← THE Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
The truth is we're a lot closer to like a Weimar Germany. Like the end is nigh. Everybody's trading and gambling, you know, all day and night long to try to get ahead. Our government's very, very corrupt. That's ultimately why we're here. You just don't own anything. You have a debasing monopoly. Money from the government, swap out fiat currency for bitcoin wherever possible. If you're deterring people from even trying to self custody, to me, you're not a bitcoiner at all. If bitcoiners are doing what they say they're doing, which is holding and not selling, is it really that painful like for it to go down? It just only goes up. And if you're denominating a bitcoin, terms, you're up. I think the way to have a clearer goal in mind is to try to fix the money. Like that is the root cause of most of the corruption and the problems that we face. That's an opportunity that like we don't even deserve as a culture. But oh my God, we're gonna get it again. You.
- [00:57]
B
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to make new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you're still early. This episode is brought to you by Blockware. What if you could lower your tax bill and stack bitcoin at the same time? Well, with blockware you can. New US tax rules let miners write off 100% of their mining hardware in a single year. So so earn bitcoin daily while saving big come tax season. Get started at mining.blockwaresolutions.com Titcoin use the code Titcoin to get $100 off your first miner when using the blockware marketplace. This is not tax advice so go speak to the team at Blockware to Learn more. That's mining.blockwaresolutions.com tcoin Head to the show notes for links to find the show on centralized social media platforms and on nostr or just go directly to bitcoin podcast.net you'll find it all there and kind reminder that you can support this show by becoming a paid subscriber on fountain or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care but I sure do appreciate it. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk.
- [02:06]
C
I'm back and forth on this, on the one side of it, I'm, my thought process is well, having a seed is like having that private key is, is really important. Like and mnemonic seeds were a really great innovation in that they allow us to take that seed and very easily store it somewhere and go anywhere with it and reboot, you know, in a hardware agnostic, vendor agnostic way. That's super powerful, right? That said, it's like the majority of people, the vast majority of people aren't going to care or necessarily want to or perhaps like cannot even necessarily be trusted. So like I see the argument on the other side like I want to, I want to have a seed phrase, right? I want to, I want to have that ability like to take it, to take it anywhere. A lot of people just maybe don't care. And like, like the majority of people I don't even think are gonna self custody Bitcoin. I think that's like, that's just not gonna happen. We know we don't have enough UTXOs for, for everybody. So it's like I do feel that they're filling a gap, but it's like, you know, it's, it's like with everything there's, there's trade offs, right? Like there are trade offs and you have to be honest about those trade offs and what, like what they imply long term for you or your personal sovereignty and for some people that just you know, may not be important. It's a slick product, people seem to like it. But like you know, everybody's got to make an individual choice. I just don't. And I know this is like a, not the nicest thing to say, but it's like not everyone is maybe built for taking complete self control and self custody. You know what I mean?
- [03:41]
A
I do, I understand that philosophy. My, my issue is not like I have bit keys, I've used them. I got this before they were released. Like I've, I've been on, on them a long time. The issue.
- [03:54]
Started when they started lying about what they are. They're, they're not self custody, it's collaborative custody. It's a totally different thing. You, you, you depend on them to send transactions and you give up their privacy trade offs. So I'm with you, you. But if they're not going to be honest about the trade offs of using their product, that's no good for anyone.
- [04:18]
In the beginning. I think what happened is the person in charge of marketing there just doesn't understand bitcoin at the level of people who've Been using wallets for years.
- [04:32]
You can't just call it self custody. And you definitely shouldn't encourage people to throw their seed phrases away. I know it's, it's kind of like a rage, rage baity marketing tactic. It works for that reason, but it's, it's very, very dangerous. You're encouraging people to use bitcoin with trusted third parties, which defeats the whole purpose. Just, just go buy an etf. Why would you even fuck around with this? Like what's, what's the point of it if you're not willing to put in. Like if you can understand that this is a two of three multisig, if you know what that is, you're smart enough to set up a 2, 3 multi sig. You know what I mean? Like it's not, it's not that hard. It takes two or three hours. I kind of get it. Like people in general, like in aggregate we're pretty like low IQ species. It's hard for everybody to self custody but.
- [05:27]
I actually am more hopeful. I think if we take on that mindset it's pretty defeatist and people won't, of course they won't do it. They'll take the easy way out, they'll take the laziness, trade off, the convenience trade off every time. And I just always want to push people not to do that. I think if you learn to set up your own multi sig and then you try to get a plug and play piece of, you know, a nice, nice trusted third party hardware like this.
- [05:57]
That'S perfectly reasonable. But if you're, if you're doing deterring people from even trying to self custody.
- [06:04]
To me you're not a bitcoiner at all. You're in this for fiat dollars, you're in this for short term gains. I mean it's not the first time one of these projects has started out on a great premise which is like fulfilling a need in the market. We need more competition in the hardware market and we need more varied solutions and we need to abstract away parts of, of bitcoin that are complicated. This has done a good job of all of those but for me the trade offs are too high and the, the marketing is, is so disingenuous that it does like a disservice to everybody.
- [06:42]
Anyway, that's my rant on.
- [06:43]
C
I, no, no, I, I, I do, I do feel you on the, on the marketing side because again I think the, like the initial premise of this is, is very good.
- [06:49]
A
Right?
- [06:50]
C
And as you said like abstracting away parts of this that are, you know, maybe not necessary for people to get into the nuts and bolts of, but still giving them a solution that's better than keeping their bitcoin on an exchange.
- [06:59]
A
Right?
- [07:00]
C
But it's like if you're, you know, if the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required. Right. And again, I don't know enough about the, the signing mechanism on the bit key. Like it is a two or three multisig though. And like presumably you do hold two of the keys, right? One on, I'm assuming one on your phone and then one is. The bit key itself has the other key and then they have the third key, right?
- [07:19]
A
One is on. Two of the keys are on hot devices, which is a problem. So one is on. It's not even block servers. Block doesn't even custody their own custody. It's on Amazon, it's on aws. That's where one of your keys is. The other is on your phone, which is the most compromised piece of equipment like in your life. It's the most surveilled, you know, virused out, bugged out. It's a huge security vulnerability. Anybody that's been in bitcoin for any amount of time, you know intuitively not to do extremely private things on this device, you have to consider everything on their spent compromise completely. Okay, so those are two of your three keys.
