NEW REPORT: ARE BITCOINERS CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? WHAT'S MORAL MAXIMALISM? | Troy Cross

Summary

Podcast Summary: THE Bitcoin Podcast – "NEW REPORT: ARE BITCOINERS CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? WHAT'S MORAL MAXIMALISM? | Troy Cross"

Episode Information:

• Title: NEW REPORT: ARE BITCOINERS CONSERVATIVE OR LIBERAL? WHAT'S MORAL MAXIMALISM? | Troy Cross
• Host: Walker America
• Guest: Troy Cross
• Release Date: July 21, 2025

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1. Introduction

In this insightful episode of THE Bitcoin Podcast, host Walker America engages in a deep discussion with Troy Cross, a philosophy professor and co-author of a comprehensive study on Bitcoin ownership and its correlation with political ideologies. The conversation delves into the nuances of Bitcoiners' political leanings, moral values, and the broader implications for Bitcoin adoption in the United States.

2. Background and Survey Overview

Troy Cross introduces the study, highlighting its status as the largest comprehensive survey on Bitcoin ownership and attitudes in the U.S., encompassing over 33,300 individuals. The study aimed to uncover whether Bitcoiners align more with conservative or liberal ideologies or if they possess a unique moral foundation.

"We surveyed like, 33,300 or something like that, different individuals. It was like a very official survey... and we found some very interesting things." [11:14]

3. Bitcoin Ownership and Demographics

Cross explains that the survey revealed a stable rate of Bitcoin ownership at approximately 12.5% based on direct ownership questions. When factoring in indirect exposures—such as through ETFs, retirement accounts, or joint holdings—ownership rises to 18.6%, equating to about 48 million American adults.

"So, basically, like you have these... on the do you own? Question. There's one more complication... we found 12 and a half percent to that same question. But when you consider... 18.6%, which is between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6." [16:07]

4. Political Alignment and Shifts

Last year's findings showed that Bitcoin ownership was politically neutral, aligning closely with the general American population's political distribution. However, this year's data indicates a slight rightward shift, with an increase in Bitcoin ownership among conservatives and a decrease among liberals.

"So yeah, that's a more nuanced message. It's like, where are we politically? On the whole, we're like where we were last year, but liberals own are less percentage of owners this year than they were last year and conservatives are more a percentage of owners than they were last year." [30:36]

5. Sentiment Towards Bitcoin

Despite Bitcoin's price doubling, overall sentiment towards it became less positive, especially among liberals. Owners of Bitcoin, however, maintained or even slightly increased their positive sentiment.

"But when you look at sentiment here, this is sentiment is a composite score... liberals dropped 0.7 last year... they're, they're going from basically neutral to slightly disagree with any positive statement about bitcoin." [30:41]

6. Barriers to Bitcoin Adoption

The study identified key barriers preventing wider Bitcoin adoption:

1. Too Risky: 45.5%
2. Don't Trust It: 43%
3. Don't Understand It: 37%
4. Not Enough Money to Invest: 27%
5. Regulatory Uncertainty: 25%
6. No Need: 23.5%
7. Don't Know Where or How to Purchase It: 15%
8. Too Political: 14.7%
9. Environmental Concerns: 6.1%
10. Unsure: 4%

"We should just tackle these from the big ones. You know, like, too risky, don't trust it, don't understand it." [53:11]

7. Moral Maximalism and Bitcoiners' Values

A standout concept from the study is "Moral Maximalism," a term coined to describe Bitcoiners who exhibit high levels of importance across various moral foundations. This distinct moral profile sets them apart from traditional conservative or liberal ideologies.

"Bitcoiners are their own. Have their own distinctive moral foundations profile, which I called it moral maximalism because they just seem to be higher almost everywhere." [61:07]

The moral foundations surveyed include:

• Care: Importance of empathy and protection.
• Cultural Liberty: Right to personal freedom unless it harms others.
• Economic Liberty: Right to manage personal property.
• Purity: Importance of moral and physical cleanliness.
• Authority: Respect for authority figures.
• Loyalty: Value placed on group allegiance.
• Equality: Fairness and proportionality in treatment.

Bitcoiners scored exceptionally high in Cultural Liberty and Purity, matching or exceeding conservative levels in most categories, yet maintaining moderate positions where applicable.

8. Implications on Politics and Education

The alignment of Bitcoin with conservative values, particularly economic and cultural liberty, suggests potential political implications. However, Bitcoin's strong association with political figures like Donald Trump has led to polarization, alienating some liberal and female segments of the population.

"Bitcoin is hyper male. We skipped that slide. But it's, you know, you're twice as likely to own bitcoin as a man than a woman." [38:44]

Cross emphasizes the critical role of education in overcoming barriers to Bitcoin adoption. By increasing understanding and trust, more individuals can appreciate Bitcoin's utility and moral grounding.

"It's a matter of education... It really does just come down to education." [75:03]

9. Future Studies and Closing Remarks

The conversation concludes with anticipation for upcoming global studies on Bitcoin adoption, expanding the current study's scope beyond the United States. Cross and Casen advocate for continued research and educational efforts to foster broader Bitcoin adoption.

"I'm looking forward to seeing Sarah Kreps and Ella Hoff too, who's also working on that, Ella and Sarah's project, the Signal project... that's one of the things I would love to know." [102:32]

Key Takeaways:

• Bitcoin Ownership: Remains substantial and comparable to major social categories like religion.
• Political Neutrality to Slight Rightward Shift: Bitcoin owners were previously politically neutral but are now slightly more conservative.
• Sentiment Decline Among Liberals: Despite rising institutional adoption, liberal sentiment towards Bitcoin has become more negative.
• Moral Maximalism: Bitcoiners uphold high moral values across various foundations, distinguishing them from traditional political categories.
• Education is Crucial: Addressing barriers through education can enhance Bitcoin adoption rates.

Notable Quotes:

• Troy [00:00]: "Bitcoiners are their own. Have their own distinctive moral foundations profile."
• Eric [28:08]: "It's a worrisome trend... Bitcoin's a positive sum game."
• Troy [61:07]: "Bitcoiners are just people who know about bitcoin. That's what characterizes bitcoin ownership more than anything else."

Conclusion

This episode offers a comprehensive analysis of Bitcoin's place within the American socio-political landscape. By uncovering the unique moral and political profiles of Bitcoiners, Troy Cross provides valuable insights into the factors driving Bitcoin adoption and the challenges ahead. The discussion underscores the importance of education and nuanced understanding in fostering a more inclusive and widespread embrace of Bitcoin.

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Links & Resources:

• Survey and Report: NakamotoProject.org
• Follow Troy Cross: Twitter @thetrokro
• Bitcoin Policy Institute: For more reports and educational resources.

Transcript

[Troy]

It's weird that all you can know about someone is their mobile foundations profile and you can predict their political ideology or vice versa to some, you know, non zero degree. And we wanted to know last year when we asked these questions like where are bitcoiners? Are they more like conservatives in the way they their ultimate core values or are they more like liberals? And we found last year and this year the answer was like neither. Bitcoiners are their own. Have their own distinctive moral foundations profile which we. I called it moral maximalism because they just seem to be higher almost everywhere.

[Walker]

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 [e-mail] walker and this [e-mail] on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find his podcast on X and Instagram at tcoin Podcast. Head to the show notes for sponsor links. Head to substack.com walker America to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin, podcast.net or everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk.

[Eric Casen]

Troy, welcome back. It's good to see you again. We were just together in D.C. which was, I got to say, quite, quite an experience. I'd never done anything like that, going to, talking to my elected officials. It was illuminating, let's say.

[Troy]

Yeah, it was a great event and I was super pleased that we coordinated a pleb descent on Capitol Hill. What did you learn in talking to the reps or staffers?

[Eric Casen]

Well, so. And I say this in the kindest way possible because we met with some, like, really, really nice people on the staffer side of things. I'll get to the reps in a second. But I, I'm just. I was kind of blown away by like the. The age of the staffers. Like, it is skews, except, like, seems like fresh out of college online and like, there's nothing wrong with that. Right? Like, you know, age is just a number. Right. But it's. It was kind of interesting to me because it's like we have these decrepit, like, octogenarian politicians and then all of their staffers are like a quarter of their age and they're. And I'm just like, I just started thinking about that dynamic and like, how absurd that is. That, like, this is how stuff gets done in our country. And then I was like, well, I guess, like, no wonder. Not that much gets done of, like, you know, substance. But, okay, I was on. Let's. Let's start with the positives. On the plus side, I was very pleasantly surprised that some of the staffers were so open to asking questions, like, really wanted to know. Like, we tried to emphasize, you know, like, we're. This is the Bitcoin Policy Institute. We're not here to talk about crypto. Crypto is this bad thing that's over here, and you should ignore these scammers. They would then ask, like, okay, I really don't understand the difference. Like, can you. Can you explain that to me and genuinely ask? And, like, that's wonderful. That. That was great to see that that was not the case for all of them, but that was the case for some. And to those, it's like, hats off to you. You, at least are willing to learn. You asked great questions. On the negative side, I noticed that the totalitarian temptation is very strong. Like, some of the other staffers would ask things like, well, you know, the classic lines, what about money laundering? And, you know, making sure this isn't used for illicit finance. Just like the. The buzzwords, right? And, you know, you try to give them a reasonable answer about this. Like, well, actually, you know, most money is laundered, like, the vast, vast majority through the US Dollar. And, like, bitcoin's really bad way to do it because it's a transparent public ledger. Anyone can audit at any time, and then you just still see them push and push more. So that was a little disappointing, but I suppose somewhat. Not unexpected. The most, I was.

[Troy]

You had some tweet about. Was it Dick Durbin? Did you talk to Dick Durbin?

[Eric Casen]

I talked to Dick Durbin, yeah. So my.

[Troy]

That was something. That was something from the great state.

