a mathematical system, right? With extremely conservative economic values. Right? And full anarchy. First of all, if you don't want to lose your coins, just turn off Twitter, go stack more sats and fuck everything else. Honestly, being worried about this stuff, it's when a lot of people sell, no, stop that. Just go fucking move on in your life. Nobody gives a shit. I feel like there are some very valid grievances. The arguments for removing the OP return limit were very poor. They know that there's a reality that filters don't work. But you can also just do nothing. Jesus can just fucking do nothing. You don't have to do something. You know, Core has been an absolute clusterfuck on how they handle users, businesses. And then you have the dark side that went complete fucking batshit insane. Like, you know, like once you bring csam, I mean, like, you know, the conversation is over. Like really, like, it's. That's it just conversation is that. That's where we're at now. It's like, you know, both sides are absolutely insufferable. And so my, my answer to that is I don't upgrade my node and I welcome. I seriously, I recommend everybody to stop upgrading. This idea of upgrading software is, it's like this is Windows mentality, you know, like, I come from, you know, the FreeBSD side. It's just don't upgrade. You know, I have servers running in seven years, 10 years uptime, I'm going to upgrade. It's not broken. There is no major vulnerability that matters. There is no major vulnerability in Bitcoin client that requires an update. Bitcoin is not about, like, you know, equality. Bitcoin is about fairness. It's a very, very different thing. You know, it's like we have a fair network that provides the same rules to everyone. It doesn't matter if you're king or if you're drunk or both. You have the same rules, right? Like everybody gets to enjoy the same rules. Nobody with more can rug you, right? But that doesn't mean that your voice, your node is worth the same as massive exchange node. At the end of the revolution, the revolutionaries kill each other, right? Like, it's always like that because like all a revolutionary knows to do is to be a revolutionary. You know, people like, you know, it's, it's the same reason why people come back from war and start shooting other people. You know, it's very hard for you to step out of that fight mode, you know, and accept that shit is just fine. You know, it's like, you know, it's like the go walk on grass meme. Listen, I'm guilty too. I'm. I'm on Twitter posting and you know, like participating in the, in the pointless, like the many pointless discussions because it's entertaining. But at the end of the day, like, you know, I walk barefoot on some sand and I remember that like the coins that I lost in a bolt accident are, you know, probably worth a lot. And, you know, and that's it. It's like just, just accept that, you know, we're winning. Like, it was hard. Losing is clearly more fun for some people.
- [03:37]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to make 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're still early. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well, with Blockware you can. New US tax rules let miners write off 100% of their mining hardware in a single year. So earn bitcoin daily while saving big come tax season. Get started at mining.blockware solutions.com Titcoin use the code Titcoin to get $100 off your first miner when using the Blockware marketplace.
- [04:18]
Host
This is not tax advice so go.
- [04:19]
Walker
Speak to the team at Blockware to learn more.
- [04:22]
Host
This is.
- [04:22]
Walker
That's mining.blockware solutions.com TitCoin Head to the show notes for links to find the show on centralized social media platforms and on Noster or just go directly to bitcoin podcast.net you'll find it all there and kind reminder that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on Fountain or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk.
- [04:53]
Host
Well, nvk dude, welcome back. I am a little bit offended that you didn't remember coming on the show before, but I'll let it slide. I think I may have been calling the podcast, like, the official name may have been another bitcoin podcast at that time.
- [05:04]
NVK
Yeah, I think you had just started and you had a different.
- [05:07]
Host
It was early. You were early. Yeah, it's been two years. Yeah. Yeah, that's. That's actually wild. Time flies when you're making bitcoin podcasts and nothing ever changes in the bitcoin space. But, yeah, I'm excited to have you back. It's. A lot has changed since then. So it was like. Yeah, it was almost two years ago. It was like beginning of 2024 when you came on. At that time, the. The kind of big debate of the day was around inscriptions and ordinals and that kind of thing. Bitcoin wasn't pumping quite as hard. You know, the.
- [05:40]
NVK
We were.
- [05:41]
Host
We were not quite so bullish, maybe. And now here we sit at. I think we just. At the time of recording, we just popped back above, like 120,000 dol. Infinitely printable fiat cuckbucks per bitcoin. And somehow still people are finding things to argue about. And so I wanted to bring you on because you're always somebody who. I feel you could probably be accused by some of being like a quote, offense sitter, somebody who's not deciding to take a side. But I always view it as. You tend to call out the bullshit on both sides of any debate when you see it, which is what everyone should do. Right? But I don't know, man, what's your vibe check right now on the bitcoin ecosystem? Does anything ever change or is this just. You've been in bitcoin a while? Is this just the same, you know, same as it ever was?
- [06:28]
NVK
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's bitcoin. I mean, there is no sides. That's. That's the thing. It's so fucking stupid. Like, there is no sides. There is no parties. There's no voting. There is no. Like, people just bring their, like, commie democratic baggage with them to bitcoin, right? Like, and then. And then they get confused, you know, like, there's a lot of people who gave people a lot of sort of like, bad analogies for bitcoin. Like, you know, voting and democratizing and shit like that. Like that. None of that stuff has anything to do with bitcoin. Like, bitcoin is the most selfish money that ever existed before. Like, you know, in a good way, like sort of like an objectivism way. Right. It's like you sort of advocating or really just protecting your bags by self verifying on your node with the software version that you want is all that really matters. I mean, everything else is just noise.
- [07:33]
Host
Yeah, it's. It's really funny. I was, I had Tidwell on the show recently and he basically, he had a quote that I loved, which was, you know, your, your relay policy doesn't make you a different bitcoiner. It doesn't mean you support a different bitcoin. We still have the, if we have the same consensus rules, we're still bitcoiners. Like, we're agreeing on, on the same things. Like everything else is just like, that's just like your, you know, that's just your opinion, man. But it was the, the last, the title of our last show that we did together, I put it as was a quote from you, which is, bitcoin is winning. Stop worrying. And I thought that was pretty good advice. And I don't know what it is about the human psyche that it's like bitcoin trades sideways for a little while and bitcoiners, instead of being more externally focused at existential threats, turn more inward and start getting at each other's throats. And I don't know if that's just like.
- [08:22]
NVK
It's not a new phenomenon, right?
- [08:24]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:25]
NVK
I mean, like at the end of the revolution, the revolutionaries kill each other, right? It's always like that. Because all our revolutionary knows to do is to be a revolutionary. Like, you know, people like, you know, it's, it's the same reason why people come back from war and start shooting other people. You know, it's very hard for you to step out of that fight mode, you know, and accept that is just fine. You know, like, it's like, you know, it's like the go walk on grass meme. You know, listen, I'm guilty too. I'm. I'm on Twitter shit posting and you know, like participating in the, in the pointless, like the many pointless discussions because it's entertaining. But at the end of the day, like, you know, I walk barefoot on some sand and I remember that like, you know, like the, my, my. The coins that I lost in a bolt accident are, you know, probably worth a lot, you know, and that's it. It's like, just, just accept that, you know, we're winning. Like hard losing is clearly more fun for some people.
- [09:39]
Host
Yeah, it is funny. And I'm so sorry to hear about that boating accident. You should really be more careful when you're out there on boats. But I understand I lost. I lost my keys as well in a boating accident. So if anybody sees them, you know, let me know. But I think it's strange to me that we can have. I mean, I guess. How do I say this? Everybody just seems to be talking past each other and not actually. Like, it's almost like this search for purpose and meaning and like this feeling that you need to. Every person feels they need to somehow save Bitcoin, that bitcoin is somehow right on the verge of dying at any given time and that it needs to be saved. And if you don't act right now, you know, it is. It is going to fall into the abyss, never to recover. And it's just kind of funny.
- [10:27]
NVK
Like, we have a lot of main character syndrome, you know, like people. People want to feel important. People want to feel like they matter. People want to feel like they're nod matter. Like this whole meme about the. The plebs and the running the nodes, like a complete idiosity. Like it was invented for people to feel good about themselves. But, like, no, that's not how it works. Just like keeping a node powered on. On the Internet, like, doesn't do anything to bitcoin, because if it did, bitcoin could be sibled, right? Imagine if node count mattered. You know, you could like just have a massive credit card like state actors do, and just go on Amazon and run like a million nodes.
- [11:05]
Host
This is something that I, and I thought this had been like, discussed ad nauseam to the point where most people understood this, that like, just the act of having a node online doesn't actually do anything meaningful. Again, I went back to our last discussion almost two years ago, and I was looking through some of the notes on it, and we literally talked about. We went through economic nodes because there was a big amount of confusion at that time about what an economic node is. And here we are again with apparently people not understanding what an economic node is. And it's just like, I mean, is it worthwhile for you to take the one minute to explain why an economic node matters? Again, for people, for those who didn't see the first episode and haven't been paying attention, apparently. Like, can you. Can you break that down for us? And I, I feel bad even asking because you probably talked about this, you know, 10,000 times for you personally, but can you break that down a little bit for people so that they understand what you mean?