- [08:06]
That means anyone who could get access to block servers, which there's no reason to believe that's a particularly difficult thing to do for like an advanced attacker or, or the hotkey on your app or just this device which you know, there's no physical backup so you can't lose this, you know what I mean? There's no key backup, so if you lose this, you're shot and you're completely relying on blocks infrastructure. And the problem is you don't have a seed phrase so you cannot unilaterally exit their system. They have a non standard.
- [08:40]
Emergency kind of exit protocol. Like if something goes wrong, you're completely trapped on blocks. If they're, if their GitHub disappears, if you don't, you can't even reinstate their, their emergency software. On an iPhone you have to have an Android. So it's just, it's, it's a very convoluted like I promise you just go and go look into it. And the more you read about it, the scarier the promise that they're, they're giving you is at least if you're interested, if you're custodying like serious Money like you'd lose sleep if you lost it. It's just, it's a really scary proposition. Something like this, you actually would be safer just leaving your money on, on Coinbase or strike or something.
- [09:21]
C
Okay. Yeah, I need, I need to, I need to look deeper into it because like, I got to say, like, it is like a slick looking product.
- [09:28]
A
Yeah, it looks great.
- [09:30]
C
Yeah, it looks, it looks excellent. Yeah. I dislike the marketing of like ditch your seed. It's like that just feels like a.
- [09:39]
Bad intent or maybe the, yeah, like to me, self custody, it's a bad, it's a bad result or a bad suggestion. Like we, we don't want people to do that because this is an incredibly powerful thing that you can do where you can unilaterally exit anything as long as you have that seed. It's like that is true power.
- [09:56]
A
That's self custody. You unilateral exit and unilateral control of your Bitcoin is self custody. This lose your seed phrase. I promise you this was an idea that originated in California. This is the most, the dumbest idea I've ever heard.
- [10:10]
Like, I saw the first marketing for it in person in Vegas and I was with it. It's. I have to hand it to them. Like they did, it did trigger so many people. I, you know, I watch people walk by just like, what the fuck are they doing? You know, it makes you talk about them, it makes you. But I don't know, we, we, we, we decided the market marketing team's real genius was that block can actually block your transaction. So it's like totally accurate.
- [10:40]
Because they can. Anyway, that's, yeah, Big keys. Big key's fun.
- [10:46]
C
Vicky's fun. I mean, clearly the marketing work is here. We are talking about it. But I want to talk about, I want, I want to talk about you a little bit too. You mentioned, you mentioned Vegas and you have been a. I think maybe for people who don't know, you have been like behind the scenes running conferences for a long time. Like when things are going really smoothly and nice, it's because you and, you know, you and maybe X Frog, usually you and X Frog would be always the people I'm seeing backstage. But can you talk a little bit about how you got into running shows, running conferences and like, you know, you just became like this kind of like staple. And a lot of times the people behind the scenes, you know, like you don't see them because they're the ones making sure everything's moving, moving smoothly. Right. But like, how did you actually get into that in the first place.
- [11:36]
A
Started well, I was working at Bitcoin magazine and we had a conference coming up and we had kind of.
- [11:47]
We were doing bad with revenue, so we needed to invent kind of new products to sell. And so we didn't really reinvent. We just kind of stole the news desk. This is the first time you would have seen a news desk in the bitcoin space. And we brought it, we modeled it after like a sports center, like ESPN style news desk. And I brought it to the exhibitor hall floor and we sold it for like 2,3 million bucks.
- [12:19]
Yeah. To Marathon.
- [12:23]
As a 2,3 year sponsor or something like that.
- [12:28]
So we built this thing out and then I decided I wanted to run it because I was looking for. I was bored at the mag. I was running the Twitter. I was running, you know, I'd written two, 300 articles, been doing a lot of podcasts. I was running their. I started their YouTube channel, their rumble channel. So I was doing all this social media stuff and I was like, kind of bored of it. I just didn't find it very fulfilling. And I saw how big the conference was getting. This was like, you know, 2022.
- [12:59]
And 2021 was already so big, but 2022 was coming up and it was, it was going to be huge. So I just jumped in and programmed it. Like I just called all the people called Saylor, like, got. Got a hold of everybody I could get a hold of, like, hey, you have to jump on this desk. Like when you get off stage, come to this place and jump on the sports center desk. It's going to be the biggest thing that's happening. And it was, it carried the live Stream. We got 2 million viewers like on that across the span of those days on that content. And it wasn't like the best iteration of that that's ever happened. It was messy. It was really messy. People didn't show up. People showed up super angry that they. They had been bumped. You know, just like all. I learned all kinds of, you know, ways to work with people and not to work with.
- [13:49]
You know, people on stage because they're like, all stage presence is so tied up with people's egos that, like, it's a very delicate job. It's very like, you have to be really good at communication and like, really patient with people because they show up. People show up wanting to fight. I remember the, the Hive guys. Aiden killed the CEO of Hive, like wanted to fight me one time because he couldn't get on stage. He was so aggressive. It was crazy. So you pull up a chair for people. You know, you got to solve the problems and make it work. But I really liked it because it was like this high pace, high pressure thing. And it was like me and Rizzo.
- [14:26]
Nolan Barley, like we were all, we're all just having a blast filling in, you know, interviewing sailor up there. I interviewed, you know, Portnoy before, you know, when he was still cool and Ben Askren and like all, all these interesting people, like get them up there talking about Bitcoin.
- [14:47]
And then there was, you know, I wanted to do something bigger. I was like, well I want to do like main stage. So they gave me the Amsterdam conference like as a trial and I did that.
- [14:59]
And then I just took over all the conferences. So we're doing four conferences a year. I did a couple conferences for Jack as well for, for Noster. Did the first ever Noster conference in Costa Rica, did one in Hong Kong, in Japan, in and Latvia.
- [15:21]
Yeah, a lot of events man.