[Eric Casen]

Of Illinois, and that was. That was supremely disappointing because I went in there, like, I know his past position on bitcoin, that he's been very negative. I went in there in good faith because, like, that's how I wanted to approach it, right? And I asked him, I said, you know, Senator Durbin, would you. Has your position on bitcoin changed at all since? In, like, the depths of the Bear Market, 2022, he co authored a letter with Elizabeth Warren, basically reprimanding Fidelity for daring to offer their clients bitcoin exposure in any way. And the price was, like, $20,000 at that point. So he, you know, he was protecting his constituents from 5x plus upside. Thank God for him. But I didn't say it that way. I just said it. Actually, I said it very respectfully. And he just, first of all, goes off and starts talking about crypto ATM scams and then says a bunch of other random stuff and brings up ftx. And I'm like, well, first of all, you took money from Sam Bankman Fried. But okay, we won't get into that again. Didn't say this to him. I was being far too nice. Very uncharacteristic of me. And then he takes his finger, he starts raising his voice, and he points, like, points at my face. And he's like, you need to clean up your act. You got to clean up your act. I'm like, like, it's Sam Bankman fried, and people running scams are my fault. Like, I'm literally just here talking about bitcoin. We had a few other people with us. We all tried very respectfully, again, to be like, respectfully, Senator, this is totally different from what we're talking about here. He wasn't having it. And then he was like, I'm not talking about any more bitcoin. We were like, okay, okay, sit right back. But yeah, long story short, that was illuminating again, but he's also like 83 years old, so he's going to be out of office pretty soon.

[Troy]

So, hey, he might be out of more than his office. But, you know, your point at the beginning about staffers. I mean, first of all, my experience with staffers has been pretty positive. They are really young, they are ambitious. They wanted to do stuff. They want to. I mean, they're climbers, they're strivers. You don't get to be a staffer unless you are a promising, ambitious, talented young person. But of course, they're also very sensitive to the political winds and perception and, you know, kind of you. They're immature. They're immature, yeah. So it is weird when you realize that people like Dick Durbin don't have a clue. In part, it's not their fault. The brain is just not working very well at 83. I mean, it's kind of amazing he can hold a conversation, like, let alone, like, grasp the difference between FTX and Sam Bankman Fried and ATM crypto scams and bitcoin. Like, of course that stinks. Is going to be lost on him. He can barely, you know, remember and cognize. It's, it's, it's doing pretty well. Like, if he's your grandpa, you're like, grandpa's doing great.

[Eric Casen]

He's.

[Troy]

He's doing really well.

[Eric Casen]

He goes to work every day.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's like, you should retire. You should be retired at 83 from one of the most important jobs in the world. So, yeah, you got, you're right. You got this weird combination of basically super ambitious kids who you wouldn't really want running things, but they are very gifted just because of their maturity level. And then people who don't have a clue and the people really, really making the shot, calling the shots are the staffers, I think more and more, you know, it's like they really write. They write things. They do keep track of the details. They are the ones who are act. And that's a scary moment where you're like, okay, the kids are actually governing, you know, and then they, and then, and then the olds, they just bring them out there to grandstand, basically and get reelected. And. Well, in the case of Joe Biden, it was literally weakened at Bernie's. Like that was the extreme case of it where, you know, the people governing were invisible and unelected and the person there. So that's like the extreme case. But when you have. I can't remember what the average age is in Congress, but as old as it is, I don't know what it is. It's 75 or something. Yeah, something insane like that. 69, 75. That's like average. The average is not too far off from lifespan numbers. It's really not very, very different from average lifespan. There we are with the average rep. Like. Yeah, yeah. It's not an ideal situation. Maybe partly why the Biden thing didn't shock people as it should have was because, like, but look around Congress, like there's a lot of that. So now it's, Is it relevant to bitcoin? Hell yes. Because age is the biggest demographic factor that correlates with bitcoin attitudes and ownership. So you. Yeah, Dick Durbin's attitudes are not unusual for an 83 year old. I'm just going to very quickly go to it. I'm going to share.

[Eric Casen]

That was a perfect segue, Troy. Also, I can just like. You really nailed it on that one.

[Troy]

Can I share this?

[Eric Casen]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Troy]

Screen here.

[Eric Casen]

Go for it. Let's, let's, let's dive right in.

[Troy]

So for shared this window just really quickly, before we even get into the thing.

[Eric Casen]

Yeah, yeah.

[Troy]

Okay, 83, we've got a little blip there. But you know, that's probably just sampling data. I mean, look at the curve. Yeah, you're in that kind of, like, I don't know, 3% to 5% ownership max in that age. So, you know, 95, 97% of people in that age range, males and women over 80. We didn't have any owners.

[Eric Casen]

Yeah, that's just degenerian dudes representing as bitcoiners, I guess.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah. But Dick Durbin is. In that vast space of white. Our graph there on the right side only goes up to 50%. Right. So you have to picture that. Like, if you want to picture the full bar pie chart, they call it, that would go to 100. That even 80 plus males. That is just a tiny, tiny percentage of people who own bitcoin in that age range, man.

[Walker]

It.

[Eric Casen]

I mean, it is. So just for context for everyone, you put out a fantastic study here. Just to back up a little bit, this is the second time you've done a study like this, but this one is understanding bitcoin adoption in the United States. Politics, demographics, and sentiment. You also did this study. It was about a year ago. Right. Oh, and I think Troy might have lost you. Me? Hold on.

[Troy]

Sorry. I'm back. Sorry.

[Eric Casen]

You're good. We got you back in. Okay. So, yeah, long story short, you put together this great study, and I'll share just the COVID image here, just so folks can see it if they're watching the show. But this is the second time you've done a study like this, and it's understanding bitcoin adoption in the United States. Politics, demographic, and sentiment. You surveyed, like, 33,300 or something like that, different individuals. It was like a very official survey survey that was done. This isn't just picking a random dude off the street. This is like, you guys used Qualtrics, and this is how surveys are done. And you guys found. You found some very interesting things. Last time we talked, which was little under a year ago, I think things have shifted a little bit. Some things have stayed the same, but there are some new insights. So maybe we can just kind of start with, like, at a high level, like, what's the. What were. Kind of like the boom, you know, the. What were the pull quotes here? What were the. You know, the really big key takeaways? And then I want to, like. I want to dive into a bunch of these in way more detail because some of them are really fascinating.

[Walker]

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[Troy]

O. Yeah, well, yeah, thanks for the description of the survey. Yeah, it was the largest comprehensive survey of bitcoin ownership and attitudes that's been done when we did it last year and then we did it again. There have been some more surveys recently that we're really looking forward to seeing or just saw. Signal, the polling company that presented with me at the Bitcoin conference or the summit in DC, they did a sample of 1,000 people. I think their sample wasn't quite as good as ours, but their questions were great. The Reynolds foundation is working together with Cornell and Sarah Kreps to do a global study of 25 countries. On average, they got a thousand in each country. I got like 2,000 in America, in the U.S. but you know, on some of our countries they got like 500. That one is going to be a much bigger study than this one and global and should show us all kinds of cool things. But. But we wanted to do our study again to see what had changed. Basically, like you said, a lot happened in a year. Bitcoin's price when we did our first Survey was about 41,000. It. It was 85,000 in March when we collected this data over the month of March. So more than doubled. Of course, we got tons of ETFs, we got Bitcoin, treasury companies, we got the election of Donald Trump, we got the announcement of a strategic bitcoin reserve. Actually, the announcement of a strategic crypto reserve happened at the beginning of our study, just before our study. And then during the study, they came with that really nice executive order which clarified the difference between bitcoin and crypto and their role in the reserves.

[Eric Casen]

Thank God for that.

[Troy]

Thank God for that. But we couldn't really do that because we were already collecting data. We couldn't really capture that. But we wanted to see how all of this stuff had changed bitcoin attitudes and ownership. And in terms of top lines, we didn't really have a single top line last year. We had a single one. It was just like, hey, last year what we found was bitcoin isn't political. I mean, it's deeply political, but it's not political in the sense of owning bitcoin was not predictive of having a certain political ideology and vice versa. Having a certain political ideology didn't really tell you whether or not you own bitcoin. We found the distribution of bitcoin owners and the American public at large on political ideology was like, almost indistinguishable last year. Both mostly moderate with little wings tips of conservatives and, and liberals. But that's what ownership looked like too. And that was hugely shocking given how political the podcaster space is and the Twitter space is and DC is, and also the New York Times is. And given, given the entire discourse is. Is heavily political. We were just like scratching our heads, like, how is it that bitcoin ownership just kind of looks like America? But that was the, that was the top line last year. This year, we didn't know whether that would be shattered or would continue. That was the real, like, number one curiosity for me. Also whether bitcoin adoption would. Would grow, whether sentiment towards bitcoin would increase or decrease. We. We saw a slight shift to the right in both ownership and in sentiment. Maybe I can share a screen for some of these.

[Eric Casen]

Absolutely.

[Troy]

Let's start with politics.

[Eric Casen]

Yeah. One quick note. Also, just on total number of Americans, if I'm remembering correctly, in terms of percentages from your last study, it was like, was it 1 in 7 something like, or 7%? Which one was it for owner exposure to bitcoin in some way?