- [12:00]
NVK
So what is an economic node. An economic node is a node that self validates, right. Transactions, right? So coinbase, sending and receiving transactions and their node in, in, in the name of, you know, 1 million users is a very important node in the network, right? They're essentially representing 1 million people money. And, and it's, and it's relaying those transactions, is, is checking those transactions, right? So if they diverged, we would have a serious economic problem in Bitcoin, right? Can you imagine like a million people's worth of coins just takes a different fork. Now that's a problem, right? So that is a node that has economic capacity and economic participation in the bitcoin space, right? You know, a ple node with a few cents there, right. Like, does that node matter? No. I mean, I know it sucks, but it doesn't, right? Bitcoin is not about like, you know, equality. Bitcoin is about fairness. It's a very, very different thing. You know, it's like we have a fair network that provides the same rules to everyone. It doesn't matter if you're king or if you're drunk or both. You have the same rules, right? Like everybody gets to enjoy the same rules. Nobody with more can rug you. Right? But that doesn't mean that your voice, your node is worth the same as, you know, a massive exchange node, you know, or you know, Michael Sailor's node is going to be, you know, is worth a lot, right. You know, he's representing a lot of shareholders there, right? But here's the funny part, like his personal node, I mean, like it kind of starts to diminish a bit how important it is, you know, what, is he going to dump his 10,000 coins personally? You know, would that hurt like, you know, in, in the, in the day trade? Candle? Sure, but does that matter? No. Right. Like this is why it's so important for people to understand that like, you know, in the aggregate, you know, it matters is rough. We never know what the number is. It's not possible to know what the number is. It's an ever changing system dynamic, right? So, you know, if a single human being decides to fork off, well, I mean, good luck If a group of people want to fork off, but it turns out that they are not going to carry with them the hash rate and a lot of the economic capacity of the network, well, that's great to get an airdrop, right? We get to sell the coins that are part of that fork and inform that fork that they're worth zero.
- [14:56]
Host
Now we've literally seen this happen. This isn't you imagining this. We, this has literally happened multiple times.
- [15:06]
NVK
That's correct. And you know, so like, I think people just need a reality check. It's like, you know, I love the meme is like, you know, I don't matter because you don't matter. Like it's literally the whole point of the system, you know, is to make individuals matter less, you know, like, be less effective at disrupting the network on a positive or negative, you know, like, and you know, like the democratizing meme, all, all those like kumbaya things like leave them behind. All the democracy thing, leave them behind. It's like bitcoin's anarchy, right? It does not have religious attribution. It does not have political attributions. It doesn't have fucking anything. It's just a mathematical system, right. With extremely conservative economic values. Right. And full anarchy.
- [16:00]
Walker
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- [17:06]
Host
Of course, none of this is tax advice from me.
- [17:08]
Walker
Go speak with the team at Blockware to learn more one more time. That is mining.blockware solutions.com tidcoin yeah, well I think that that's tough for people.
- [17:19]
Host
To actually grasp because we don't have anything that looks like that. There's nothing that's like that in the fiat system to, to the extent that bitcoin is like, this is a new paradigm. So I, I empathize with people and obviously I didn't understand it right away. You know, like, you know, the only person who understood it right away, I guess was Satoshi Everybody else had to, you know, kind of like we all get it wrong maybe.
- [17:40]
NVK
It's totally like, it's a very complicated new paradigm. Yeah. Like, you know, it's. It's. It's very similar to, you know, like, oh, there is electricity now. There wasn't before. It's like, you know, is like witchcraft. Right? Like, people are confused for 100 years. Right. Like, I mean, the posters of when the electricity was sort of like starting to be publicized are amazing. It's like, oh, my God, this is witchcraft. Oh, you touch, you die. You know, it's like, yeah, you know that that's how it works. It's either accept that this thing is awesome and it's going to go somewhere. So you have that sort of like a bit of a.
- [18:19]
Host
Some.
- [18:21]
NVK
You have some. Some faith that the system will go somewhere. You have some belief. You do that with. With a lot of agency by reading what you can understand, you know, and you essentially have a long position on it. Right. Or don't nobody gives a shit. Like, you know, it's like, sorry, we don't need you. I know it sucks to hear it, but we don't need you. We don't need anybody. We don't need core. We don't need knots. We don't need anybody. This thing is going to keep, like, TikTok another block. I'm still running client 22. It works. Does it work for lightning nodes? No, but I'm not running lightning. I'm talking about bitcoin. Basically, it works, right? Is it nice to have lightning work? Yes. Should we change bitcoin to change bitcoin even further to make lightning work? Probably not. You know, it's like, you have a system that works. Like, have some fucking respect.
- [19:22]
Host
I think it's hard for people to say or to acknowledge that, oh, it's going to be fine without me, like. Right. Sure. Does it need everyone in the collective to use it to even. To exist? Like, if nobody was using bitcoin. Yeah, it wouldn't, like, it wouldn't matter anyway. Right. But we're all here. But you as an individual, like, you have. You're not going to save bitcoin. It's admirable.
- [19:44]
NVK
No, you're not here to save bitcoin. I'm here to save bitcoin. No, you're not. No, you're not. And everybody finds it out fast. And if they don't, they rage quit.
- [19:53]
Host
Yeah. Are we about to enter a season of rage quitting?
- [19:56]
NVK
Oh, absolutely. I can totally see it. I already have a Personal list. Just for the fun of it. I already have a list of people, I think, who quit.
- [20:04]
Host
Got it, Got it. Ready to go. Okay.
- [20:06]
NVK
Personal wagers. Like, I'm not. I don't publicize these things. I don't wish harm on anyone. I love all these people. Like, I really do. Like, I think, you know, everybody is like, you know, regardless of their role. You know, it takes many types. It takes many kinds of people to build something huge. Right? So, you know, in that sense, I love everybody. But realistically speaking, you know, like, we know that people will not be able to accept and they will rage, quit. It's just the natural course of bitcoin.
- [20:41]
Host
I had to bring up this.
- [20:42]
NVK
Well, there is a poster. It's one of my favorite posters.
- [20:44]
Host
Electricity. I mean, it's amazing. Like, you just look at this, you know, I mean, the guy I love, the skull that's in the. On the, you know, electrical pole, just for added benefit, the light bulb, like, it's all just incredible. You got the constable running away from it, you know, just amazing stuff. But. And that's. I feel like where. That's kind of where we're at right now. It's like everyone's literally going to die, and bitcoin is going to fail if we don't do something right now.
- [21:12]
NVK
I mean, when you go hyperbolic on bitcoin, you tend to lose the crowd. Don't lose the audience. Don't lose the audience, because once you lose the audience, it's very, very hard to get it back. And I think both sides have made some good arguments. Both sides made terrible arguments, and now both sides are losing the audience.
- [21:37]
Host
Yeah. Because I think people are just. The average pleb out there is just tired of it. The suit coiners haven't cared this entire time. Like, they're.
- [21:46]
NVK
Because they know it's working.
- [21:48]
Host
Yeah.
- [21:48]
NVK
You know, like, you know, they did their due diligence, right? They. They saw the blocks are coming, the clients are working, you know, like the fuck they're. All you have to do is open. You just have to open your node once in a while to sync it. Check to the next few transactions that went in. Your treasury are good. They're good. Great. Close the laptop, Move on.
- [22:08]
Host
Yeah, yeah. And it's like, meanwhile, plebs are whipping themselves into a frenzy or being whipped into a frenzy.
- [22:15]
NVK
I don't.
- [22:16]
Host
I don't know which one it is. It seems to me, I mean, so you've, I think, done a good job of calling out on both. Again, quote both sides. I'm using this just because this is the way it's being talked about. But on quote, both sides of this, quote, debate calling out what you see as kind of improper or just, just bad, you know, decision making processes, is it worthwhile to talk about that at all? In terms of like, what. Okay, listen guys, here's if, if you want to make it through this without losing your mind and rage quitting, here's how this conversation could have been approached a bit better. Do you want to talk that about that at all or is it. We can also skip it because I'm good with that too.