- [15:23]
B
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- [16:07]
C
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- [16:10]
B
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- [16:43]
C
Now back to the show. The. The nostr unconference Nostarika was. That was a special time. That was like a. It feels like one of those things you're going to look back on and I Mean I already kind of do and just be like wow, can't believe, can't believe that was a thing that, that happened and that I was at and like aware of at this time and like what a, what a vibe there. And now. You know, I think there's been like looking at NOSTR specifically a lot of people have maybe or maybe like disappointed about say user growth more broadly. You know, just thinking like oh, it's kind of like stalled out. I don't know if that's necessarily a bad thing. At like right, right now you still have a really highly active num. Like highly active cohort of people who are on Nostr every single day, like all day, all night, across the world, all time zones using a patchwork of different applications of end clients and who, who are, you know, then you've got all the builders who are like making that possible. And so to me it's like when the masses eventually do really come to Nostr in size at least the infrastructure is going to actually be built up more because like that's the thing about an open protocol and a lot of open source software devs hacking stuff together. It's like there's a lot of stuff that moves. Maybe is, is less immediately reliable than a. Some centralized platform build out but is long term far more resilient. But you know, it takes a little bit longer to get there. But I don't know, I've been the vibes on Nostr continue to be good for me.
- [18:17]
A
I don't know about you, I think it's good. I would definitely be among those that are probably impatient and disappointed with the growth. I don't know if it'll succeed or not. I think for what it offers like it's succeeding today for, for, for like a couple people.
- [18:37]
I enjoy it. I don't particularly enjoy scrolling it. I find it pretty boring to be, to be a little bit bearish but I do, I enjoy posting there because people are so friendly and nice and genuine and I do think there's something to be said for like economic value of tipping over like virtue signaling with likes.
- [19:04]
I think I got pretty bored with everything that was being developed on it. Like there's a lot of this stuff is very niche and, and just doesn't have users. So it's like okay, we're early now what? And I think the answer is like we just keep doing our thing and hoping for like a breakout. Like I think I got really interested in something more like a bit chat which is like okay, this uses Nostr but Nobody using Bitch Hat knows what NOSTR is unless they discovered it through nostr. Like very few, you know what I mean? They don't know that the backend touches NOSTR at all. That's like, okay, now you're getting into a really interesting place where like Noster, in my opinion, has always had this identity crisis of like being so self absorbed and so upfront technical and affiliated with Bitcoin that it actually turns people off. Like I would say you and I had a really similar conversation about, you know, Roxum. You know, we, we there. There was so much bitcoin that was actually turning people off in the programming that, who are not in that world. It's like, well, if we want to reach more people, we need to talk about more things.
- [20:17]
And so I think the, the one thing I will say I really enjoy about Nostr is there's a couple of people on there, like close friends of mine. Actually you're included in this because, you know, you'll post like fishing content. Like I really like fishing, I really like outdoor stuff and I really like shooting video about it and posting about it just as like an amateur, just like fun kind of hobby or whatever.
- [20:44]
I don't get anywhere near as much.
- [20:49]
As much of that content on like Instagram or Twitter. Like in terms of engagement and just people swapping stories and giving cool tips. Like the people who engage in it are really, really into it, which is awesome. And I just feel you, I don't know, you just feel the authenticity more than you do on a Twitter where those things fall completely flat. If you're not servicing the algorithm exactly how, you know, on the soup of the day kind of algorithm, like it's not going to get anything at all. I tend to get way more engagement on Noster for whatever reason. Not that that's the, the metric of success, but if you put in work into like editing these things and putting them out there, you know, if I, if I don't get any return on it, I'm obviously going to just stop doing that. But on no sir, I've seen that just posting a couple times a day, you get, you get a lot of cool new people to talk to. I find people who enjoy jiu jitsu, people who enjoy bitcoin, people enjoy fishing, people who even spear phishing, like some pretty niche activities. So I would say yeah, hopefully those communities are growing out. I don't know if it's in the right form factor. I don't know if like Twitter clone is the way I really like stuff like zap Stream, like what we're on right now and I hope that some of these other applications can scale like bitchat really fun. But after the first week it kind of like what would I use this for? It's kind of like a, probably a good tool for like emergency services or something like that or you know, people in like disaster zones. But I don't, I don't, I don't really know day to day there's a use case for, for it. You know, we, we have a problem product market fit problem. In open source tech, we're inventing a lot of things that don't solve any like tangible problem that the market needs.
- [22:41]
C
Yeah, it's like, well and like, you know, with bitch, I think you're exactly right that it's not something that I need to use every day. Like, I just don't necessarily like I could use it every day and there's you know, various like GEO servers that I could hop on and I could, but I just like, I don't necessarily need to. There's not a reason for me to go in there every day. However, like if I'm, if like you've seen this around the world, whether in a disaster scenario or when government is throttling, you know, communications during protests or something and like downloads explode, right? Like they, they go wild. And so it's like you, you know, it's one of those things where you're like yeah, yeah, it's, you don't need it until you need it. And then it's like, oh wow, this is, this is really useful. I'm glad that I have this, this P2P tool, but I hear you on the product market fit side more broadly, I think that that's a very, very fair observation. And I think that a lot of times it's, it's not necessarily like a bad thing. It's just a reality of like look.
- [23:37]
Just because you can build something really, really, really cool doesn't mean anybody actually like gives a about using it. Just because you can create something that's a really interesting technical solution doesn't mean like that anybody that you're actually solving that many people's problems. You might be solving like a problem and some people may really like that but like with you know, so many of these things, it's like that's really neat but like I don't know how many people are going to use it. Maybe some will and maybe that's enough, you know what I mean? Like that's the other thing is like maybe like, not everything needs to have this mass appeal. Maybe these, you know, micro apps make a lot more sense. And it's like you can just. Even if your, your application services a small number of people, like, that's still a win. That being said, it's like, you know, like. But then it's also like, you need to be sustainable from a gay business perspective. Unless you are planning on living on grants forever.
- [24:25]
A
And that's the kicker.
- [24:26]
C
That's the other side. Right?
- [24:28]
A
Well, that's, that's why many of the, that's why like a niche kind of in group can get really excited about these things. But you have to understand these people are engineers, like highly specialized, therefore, like really highly autistic engineers that are not good businessmen. They live on charity of NGOs, most of which, you know, there's like one or two funders of. It's like two of these things that exist. Bitcoin. They give people money. It's this circular thing of, you get grants, we throw a luxurious party, we invite people to make donations, to give grants. You make applications that never seem to scale.
- [25:06]
I don't know, the market would extract and come up with solutions to these problems. But the problem I think that people are having is that they don't turn these applications into businesses.
- [25:19]
And they're not running businesses. So they wonder why they're having, like, they have unrealistic expectations for users because they're not under the same pressures that, you know, you would be in the free market because they're living on charity.