[Troy]

Okay, last year, this is tricky. I wish I had a simple answer for you here. Last year we asked us, we asked a question which was, do you own bitcoin? Really nice, simple question. We also asked, have you ever owned bitcoin? And then for the people who said they had, but they don't own it presently, we asked them, like, why they sold. But last year a lot of people in response to our survey said, you know, you're missing a lot of kinds of ownership because a lot of people don't own bitcoin, but their spouse does. Let's say their Partner and they jointly own it, but they wouldn't say they own it on a, on a survey. It might also be that somebody owns ibit, but they're not counting that. Or they might own Microstrategy, that they don't consider that to be owning Bitcoin. Or they're, yeah, they're stacking it through a business or something. So we decided to ask the do you own bitcoin? Question again, but also ask, do you own it on an exchange, do you own it in self custody, do you own it on an etf, do you own a retirement account jointly with a partner, and so on. And then we added up and non exclusive check, all that apply. And then we added up the group that selected at least one kind of ownership. And so that's a new metric we didn't have last year. And we can't compare it. Last year we found one in seven people own Bitcoin, about 13% to the straightforward question, do you own bitcoin? This year we found a statistically indistinguishable number, 12 and a half percent to that same question. No statistically significant difference between those two numbers. But on the expanded question of ownership we got 18.6%, which is between 1 in 5 and 1 in 6. So we were missing people basically who owning through these other methods. And that might have grown too, we just don't know because the ETFs grew tremendously, the treasury companies grew tremendously and so on. But yeah, as far as we can see, Bitcoin just held steady. On the do you own? Question. There's one more complication in that we wanted to clarify Bitcoin from crypto in our survey. And a lot of people last year said, ah, your 1 in 7 is too high because people are just answering, yes, I own bitcoin, it's called Solana, I have it on Phantom. And so they're probably right too. Good criticism. We did say Bitcoin in a, in a preliminary remark at the beginning of the survey, like we're not interested in any other cryptocurrencies, just bitcoin. But this year when we said do you own bitcoin? We actually put the, we put that disclaimer right into that question. So consider, you know, bearing in mind that we are not interested in any other cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin, do you own bitcoin? And we got 12.5% of people that said yes on that question. And, and so who knows how many shit corners we filtered out there that we didn't quite filter out last year because they forgot the instructions from, you know, the beginning of the survey. So it's really impossible for us to make claims about ownership across time, unfortunately. Yeah, this is a long way of saying we don't have apples to apples. We have a top line, but not a dynamic measure on ownership. Because we got clearer about ownership this year. And I think the top line is something like, yeah, 12 and a half percent Americans say they own Bitcoin. But when you consider the various ways of getting exposure to bitcoin indirectly through a retirement account or an ETF or a Treasury company or on an exchange even, we got a much broader number, 18.6. That's 48 million adults in the U.S. like I said in the report, there are 50 million Catholics in the U.S. that basically puts bitcoin owners on a par with Catholics in terms of their political size and constituency. And of that group, 11 million people claim to hold bitcoin in self custody, which is, you know, Elizabeth Warren, shadowy supercoder kind of material. And there's 11 million of us. That's 4.21% of the US population or also 24% of Bitcoiners. So roughly a quarter of bitcoiners claim to hold bitcoin in self custody, which is freaking cool. And that, that number we thought like can't be true because it just seemed too high to us. But I did some research on, on, on hardware Wallet sales ledger claims 8 million cumulative sales Trezor 2 million. That's not enough. Even if you throw in all the other hardware wallets. Probably like I have a lot of hardware wallets, I'm guessing a lot of us bitcoiners do, you know, probably at like three hardware wallets per bitcoin owner. You know, that doesn't, and that's worldwide. That doesn't add up to 11 million Americans. But when I looked up the downloads for crypto wallets that can hold bitcoin with keys, it was more than enough. Trust Wallet alone has 200 million downloads of their, of their app. And Trust Wallet has Bitcoin on it. You can hold Bitcoin on it. Of course, typical crypto wallets can hold bitcoin. So I, I don't know what the ratio is of American, you know, current users to their cumulative downloads, but that's one wallet. We also have Coinbase Wallet, Robinhood Wallet, you know, any number of other Mycelium wallet I used to use like back in the day, whatever, there's, there are all of these phone wallets where people are holding their own keys. I think this is crypto and how it, the blessing and the curse that it gave to us. Over the last cycle, crypto got a lot of people to download wallets for their phones so they could do defi and so they could have NFTs and stuff like that. And then as those things like die, you know, people get the biggest cryptocurrency that there is, which is bitcoin and and then they have it on self custody because they already have a wallet and they already are familiar with using a wallet themselves and signing their own, signing their own transactions. So I mean this is one of those cases where we do owe something positive to crypto. The negative side we'll talk about later in terms of perceptions of bitcoin and well, you already ran into it in you know, Dick Durbin's office.

[Eric Casen]

But yeah, that's wild and I, I apologize for, for derailing a little bit what you were going to go into on like the political breakdown. So like go into that next. But I wanted to set the stage with that because I think like that's just wild to me that it's. We're still very early but like it. There is a big chunk of people that this is actually a meaningful like.

[Walker]

They own Bitcoin or they're exposed to.

[Eric Casen]

Bitcoin in some way. The self custody one alone, I was just like heck yeah, like that, that's amazing to see. I hope that number continues to grow. But like that's, it's not bad for right now.

[Troy]

It's not bad at all. I think what I, yeah the. Are we, are we still early? A lot of the comments on when I posted this on Twitter were about that. People saying well what this shows is that we're not early. I think we are early in terms of total allocation to Bitcoin. I think we are early in terms of self custody. But we are. I mean, I mean on chain activity is like nothing and so, and that's another, that's another reason to question my data on self custody really. This is how many people think they self custody. But if you look at wallets that have a non trivial amount of bitcoin on them, it's not a lot. So we have a long way to go on self custody. But also what does early mean? Yeah, it could mean the total value of the asset. It could mean incorporation into our lives and economy that we buy things with it. That's not happening very much if you look at the, the data. Right. It, it could, it could mean, it could mean a lot of things. And I think on one of those dimensions, like having some bitcoin, you're not early. Like, you know what I mean? You, you have $20 a Bitcoin on coinbase. Like, okay, a lot of people do. Like, like 48 million American adults do. You're not that early anymore. Beyond that, you're still early.

[Eric Casen]

That's, I think a very important distinction in terms of allocation size. Let's say percentage of like individual percentage of net worth is another one to look at. But okay, let's get into the political side of this a little bit. What can you tell us about that? You know, what was the same from the last time you looked at this? And then what has changed over the last year plus or so?

[Troy]

Well, we were still struck here. You're here, you're looking at, on the left hand side of this chart, the breakdown of owners versus non owners of bitcoin, left to right. And you see among non owners, it's mostly moderate, slightly right shifted in our sample, barely. And you look at owners and it's also mostly moderate and slightly right shifted. If we looked at this chart and we didn't have last year, we'd be like, wow, bitcoin isn't political. That would be our lesson. But when you look at the dynamic from last year where they were exactly the same to this year, you do see gains among conservatives, 4.2% gain among conservatives, and you have a similar amount of losses among liberals and somewhat liberals. So you, you, you see, you see the shift in ownership. It's, it's slight, but it's there. So yeah, that's a more nuanced message. It's like, where are we politically? On the whole, we're like where we were last year, but liberals own are less percentage of owners this year than they were last year and conservatives are more a percentage of owners than they were last year. And we also asked four different questions on political orientation. One was a 10 point scale, one was a scale that also included libertarians and moderates and others. And another was a different kind of measure. They all showed this rightward shift. So I think even though this one was sort of like on the borderline of statistical significance, some of the others were much more significant. So I think overall ownership shifted to the right. Libertarians also own more this year than last year and libertarians are 5% of all Bitcoin owners and like 2 1/2% of the general population, something like that. It's, it's hard to find the General background percentage, because definitions differ. But you're. Yeah, you're, you're twice as likely to own bitcoin as a, or to be a libertarian as a bitcoin owner than as a non bitcoin owner. So. So like. But it's just a tiny amount of the total population. But yeah, everything shifted a little bit. Right. But it's still fairly moderate.

[Eric Casen]

And I think that. Right. Shift also, you know, in my mind that, that makes sense.

[Walker]

Right.

[Eric Casen]

Given, given the discourse like, like that there are people who, like, I know people personally, like in my like, you know, normie friend world who like, would not touch bitcoin until they heard that Trump was like all about bitcoin now. And they're like, well, I guess I'll get a little bit. And I was like, you know, I'm telling you guys for years and now and this is what. But it's like, okay, that's what tips the needle for some people. I'm sure it tipped the needle. I don't know, I'm curious if it, if it, you know, did that actually induce a number of people to be like, I'm going to get rid of all my bitcoin because I hate Donald Trump, or is it just that more conservative people ended up buying bitcoin because of Donald Trump? People aren't necessarily. I mean, I guess that's tough to know exactly. But I mean, do you have any perception of that?

[Troy]