- [22:54]
NVK
I mean, I can put like a very small 2 cents. It's just like, I mean, listen, who am I to tell people what to do? But you know, it's like, first of all, if you don't want to lose your coins, just turn off Twitter, go, go stack more sats and fuck everything else. Honestly, like, you know, being worried about this stuff, it's when a lot of people sell. I remember the DMs when, you know, UASF was happening and people were like, hey man, you know, I'm scared. I'm going to sell my coins for now until the. No, stop that. Just go fucking move on in your life. Nobody gives a shit. You know, I feel like there are some very valid grievances. The arguments for removing the up return limit were very poor. Some big names weighted in. They're also not ideal, like, not very convincing arguments. But, you know, there's a reality that filters don't work, you know, but you can also just do nothing, you know, like, Jesus could just fucking do nothing. You don't have to do something, you know. You know, Core has been an absolute cluster fuck on how they handle users, businesses. You know, I, I think the, it's, it's sort of like, maybe it's just like the more Gen Z sort of vibe to it where, you know, they're not as tactful or as, as laid back and can handle the heat as, as, as, as easy. And you know, again, they're losing the audience. You know, most of them are preoccupied with layer two. You know, there's, there's a lot of that and you know, the people that don't care about layer two, well, you know, it's like they don't care about your preferences. Like it's, you know, because working, right, that's not to say that's not important to have layer two. Like, none of these things are absolute and there's many ways to look at them, right? And then you have the dark side that went complete batshit insane. Like, you know, like once you bring csam, I mean like, you know, the conversation is over. Like really like it's, that's it just conversation is done. So yeah, I mean that's where we're at now. It's like, you know, both sides are absolutely insufferable. And so my, my answer to that is I don't upgrade my node. And I welcome, I seriously, I, I recommend everybody just stop upgrading. This idea of upgrading software is like, this is Windows mentality, you know, like I come from, you know, the FreeBSD side. It's just don't upgrade. You know, I have servers running in seven years, 10 years uptime, I'm going to upgrade. It's not broken. There is no major vulnerability that matters. There is no major vulnerability in Bitcoin client that requires an update. You know, the, all the vulnerabilities are more sort of like of the category of like. Yeah, they can crash your node. Yeah. Well start the laptop again. You know and I, I, none of my nodes have been taken down. So you know, clearly not a widespread problem. And you know, most people are not running lightning self custodially because self custodial lightning is fully broken. You know, to just being very honest, you know, lightning is great. Custodial lightning fantastic works. You know, upgrade those nodes. Yeah, I think I'll leave it at that. Otherwise I'm just gonna start inciting more hate towards me by just being a little bit more bland.
- [26:29]
Host
No. Fair enough. So I mean, and again this is, it's very funny. People, people automatically assume in, in this conversation that if you say something that is against what they view as, against their opinion of how they perceive things to work, they view you as the enemy. You must be a shilling for the other side. Right. And when in reality it's like no, you can just, I can just think that, you know, the options on the table are not actually addressing the things that you think they're addressing. Like I haven't upgraded my node in, I don't know, a couple of. It's been, I mean at least a year, year plus maybe, maybe more like. That's, that's what I've told people as well as, you know, look, you know, Bitcoin nodes are meant to be backwards compatible. Like each node implementation upgrade, like that's the whole thing, it needs to be backwards compatible. Right.
- [27:15]
NVK
Yep.
- [27:16]
Host
And so in like unless as you said, there's a major, some sort of security vulnerability that's discovered something like that you shouldn't need to update your note, but if you want to go for it, and if you want to run knots, go for it. Like, do whatever you want, but just be realistic about what that choice actually means. And if it is actually doing the things that you are being told it's doing in terms of you saving bitcoin. And that's kind of where it's like we should be able. Yeah, like, live and let live. Go touch grass. It's all going to be okay. Bitcoin is winning. And let's remember this, we are replacing a absolutely cluster fucked fiat system. And this is. As messy as this might be in bitcoin, man, it's. It's still a heck of a lot better than that. And I feel like that is. That is forgotten even by bitcoiners, which is, which is shocking. Yeah, yeah, I did want to ask you just so more broadly, like, because I think we've said enough about the current, current drama for now and it's been just drained ad nauseam by so many people on so many podcasts. And the last thing I'll say is I would love to know, like, also be scared to know the cumulative time that has been spent just like debating and debating and rehashing these same points with people talking past each other like it's in terms of man hour years, like it's decades of cumulative time that have just been burned on this. But okay, whatever. Where do you sit on more broadly, like zooming out a little bit, quote, upgrading bitcoin versus maintaining bitcoin.
- [28:44]
Walker
Do you.
- [28:45]
Host
Are there privacy and scaling upgrades that you think need to happen and should happen in bitcoin? Or are you more of the opinion that, hey, what we have works. Well, let's not mess that up. Let's focus on scaling on other, you know, other higher layers, let's say.
- [29:03]
NVK
I think there's two things that must be very separated. One is consensus changes. The other one is non consensus changes, right? To bitcoin core, the client. I mean, I really wish the. And this is idiotic of me to even think about wishing that somebody else would do something. It's like pissing in the wind, right? I mean, who am I to wish the core went in a different direction, right? I mean, I should just, you know, pull my sleeves and go do it myself, right? Like, this is a full meritocracy, right? But if any core person is listening, like, you know, go build an indexer on, on bitcoin core, like, it's nothing to do with, with consensus, but like you know, we shouldn't need to need like Electrum server for SPV light nodes, right? Like Bitcoin core should have an indexer. Bitcoin core should support bip39. Like there's a bunch of like low hanging fruit things that the market needs, business needs, right. That, that like would, would come a long way in also buying goodwill from industry for, for the client now on consensus changes. I mean, you know, like there's personal preferences but like you know, maybe they're misguided for me too. Like I mean I'd love to have covenants just because I want to have on chain vaults, right. Like I want the security to be not cold card based. I want the security to be bitcoin like block based, right. There's a lot of design space there. But unfortunately the covenant conversation gets hijacked by layer twos. Love to them, I know they need it but just talking from pure sort of selfish necessities, right. Like you know, and, and I think that you know, for example the covenant discussions, you know, if, if, if they would go make the case for all these economic actors that they can have amazing on chain vaults you'd be a lot more tolerable of a change than talking about how they want to pay for you know, feeding chickens on the Internet, right.
- [31:17]
Host
Can you talk a little bit about just for folks who may not be totally familiar the, the basics of what covenants are and how these unchained vaults work. Because it's something that seems kind of like pretty cool to me like has genuine, like it would be useful for, I mean not, and not just for businesses.
- [31:31]
NVK
So right now if you want the spending condition right now is on the output, right? So you know like when you send it like you're sending into a multi sig address, therefore that address requires the two signatures for you to move to the next address, right? What we're trying to do is the, the spending conditions to be on the input. So that means that you can move with spending conditions from that contract. So for example, let's say you create a vault and that bitcoin address itself knows that it cannot be spent unless it meets some conditions. I'm putting it very crudely to see if it sort of makes sense. But the point is we could create a vault saying for example the money doesn't move from here more than one bitcoin a month counted in blocks of course. But that kinds of amazing spending conditions, spending policies are how you find amazing security and still remain functional because it's easy to put a Private key under the ocean and just leave it there. You know, very hard for somebody to get it right now if you have, you know, in order to become capable of signing and having security around that, signing operationally that's really where the magic is at because that's where the trade offs and the balances come in. Right. And, and being able to do that with onchain policies versus cold card policies would be a huge upgrade.
- [33:11]
Host
Yeah, I mean and again this, this seems like one of those things. I would assume there's not as much, let's say general resistance to this. It's just there's maybe not as much.
- [33:22]
Walker
General knowledge about this.
- [33:24]
Host
Is that fair?
- [33:26]
NVK
I mean like there is some FUD around it. You know, there is some core FUD around the fact that there is no demand for it, which is absolutely absurd. You know, there was no demand for up return limit removal and that was changed. So that, that pisses me off. There is, you know, there is definitely like amazing applications that's already been demonstrated, you know, like as, as well as you can do without changing bitcoin. And yeah, I mean, you know we, I mean there were some FUD around how, you know, like the governments can get into the covenants and whatever. Like it's the same with multi sig. They, you know, the government wanted to force you to be a co signer, you know, of your keys or something. So like you know, idiotism. Yeah, I mean I don't, you know, but, but it does change bitcoin, which is like I think the only fair bitcoin real sort of negative to it is like he changes bitcoin.
- [34:31]
Host
Right.
- [34:31]
NVK
Like now we have a fundamental change to it.
- [34:36]
Host
It's actually something that can. Is something that's going to be implemented eventually but it's just going to take a lot more time just because of the fundamental nature of the change.
- [34:49]
NVK
I don't know. Some days I wake up thinking that we can still do some changes on bitcoin. Some days I wake up saying that we're fully ossified. So I don't. The only change. There's only one change we have to make to bitcoin. We have to fix the UNIX time code. There is no choice on that. The day will come and it's going to have to be changed period. Or bitcoin stops.
- [35:10]
Host
Can, can you. And again, just for folks, can you explain that one a little bit just in layman's terms. That's like a pretty. I feel like that's like a not. That's not even A controversial one that's just like this.
- [35:19]
NVK
It's just, it's just encoding. Think about it as just like the encoding. Right? Like old computers used to do the encoding of dates in a certain way and they're done differently now. Right. So in order to remain compatible with computers, you have to fix that. It really is that. It's like, think about it. Like, the best way to think about it is like Y2K. If they had not fixed the computers, some computers crashed. It's similar to that.