- [25:37]
Which is okay. I mean, I wouldn't really participate in it. I'm not saying these aren't ideas that are.
- [25:46]
That are not worth funding. It's just that.
- [25:50]
I don't know, like, how much of this stuff ends up just being, you know, throwing events for each other to have kind of developer parties to throw more events to get more grant. Like, it's just, when does, when does the funding stop? Like, when do you cut someone off? When do you. I don't know how you evaluate those things in a sort of NGO funding loop setting. You know what I mean? In the free market, there's a flywheel that makes a lot of sense. If your product isn't meeting the demands of the market, you'll fail and you'll disappear and you'll cease to exist and your company will die. And that's a good thing. That's what we need. So.
- [26:27]
I think, I don't know, I want to be optimistic about Nostr, but I think it might be one of Those things, like no one's figured out how to make it into a business. And therefore it's very kind of like small, closed in group of people that use it. I don't know how many, do you have any idea how many people use it day to day now? Is there any way to.
- [26:51]
C
Let's see, there's some places that have, I mean it's gotta be more than a couple thousand.
- [26:59]
But I don't know, I mean, let me see. Primal had some decent stats on this at one point. Do they still.
- [27:09]
Let'S see.
- [27:10]
A
No, I don't, I'm not always so bearish. I just, I think it's fun to push, to push these guys, you know what I mean?
- [27:17]
C
Well, I think it's important to actually like think about this stuff deeply too, right? Like to actually say like, okay, what, like what, what do we actually need to do? Like if we care about scaling this stuff, if we care about getting more people on board, like what does that actually mean? What does that actually look like? And I think.
- [27:36]
On the point of like the funding side of things.
- [27:40]
I would push back on one area of that, which is that I agree with you from the free market perspective of like that's going to give you the best signal about what is working and what is not, right? That being said, there is something to be said I think, for having some developers, like, it's like patronage, you know, during, you know, by the, by the Medici family of, of Leonardo da Vinci, right? Like if Leonardo da Vinci had to, could only invent things and create art and do like that, if it was profitable at that time, we wouldn't have most of his inventions and art and things he created, right? Because like a lot of them just had no product market fit, you know, like so I do think that patronage enabled by Bitcoin is a really valuable thing. And in this case, no, we're not talking about the arts, we're talking about technology. But patronage of technologists, of builders I think does have a place because it allows them to just be able to solely focus on building. Now you could, again, to play devil's advocate myself, you could argue that, well, by not being in tune with the actual market itself, perhaps they don't build what is actually going to be needed by the market or wanted by the market. But maybe, you know, I don't know, like it's, it's. I, I see both sides of this here, but I do think that like that patronage and supporting open source developers like definitely has a place. I agree, like, I don't know how long it's sustainable. I mean, if Bitcoin keeps going up forever, maybe it's always sustainable. I'm not sure. But like, it's tough.
- [29:11]
A
It's tough for me. It's like I know that I could create an anonymous Noster account, start posting about developing and I could apply for a grant for a messaging app and receive that grant within a few months. Like, I know that that would not be a hard thing to do. Everyone who wants funding and Noster gets it. Any like, serious proposition. Okay, but like, who in the world needs another messaging app? Like how many fucking messaging apps do I have to have on my phone to be able to talk to someone? You know what I mean? Like, there's no market demand for this at all. Nobody, nobody needs it. I do need better privacy.
- [29:50]
But it turns out there's not a way to do that that's also convenient and not like a technical hurdle for most people. So the problem is the most private. Like I can't get anyone to use Simplex. There's no discovery there. I can't find people on it. And I surely it's, I have to ask someone to download something which is extremely suspicious. It like kills itself. When you, when you try to ask someone to use this privacy tech, you send them a link and they say that's suspicious. I'm not downloading that. No.
- [30:19]
So I just, yeah, I'm just.
- [30:24]
I wish there were more entrepreneurs in the space working with Nostr from that lens.
- [30:32]
And I wish there was less funding available so that they could get serious about the projects they're proposing. I think the same about Bitcoin. Like, I don't, there's, there's no way that, you know, Bitkey is, is a profitable company. It's just not possible at this stage. You know what I mean? Like, you have to look at something like the trade offs the ledger has taken or scraping by for, you know, a decade with a cold card or something like that to get to.
- [31:08]
A place where you're like a profitable real company.
- [31:13]
I think that's, I think that's really what makes these products better. Like if you, when you take it outside of a free market environment, you end up with weird.
- [31:23]
Like altruism.
- [31:25]
Kind of utopia tech. Like, like, like blue sky, like sort of closed communities. And it's just, it's, it's not gonna scale. You know what I mean?
- [31:35]
C
Okay, that's actually a fair point as it relates to, to Blue Sky. Like, boy, I have not opened that up in a while. Like Every, sometimes I will. I opened it up like right after, right after Charlie Kirk was assassinated. That was a mistake.
- [31:51]
A
Really?
- [31:52]
C
Yeah. That was not the, not, not, not a good time to, to open that up.
- [31:56]
A
No, there's just sick people, sick people on that up.
- [31:59]
C
There are. And like, and like, and that's, that's true everywhere, right? Like no matter. Like it's not just, you know, unique to blue Sky. But I think your larger point of. And this is, this is very fair and I don't know how this gets reconciled because on the one hand you want certain like freedom open source. You want open source freedom tech to be built, right? Like that. That's, that's generally a good thing if there are technologies that are being leveraged, new protocols being built, new, new applications being built on top of protocols that are already out there and open. And this is all open source generally just a net positive. Yeah, but the difficulty is that like, okay, like there's no money in it.
- [32:37]
A
People don't pay for it.