I think they both happened and I don't have solid support from that, from the data, but I do have this dropping among liberals. Right. And where moderates hold steady. So it's like, it's not just that the percentage increased on the conservative side and then just dropped uniformly across the rest of the spectrum. It especially dropped for liberals, somewhat liberal, very liberal and liberal. And so I think both happened. Although when we go to sentiment, which is how people feel about bitcoin overall, you get much bigger drops on the left and you don't really get a rise on the right, you just get a non falling. And so the left seriously dislikes bitcoin now. They didn't used to dislike bitcoin, so that changed. And I think there's a gap between sentiment and ownership. I think your standard liberal that had bitcoin did not sell their bitcoin, but they just dislike it more. And you know what I mean? Like, so their attitudes are like, it's, it's been the best performing asset, you know, in a generation. And when you hold that, maybe you don't talk about it, but do you sell it probably not because it's made you, you know, it's made you money. So yeah, if we go to sentiment here, I'll just scoot down. This is sentiment is a composite score of 6, 16 different questions about how you feel about bitcoin. How much you know about it, how much you trust it, how, how useful you find it, whether you think it's moral. And look at these drops on the left. This is on a, yeah, on a seven point scale, liberals dropped.07 last year. Very, very liberals. That was, they were slightly below neutral on it. Just slightly below neutral. They dropped, you know, almost a full point. That's on a seven point scale. That's, that's a Likert scale. That's from like strongly disagree to somewhat disagree neutral and all the way to strongly agree on some positive statement about bitcoin. And so they're, they're going from basically neutral to slightly disagree with any positive statement about bitcoin. And yeah, and you see conservatives and very conservatives kind of holding steady. Overall, sentiment dropped last year on bitcoin. This is I think, kind of shocking because bitcoin's price doubled and it is an asset because it won on like, it won in almost every way that the protocol could, could win the regulatory front, the adoption front. But people feel less positively about it this year than they did last year. Non, non owners. What I show on the right is that owners of bitcoin are more positive this year by a half point than they were last year. Not like the people who are in, are getting even more in. It's a kind of polarization of attitudes along gendered lines. Women dropped much more than men and along political orientation lines. And those two things are sort of blending because, because the Democratic party is becoming increasingly female and the Republican Party increasingly male. So bitcoin is, is hyper male. We skipped that slide. But it's, you know, you're twice as likely to own bitcoin as a man than a woman. And it's aligning with the, the male dominated political ideology and females are becoming more critical of it. Yeah, that's that. So I, I, I think the kind of orange branding of bitcoin has taken a toll on the political enemies of Donald Trump. I think bitcoin's brand is extremely strong. It's one of the strongest brands in the world. That's why we have absorbed all of crypto in our brand. We are like the Kleenex of bitcoin or the Kodak where it just becomes a name for the whole genre. But Donald Trump's brand is one of the only brands that's stronger. And we have. The Trump brand is unbelievable. His, his negatives are insanely high and his positives. And we have kind of both from both these brands, the bitcoin brand and the, and the Trump brand. We've had a fusion attempt to make a fusion, like the David Bailey gambit to invite Trump to the conference to raise money for Trump, which was a brilliant, brilliant play. Led, led to a wildly successful conference and all of the policy stuff that we wanted at least being discussed and the worst of the policy that would have been implemented under an Elizabeth Warren presidency avoided. Yeah, horrible to think about that potential future. Right. But as much of a win as that was, that's him trying to cement, he had to cement the bitcoin brand to the Trump brand to do it. And Trump also being the crypto president, the bitcoin president, like he's branding himself with bitcoin. And in the mind of most people there just isn't room to distinguish these things. And so your feelings about one just kind of fuse over to the other. And so while there's tremendous upside to bitcoin's price and to its prospects and international game theory and everything that we are experiencing, there is this like thing where people who, people who are extremely negative on Donald Trump are more wary of bitcoin than they were a year ago, despite all of its successes. Maybe because of its successes, they find it suspicious. And we saw that in the data and you wouldn't really see that in price and you wouldn't really see that in other metrics. I mean maybe you see it on chain, like there's, it's kind of a ghost town in the mempool. And you know what I mean, there are others, like there are these little markers like where's retail? You know, where's, where's retail? We have institutional adoption is insane. But we don't see the fomo, we don't see Google searches, we don't see bitcoin Twitter going nuts. Right. And people are kind of like, where's the wave of adoptees coming in? And I think this data indicates like at least part of the story for where, where they are. Some of them are scared off by the politics and association with that, that character and Trump coin and all of the self serving grift that they, you know what I mean, they, they make the same mistake Dick Durbin made.

[Eric Casen]

I literally had staffers bring up Trump coin to me like as one of the first things they'll Be like, well, we don't really, you know, you're talking about bitcoin. They'll be like, well, we, we, you know, I, you know, you're not a supporter of Trump Coin, are you? And we're like, no, no, we. Everyone who's a bitcoiner thinks that was a. An absurd grift and absolutely just ridiculous and will disavow that and say that is shitcoining. And, like, you know, I didn't think I'd be, you know, talking to staffers about shitcoining. But, like, then there you are. But, like, that was the first thing that came to mind for them when you brought up bitcoin was, well, we hate Trump, and Trump launched Trump Coin. And that's crypto, which is bitcoin also. Right. And it's just. It's all jumbled together for a lot of people. And, like, one of my biggest takeaways was like, wow, the educational work that BPI is doing is so damn important.

[Troy]

Really important.

[Eric Casen]

Other. Otherwise you have people who think Trump Coin is the same as bitcoin who are writing laws and you can say like, oh, I don't have to do what the government tells me. That's why I have bitcoins. You know, give my middle finger to the government. It's like, well, that's true, but they're still the guys with guns who can come and take away your stuff and incarcerate you. So do you want, like, them to write favorable laws protecting your right to use bitcoin? Like, you don't need them to do that. You can still use bitcoin, but you'd rather have them. Like, I'd rather have a lot of Senator Lummises than Elizabeth Warren's in government, for example. Absolutely. Very, very simple heuristic there, you know?

[Troy]

Yep. I think two, Two points there. One is, for those, from those staffers perspective, it's like, well, wasn't. Wasn't Melania Coin launched, like, during the crypto dinner?

[Eric Casen]

I think. I think it was. Yeah.

[Troy]

Yeah.

[Eric Casen]

I wasn't at this crypto dinner, so I was watching on online as Melania Coin got launched. I'm pretty sure it was, like, while the dinner was taking place, which was just insane. Also, like, what are we doing here? This is like, it was one of those things where it was, like, so surreal that you're like, no come. Like, no way.

[Troy]

I know.

[Eric Casen]

Yes.

[Troy]

But if you look at the crypto dinner, I mean, it's all prominent bitcoiners and it's. It's bitcoiners. Who donate heavily to elect the guy. And so it's really hard for a Democratic staffer to look at that and then say, oh, but you are opposed to that. But there you are at the dinner and you just announced it.

[Eric Casen]

And you know, luckily, luckily I wasn't there. So you know, I was safe.

[Troy]

Right? Luckily. Right? I know I knew a lot of people at the dinner. I luckily wasn't there too. But it's just like that's the danger of, I hate to go political here, but that's the danger of getting in bed with an amoral, self enriching politician. You, you are stuck. Once you start playing that game of politics like you start supporting a politician, then when they, when they do that you don't like, it kind of blows back on you. And you, you can distance yourself from it, but you're partly responsible for them being in office. And so you kind of just kind of take that as it, and they're brilliant strategists who made that, that decision and, and know what they did and live with it. But man, it sucks. It, you know, it's just, I want to have a conversation with the Trump family and, and say, look, you guys, you have a chance at history, like ultimately in life, okay, I know you have a corporation and you have a family business and your wealth and whatever, but almost nobody gets a chance to go down as Lincoln. You know, Washington, like you got that chance. You, you can, your, your legacy can go down for your entire family line. Like we led America into a period of peace and prosperity and greatness and, and, and you would forfeit that for a chance to enrich yourself on a crypto token. It's not even a question of ethics. It's a question of self interest. Do you understand what the stakes are here and how much more important this is even to you and what you ultimately care about in the long run? You're jeopardizing it. You're jeopardizing it all. You're jeopardizing your legacy. The, the ability of all of your legislation to succeed. Every, you know, the Democrats don't want to support common sense legislation because it has some symbolic association with this grifting that, that you know, that came up with even the stablecoin legislation. And it's going to be there with market structure, the Democrats who are already on board, and I don't even care about that stablecoin legislation stuff, but these people were already on board. They were already like bought and paid for by the political whatever lobbyists once, once the Trump grifting got too hard to stomach and he's giving audiences to whatever shakes who are lots of Trump coin. They, they, they withdrew their support and had to be won back. Yeah, you're jeopardizing your agenda and your chance to get done what you need to get done. So it's hard for me to believe, it's hard to for me believe that it happened for that reason. Like who in that family, that power system has, is making these kinds of calls? Like you know it. The rest of us have to like scrape for money and do things that are not necessarily, we're not necessarily proud of, to make a buck because we need money to survive. But you don't, buddy, you got like, you got a golden opportunity here. I don't know. It's a shame.

[Eric Casen]

It's incredibly high time preference behavior is what it ultimately comes down to.

[Troy]

That's right, that's it.

[Eric Casen]

Like insanely so though for the position that you are in when you have the luxury of being low time preference. But then again it's like how low time preference can you be when you're his age also? That's like, that's a function of age. Like you, like realistically you're, I mean maybe Trump lives to be 150. I doubt it. Like, he's probably gonna have a slightly above average lifespan. Good for him. I hope he is healthy long into his is even later years. But like as a function of your age, you're necessarily more high time preference. Like but, but then again you're also like very wealthy. So like you have the ability to be low time preference. And if you care about your kids and your grandkids, which exactly like that.

[Troy]

I was gonna say you're a father now, you're a father now. And I feel like that generalization is just not true for people who, who have kids especially I can't speak for the people who don't. But my parents, they've gotten more, more low time preference as they've aged. And I feel the same way. It's like I care more about my kids and my legacy now than when I was a teenager. I didn't care about my 30 year old self. Right. I feel like you're right in theory, but in practice for me it's gone the opposite way.

[Eric Casen]

100% agree. And I felt like I didn't entirely. I thought I was a low time preference person because bitcoin made me so enlightened prior to having our first child, our son, and then he came along and I'm like, oh, no, I was like. I mean, I was kind of like mid time preference. But like, now I'm like, what happens, like, long after I'm gone? Because he'll still be here and his kids will still be here and like, it's real then. But maybe that's not as important for some. I don't know. I won't speculate on that. But it was just insanely, insanely shocking to see. And it's like, imagine the vibe if that hadn't happened. Like, you wouldn't have to have conversations with staffers when you're trying to talk about bitcoin and how great it is for Americans and the people of the world. You wouldn't have to first address Trump Coin and Melania Coin.

[Troy]

Exactly.

[Eric Casen]

Wouldn't that be nice? But I guess that's in an alternate reality. We're in a different place, but for this timeline, we're not.