- [35:49]
Host
Do you think just on this topic of ossification, Because I think people often get confused and think ossification is like some choice that happens. Like, okay, and now we'll ossify, but it's really not a choice. Right. It's more of just a natural result of a process that happens. Is that a fair way to describe it? And I mean, I think you're kind of arguing maybe that we may already be at that point where we are sufficiently ossified, where the, like, we're just probably not going to change at any meaningful way at the consensus level. Is that, is that your general, like, you know, kind of for, let's say base level assumption at this point?
- [36:28]
NVK
I think the, the, the best way to look at it is maybe unpopular, but realistically speaking, Bitcoin really is as ossified as the people at the time are not into changing it. Because at the end of the day, you know, there is nothing preventing people from 50 years from now from changing the limit of bitcoin.
- [36:55]
Host
You make tail emissions.
- [36:56]
NVK
The supply. No, the supply, yeah. So, you know, there's nothing really holding them back. Right. So, you know, like, except for economic forces. Right. That would say my family stacked all the way to now. You, you're not going to change the limit. Right? But, but, but, but the point is bitcoin can be changed. It's not like it's written in stone somewhere. And you know, the humans around the can go and just, you know, the humans can do whatever they want. They might fork off, they might not. So I think it's important to, to realize that, you know, for example, if we did like have a quantum advancement in, you know, 20 years from now, you know, they require a change. We might have to change bitcoin. Right. That's, that's, but that's something for the humans that are dealing with it at that time to deal with it at that time. Like, you know, you can't control the future. Like. Right. You know, it's like, it's like what trust lawyers Always say, like, okay, you can set up your trust as tight as you want this way. But, like, you can't really rule your children after your dad. They're going to. They might figure out a way of breaking the trust rules. You know what I mean? It's like, you're dead. Get over it.
- [38:12]
Host
Do you. Do you think that there's any reasonable chance of a hard fork happening anytime in the near future? Like, is that something that's. That's on your radar?
- [38:24]
NVK
It's not going to happen.
- [38:25]
Host
Like, you know, again, like, no airdrop for us then?
- [38:28]
NVK
Yeah, no, I mean, oh, no, we could get airdropped. We can definitely get airdrops. But I mean, like, no, no, I don't think there'll be like a successful change to Bitcoin in the. Coming. In the near future. It's just not going to happen. And it's designed this way. The more people who don't agree with each other, don't like each other, have different preferences than each other, share the same rule set, share the same network, there's less likely you're going to see changes happening. Right? It's like, it's like getting like, you know, Israelis and Palestinians to agree to turn the whole space into a massive Christian swimming pool. Both sides are gonna say you. Right?
- [39:16]
Host
Like, that's a good analogy.
- [39:19]
NVK
Just. No, right. Like, I mean, so essentially that's what I'm talking. Like, it's just. It's just you have more opposing sides sharing a concern, right? Like, you can't. Like, it's very difficult to make a massive change that is unilateral by any, any, any side, do you think, on.
- [39:38]
Host
The quantum side of things? Because I've. I've seen so many different opinions on this as somebody I don't know recently, maybe it was just trolling, but was like, if we don't upgrade Bitcoin to be quantum resistant by next year, it's all over. And I'm like, whoa, okay, again, whenever.
- [39:50]
NVK
People put a timeline or something or make an assumption about like, like a deadline in Bitcoin, they're literally full of shit and they're trying to take your coins. It really is that simple.
- [40:03]
Host
I mean, it's like, it's phishing 101, right? Like, from a, from a social engineering perspective.
- [40:08]
NVK
Think about it this way. Think about Bitcoin as a gigantic, gigantic options market, right? Like, it's like a, you know, we are all long, right? So, like, if it was true that quantum is a problematic, you would see, you know, the people who have asymmetric information starting to sell. Right. Like, why would they tell anyone about, like, because they don't want the selling to happen while they're selling. Right. They want the best price possible. So, you know, it's not, yeah, it's just, you know, it's a, like the prediction market will go the other way. Right. I don't think you have to worry about any of this stuff. And if this stuff sort of worries you, then turn off the Internet and go focus on the stuff you understand.
- [41:06]
Host
Go touch some grass. You know, I lied. I do, I did have. Just on the topic of touching grass, I do have one more question about the Core vs Knots debacle. Is Bitcoin going to die when Core v30 comes out?
- [41:19]
NVK
I, I, I don't think so. I don't think it'll make any difference. I don't think. I also, just for people to understand is that the majority of the network doesn't upgrade to new software, like, right away ever. You know, I don't. Unless they need, unless they need the specific thing that's being changed. Like, it's not. People don't upgrade. You know, it takes a long time for miners to upgrade. You know, like. Yeah, it's just. Stop worrying.
- [41:54]
Host
I had to get that one in there just to make sure. This way, when Bitcoin dies, I'm going to point back and be like, you've told me it would be okay. Nvk. Son of a gun. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
- [42:02]
NVK
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like, thankfully it's not a securities law. This is a commodity. Right? It's like we can, we can speculate.
- [42:12]
Host
Speaking of securities, actually, I've got to say. So you, you started bitcointreasuries.net a while ago. I mean, it's been a number of years and I don't know how long you've had the domain, but like, the site's been active for, for several years, long before the current influx of Bitcoin treasury companies. Question one is, how many domains do you actually own? Ballpark. And then question two is, did, I mean, were you, were you ever skeptical that this would blow up the way it did? Or did you kind of like, know, like, yeah, this is going to be a, this is going to be a hot domain?
- [42:45]
NVK
No, I, I don't have any domains.
- [42:48]
Host
Did you lose those in a boating accident too?
- [42:49]
NVK
That's fair.
- [42:50]
Host
Okay.
- [42:53]
NVK
So, you know Bitwaters like scarce things, right? It's just, it's like, it's the mindset it can't help each other. It can't help yourself. But remember, nobody owns domains. People rent domains. It's just like real estate. You rent domains, you stop paying, it goes away. Bitcoin is the only thing you actually own. So the treasury is. What's funny is that the treasury sort of like meme concept has been around since the very early days of bitcoin. It's not a new concept. The idea is kind of simple. It's like any rational state actor, state actor, any rational economic actor that. That sees a better money will sort of acquire it, right? And like, you know, publicly traded companies are no different than that. And, you know, it's just sort of like, again, it's like, I love that meme, Bitcoin, everything is working according to plan, right? It really is just that it's, you know, you have, you know, you have just people buying better money, storing it, and then trying to figure out how to financialize it, because that's what Wall street does. But, you know, even the. Even the publicly traded companies that don't financialize it, like, they're just sort of sitting on a pile. There's lots of them that do that too. You know, like, you win because it's just, you know, bitcoin appreciates faster, that the dollar is dying. And then everything else, I mean, you know, I mean, you can penny stock, you can gamble, but like, with more predictable things, bitcoin is the only thing that, you know, sort of is consistent in the last 16 years.
- [44:49]
Host
Yeah, I think a lot of people and myself, I play around with stocks occasionally with a very small, hilariously small amount of money just to remind myself of what a bad trader I am, and then be like, oh, yep, see, you should have just put this in Bitcoin, you moron. With a few exceptions, but usually it's like, nope, should just put it in bitcoin and lived your life and you would have been better off in the long run. Should have been podcasting more instead of looking at those price charts. But I think that a lot of people have perhaps come to that realization even with these treasury companies, just because a lot of people bought in on top of the hype for some of these earlier this summer and then have now watched bitcoin kind of chug along sideways. Now bitcoin rips, but during that time, treasury companies kind of took a little dip. But the other thing is, we're so early in this. We're so early in bitcoin, broadly, I don't think we're even out of the innovators phase. If you want to get into the tech adoption curve, we're certainly not even close to the early majority. Not even close. And so I think it's going to be really fascinating to see how this develops over the coming years. We're also, I think, about to enter a massive liquidity push environment where like, things have been like, as far as.
- [46:06]
Walker
Fiat goes, things have been like relatively.
- [46:08]
Host
Tight for the past couple of years. And I don't know, it's going to get pretty crazy when they turn things back on. I'm just, I don't know, maybe, maybe the government kind of just takes away more of the Fed's cartel autonomy and things get really interesting. I don't know. Are you, I mean, you don't have to answer this if you're not comfortable with it. Do you play around with these treasury companies at all or are you just like focus entirely on stacking bitcoin and obviously building your companies to stack more bitcoin?