- [32:39]
C
And, and I guess one. If you. Yeah, that, that is the problem. But, and if you take it to the next level though, perhaps it's like we are still so early in so much of this right now that maybe, you know, some of these things that are being built out, like, don't necessarily need true product market fit or widespread adoption right now, but because they are open source, the genie is now out of the bottle. Now the people that are going to be coming along in the next five, 10, 20 years have a foundational protocol stack of freedom technologies to be able to build on. And they're the ones who are going to find product market fit. They're the ones that are going to, you know, develop things that are, that are. People are genuinely clamoring for. But right now it's just like maybe, I mean it's the same thing with bitcoin. Like bitcoin exists. Bitcoin exists and has existed and is talked about by not just, you know, random magic Internet money nerds anymore, but fucking Larry Fink of blackrock and Nation and Donald Trump are talking about bitcoin, right? And still, still barely anyone owns bitcoin. And even of those who quote, own bitcoin, a far, far smaller percentage have bitcoin in self custody, like really own bitcoin, not just an iou. So it's like, and, and this is. We're talking about money. We're talking about a thing that makes you wealthy and most people still don't care. You know what I mean? So like how can we Expect them to care about like, yeah, encrypted messaging and relay based communication models. Like of course they're not going to give a shit. They don't even give a shit about a thing that's going to make them rich. Why would they care about something that just, you know, just does something so small as to protect their privacy? Like a lot of people just don't give a fuck, you know.
- [34:15]
A
There's. Yeah. And what I really like about what you said there is how long does it take to extract something useful out of this kind of pile of open source tech?
- [34:27]
Obviously the answer is not, you know, two to three years. If you think about Bitcoin, it was not invented overnight. Just like.
- [34:36]
It was decades of, of small like technological achievements that were put together, that were discovered. They weren't even invented. They were, they were just put together. It was like half created and half discovered and put together in a way after, after decades of, of cryptographic sort of breakthroughs, you know, there's like seven core features that just came together in the perfect way to make this thing.
- [35:03]
You know. And some would argue, you know, for some people it doesn't have what it needs to have. Some would say, you know, it needs to be more private, should, it doesn't need to be scared, you know what I mean? But there's, yeah, the core invention, like yeah, it was extracted but it took a long time. The question I guess for Noster is like okay, how long is that going to take before someone comes along and makes a viable business out of this that scales and what will it look like? I'm kind of with like I have a lot of.
- [35:32]
I would bet that it has something to do with Ecash and actually like financial networking.
- [35:41]
And maybe encrypted, you know, communications or mesh networks maybe, maybe someone can beat out the cell networks over Noster relay somehow. I don't know, I don't know what it looks like, but I don't think it's going to be the first iteration. Right. It's not going to be a Twitter clone.
- [35:59]
C
Yeah. Because on Ecash to that.
- [36:04]
A
Yeah, me too. And Stables, I think this stuff is, I don't know, it's, it's interesting. It's not stuff that I need in my day to day life, but there, you know, that's where it's like we're very financially privileged here. Same thing with stable coins. Like we don't, don't need them but other people, I know a lot of people that use them every day need them to get paid, you Know, because their own currency is, is useless. Their own financial infrastructure's way worse than what we have with the dollar.
- [36:40]
C
A slight sidebar, but an example of not needing something until I needed it and thinking something was probably just an over engineered technical solution that was cool for super autistic nerds, but not actually something that was useful. But then I actually needed to use. I was in Madeira and I was hanging out with some bitcoiners who were hacking around on stuff and, and I was, I was trying to call a bolt for Carl and I like it was like, I don't know, like early in the morning at that point. You know, we've been hanging out.
- [37:11]
Doing some, doing some eating of steak, doing some drinking, having a good time, talking about subverting the state. And for whatever reason like my roaming plan on my phone had just like, just completely like died out. Like I could not get any sort of, any sort of Internet access at all. Neither could Carla. I don't know what happened. We just like e sin didn't matter. Yeah, like we had, but we were, we were just totally screwed. So could not access the Internet at all. And we were like, okay, like can we you know, like connect to like, like the, you know, WI fi here and now? Granted this, this friend could have just given me the WI fi password but he was like, I want to show you how something works. I'm like okay, here we go. But it ended up being really cool. It was basically a, I think they called a tollgate for the WI fi. So basically you can pay for a limited amount of WI FI access. But how do you pay for the access to the WI fi when you don't have WI fi? Like you don't have Internet, you're not, you're not connected. Right. So how do you do that?
- [38:06]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [38:07]
C
I did it literally by sending him physical or like you know, E cash tokens offline, by scanning an offline QR code, sending E cash tokens and then that paid the toll gate. And I was like okay, like that's actually pretty darn cool. And then I was able to, I got the Internet and was able to use it. Granted, you could still argue like that's a bit of an over engineered solution but it's like, but it's also kind of not like, you know, it makes it really, really convenient to be able to add in to public WI fi this capability that people actually can, you know, can pay for it if they need to, but also just like it's, it's amazing to see what Ecash can do. And I like, that's one of those things where I'm really glad that there's you know, like Cashew is getting, is getting funding, right? And that people building on cash who are getting funding because like E Cash to me is like when I see all these zcash people especially who are totally organic and not at all just VCs trying to pump their bags. Totally organic. But when I see all them talk about like, oh, you know, like, can't believe bitcoiners don't care about privacy. It's like, well we do. We're just building it in layers, right? And so I think that stuff like E Cash is super important and I'm super bullish on it just because like the shit that it can do is kind of like mind blowing. Like the fact that it is like a bearer token, like it's, it's kind of nuts. And yes, again, trade offs, right? Trade offs. Always acknowledge the trade offs. Like you can get rugged by a mint but like are you going to get rugged by every mint all at once? Probably not.
- [39:35]
A
But yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know where it fits into day to day life. But those, those experiments are really, they're really wonderful and fun and you know, I think, I think there's a place for that. But I think still kind of the core mission is.
- [39:55]
Probably getting people to use base layer money in a way that's not, that's not ruggable. I mean to me that just seems like the most important kind of cypherpunk thing we can do.
- [40:07]
I'm not totally with.
- [40:11]
Who is the.
- [40:15]
Unchained capital guy, Parker Lewis, who thinks that notes there's a distraction necessarily.
- [40:23]
But I don't know if it's the most important thing, you know, now that it already exists in a way that you can communicate off. Like I think really when you look at the problems of the world, like for me I would prioritize, you know, fixing the money monetary system and weeding out corruption and debasement.
- [40:42]
Because we could, we could force.
- [40:45]
Conversion to bitcoin. Like we have forced bitcoin upon the world and made people adopt it and change the laws around it and forced it into treasuries and retirement funds and businesses and yeah, we should continue to. That's like the real silent revolution. And like the, like on the, the, the flip side, like the things that, you know, Cash App and Square have been doing are, are very, very cool.
- [41:11]
You know, getting, forcing merchant adoption. I wish they were a Little more forceful about it, It'd be cool. You know, it should be default on. That would be really nice.