[Troy]

That's right. I think this is part, like you were saying, how important the Bitcoin Policy Institute is and related educational efforts. And all of us, really, when it comes time to educate our representatives, you know, we live in the world that we're given. Like, I didn't vote for Trump, but I shudder to think about what would have happened under a Harris regime, not just to bitcoin, but in many other respects. You know, none of those options really appealed to me. But if Harris had been elected, I would be advocating likewise with Trump. I've got, I've got a different set of problems. Instead of like, how do we keep you from making this illegal? We've got, how do we keep you from grifting on top of it? You know, it's just like, pick your poison. But I'm glad you guys came in and did some of that. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's a reminder when you meet people in D.C. that, that we really do have a representative democracy, despite the fact that, you know, yes, it is sullied with money and. But there are people ultimately who make each decision. They're just people. There's people behind every decision. And those people are the representatives and the staffers. And you can talk to those people as people. You have that, that right and that access as a citizen. And, and once you see that happening and you realize how little they know and that many of us in bitcoin, like, actually know a lot more, then you realize, like, okay, this is a good system. We, we can close this gap and we kind of have the duty to do it as, as citizens, to Let our voices be heard, make our presence felt in D.C. we are represented by them. They serve us. It's back to the Declaration and stuff. It's a government for the people. We're the people. Whatever. I know there's a lot of whatever anarchists in bitcoin, but it's not a terrible system. At least we're not just outside the castle shouting at the walls. We can actually talk to people. And yeah, yeah, Trump, whatever you make of him, he listened. He actually heard that voice. Harris did not. And that was a big part of the election. It could be sufficient to have swung the election in his direction is just listening to bitcoiners and crypto people. The guy that I co presented with in DC, Brent Buchanan, did a poll of about 800 or maybe it was a thousand people. And his data shows that bitcoin owners were more likely to vote and it was a very important issue for them. And they swung hard for Trump. They were all over the political map, but they swung hard for Trump in that election, more so than other Republican candidates. And you know, his, his kind of. One of his takeaways from that, which I think is very good, was that if Democrats don't learn to listen to that same constituency, they're going to lose even more center left males. Younger center left males could cost them the next election. Kind of advice to Republicans is like take more of what you already took from young Hispanic males, young, young black males. Just leave the Democratic Party isolated with just college educated women. You know? You know what I mean? So, yeah, anyway, no, it's.

[Eric Casen]

Well, and do you want to, do you want to. I want to get back to, to your study as well, but do you want to go through that? The slide you showed me before from the.

[Troy]

Yeah, I can do that.

[Eric Casen]

That one's super fascinating, I think. Link.

[Troy]

Let me share this and highly recommend.

[Eric Casen]

Anyone who did not catch my feverish live tweeting stream of the Bitcoin policy summit, go and watch some of those live streamed talks that are up there on YouTube. Even if you did read my feverish live tweet stream, it was just a lot of signal there. And remember that the people that are up on stage are again addressing a room of people who may think that Trump coin is the same thing as bitcoin. And so like their message is, is really important. Yeah, okay, let's, let's.

[Troy]

Yeah, okay, here we go. This is the one that I wanted to share. Bitcoin barriers, barriers to bitcoin adoption. The question is, what are your main, what Is what are the main reasons you don't own Bitcoin? Select all that apply. Too RISKY Is number one at 45 and a half percent. Don't trust it. Is 43%. Don't understand it. 37%. Not enough money to invest. 27%. Regulatory uncertainty. 25%. No need. I think this is like, I don't have a need for it. 23.5%. Don't know where or how to purchase it was 15%. Too political was 14.7%. And that may be showing up in our ownership data. That might account for some of that shift. Environmental concerns was 6.1% and unsure was 4%. I. I was just really struck, like, hey, we should just tackle these from the big ones. You know, like, too risky, don't trust it, don't understand it. We can't do anything about not enough money.

[Eric Casen]

Those first three, though, too risky, don't trust it, don't understand it. Those are all similar vibes, really. Right. That's just like. Because if you do understand it, you know it's not too risky. If you don't trust it, you don't understand it. Like, that all comes down to a lack of understanding, right? Because once you do, you're like, oh, no, this is not too risky. It's not owning it. That is risky. And it is. Don't trust, verify. I don't have to trust it in the same way that I have to trust other things, but I can trust it because I don't have to trust anyone. Again, that just comes back to education, though. And that's why I say, okay, that's an earliness sentiment right there that it just. People still haven't wrapped their heads around what the heck this thing is. And you also, you know, yeah, there's more educational resources than ever before, but, like, people are busy just trying to, you know, stay on that Fiat hamster wheel and not get thrown off. And like, it's, you know, you feel for people because, like, you want more people to understand it, but you've got to be able to take the time and, and have the. Take the initiative to go out there and like, actually learn about it. So you don't say it's too risky or, you know, I don't trust it.

[Troy]

Yeah, we actually asked these questions about trust and risk in our survey too, and understanding and knowledge. We asked four questions on knowledge, four questions on trust, and. And we found them to be super correlated with each other and super correlated with bitcoin ownership. They were much more correlated than anything else. Like anything in demographics or politics. And our conclusion last year, and it holds true for this year, is bitcoiners are just people who know about bitcoin. That's what characterizes bitcoin ownership more than anything else. It's just people who know about bitcoin. So you're exactly right. And I think we get caught up in debates like the environmental concern debate. You know, that's been a major focus of mine for the last four years. And it's 6.1% of people. Only 6.1% of people list that as one of the main reasons. Not even the main reason, but just one of when you can select all that apply. That means 94% of people didn't consider it to be one of the reasons they're not buying bitcoin. And yet that has, like, dominated the discourse. I don't know, man. We gotta focus on the education side. And it's hard. I mean, you know, it's hard. We have a ton of resources, yes, but people don't have a lot of time. And bitcoin is a bloody hard thing to explain. It isn't quite like anything else. There's a book that I just started reading on anti. Anti mimesis or anti mimetic ideas. You know, mimetic ideas are ones that easily catch on and spread, like on social media, like, you know, cat gifs or memes. But antimemetic ideas are ones that in some ways resist spreading or they're hard to spread despite being oftentimes like really good ideas. And I think bitcoin is an anti memetic idea, which is, I know, weird to square with the fact that our entire community is the most memetic community on the Internet. We are the kings of memes. But the underlying thing is not a meme and it is not meme. It is not directly capturable. In something as simple as a meme, we. We've got like a thousand memes for it, but none of them are quite right. None of them are perfect, you know, and. And so you can. There's. There's something really hard to grok about the bitcoin idea. It takes time. And I think what you see there is something like the, the lack of time and effort that people are willing to put in to understand it. They're busy, they don't need it that much. They've got privilege. And where you have to understand it, you learn it, you get it, you see its value. But if you don't have to, it remains this abstract idea. And the Whole set of questions that we have about it, what backs it and why can't I just copy it? Oh, my God. You know, the whole list of things. Can't we use it for crime? Like, those things just keep coming at us and people don't have a core idea of what it is. It's an asset. It's a network. What is that exactly? Yeah. Who controls it? Who made it like those basic things? Is it digital gold? Well, kind of, yes, but kind of not. And, and, and, and so, yeah. Yeah. I think we have an enormous educational task in front of ourselves. And like this. This chart is awesome. It's like how we cross the chasm of adoption. We gotta. We gotta get people to understand it. And when they understand it, they'll see that it's not too risky and they'll come to trust it. Or as you put it, realize you don't even need to trust it. It's trustworthy, it's reliable. Yeah. We asked one of our questions on trust. I got to say, this was just, do you trust the bitcoin blockchain to be accurate, an accurate record? And we thought like this, this is almost like a test of bitcoin literacy. Like you should say, you know, strongly agree. Like everybody should say strongly agree. There shouldn't be any disagreement about this one. Actually, the answers to this question about trust were right in line with question the other questions about trust, which is like, do you trust it to hold value over time? Like that kind of, you know, do you. Do you trust it? Do you think it's tr. You can trust it with your savings? People had the same answer to that as do you trust the accuracy of the chain? Which tells me they do not understand it at all.

[Eric Casen]

It's a highly into one for them.

[Troy]

Like, it's all lumped into one. Yeah, trust. Bitcoin is an. Is a volatile asset. If you need money a year from now and you know you need it Bitcoin, you may not want to park your. All that savings in bitcoin during that period of time. If you're, you know, whatever, you need a house in a year. But. And I think bitcoiners would say that, but none of us bitcoiners are going to say that the blockchain contains falsehoods about what has transpired on the chain. It's like the most accurate source of information in the world, so. The most trustworthy in the world. So, yeah, anyway, that tells you where people are at and what our real challenge is. I guess you're a bitcoin educator. So this puts you at the tip of the spear.

[Eric Casen]

Yeah, I mean, it's. At least, that means there's plenty more podcasting to do. So that's a good thing. You know, there's no shortage. We need more bitcoin podcasts out there to counter, to counteract this.

[Troy]

But I mean, if you're going to take, if you're going to take 40 hours in a week, there has to be a lot of content out there to provide that.

[Eric Casen]

40 hours, exactly. Exactly. Okay. So another thing I wanted to get into in your report was this, this idea that you guys, I think, I mean, I think it's a term basically that you've coined as a result of the. What you saw in bitcoiners, which is moral maximalism.

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah.

[Eric Casen]

Can you, can you talk about that a little bit? Because I thought that was fascinating.