- [46:39]
NVK
I mean, like, you know, I, I am a caveman bitcoiner. Right? So like, you know, the bolting accident did. And then, you know, never do anything different than that. And, but you know, like I, I do have like, you know, some trading accounts that are part of my fiat lives. You know, like I, I do have other businesses and have other things going on and sometimes you need things that are a little bit more like a fiat universe compatible. Right? So yeah, I do own some of this, the stocks. I own other stocks. But the, the point is, you know, like the majority of, of the people out there, you know, they're not gonna have a UTXO. You know, there is not enough UTXOs for everybody. I've done the math. There's a few tweets. Seriously, like, there's just not enough UTXOs for everybody. There really isn't. Like, so the, the issue is like, how do these people, like, you know, so they're not gonna get the freedom, right, the self sovereign part of bitcoin. They're not going to enjoy that part. So can they at least get some upside from the debasement against debasement against everything else? So they will find sort of allegories to the bitcoin play. Right? If their pensions are exposed to partially to bitcoin through a bitcoin treasuries company, at least their pensions don't go to zero. Right? I mean, I think because the Dumorist brain is very lazy, they are not trying to find solutions, they're just pointing out problems. So it's very easy to go to, oh my God, Civil War and 60102 and this and that and everybody shooting each other. But it's not how the world works, right? Like there's a lot of inertia even during big wars. I mean like the majority of the populations in the countries that were not being the ones being bombed, like it was life as usual, you know. And so, you know, if I think we're going to end up unless we have like some crazy black swans that God knows what happens, right? But I think what we have is some sort of like a peaceful, slow like monetary replacement. You know, it's the great replacement.
- [49:30]
Host
You got to be careful with that one. I don't know if that gets you in trouble anymore on the Internet, but YouTube will add a flag to this later.
- [49:37]
NVK
That's a great replacement. Yeah, you can beep it for YouTube theory. That's right. No, beep it for YouTube. I don't care. The, the. But the point is, you know, like I, I think, you know, it's in everybody's interest to have the majority of the world at peace, right? Because even if you profit from war, right, like, even if you're like a Soros type, right, and you're like, you know, like fuck yeah, like let's Raytheon the fuck out of the other country, right? Even if you profit from war, it's like war over there. You still don't want war where you live, you know, you still want peace where you live. So it's in everybody's interest to sort of like change the wheel of this car while it's still driving. It's going to be tricky, but you know, it's already happening when you think about it, right? Like, you know, people don't saving dollars anymore. They save in dollar denominated stocks, right? Like people's savings are in stocks or they are in commodities, right? So, so like we've already like demonetized the dollar in that sense, right? Like it's just that we still need a unit of account and that's what the military comes in, right? Like when, when Americans say, you know, my, my taxes, you know, like what does the military do? Well, they make sure you have, it's worth a lot and it costs a lot of money to maintain the unit of account. Is that a good thing? Probably not. It's not great. But that's why you can buy a TV for cheap. Delivered the same day from Amazon in your own currency, right?
- [51:28]
Host
It is incredible. Same day Amazon delivery just never ceases to blow my mind.
- [51:32]
NVK
You can't have Amazon same day for cheap without the army. It doesn't work like that, right? Like that wealth would have been more distributed or it would have shifted somewhere else. So anyways, the point is the treasury companies, they're just a backdoor into the system. It really is. It's like we are infecting the financial system. It's not the way around, right? You can still hold your bitcoin. Nobody's preventing you from doing that. I literally make products for us to do that, right. It doesn't get more caveman than a cold card. But like, you know, and that's why I'm at the two sides of this spectrum. It's like, you know, like I think we need to financialize and backdoor into the system so that we don't have like fucking civil wars, right? So that everybody enjoys the benefit of number go up even if they don't own bitcoin, right? And on the other side we can have our freedom and be cavemens, you know, like that they don't have to participate in the system in a certain way. I think that's a much healthier way to go about it. And it's clearly playing out. So, you know, I hope I'm not wrong that things don't change.
- [52:49]
Host
I mean, things could undoubtedly get very messy and I think will. I don't think it's necessarily. I mean, if you subscribe to the fourth, you know, general fourth turning theory, like we're undoubtedly in the midst of one. There's a lot of other cycles that appear to be converging right now as well, whether societal, economic or otherwise. Things could and probably will get extremely messy, but we have these incredible tailwinds that we've never had before, which are bitcoin. And I think AI is an important one to mention as well. Like you've got deflationary money and probably the most deflationary technology to exist thus far in terms of AI. And it's going to be really interesting to see how that plays out. Because the fiat world doesn't work when everything gets cheaper forever. Like it needs things to get more expensive forever. It's kind of like part of it. Flat screen TVs just happen to be able to outpace inflation and continue to deflate, which is, you know, incredible for us as a consumer. Like that's the, the beauty of the pseudo free market that we have, right, is that we can keep getting certain things.
- [53:53]
NVK
I mean, it's just that the marginal cost of production of Most things go, go to, you know, not zero, but it goes to, you know, as low as. As you can, right? Like, and, and as we come up with solutions to get around scar cities, right, like it gets even cheaper. So, you know, like you have materials that were scarce and no longer scarce. You know, we're gonna get gold is gonna have this day too. You know, we're gonna get to a point where gold is no longer scarce. You know, like they keep on finding more, more gold and you know, eventually, you know, it's worth minus a mass. You know, it's like. But a lot of these things have these problems because they have utility value. Utility value is not a good thing. It's a terrible thing because it creates a market for that product to be sold when bitcoin. The only utility value for bitcoin is holding it and exchanging it. But there is nothing else. Anyways, we're all going to be fine.
- [55:00]
Host
I always appreciate having a conversation with you. NVK is like going outside and touching grass a little bit. It's always very calming. I do want to talk about stuff that you guys are building right now because I know you have your hands in a lot of different pots. You want to talk a little bit maybe on the hardware side first. Just kind of what you guys have released recently, what you're cooking up for the future.
- [55:22]
NVK
So for people that don't know, we make the cold current, right? Like the mnematic, quintessential bitcoin hardware wallet that everybody uses. I think the main thing that I've noticed in this last sort of few years is that it's very clear to me that there is interesting competition out there, but it's very clear that people don't use bitcoin like the majority of the products out there. The thing that just from people that don't use bitcoin, so I don't see things coming out, we just keep on iterating. I was like, how can we make bitcoin more usable, operationally speaking, to bitcoiners trying to send base layer money safely, securely and pass on their children, right? And I think that's really where this last feature was born from. So you have your hardware wallet, everybody has one, right? And including your cold card, you go and you can send your whole amount out. And that's not a good thing, right? Because even though we give you trick pins to break it to work it out and you can delay login and whatever, at the end of the day that device is allowing you to just send it all and that could be to a bad person. Right. Under duress. So what we did recently was to add spending conditions to an extra key for multisig. But we saw the demand and saw sort of like the light there where what people really want is the hydro wallet to say no, you can't spend more than this or you can't send to an address that is not on this list. Right. And so what we did is we created a system for spending policies inside the hardware wallet itself. So the hardware wallet can prevent you from doing things that you don't want yourself to do in certain situations. Right. So you can set up your cold card to now let you spend more than one Bitcoin per transaction. You can make the cold card not let you spend without a two factor authentication from a different device, not let you. So there's velocity magnitude, so not spend more than a certain amount, period. And also whitelist whitelists are very important because you can have a operational code card that's maybe like your warmer device that sits on your desk for you to operate your business or if you're a trader and then it can have only the white list that go to maybe your other code card that's deep under a mountain or go to your exchange account, you know, things like that. So you can have a list of white listed addresses and you know, like this, this helps people travel as well. So you can have a traveling code card now, you know, it has spending limits so you know, you can't be forced to, you know, do something you don't want to do. And it's more like it really is within those. And can we do this without an app, you know, so that we don't have to depend on Apple, we don't have to depend on more software stacks. Can we do this without a server so that you don't have to talk to anyone or anything, you don't have to talk to Coincaid. And so we spent a lot of time making that work with just a device. There's no counterparties on that spending policy.
- [59:07]
Host
I think that's, that's pretty incredible. I mean, so I'd also like to know just your opinion, I mean on multisig kind of broadly, because obviously you guys do not still to this day do not have any sort of, you don't do any sort of software. Like you don't provide the client to use as you know, the software interface. You.
- [59:25]
NVK
That's deliberate.
- [59:27]
Host
Big things. Yeah, yeah, it's been like very purposeful on your side. Cold card is obviously used by A ton of people. It's used in a lot of multisig setups as well, especially for people that want some sort of vendor diversity in terms of, you know, maybe they want a couple other brands and they want a cold card in there as well.
- [59:44]
Walker
What are your thoughts?
- [59:45]
Host
Because obviously some of these things that you're talking about in terms of these features that you've enabled could. They're almost their own form of multisig, but already just built into the actual device itself. Do you think that, like, what do you think is the appropriate setup for most people? I'm not asking you to say this is what everyone should do, but for most people, what do you think is the best way to go about that?