- [41:21]
C
Yeah, just, just, just push it on for everyone. Push it on.
- [41:24]
A
It's an extra QR code. If you're gonna push fucking tips on me everywhere I go, you know what I mean? Like we had a self car wash. Like at least.
- [41:33]
Yeah, allow me to pay in bitcoin everywhere. No, but that's, yeah, that's like leaps and bounds really. Leading by example. I think it took a really long time. I'm not sure why it took so long, but it's finally here. I'm grateful for it.
- [41:50]
I think people need touch points. Like I've always said this. It takes two or three touch points to be able to understand like emergent technology and to see the need for it. And like you had one with the, with the toll bridge, right, for ecash probably, plus a couple other ones where you're like, okay, this is an important like viable technology that I need.
- [42:13]
For bitcoin, it's no different. And when you dig into it, it's endlessly complicated. So how do you provide people with those simple touch points?
- [42:23]
Yeah, I think that's one of them. I think probably seeing it in the news every day and thinking they could get rich from it is probably the biggest kind of bright neon sign about it. But practical, tactile experience with it through devices and payment terminals will probably be the second, the first time someone receives it. That's kind of a life changing moment. If they're smart.
- [42:49]
If they're open minded, if they're not, they won't recognize the opportunity.
- [42:54]
C
It is like a, I mean at least for me, like the first time I, I got bitcoin for doing something like not just me buying bitcoin on a, on an exchange, but like getting bitcoin in return for doing something, I was like, oh, this is so much better. Like this is so much like this is way better than buying it. Like buying bitcoin is great. Earning bitcoin is incredible. And like when you, when you do like and when you see that and it's like, oh, I provided my, my time and energy. I did work for this and now I have bitcoin like that you feel like you are, I mean you are, you're living in the future because it's not evenly distributed yet to everyone. And like anybody who is able right now to do any sort of work. And there are, man, like the gig economy is not such a bad thing if you're getting paid in bitcoin for the gigs you're doing. Like, if you're getting paid in Fiat, maybe not ideal, but if you're getting paid in bitcoin, like you right now, like, if you're a pleb stacking right now, I just saw, you know, we're, we, we just, we, we just kissed into the 87s right now. And I don't love to talk about price, but we, we, we just did. Yeah, 7, 816 at the time of recording this, which is. Yeah, let's do it. Do it Thursday, November 20th. You know, I'll, I'll smash. I'll smash by a little bit too right now. But, but if, if you're listening to this right now and it's like, oh, bitcoin's dipping. It's like, you know what? You have a chance right now to accumulate bitcoin that you, like, five years from now, it's going to be worth more in Fiat dollars than it is today. Granted, if you're denominating it in fiat dollars and you're not thinking of it as your piece of the whole 21 million pie, it's, you know, that, that there's a little mentality shift that's required there. But for now, like, we do measure it in Fiat, right, Whichever fiat you happen to use. All right, I just, I, I just, I just smash. Bought some SATs. Boom.
- [44:41]
A
Double checking that I had any Fiat left. I do.
- [44:44]
C
That's my biggest problem.
- [44:46]
That's my biggest problem. But, you know, like, one of the reasons it's awesome to earn bitcoin is because you don't think about it from a cost basis perspective. You're not like, oh, I bought that Bitcoin for 100k or whatever, and now it's, you know, now it's quote worth 90k. It's like, no, no, I earned that bitcoin. Here's how much bitcoin I earned for the amount of work that I provided. Like, it's a completely different mentality shift there. And I think that it's, it's very valuable for people to experience that. It's, it's hard pricing things in bitcoin. I initially tried pricing podcast sponsorships in bitcoin and, and the difficulty was most sponsors were like, well, like, that's, that's cool and everything, Walker, but like, our accounting department can't really work with that, can you? Yeah, can you just price it in dollars for us? But, you know, that's a, that's an interesting thing as well, because then it's like, okay, if you're pricing a service you provide in bitcoin, that service should get cheaper over time unless the service you're providing becomes more valuable over time as well. So it's kind of an interesting incentive to create more value for whatever service you're providing than the value of bitcoin. That is, you know, that is appreciated. At that same time, it's like it's a real mind fuck. Honestly, like it's a real mind fuck.
- [45:58]
A
I don't know if you're setting me up for softball here, but this is, this was the whole premise of why we created Roxum.
- [46:04]
C
I actually wasn't even using. But yeah, that's a perfect transition.
- [46:08]
A
This is actually the whole premise of why we built the exchange and the media company is because people who are already on a bitcoin standard.
- [46:18]
Whatever that means to you, even just generally, like you have a decent amount of bitcoin, maybe you're really invested in its success and future. They don't think about risk management correctly. Most of the people that I know, people group chat, blow me up right now about all the opportunity on the bitcoin treasuries market.
- [46:40]
There is no opportunity there that's correctly priced. If it's not in bitcoin terms, if it's in fiat terms, you're not accounting for the hurdle rate. That is the opportunity cost of just holding bitcoin. Which means you're making a tremendous error in all of your trading. And your, your hurdle rate is actually much higher than you could have ever, you know, conceived of. You're trading over a long time, especially if you're trading in short time because the short term volatility of bitcoin is very high.
- [47:13]
Like when we thought about this exchange, it's like, okay, we need a place where people can buy and sell oil contracts, gold, first of all, do something with their bitcoin.
- [47:25]
Like if you acknowledge that, okay, there is a way to.
- [47:31]
To analyze risk on bitcoin terms. So there are ways to outperform bitcoin. We know people do this. We know people try to do this. It's not for everybody not recommending people do this, but there's an appetite to do it for sure. There's people that, that want higher returns than that. They want to put all their capital use, especially like very wealthy people and also people who don't think they have enough bitcoin. Very, very small holders, they want to catch up. Okay, so how do they do it? Well, if they're going to do it on the stock Market, it's going to be a real pain in the ass to mark the price to bitcoin's price every day because everything's denominated in dollars or like the fiat currency of your choice, which is debasing. So if you denominate it in bitcoin, you can at least price the risk appropriately and you can make intelligent trades. And I think that's a good and useful service for people because we're not, they're not all, you know, let's just hodl forever and never spend. That's like far from the reality. Like the truth is we're a lot closer to like a Weimar Germany. Like the end is nigh. Everybody's trading and gambling, you know, all day and night long to try to get ahead. Okay, if they can't be, you know, convinced not to do stupid things like that, like how do we at least give them, you know, tools to do it.