[Troy]

Let me share this. Yeah, well, we, this is Andy Perkins idea. And Andy is the head of the marketing department at Washington State University and the co author of this report. He designed the survey that we, that we use to collect the data. And Andy uses this framework of moral foundations in, in some of his other academic work. And it's the creation of Jonathan Haidt and some other social theorists about how we can understand and explain some of our moral disagreements and public policy disagreements through thinking about what our deepest moral and cultural values are. So each one of these dimensions of this radar plot here is a measure of one of the foundations of moral reasoning. Care, cultural liberty, economic liberty, purity, authoritarianism. Authoritarianism doesn't mean a political thing. It means like respect for authority. How important is it to respect your parents? How important is to respect your political leaders and obey them and stuff like that. Loyalty, proportionality, or kind of fairness is another name for that one. Equality. And each one of these dimensions you get a battery of questions like, I don't remember what it's four, four questions. I think for each one, maybe five or six that ask you a variety of questions of how important is it to, you know, pay people equally for the same kind of work? Maybe for proportionality. And then you would have a seven point scale, you know, not very important. Very important, or yeah, strongly disagree, to strongly agree. And where you rank on this dimension is an average of those questions on proportionality and likewise for all of the others. So what you get here is like a profile of which things you care about most in moral reasoning. And the reason this framework is interesting is because liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans differ in their moral profiles sort of robustly. Republicans Are higher in, like, respect for authority, and they're higher in purity, and they're higher in economic and cultural liberty than liberals and similar to liberals in the other dimensions. And some, some liberals are slightly higher, but that means there's some there there. It's not just, you know, statistical noise, but it's weird that all you can know about someone is their moral foundations profile and you can predict their political ideology or vice versa, just to some, you know, non, non zero degree. And we, we wanted to know last year when we asked these questions like, where are bitcoiners? Are they more like conservatives in the way their ultimate core values, or are they more like liberals? And we found last year and this year, the answer was like, neither. Bitcoiners are their own. Have their own distinctive moral foundations profile, which I called it moral maximalism because they just seem to be higher almost everywhere. Like on cultural liberty, cultural and economic liberty were distinguished by. Economic liberty was like, about property, basically, I have a right to do what I want with my own property. Cultural liberty is like, I kind of have the right to do with my life whatever I want to do unless somebody else would be harmed by it. On cultural liberty, bitcoiners were higher than everybody. On economic liberty, sort of between liberals and conservatives, I was surprised by that, actually. We had the same result last year, Same exact result last year. On purity, bitcoiners were higher. On care, bitcoiners just kind of matched conservatives. On equality, bitcoins were the highest proportionality, bitcoins were matching conservatives loyalty just barely below conservatives, well, well above liberals, authority below conservatives, but well above liberals. So it just seemed like they were either right next to the maximum or at the maximum across the board. Like they. This isn't to say they're more moral than other people. Some people misunderstood the phrase moral maxim as like, they're really good people. It's more like they. They just tended to agree with the importance of some moral value, like the importance of equality or the importance of care, the importance of fairness or the importance of loyalty. When asked, you know, how important is this? They were like, it's more important than other than other people. And also this, this profile just matched last year's, like, almost precisely, which is like, cool. There's a bitcoiner type that's. There's a bitcoiner type of a set of values and ways of thinking deeply about morality that correlates with bitcoin ownership.

[Eric Casen]

I would say. Once I saw this, I was like, yeah, this tracks like bitcoiner. I forget what exactly you said in D.C. but it's basically, bitcoiners care about everything a lot. Just, there's a lot of it, a lot of passion there, which is like, you know, that. That makes sense, but it's also another just good reminder that this is like, yes, money is inherently political because it's money, but money is not partisan. And bitcoin is like, of course bitcoin's inherently political because, again, it's money, but it's not partisan and neither are its owners. And like, this is like, that's what I think is so fascinating about these studies that you guys do. And I'm so glad you. You do them. I hope they continue because it. It just very clearly shows that. It's like you can put whatever label you want, whether you're pro or anti or whatever, and you can slap whatever label you want on bitcoin, but bitcoin doesn't care. And it turns out that the people who own bitcoin don't fit your label either. Like, they. They're, you know, often right in the middle of what you expect. They're, you know, so. Except when it comes to this. This moral maximalism where they. They care about everything a ton, which is just. Yeah, amazing. Amazing.

[Troy]

It does kind of fit, right? It's like, yeah, there's. Yeah, I think. I think bitcoiners, it's hard to make any, you know, any generalizations about all of us, but we're doing something new and different, right? We are early. We are early. We are the early ones. And who steps out into this new domain first? Kind of like asking who comes to America. It's not a random sample of Europeans that we end up with in the US the settlers. We end up with adventurers. We end up with people who are dissatisfied with the system. The people who are dreamers and want to build some I more ideal, safer, better future for their families, for. For themselves. So, like, that's something like that, I'm guessing, is showing up in this moral foundation profile. You know, it's like people who see the system and say it's not fair and that I'm out. Those people gonna rank higher on fairness, right? Or certainly cultural liberty. People are stomping on my liberty. I'm going to opt out. Those people are. You survey all those people, you're going to see, they rank cultural liberty higher. Right? So, yeah, I feel like something like the earliness of bitcoin owners right now is reflected in this. I don't know if this profile will dissipate and we'll just go to like, average. Over the average population of moral profile. Like, over. Over time. My, My guess is that we do. Like, over time, we just. This thing just becomes noise. But right now we have. We have a type. Yeah, yeah.

[Eric Casen]

No, I mean, it's, it's. It's cool to see and it is interesting to think, like, as bitcoin becomes more ubiquitous. I know, what does the profile of a, quote, bitcoiner look like anymore? The waters will be muddied, necessarily, because you're just, you know, it just looks like all of us. But like. And right. Like, that's the interesting thing. Like, right now it still kind of looks like all of us. That's one of like the big takeaways from this, right? Is it still looks like bitcoiners look like America. Is it fair to say?

[Troy]

Absolutely. And I think that saddens a lot of people. The waters have already been muddied. They've been very much muddied. I was part of a lot of Internet communities that went through this period of growth where they were special at first, and then it just became people like shitposting and the quality deteriorated. And you couldn't count on members to know anything or do anything other than just go for cheap laughs. And every time I mourned the death of that community. And I feel like. I feel like that's part of. That's just part of what it is to be adopted. You know, you can remain niche and you can stay cool, but then you will always remain niche. So do you want people to adopt or not? And yeah, I think going back to ownership where we started, it's going to be impossible to measure exposure to bitcoin because it's going to be almost 100%. MicroStrategy gets into S&P 500. That broadens. Like, everybody's going to get a little. Wisconsin has in their retirement fund. Every Wisconsin state employee retiree has some exposure to bitcoin. And then treasuries keep adding bitcoin to the balance sheet. I mean, it's going to be like stocks. If the country has. I mean, US does have some bitcoin. I mean, really, actually, all the US citizens all have exposure to bitcoin through the holdings of the government in some extended sense. But if those holdings grow, then that exposure will also grow. So it's like the point of studying bitcoiners might, over time just disappear. The questions of how many people own it, what do they like? I mean, hopefully all this is just like, nobody studies cell Phone owners now, like, what are they? Like, what's the profile of a mobile phone user? Like, dumb survey, nobody would do it. And that will be. That will be bitcoin. And then people will say, ah. I remember when being a bitcoiner was cool. Well, it was never cool outside of our circles, but it was like, cool within our circles. Remember when it was uncool, Just be boring. Yeah. I wanted to do one last thing, Walker, just. We already made this point that trust in bitcoin, knowing about bitcoin, belief in its utility, belief in its morality, are more predictive of bitcoin ownership than anything else. We asked four questions for each of these. They were highly correlated with each other, highly correlated with bitcoin ownership. Like, so far and away, above everything else, even that age chart. Like, I compared these against age, these against gender, and even these against age and gender combined. So you have these categories of, like, old and female, young and male. These attitudes are more predictive than being young and male, let's say. So really, this is what bitcoin adoption is about. These attitudes towards bitcoin, not, as I say in the report, it's a matter. It's not a matter of who you are, it's a matter of what you know and believe about bitcoin that predicts whether you own bitcoin. And so, yeah, that puts the ball in our court as bitcoin educators to get it done and also gives us hope that it can be done. Since bitcoin isn't some niche political identity. It's certainly not, you know, young white males or something whites are less likely to own than, than non whites in our survey.

[Eric Casen]

It's.

[Troy]

It's not like you're fighting identity in order to adopt bitcoin. You're fighting ignorance. And, and that seems doable. Whereas, you know, you're not going to talk someone out of like, their religion or their, you know, their gender. You could talk them out of their ignorance.

[Eric Casen]

I mean, that's a very good thing, right? Like, that. It really does just come down to education. I mean, and it's wild to see that, like, just how similar this is across the board. Like, that's, I mean, it's pretty darn clear that there's really, there's no. I don't think there's a, A good way to con, like to argue against that. Like, the more, you know, the more likely you are to hold it is essentially like what that boils down to, right?

[Troy]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we don't know which of these comes first. And we don't know like. And I should include. Yeah, ownership is orange there. Right. So it could be and probably is true that when you give people some bitcoin or they buy a little bit, then they start to trust it, then they learn about it, then they see its utility, then they think it's good. And it can also go the other way. You learn about bitcoin, you begin to trust it. Once you know about it, you begin to see its utility, you begin to see its morality, and then you buy it. We don't know which way those causal arrows are going. We can't measure that in our. In with our tools. I'm pretty sure it goes both ways. Those faucets in the early days created a lot of bitcoiners, and they probably created a lot of fervent bitcoiners. And we should probably bear that in mind, too, when we're educating about bitcoin. You know, it's great when you, when you are orange pilling someone just to give them some bitcoin. Like, it's a classic move. Here, here's 20 bucks worth of bitcoin. Play around with it. Send it to people, try different wallets, whatever. Just have fun with it. Play with your bitcoin. It actually is a strategy for me anyway. It's a technology. Play with it. You know, watch it. Watch the price chart. Honestly, you know, for some people that I've just told about bitcoin, they just watched the price chart, and that was enough to get them to begin to trust it because, you know, years pass and they come to see that the pronouncements of its death are greatly exaggerated. Just watch it over time. Yeah, So I think it goes in all directions, but the correlation is ridiculous, ridiculously tight. And. And that does make me think that, that if we educate people, we can achieve broad adoption. And then I would say the counter signal to this in the report, the counter signal to this is this trend of a trend in. In sentiment, especially where you see the brand identity calcifying as political. Right. And you see people losing people on the left and losing women, which we already have fewer of. And. And so I think there's a kind of bright spot in the report, which is like, hey, we're basically Americans who know about bitcoin. And then there's a warning, there's a red flag, canary in the coal mine kind of thing, which is like, this is a worrisome trend. Here we have a technology that is rapidly growing in value and rapidly growing in institutional integration, government adoption, but it's shifting, it's polarizing in its. In its perception. And. And frankly, why is it neutral, negative across the board, except for owners, why aren't we positive? That is in itself not cool. People are like, how do you feel about Bitcoin? And this is in the signal poll as well. They just asked a simple question, like your impressions of bitcoin. Positive, negative, neutral. It hovers around neutral, but it's slightly negative. Why? I don't think it was like that for. I don't think it was like that 15 years into mobile phones, although people did hate lots of things about mobile phones or the Internet. But I don't think we just sat there at neutral sentiment and kind of went down while the technology was exploding. So I think there's also a warning signal here.