- [60:06]
NVK
This is funny. So we actually have the most comprehensive multisig support on the market. Every possible multisig craziness, fully supported, which is funny. And we actually have spending policies for multisig as well. So I think the reality is this, like, we need optionality, right? Because different people have different needs, and also people have different needs themselves. So, like, you know, the same way you have, like a spending wallet, you have a travel wallet, you have a checking account, you have a savings account, you have a trading account, you have, you know, like a gold bar account. Do you know what I mean? It's like, when you think about that, like, you know, okay, so how can we provide that functionality to people with. Through our devices? Because we have those needs as users. Pretty much. Like, almost all features that Coldcard have are a need of our own. We're very selfish with that. We make the products for ourselves, and then hopefully people get used to it as well.
- [61:12]
Host
But you are a bitcoin business. Like, you operate Bitcoin businesses. Like, you know what Bitcoin businesses and users need, because you operate one and you are the other. Like that, you know, Makes sense.
- [61:21]
NVK
Exactly. So, you know, I think like, the great majority of people, you know, outside of Twitter, you know, outside of the spotlight, they're more than well served by single sig playing vanilla single sig. Most people can keep a metal plate secure in secret. Okay. You know, would you put your whole life savings on it? Probably not. Right? Like, that's where you start sort of doing a little bit of game theory on your own life. Right? Like, how much? It's the same as having a gold bar, you know, when you're safe in your house or something. Right? Like, how much gold did you have in your house? Right. Like, you can answer those questions.
- [62:05]
Host
Not all of your gold, hopefully.
- [62:06]
NVK
Exactly. Right. So so think about single sig in that sense, right? Like. Like how much would you have on hand or accessible to you, right? Same with cash. How much would you have? Because cash burns, right? Like, it gets tricky. So, you know, so now we can add say like a passphrase. Passphrase with single sig is like remarkable right now. It's plausibly deniable. It's super simple. Pretty much every wallet supports it. You know, like if somebody captures your seed plate, it's okay. It's not in the world because they don't have the passphrase. You know, you can put the passphrase in a different location. Is very. It's fairly simple for inheritance as well, because it's just, you know, it's just two little secrets for you to sort of pass on, you know. So like, that goes a long way in terms of like amount of money and people's circumstances right now. You know, like, you live maybe in a more dangerous neighborhood, right? Like, well, you know, now you have to start thinking a little bit more broadly on this, right? Like you need to think about like how, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, like duress could be a bigger sort of concern for you, right? So you start thinking about what can you do around that. Is it some trick pins? Is it delay pin? Is it like maybe multisig? And you can't sign it alone in that place, right? You know, now are you a business? Well, businesses are different, different needs, right? Like maybe you need multiple people to sign something, you know, with the spending policies for multi sig. That was for business because, you know, now you can have like one like same wallet, okay? So one business partner can sign up to a certain amount, you know, the other business partner can sign up to a certain amount and. But together they can sign everything, you know, like, like, how amazing is that, right?
- [63:58]
Host
The nuclear codes where you've got. You got to have two guys each with their key base. I mean, it's literally that. Yeah.
- [64:03]
NVK
Yes. And super useful. And that's all device based. You don't need servers, you don't need any fake, don't need to pay a company, no need to pay a subscription, nothing. And you don't have to exist either. Like it could be completely none, right? Because you don't have to work with a collaborative multi sig company, which is not a bad thing either. It really depends on what you need, right? We're very intense and reflective about these ideas. How far can we take a embedded device in terms of operational security and being operationally capable without needing a service or an app, because service or attack surface and a privacy attack surface. And apps are an attack surface because, you know, now you have the same vendor showing you the address. So, you know, and that's sort of like, that's. That's the space we live in. And I think we got to a point now where it's, you know, it's. It's hilariously simple to set up a cold card to transact a cold card. You know, as much as people love to, like, you know, say things are hard, it's, you know, things are hard because you're trying to sell something else. You know, it's, you know, we have plenty of examples of the, of the grandma, right, the bitcoiners grandma that they taught how to use Bitcoin, right? Like, it's like the ephemeral grandma that, you know, probably doesn't exist, but still, like, there's a lot of those examples of people that managed to get that through. And I think there is another part that's very important, is that we don't compromise on the necessity for the person to understand what they're doing. Because, you know, like, you should not have Bitcoin if you're not willing to understand what you have now, right? You should not have gold in your house. If you don't understand what gold is, it is not safe and you're going to get scammed. For example, Ledger, they do a very good job of security. Some good people there, very professional people, they really try to make it very easy. They have an app wallet that's very easy to use. But the problem is you abstract so much of what's happening from the user that then the user gets a DM from a scammer saying, hey, give me your seed. Okay, here's my seed. You know, I'm. I'm the support people. Give me your seed that I'll help you, right?
- [66:36]
Walker
So whenever I hear those stories, I'm like, how? Why?
- [66:39]
Host
No, this is the majority of the.
- [66:41]
NVK
People who lose Bitcoin, you know, it's because, again, like, they're not being forced to understand what they have, right? And part of our flow, even though it's simple, it requires people to have some agency, right? We. We believe that that's our responsibility. And, you know, we. I really, like, I really want to bang this pointer is that, like, if you're not willing to understand bitcoin, go buy MicroStrategy. You know, go buy, you know, go buy some ETF. Go buy, you know, like, shares in a company that has go do something else. You know, like bitcoin is for people like having UTXOs with a signing device. Okay. It's for people who want to take responsibility over their money because it's a lot of responsibility.
- [67:34]
Host
Yeah. If you can't open a PDF, buy the Bitcoin etf. That's what I always say.
- [67:41]
NVK
That's funny.
- [67:42]
Host
Yeah, it's not bad. I think that that's fair. And I think that may sound harsh to some people. Like, no, come on. Bitcoin should be for, for, for everyone. But, but like, I think this, I'm not the first or the last to make this distinction. But like, bitcoin's not for everyone. It's for anyone who is willing to learn and do the work. Like, because it is scary. It is scary to have self custody of your wealth. We are not used to that.
- [68:06]
Walker
Again, this is not a thing in.
- [68:07]
Host
The fiat system that you can do. You can't self custody digital dollars. That you can't. It's impossible. You can self custody physical dollars and that has its own set of risks. Right. You can self custody gold, but most people don't. And most people don't self custody their digital dollars. Most people have a custodian for any.
- [68:27]
Walker
Meaningful amount of wealth.
- [68:29]
Host
It's a weird thing. It's a weird thing that we're doing in this bitcoin space where you are the one, the buck stops with you. And if you screw up, there's no customer service to call. There's no, you know, oh, let me just reverse that transaction for you. No, no, no, it's, it's not how it works. Like, you're done. And I think that for most people that is scary. Which is why to your earlier point about, you know, hey, there's not going to be enough UTXOs for everyone.
- [68:53]
Walker
Right.
- [68:53]
Host
It's like, I don't know if there needs to be enough UTXOs for everyone. Like, it's because everyone doesn't want that responsibility. To be honest with you. I don't know if that sounds too harsh too, but I just, I don't think everyone wants that. I think most people want to be able to call a custodian when something goes wrong. I think that that's because that's what.
- [69:17]
Walker
They'Ve been trained to do.
- [69:18]
Host
It's scary to take self custody. It requires taking true ownership. Like you said earlier, bitcoin's the only thing that you can own and you really own it. If you like, you have the keys, you have the coins, and if you Screw that up, those coins are gone. And that's an understandably scary thing for I think probably the vast majority of the population.
- [69:38]
NVK
Yep. It's, you know, again, it's, it's. You can't like, it's like driving, right? You know, bitcoin, Bitcoin self custody is literally like driving. Okay. Nobody learns in the highway, right? People go in a parking lot where the stakes are low, they learn how to drive. There's a lot of people who shouldn't be driving. You know, if you're driving your family now, you have your whole family in your car, their lives are at risk. You're a responsibility, right? If you're driving a bus, it's a lot of responsibility. You're holding a lot of people's lives, right? You know, if you don't want to drive, you do take the bus. You know, it's like, you know, if you don't want to have bitcoin self custody, but take the bus, you know, go, go with somebody else. Have a custodian hold it for you, you know. But like, but I think it's important to also have honesty around the trade offs, right? There is a lot of solutions out there. There's a very dishonest sort of way. It's like, you know, you're safer here or you do this or whatever. It's just no, like, there is no honesty in the marketing about what they're doing. Right. But you know, we can't change that. I mean that, that's just the reality of the market. Right. And people need to get burned to understand sometimes or people need to get su. Right. So, yeah, so we continue trying to educate people, build the right tools. I think we're fortunate that we are in a market that there is a lot of people. I mean like, you know, the amount of device to sell is pretty insane, you know, and we can remain sort of like a company with a fairly sort of opinionated view of how soft custody should be done and still sell devices like that to me gives me hope about bitcoin, right? Like in terms of self custody in that sense that like, you know, if we can exist, there is enough people.