- [48:50]
In a way where they're seeing clearly and that, that, that comes from I think pricing things in bitcoin and also.
- [49:00]
You know, at the end I think, I think people will trade for that way for a little while and what it'll do is help them realize they're not good traders hopefully if they're like self aware, you know what I mean? Like I think I was telling you before the show, like I'm a big Allen Markets user. I always like to put like a hundred dollars on island markets, a thousand bucks, something like that. Trade it for a few months just to acknowledge how bad of a trader I am. You know what I mean? Like you very.
- [49:28]
C
Dude, I do the exact, I do the exact same thing like in, in like my Robin Hood app, like with a. I'm, I'm not talking with like a lot of money, right? Because my, my money is, you know, my money is well, bitcoin.
- [49:41]
But I'll mess around for a little while. But again, it's denominated in fiat and I know that, right. And so I always come back to was I able to actually convert this into more bitcoin than what I started with? And a couple of times the answer has been yes. And it's like great. But I also had to wasted a bunch of time doing that trading. I also had to pay capital gains in this because I'm using a centralized exchange. Even if I wasn't using a centralized one though, I would totally pay the capital gains on it. Just to be clear there, to be very clear for anyone who's an IRS agent listening but like most of the time I fucking don't outperform bitcoin like in getting more dollars. Doesn't. That doesn't fucking matter. I don't want more dollars. I want more bitcoin. But I'm not a great trader. A couple times I've made like the good trades I've made have been buying like bitcoin miners when they were really cheap and then waiting a long, and then waiting a long time and they go up a lot. It's not me like trading back and forth all the time. It's like literally just buying and holding. But it's a good reminder that I'm not a very good trader and I might be even an okay trader in dollar terms, but I'm a bad trader in bitcoin terms. And I think that's like what it comes down to, right is like if you're measuring your ability in dollars, you're necessarily mispricing that ability. You know what I mean?
- [51:04]
A
Yeah. Like the bet I've. The only trades that I've made that are good have been long term like year plus and they've been just early opportunities. And yeah, like some of them have been treasury companies miners last cycle. But it's not, it's nothing I would bet the house on. You know, it's, it's stuff that I'll kind of assess like how much would I be comfortable completely losing on this. And that's, that's the max that I'll put in. And it's always, you know, even if it grows at the start, it's no more than 5, 10% of the whole portfolio ever goes into something other than bitcoin. And normally like on if you just pick a random day, I don't have exposure to anything except for it because yeah, I found that of all the, you know, couple years that I've been using like whatever Robinhood or Ellen Markets making those trades, there's very few of them where I wound up with more bitcoin at the end. For those small high activity where I'm just like, no, I'm just going to let my emotions, my instincts carry me and I'm going to try to make analysis. And then you give up on your thesis of course and ruin the whole plan and do something else. No, the only things that have worked out for me are buying and just not selling for years for a long period of time and then just being very, very early with, with Meta Planet in particular. But I'm not even sure that the Treasuries are a good, a good play anymore. It was just, I acknowledge that was very high risk thing to do. But the other thing you learn from like using those services and trading and I think people will learn it from Roxum, from our exchange is that.
- [52:51]
Yeah, sure you can outperform bitcoin but the risk is tremendous. Like the leverage you're going to take on to try to do it is going to wipe you out more times than not.
- [53:03]
Yeah.
- [53:04]
C
So I, I appreciate you coming with that perspective because like yeah like this is something you're, you know, you're a part of Roxam. I'm also for anyone who's been paying attention like I've been streaming on Roxam as well on the, the media side and we can maybe talk about that as well because I think it is an interesting approach to getting bitcoin out in front of more people in sort of a not so in your face way in terms of like your long term strategy. There's. But on the exchange side like I mean you're literally saying like look, yeah you can do this and we make this available but like odds are it's not going to go well and like you should just stack spot bitcoin like that. That's the thing like for, for pretty much like for pretty much everyone especially if you're just starting out. I think that that's like, that's why so many people get sucked into shitcoins is because American Hodl talks about this. You know, people wanted to like teleport to be an og, you know. And you think you just make that one, find that one shitcoin that's going to thousand x and like and then you get to be an og right. And you'll totally convert it all into bitcoin once, once that hits and, and not just be a dj but it's hard. Yeah.
- [54:05]
A
You're not going to tell people either. Yeah, most of my friends that like we started pretty much around the same time period buying you know, Meta Planet and most of them round tripped it completely.
- [54:19]
They didn't sell. They're, they're, they're still up but it's like they missed out on you know, 30x.
- [54:28]
Like opportunity because you're just. You like the market is plays psychological games with you and you're not, you're not special. You're not immune to them, you're not immune to you know, you're not going to be able to be fearful when others are greedy. You're going to be greedy. This is hard.
- [54:48]
C
That's the one and that's exactly How I am with everything except for bitcoin, which is. And maybe that's just getting to a point in my bitcoin journey where I've separated it so much from everything else that I can actually be greedy when others are fearful. Like, right now, I am super greedy. I'm trying to figure out how to be able to stack more sats. And I know that we might go lower. We might kiss 58k. I have no fucking idea. 58k is an incredible meme. I think that they've got some sort of 58k cabal that they're, you know, they're running. They're. They're clearly manipulating the price, the 58k Meemers. But. But if. But if bitcoin does go lower, like, okay, I'm going to do whatever I can to still acquire more like that. I am very greedy right now because everyone is freaking out so much. And you know what I mean? Like, when I see people coming out of the woodwork, the gold bugs, the fiat economists, and they're just dunking so hard on bitcoin right now. They're gleeful. That's when I'm like, okay, this. This is the. This is the sign I was looking for. I was buying a DCA every hour of every day with, like, you know, a small amount.
- [55:48]
A
Nice.
- [55:49]
C
Because, like, I just. I've spread it out as much as I can.
- [55:51]
A
Yeah.
- [55:52]
C
But then, like, when these times hit, I'm like, I need to find out how to either earn more bitcoin or acquire more fiat to buy more bitcoin. But I need to do, hopefully both.
- [56:02]
A
I'm thinking, yeah, that's. That's the correct way to think about it. You got to increase your. Decrease your expenditure and increase your cash inflows.