[Eric Casen]

Do you think that's perhaps a unique function of Bitcoin as money, given that if you don't own something and you see its value going way up, like, you kind of root for it to fail a little bit because you don't want to have been the guy who sat on the sidelines and kept watching it. You don't want to be the Peter Schiff, you know, like. So you. It's. It's that, like, sunk cost bias where you just. You double down. You double down. You're like, nope, it's bad. And the higher it goes, you're like, I hate it even more now. Do you think that's part of it? And, like. And that's something that's different than, like, mobile phones or the Internet or whatever, because, like, they're not money.

[Troy]

Yeah, it's very true. Yeah. Something I heard in D.C. that was just really disturbing, and I heard it through other people, too, was that some of the Democratic opposition to Bitcoin was not based in any of the concerns that we talked about earlier, like crime and sanctions evasion, but was just because it would give a win to people who hold it. And the Trump family has a lot of it. And right now, one of the quotes that I heard was just, we can't afford to give them a win right now. Like, we'll get past this and, like, eventually we'll be able to. We'll work something out, but right now, we just can't give them a win. And, yeah, that's depressing to think our representatives are making decisions on behalf of the American people that are suboptimal because they don't want to give their political opponent a win. The fuck. That's not the job. That's not your job. Do Your job, your job is to serve the American people.

[Eric Casen]

Maybe do a little soul searching too, like, okay, this could give you a win too. Nobody has a monopoly on this open protocol. You're only hurting yourself by being against it. It's just so frustrating where it's like you're cutting yourself and your constituents off from this incredibly net beneficial thing and instead treating this like it's some negative sum political game or zero sum political game. Like this. Bitcoin's a positive sum game. Like this rising tide lifts all these boats, but you're treating it like every other political football that you've grown accustomed to throwing back and forth, I guess is what it comes down to. It's like bitcoin's hard to understand and it's something new. And right now people are just treating it like it's just one of their other talking points, one of their other red, blue, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola battles. And it's just, that's a serious miscalculation.

[Troy]

Serious miscalculation. It will hurt. Whoever does this miscalculation is going to be tremendously hurt by it for a long time. I think what you're raising is like a bigger problem than the resistance to bitcoin. You know, when you realize that political decisions are made that way, it's kind of like where we started with the staffers. Like, wait, decisions are being made by octogenarians and 24 year old staffers. Like, that's a little frightening. But this is another one like, wait, the simple heuristic of like, that guy would benefit, therefore bad. That guy likes it, therefore bad. That simple heuristic is decisive. I mean, I understand it as a heuristic. If you got to make a snap judgment and you don't have any time or any other information on a complex subject and you know that a guy that you generally dislike likes it, then you might say, okay, that's a bad idea. But that's not you. You have a staff, you have the ability to investigate things. And you know, Donald Trump likes a lot of great things. You, you, you don't, you know what I mean? That like he likes a lot of great things, indisputably things that we wouldn't even consider. You know, he's in favor of, in favor of the Internet. I'm sure it wouldn't make you not in favor of the Internet that he's in favor of it. It's such an incredibly lazy way to make up your mind about something, but it's, it's even more than laziness. It's, it's not just laziness because they're not lazy people. It, it's tribal religious warfare and the not wanting to give him a win is. Well, we're engaged in a battle of good and evil, good versus evil and we, we must win. It's an existential risk if we don't. We need to save democracy, blah blah, right. Gets swept into this huge like spiritual battle and that's dangerous. Democracy can't work in a winner take all close minded way of zero sum thinking. Democracy requires compromise. It requires accepting ideas from your greatest enemy when they serve your constituents. Like if, if, if it's just rotating, if democracy is just rotating oppression of your enemies by authoritarian parties, then what's the point? You know, we're Iraq like that's, you know, you just, you just want to be in the ethnic majority so that you can just oppress the ethnic minority. Right? And then if you're the ethnic minority, it's like we need to have kids fast enough to overcome the. That's not democracy. That's not democracy. And it feels like this is just one of those issues where the hyper polarization and tribalism in this issue is an indicator that our leadership is not functioning in a, in accordance with the principles on which democracy can work. And that's like a deeper concern than bitcoin in the short run.

[Eric Casen]

Well, let me ask you a question off topic of the report, but I mean generally what are your thoughts on a legitimate third party contender like with Elon or with the American Hodl Eric Casen ticket that's been floated around in the Orange Party? Where are you at with that?

[Troy]

My political science friends think it's an absolute non starter. And because our system is built to maintain and support two party rule and we would have need to have a different system like we do in other countries in order to support a viable third party. That's their studied judgment as, as experts in the, in the field. My gut and my heart says they're wrong. My, my gut says, my gut says there does come a point where people feel ill served. It's almost, it's almost like the dollar system. You know, Bitcoin is unlikely. No expert would have predicted it. But we levered up so hard on our ability to print money that we just took that as an axiom and then we leveraged on it to exploit the ability to print money to such an extent that we basically are taking down the entire system of money just like we levered up on the. Was it Ben Bernanke's? Claim that the housing market never falls over a certain period of time. We levered up on that to such an extent that we made it fall. And we do this with all certainties. And I feel like in America, the two party, the party system, Democrats, Republicans, the two party system is such an axiom that we lever up on it and abuse it to such a degree that we might destabilize that system and open the path for a third party. As unlikely as it is statistically and structurally, with everything against it. My poly sci friends would say, just look at the number of seats that are up for grabs in the midterms right now that look up for grabs. It's just a handful of seats. Everything else is like locked and loaded. It's decided already. So, you know, how do you go from a system where the goods are all divvied up and the electorate is all fully, you know, the, the districts are already gerrymandered perfectly to, to, to maintain, to basically shove all of the contestable regions into a very small number of districts. How do you, how do you, how do you break into that system where incumbents are just a lock? I mean, how do we get these old politicians? How is it that the average age is 70 or whatever? It's, it's because people don't leave. But why don't people leave? Well, because their constituents reelect them. But why are they reelected? Because the party system and the gerrymandering is so effective. So the same reason why Congress is old is also why a third party is unlikely. But I, yeah, my gut, my gut is like, you know, yeah, that's the structure, but the structure, everything right now is unstable. These big structures that we've taken for granted. We, we, yeah, it's a, it's a risk allocation thing. We, we perceive the structures as not risky, as stable. We have a hard time perceiving a risk to the structure, to the system. But if Bitcoin teaches you anything, it teaches you to look for those, those kinds of holistic risks. You can, you can see Bitcoin as a hedge on that systemic risk for the dollar system. And, and so you, you, you, you start to see it. And the third party is kind of like in the same slot as bitcoin politically. I mean, I, I mean I, I welcome it. First of all, it'd be wonderful to open up the discourse and get some new, new slate. I, I mean Casen and Hodl would be wildly entertaining.

[Eric Casen]

They've got, they've got my vote. You know, I'd Love to see it. So the one thing I don't think we, we touched on yet, which was another interesting part of the report, and I, I want to be conscious of your time here, but if we can maybe just touch on it briefly, is the, the question about if we should, let's say, divest a little bit of our gold holdings and have bitcoin instead. Can we talk about that one a little bit? Because I thought that one was quite interesting.

[Troy]

Yeah, I think the upshot of this really is also. It's the same as the main upshot, which is that education is key. If you just ask people like, hey, should we adopt a strategic crypto reserve? This is their answer. Most people are like, what? Neutral? Some people are like, hell no. And then there's a few people who are into it, but it's, it's neutral to negative. That sounds like a crazy newfangled idea. People don't like it in general. We also asked, like, should we diversify our bitcoin holdings into or our gold holdings into bitcoin? And people had similar result in the binary question, should we do this or not? It's because it's like a newfangled thing. Should we develop a strategic bitcoin reserve in which we convert some of our gold to bitcoin? People are hesitant about that. But when we, we gave them a question with a, a slider which said the United States government is considering converting some of its gold into bitcoin. If you were advising the US Government, we didn't say they, they were going to do it. We said they were considering doing it. If you were advising them, how much of the gold would you advise them to convert to bitcoin? And the slider could go in 1% increments or between 0 and 100. And for the record, the slider was set at 50. But if you didn't touch the slider at all, your. There was no record placed at all. We just discounted you completely. And there were like 300 something people who didn't touch it. And so we just didn't count them. We went with this. Yeah, we had 3,538 respondents total. And we just went with whatever. Our 3,200 for this question. That meant that you had to grab the slider and put it somewhere. And the number of people that put it on a 50% was, oh, you can see right here in the chart, 41 to 50% was not really an outlier. And 50, 50% itself wasn't especially high. People tended to put it on like 10% increments, like just because of the way the mind works, right? Oh, 20%, 30%. But what was interesting is having said all that about how we gathered the data, 80% or 79 point something percent of people put that slider off zero and allocated some gold to bitcoin. And the median allocation was 10%. The mean allocation was just over 20% because, you know, 10% is towards the low end of the spectrum. So you had those like maxis out there, like 100%, you know, so that would throw off the mean because they're so much higher than 10%. But the median was 10% which would be like we have an $800 billion worth of gold, that's $80 billion worth of Bitcoin, which is a lot of bitcoin actually. Yeah, that's a tremendous, that's a tremendous amount of bitcoin. So. And then, yes, we found that. I ran this against every other variable in the data set basically to look at how, you know, young people did it, how women did it, how liberals did it, how conservatives did it, how people who felt well of bitcoin did, how people own bitcoin did it. And it all went according to how you would expect old people much less likely to allocate to, than, than young people. I mean, look at this, look at this median conversion rate. These are median conversion rates by age for each of These groups between 26 and 30, they're like putting one third of the gold reserves almost into bitcoin. Whereas at 80 you're at like 5%. Still not that low. But we also looked at men versus women and we found, we found, didn't have this in the report. Basically, men allocate a lot more than women, except as you get older men were at like, the older men were at zero percent allocation and the older women were off zero.