- [71:36]
Host
Yeah, no, that's. It's fair. I'm curious too, Will. I think a lot of people probably have. Even if they, I mean, I probably heard about Coincide and Coldcard, but they've probably seen a block clock. I've got to say that was at such a. I mean, I've got, I've got a couple of them, a couple of the, the, the Minis and. And then like the micro minis or whatever, the extra small ones, because they're just awesome. Are you guys. Are you guys ever gonna put out, like, another one? Is there any way to top that? Because it's. It's a beautiful piece of. Of. Of bitcoin design at play there.
- [72:09]
NVK
Right.
- [72:09]
Host
It's just. I don't know, it's. It's satisfying. It's nice to have.
- [72:13]
NVK
Yeah. You know, that again, there was a born about, you know, because we wanted to see the block height. We wanted to. Seeing the block height around the house is. Is very peaceful. Like, it's a very satisfying thing. Like, you know, it's like people can be crying out there, the world can be this, life can be that. But like, it's like, tick tock, next block, right? Like, there is another block. There's always another block. And. And I find that, like, super soothing. And so. So that's really one of the main reasons why we made the device. And, you know, there was the old one. I don't know if you've ever seen the other one that has the digits that flip. That was a long time ago. You know, probably, like, when we come up with the next idea that it's not just a screen showing something, you know, we'll probably make something. I think the biggest barrier is just the idea for the next one. That is like an interesting technology because it needs to have a soul. Right. It needs a little artistic flair. You know, the device was the current one, the block lock mini, the one that has the seven digits. I mean, like, you know, it's very artistic in the sense that, like, from the hardware perspective, like, people don't do that. Like, you don't put seven displays on something. You put one display, you know, so, like, we were silly putting seven displays onto something. So we need the next idea of, like, the right technology for it.
- [73:47]
Host
Eight displays. Displays 90.
- [73:48]
NVK
There you go. There you go.
- [73:50]
Host
I've got one block clock that I. I had unplugged during a move a couple years ago. It was. It's so. It's just. It's still at Bitcoin at 28,000. And I'm just leaving that one. I'm just leaving that one as a reminder of. Of where we came from and that I should have bought more sats when bitcoin was. Was down there. It's a. It's like, it's a nice reminder, but it's a little bit painful. But it's also like, wow, things can change fast in bitcoin.
- [74:13]
NVK
You know, yeah, it's. It's fun. E Inks are fun that way. They don't. The image doesn't change once it powers off. Right. It remains.
- [74:22]
Host
It's nice. I want to ask you too about just. Okay, not Everybody can have UTXOs.
- [74:28]
NVK
Fair.
- [74:29]
Host
I do think at a certain point everybody will use Bitcoin in some way. Right. But, you know, maybe without knowing they're using Bitcoin, what are your thoughts? You mentioned to Lightning earlier that you think that really it's not necessarily feasible, except for in the kind of larger Hub and spoke custodial model. I'm putting hub and spoke in your mouth there. You didn't actually say those words. But I'm curious of just your larger thoughts on Lightning also on Ecash and where you think. There's been obviously a lot of development happening there with what Cali is doing with Cashew. Where are you at with that? Do you think that's something that becomes. I mean, obviously there are trade offs and everyone, the developers themselves obviously acknowledge these. Kali will be the first to tell you, like, look, you can get rugged, but do you think that those are tools that at least get people in the right direction towards having something that does have much better privacy and a very nice user experience compared to a lot of Fiat tools? Yes, there are trade offs, but it's still again, better than kind of the Fiat shit show that we have today. I'd love to get your thoughts on those layers.
- [75:32]
NVK
Absolutely. I mean, like, you know, like again, Custodial Lightning works great. It really does, you know, because it sort of, it makes up for the trade offs in terms of practical usability. Right. And you know, there is a lot of improvements on Custodial Lightning. So it's less, it's more private and less in need of KYC. So, for example, LightSpark, is it LightSpark? I think it's LightSpark. They do some state chain stuff. Right. So they can get away with some things and they make different trade offs so they can offer that solution so that clients that use LightSpark as the backend for their Lightning don't, for example, into KYC users. Right. So you get a better privacy set there. Right. Like we need instant payments. Right. That are sort of bitcoin backed. Right. But I think it's unfortunate that took so long for Lightning alternatives to start coming up. Right. Because we need competition on the market. Right. So now we have ark. ARK makes different trade offs. You know, I want to see how it plays out, but I'm very bullish on it. Like, I am bullish on lightning custodial. You know, there is Cashew is amazing. And. But Cashew requires lightning for the settlement of the mints, right? So, you know, I hope that they turn on like base layer cashew funding at some point. I know they don't, because a person could just unilaterally deposit how much money they want on a mint and then it could become a problem. But there's nothing technically preventing people from having Kashu being base layer funded. And Kashu in a way kind of starts to behave almost like hub and spoke, right? Because they have one fat channel, a few fat channels between mints and other lightning big players. And then they have the spoke really is the cashew, right? Which is like a bitcoin unit of account, Bitcoin denominated unit. Cashew itself is not bitcoin, right? It's just a token.
- [78:05]
Host
It's an E cash token.
- [78:07]
NVK
Exactly. But, but Kali's brilliancy there was to make it so that his implementation is integral to being bitcoin backed, right? Like, you can't use Kashu doesn't exist with shitcoins. Like, Cashew exists because it's fully integrated with the bitcoin stack, right? And it works great. But again, different trade offs. And you could say Kashu is custodial, right, because of the mint. But, you know, but then you can have a million mints. So even if 1,000 mints rug you, you know, the other, you know, 999,000 mints didn't. So you're still fine, right? So yeah, I mean, like, there's a lot of stuff happening. And, and, but, but the reality is, like, people outside of North America are poor. They can't, like, they don't even in North America actually. Like, people just don't have money, right? Like, and bitcoin is terrible money for people that don't have money.
- [79:15]
Host
That's going to ruffle some feathers right.
- [79:16]
NVK
There, you know, and that's why credit cards are very big market is because credit cards give people 30 days or a lot more with interest, right? But you have 30 days without interest, right? Like, it's very similar to payday loans, right? Like it gives people like that minimum operating period before they get their next paycheck, right? And that's what people need is like, they don't use credit cards just because it's easy to pay. It is. Now, it didn't used to be this easy to pay with credit cards, right? It's just, it's very easy now because it became the currency, because nobody has money. So the two things just merged. Right. But reality is people need credit. You look at like all the checkouts now have like, you know, a firm or whatever. Like pay with 12 days.
- [80:05]
Host
Yeah, but you know, for your groceries, I guess.
- [80:07]
NVK
Yeah, but you know, this is new to Americans. But the rest of the world functions like this. In Brazil, you have 24 months without interest on most things.
- [80:17]
Host
Really?
- [80:18]
NVK
Yes. They figure out the economics to make it happen. It's not even baked in.
- [80:22]
Host
Yeah.
- [80:22]
NVK
It's not like there's a different price. No, no. They just figured out because there is no business if you don't offer terms.
- [80:31]
Host
It's interesting because on the other side of the world, a lot of places in Eastern Europe, it is predominantly done on a cash basis or debit card basis. Obviously it's not solely the case. But even just the way that most people will buy houses up until more recently was more focusing on cash based, like. But that's. There's different traumas, like generational traumas there. Right. That have caused them to want to do that and to have less trust of centralized credit. So like, it's interesting. It's. But yeah, I think it is crazy to me. Like the first time I walked into a store and saw that it was like, oh, you know, pay over four months with whatever a firm or one of these other companies, I was like, oh my God, like, this is. We're financing a sandwich here.
- [81:16]
Walker
This is insane.
- [81:17]
NVK
It is, it's nuts. But you know, that's the reality people have, right? I mean, you know, when we fix the money and we fix the world, you know, like when we get to the other side of this, then maybe, you know, people have like better money and they won't need credit and they're going to do better. Right? But realistically speaking, like, you can't have a modern consumerist society without credit. Like, you know, bitcoin does not solve that problem. Like, not right now, it solves on the other side of it. But it's going to take a very long time. Right? And I think bitcoiners can't wrap their head around because a lot of them are savers. Just naturally savers, people who have different value set that often makes them have more money in the bank account. So when they want to buy something, they have the cash. Right. And that's not the reality of the great majority of the world's population, including of their own countries. It's just, you know, you're gonna have to accept. Ideally Visa would be, you know, Or Amex would be running on a bitcoin standard and there will be better companies and you know, like, you know, they'll be able to lower the interest rates. You know, there's like a whole other universe to look this from. Right. But you know, it is, it is what it is.
- [82:31]
Host
I do like seeing the bitcoin rewards credit cards out there because that's at least something where it's like, oh sweet. Because airlines and airline miles are literally just the biggest scam ever in terms of it's fiat to the extreme. On top of base layer fiat. It's just such a scam. And so at least spending credit and getting some sats on the side is nice. I think we'll see a lot more of that happening. And I think there's also to your point, people want credit, people need loans. You've seen a lot of companies now start offering these, offering bitcoin loans. That's great. Strike has made a big deal about this. They're obviously not the only ones. There's a lot of them out there leaden debify like a bunch of these other ones that offer, offer bitcoin loans. And I think that that's like, that's a, that's a good thing. People obviously want it. There's obviously a market demand for it. Otherwise the products would not exist and people wouldn't use them. And so it's like, you know, us being on a bitcoin standard doesn't mean that that credit is just non existent.
- [83:30]
NVK
I mean like, you know, like we live, we exist in a world where we're competing with cheap money, right? So you know, bitcoin hurdle rate is amazing. You know, like we are, we're, you know, but we're not like doing a million X a year, right? So we have to, you know, as a, as a Gen Xer or, or as a was a gen Z or whatever is now like, you know, you are competing for that house, right? On a market that has, you know, monetized real estate, right? So like and you have to have a house to live in, right? So like depending on where you live, like renting may not be optional, right? So you have to either move or buy a house, right? And to buy the house you don't want to sell the btc, you know, and, and maybe you don't have access to like, you know, like bank credit, right? So you know, like so the next best thing out of that very long list of the things you've tried, you know, can't move, you know, don't want to sell the btc, don't have bank credit. Well, I'm going to take a loan against the btc. Right. Does that incur risk? Absolutely right. But is that risk maybe better than not having the btc? Yeah. You know, and if you do that very conservatively like you should be able to be fine. Right.
- [84:55]
Host
Capital gains treatment, like if you need to sell bitcoin to buy that and you've got to pay the capital gains on top. It's like, God, you're just literally just getting kicked in the balls by the government. Just repeated.
- [85:05]
NVK
That's another reason why people buy bitcoin strategy stocks is because stocks are very compatible with the fiat system. You can walk into your bank and say loan me X amount of money versus my trading book. You know, like your literal corner bank can do it. Right. You know, and they're going to offer you better interest rates than any bitcoin collateral company would. Right. It's just because they're part of the system. Right. Bitcoin is not compatible with the system yet. But you will be, you know, once you know your, your Mary lynch offers you bitcoin backed loans. I'm not saying you should put your bitcoin there, you definitely shouldn't because those are going to take it somehow. But they're going to create an environment where you know, Landon or Strike are going to have even better interest rates to give to you. Because Merrill lynch is their new competition now.
- [86:01]
Host
And we're seeing bitcoin insurance now too. Like, which is I, I think pretty cool to see. Like, it's fantastic. Like people, these are again products that the market wants and there are now bitcoin companies. And that's the nice thing too is like these companies that are existing right now either providing these loans, providing insurance, whatever they are, they're not tradfi companies that are then pivoting to this. They're the, they're bitcoin companies that are the first movers in this space and are there before the JP Morgans and the Citibanks and the Merrill Lynch's and everything else. And ultimately I think that that's a great thing. Like that's, you know, that ultimately means that it's those companies are necessarily going to be more mission aligned with the average bitcoiner than Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan.
- [86:44]
NVK
Exactly.
- [86:45]
Host
That's a no brainer.
- [86:46]
NVK
Yeah, I mean it really is that simple. And we also can cross borders now, right? Like you can go hodo, hodo and make a private loan contract with some Other crazy bitcoiner in another part of the universe, right? Your chances of capture privacy issues or whatever greatly de risk. Right. There is a lot of paths and the more we become compatible. Compatible is the wrong way, the wrong analogy. The more we become interfaceable with the fiat system, the better it is for bitcoin. A politician can no longer wake up in the morning and go up. Bitcoin should be illegal in America. They'll tank the market, right? Like, why, if it was just a bunch of crazy bitcoiners, they could totally do it and they'll get away with it, right? They can't do that when teachers pensions depend on it. That's moat for us. You should be celebrating that. You should be celebrating anybody. You may not like the person buying bitcoin, but it's demand. And demand makes your bags more defended, right? You know, it's a hard pill to swallow to some people, but it's also.
- [88:06]
Host
A symptom of success, right? It's a symptom of bitcoin winning. This is what winning looks like. This is what winning feels like. It means your dire, your enemies stacking sats as well. And it means the suits coming in. And it means governments wanting to stack this. And it means more acceptance by the traditional finance system. Like if bitcoin was losing, if bitcoin sucked, no one would care. But it doesn't suck. It's amazing. Everybody wants it and that's why they do care. It's like that's a. It's a symptom of that winning. I do want to be conscious of your time nvk if you got time for one more. I just kind of wanted to ask your thoughts broadly on like the, the state of, of Nostr right now and where you're at with it. What's. What. What's your vibe on it? You've obviously been active on Nostr for, for quite some time, actively built some products around there as well. But yeah, I don't know, what's your, what's your vibe on it?
- [88:57]
NVK
You know, it's just like bitcoin, right? Like, it's like, it's. The adoption cycle is not linear. So, you know, you have spikes. There's a lot being built. Like, primal is remarkable. Like, I mean, like you, you know, you look at something like that because you need an example, right? And, and like, that's a great one. It's like, look, it's like practically like Twitter. Like, I mean, you can't tell the difference. Half the times I'm. I can't tell the difference which app I'm in. Right? It's just that one app I can send sats, the other one I can't. You know. You know, we are streaming right now on Nostr, right. I think it's a very necessary protocol. We need a communication protocol that doesn't require permission, a permanent identity system that doesn't require permission. And you know, people are building, there's a lot coming, there's white noise coming. It's great. It's a signal replacement that needs to exist. There is, I think Universe is another app, kind of like Discord thing where it's like, you know, people have communities, there's a lot being built. It takes time. You know, it's gonna, it's the adoption and the interest and the volume of users using the dao is gonna differ and it's gonna come. But right now, Elon is a nice benevolent dictator with Twitter, right? We don't know what that's going to be like in a few years and you can't depend on that. So I always say to people, at a bare minimum, just have a backup, build an account where you have some interactions, you have a following, you have followers, you have a place to go to in case you get canceled because it could happen. And then there's all the other stuff that like, it's just not possible to do, like zapping people on. On Twitter or whatever. Right? Like, there's a lot that's going to get start to get built and come out that that is just things that were not possible. It's not just like we're just sort of like trying to run away from those places. We're gonna now build things that are like, just not possible to build on those places. Right? It's just possible in Noster. I'm very bullish on it. It's just, you know, it's gonna take a long time.
- [91:18]
Host
Is there a particular whether it be some sort of new social engagement layer, social networking layer, or something else, a particular advancement or product, service, app, whatever on Noster that you are most looking forward to.
- [91:31]
NVK
Personally, I think white noise is a big one. Signal makes a lot of decisions that I can't for the life of me understand. Like, you know, it took them, you know, years to not like docs their phone number to people. For example, you know, they refuse to accept Bitcoin. They want their sharecoin there. You know, they don't allow you to have more than one device, like more than one phone. Like, why is this related to my phone number? I Don't want phone number. You know, if you want to, if you want to de spam. Because phone numbers help with this spamming and all. Like, sure, check once. But like, let me move on from phone numbers, right. There's a bunch of reasons that it must be replaced. You can't have. Chats are a great way of dealing with servers as a server interface. So like a chatbot kind of thing and you can't have a client for the server on Signal, it's like fully closed anyways. They do a lot of things, right? A lot of things. Right. So much so that I use it personally a lot. But I'm looking forward to the next iteration of maybe some fresh ideas and a little bit more freedom. And I think White Noise does that. White Noise uses mls, which is the evolution of the Signal protocol for privacy and secret messaging. But it integrates with Nostr, so you don't need servers. How amazing is that? Right? And yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Jeff G. Is working on that. It's, I think my next super needed app.
- [93:18]
Host
Yeah, I mean it's also one of those things where being able to open source it and make it available for folks because like Signal, there's a pretty good chance with some of the upcoming laws, you know, in Europe. I forget when, when are they voting on that, that, that new like backdoor encryption law. They're voting on it, I think on like the 3rd, 12th or 13th of October, where in the EU they may force messaging providers to give them a back door even to encrypted messaging, which is like, oh, okay. And Signal basically said they've got to, they're gonna get out of there. But yeah, I know you gotta jump. So let's, let's close this out. Where do you want to send folks?
- [94:00]
NVK
Just, I want to send them out of Twitter. I want to send them to the park near their houses, you know, like stock the sets, go walk on grass, all this noise. Go enjoy your life, go build things, go be productive, you know, and, you know, get yourself a cold card, stick the money in it and move on. Like it really is that simple. Like, it's just so simple. It's so simple that people cannot believe how simple it is. Right? So they have to complicate it. Just, just, you know, stack the sats, you know, and go live your life.
- [94:41]
Host
That is fantastic advice. Nvk. Thanks for coming on here. I'm going to cut this now. Thanks to everyone who joined in the live stream as well. Appreciate you guys.
- [94:49]
NVK
Peace. Thanks for having me Foreign.
- [94:58]
Host
That's a.
- [94:58]
Walker
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.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Tcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links, head to substack.com walker America 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.