[Eric Casen]

Interesting.

[Troy]

Yeah. And it was really, you know, across the, across the, all the age groups, women were, were really reluctant to go to zero, whereas old men would just go to zero. And I think it's because of risk aversion. I think with this framing, allocating everything to gold and not even 1% to Bitcoin is risky. And the men are less risk averse. And so, you know, the women would, would be more risk, risk averse and just allocate a few percent to bitcoin. Whereas the men were like, no, fuck it. They're like, it's Peter Schiff. We had the Peter, the Peter Schiff group is the old men who want zero percent in bitcoin. Old women, they're a little bit more cautious. And in this setting, caution pushes you in favor of some allocation. And if you think about sort of like we're thinking about converting some of our bitcoin reserves to gold reserves to bitcoin, should we do it? That binary people are probably filling in an allocation in their mind, like what are they, how much are they going to put there? Is it going to be 25%, 50%? Like I don't know. That sounds scary, right? But if you give them a slider and say you get to put the percentage, should it be zero or more, suddenly 80% of people are like, well it shouldn't be zero. Even risk averse people. So I think the big lesson for this is we need to educate people on what we would be doing. Exactly. But also frame the question in a way that doesn't. That answers questions for them. Frame the question in a way that, that, that allows them to see how small the allocation could be. Like I wonder if you just asked the question should we convert 10% of our gold to bitcoin, what your answer would be? Or 5% rather than should we create a bitcoin reserve that this newfangled thing. Right. It's very, very, very frame dependent. That's what we say in the report. We just think this issue is very frame dependent and it's early. People don't know that much about it. They don't understand what it would be. So we have to educate.

[Eric Casen]

Well framed. It's a well framed question here though, like, because that does make it make sense. You know, it's just like it's, you're, it's getting your foot in the door, right? Like you're just dipping your toes in a little, you know, just a little, just, just maybe just a little bit of bitcoin, you know, just a few billion. Like what? You know, it's not a big deal. Well, Dread, this was fascinating. Is there anything we did not get a chance to touch on that you wanted to make sure we did? Have we done a pretty good job covering this? I appreciate your time because this was amazing to get this deep dive from you.

[Troy]

Yeah, I appreciate the chance to talk about it. I really had fun with this data set and I'm not done with it.

[Eric Casen]

Okay.

[Troy]

It's a large data set and I'm not a data scientist, I'm not a statistician. My training is in the humanities, it's in philosophy. But it's really fun to have data. And I'm also lucky to have Andy As a co author and somebody who actually does know how to handle data. So I could throw my crazy ideas by him and he could tell me why I was making statistical nonsense. Yeah. So I want to give a shout out to Andy, really appreciate his help. And to the other people who are doing data collection. I think that what this shows, this, this whole thing shows us is the hidden parts of bitcoin ownership. We hear, we hear from the media, we hear from politicians, we hear from each other on social media, we hear from podcasters. But we don't hear from the typical bitcoin owner because they don't feel that strongly about it. They don't know that much about it necessarily. They don't feel the need to talk. They're not as ideological. They just stay quiet. And that is most bitcoin owners. I was thinking about it. Okay, we got 48 million people with exposure to bitcoin in America. How many people were at the bitcoin conference in Vegas? What was it? Do you know?

[Eric Casen]

30, rounded maybe a little over 30.

[Troy]

30,000. Okay, so 30 times that is 1 million. That's 1 30th of 1 million. Now we got to multiply that by 50, right? So that's. What is that one out of 1500 Bitcoiners is there something like that?

[Eric Casen]

So test your math on that one.

[Troy]

That's just guessing. I'm not good at mental math. But something like one out of every 1500 Bitcoiners is there. So it's like. And that's a very non random sample. Something that people attacked on this is like, how can you generalize about 48 million people on the basis of 3,538. And I'm like, well, what do you think we do with all of our opinions about bitcoin? We generalize on the basis of Twitter. How big do you think bitcoin Twitter is? I mean, I don't know. I have 60,000 followers. Big Bitcoin or bigger accounts have a couple hundred thousand. Maybe we have 500,000 Bitcoin on Twitter. Bitcoin Twitter at maximum bots. Exactly how many bitcoine owners do we have active on Twitter? In bitcoin Twitter? What does a good post get about bitcoin? How many likes does it get or, or views? I. I don't know. I mean a good, a really good one might be. It might climb to 500,000 views. Like a really banger post on bitcoin Twitter. Okay, 500,000 out of 50 million, you're still at 1% of the population of bitcoin owners is. You're generalizing. You're generalizing on that. And those are the people who maybe viewed a tweet, the ones who talk in the comments on that banger tweet. You might have 50 people at most, would be an amazing, amazing thread of participation. So now you're, you're generalizing on those 50 and you're thinking those attitudes represent the 50 million and they don't. So we, we're, we're all generalizing about the bitcoin community who's in it. On the basis of very, very small sample sizes, all of us. You know, the question is whether they're representative or not, whether they're random or not. And, and I, that's the value in this, in this stuff. And I'm really looking forward to seeing Sarah Kreps and Ella Hoff too, who's also working on that, Ella and Sarah's project, the Signal project. And I know there are others underway too, because, you know, it's just showing us stuff we don't know.

[Eric Casen]

Really excited to see that as well. I just, just heard about that just before we got on here. So that, that looks amazing because that's one of the things I would love to know how America really stacks up versus other countries. Like, we, we have some guesses. There's, you know, some assumptions we can make. But, like, to really get in there with, like an actual study Will, is going to be fascinating. So I cannot wait to see that.

[Troy]

And have you talked to, have you had the river people on, like, Sam Wilder's recent report on America?

[Eric Casen]

I have not. Adam. I've got to have those guys on. Yeah, it's overdue because they, they have.

[Troy]

An awesome report they presented right before us, as you know, at the summit. Alex Leishman. But their take is like, America dominates bitcoin in many respects. And weirdly, I think that's true. But there are also other respects in which we are kind of at the tail end in terms of economic value, number of businesses started incorporating it, treasury balance sheets, whatever, there's retirement funds incorporating it. We're at the front end of the financial side of bitcoin and maybe even also a lot of the technical side, too. But in terms of who needs it and who uses it, I think we're way behind a lot of other places. So we didn't talk about the race data in my thing, but Hispanics showed where the highest percentage of owners in my, in my study. And people are asking why that is. And it's like I think a lot of people have family members or know people who use Bitcoin, like use it for real for something other than speculation, but like to avoid inflation or for remittance or they've had to use it because their money is crap. And. And so I think that informs the ownership in the US of that subpopulation. Right. So, yeah, I think that if you have Sam on or someone from river for that, that's an awesome report too that they wrote on a kind of American dominance in Bitcoin. And then you have Sarah Krepson and Ella to talk about the. The. Yeah. The ways in which bitcoin is more advanced in other places. That would be an amazing, amazing combo.

[Eric Casen]

You're lining. You're lining up my. Yeah, my schedule for me. I love it. I love it. Well, where can people go?

[Troy]

I'm your new booker.

[Eric Casen]

Yeah, no, that works for me. What's the website? There's. You also have an X account too, for the project. I'll make sure to link everything in the show notes, but if you want to just let people know.

[Troy]

Yeah, the website is nakamotoproject.org and you can follow me on Twitter at. At thetrokro. And I don't have the Twitter handle for our. Our X account offhand, but it's like Nakamoto Project, but I think with no E. So if you just. If you search, Nakamoto Project will pop up on. On X. So far, we don't have any imposters. We're not that big. This org is a. We are a 501 C3 organization. If you want more reports, give us money. We're kind of out of money from. From having spent money on these last two reports. We. I didn't take any money. I didn't pay myself anything. I did it. I did it all for free. Andy didn't take any money. He did it all for free. We paid our illustrator, our graphics designer. We paid some overhead. We had to pay for the actual survey. We had to pay to the professional firm to get it done to get a large sample that's representative of the United States. It's not cheap. So. Yeah, I will plug us too. We're 501c3 pending.

[Eric Casen]

Well, I am going to go ahead and send all of the sats received on ZAP Stream during this to you guys. It may not be much, but so far we've got 5317 sats from the good people of Excellent. So that's at least something. And I double checked just so that we could tell people on exits Nakamoto and then projct. That's it. But yeah. Well Troy, really, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for putting together this study as well. I'm already looking forward to the next one. But yeah, in the meantime, I'm looking forward to what other insights you can glean out of this data.

[Troy]

Thanks so much and thanks for hearing me out.

[Eric Casen]

Hey, you're welcome anytime. Always happy to platform a philosophy professor whenever I can.

[Troy]

Cool. There are many of us. There are many of us. As you know.

[Eric Casen]

It's an amazing thing. The vibes are high.

[Walker]

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 Beyond [e-mail] Walker and this podcast at primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search at Walker America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at T. 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.