- [56:12]
I think I thought we were gonna either hit 140 or. Or don't to 70. So, you know, one of those two things hopefully will be true. I think we're gonna go to 70. Probably lower. Probably 58. That would be awesome. That would be a second lease on lice. That's literally on. On life. That's really a second. That's an opportunity that, like, we don't even deserve as a culture. But, oh, my God, we're gonna get it again. You know.
- [56:40]
Multiplying your wealth every year, it's crazy.
- [56:42]
C
Like, if that does happen, like, it's gonna be painful. Like, undoubtedly it's gonna be painful. The vibes would be super terrible. But that is gonna be. If that does happen, that is an insane opportunity that we don't deserve. You're right.
- [56:58]
A
If bitcoiners are doing what they say they're doing, which is holding and not selling, is it really that painful for it to go down? Doesn't affect me because I don't sell. I have a stack that I just never have sold. I just don't sell.
- [57:13]
Just only goes up. And if you're denominating a bitcoin, terms, you're up. If you're denominating in fiat terms, if you can't stomach that number going down, yeah, you're going to have a rough bear market. Like, the reality is most of the time we're in a bear market, it's like very few and far between where we're going parabolically upward on fiat terms. But people need to remember the principle here. We're denominating in bitcoin. If that number is going up, you're good. I promise you, 20 years from now, that's the only number that matters. It's the only number that matters now. The rest of the world just hasn't caught up yet. If you have none, zero exposure. That's just the wrong answer. You just don't own anything. You have a debasing monopoly, money from the government.
- [57:59]
You know what I mean?
- [58:02]
You need real. You need hard assets.
- [58:06]
C
Yeah.
- [58:08]
It is a funny thing. I think that people, and I speak about myself here too, I'm not immune to. Obviously, I have all the same human emotions when I watch bitcoin's price that everyone else does because we are like, the psychology is pretty universal there. And it's. It is. You always have. Like, when you see bitcoin dipping, it's always like, oh, well, I could have bought, I could have bought more sats for my dollars if I would have just waited and timed it perfectly at the bottom. But it's like you just never are going to time it perfectly. Like, very few people ever time anything perfectly. And unless you're willing to, like, even the people that just spend all day staring at charts can't even get it right. And you don't want to spend all day staring at charts. Right. Like, that's just not a. Not use a good use of most people's time. And so it's like, oh, it's. You just need to be in the market. You just need to be in the market.
- [58:54]
A
Yeah.
- [58:54]
C
Like that's all you need to do. And then go try to create value.
- [58:57]
A
And do something with your life in every case. Like a better use of people's time than trying to become a trader or an analyst, you know, unless you're. You're. You're a savant, you know, and you're going to build a whole career out of it, like, like a Dylan LeClaire or something, you know, unless that's your whole bread and butter and personality and job. A better use of everyone's time would be like, how can I get better cash inflows to buy this stuff? Rather than trying to time it? I can't tell you, like, how many times does this happen to you where, you know, a friend or a family member or something will say they understand Bitcoin, then go on in the next, you know, few sentences to say something like, I'm waiting for. You know, it's going to get down to this price. Or I'm actually, I'm. I'm long like a. Or something right now, and when that pops, I'm going to sell it all. I've. I've had people, you know, neighbors take me out to dinner to tell me about their AgentIC AI tokens, only to literally lose millions. I'm just like, you still don't have bitcoin? Like, no. Like, and you just can't be helped. I don't know. It's really. It's just like, have fun staying poor. I don't know what the Would you say.
- [60:04]
C
Realized I was actually muted. I would just say, like, it's just like, you know, like one. This one simple trick. But like, really, like, the one simple trick is just buy and hold bitcoin.
- [60:15]
A
Yeah. Do the hard thing.
- [60:16]
C
It doesn't. It doesn't have to be complicated. Yeah, but people want to make it complicated. They don't want it to be so easy because it turns everything that we've learned or haven't learned about investing completely on its head. And it's like, yep, you just have to do that. And that doesn't mean never invest in anything else ever again. Like, you should invest in building businesses and doing things like that. Like, that's a. That's a good thing to do, you know, like, you. You need that, but you should be more shrewd about them. Like, there's not going to be as much misallocated capital in under a bitcoin standard. Right. Because people are more careful with how they allocate their capital. And like. But like, for you, it's like, especially if you're just starting out, it's like, I beg of you, just please ignore the shitcoins. Like, please, please, for the love of God, ignore the shitcoins.
- [60:58]
A
I'd say ignore everything that's not your. Like what, what value are you giving to the world? You know, why should someone pay you for your time?
- [61:08]
Or you're going to end up like these treasury companies, man, where you've got.
- [61:13]
You forgot to have an underlying business, forgot to have a value proposition for people. And the, you know, when the speculative hype bubble's over, just left with nothing. You're left with the new. I saw the new reframing today. The new reframing is we didn't sell bitcoin. We invested it. We didn't sell our bitcoin. We're investing it. They won't even say trade. We invested it in greater opportunities like the dollar. What. What did you invest it in? You invested in other Treasury. So wait, you're buying other.
- [61:47]
You're. Why wouldn't you invest that in your own company? Like, why these CEOs are all invested in multiple treasury companies. It's like, what, why not? Isn't that a conflict of interest? Focus on the thing that you do. Focus on that.
- [62:04]
C
It's going to be interesting. I think with these treasury companies there's going to be. Microstrategy is in its own league, obviously. They've got almost 650,000 bitcoin they're, you know, have been dumping for a while. But I, like, they're going to be one of the last, the last standing, I think, because I think Sailor ultimately like gets it at a more fundamental level than, than most people do. And he's accumulated just such a head start. Like nobody's catching that. I, I don't think, anyway, it could be wrong, like, I don't know, maybe Tether and, and Jack Mahler's together, maybe, but it doesn't, doesn't like, that's a, that's a long way.
- [62:37]
A
That one's very bizarre to me. Yeah, it was really bizarre to me. I don't know that the Latinx don't understand anything about bitcoin except like lending tether money. I mean, I don't like, that's just such a weird team to me with no, like, track record. You know, like Jack has a track record in the space, but that company as a whole doesn't have a track record. Besides him going on the news and saying, like.
- [63:03]
We'Re not a Treasury company, actually.
- [63:07]
We'Re going to make a blue chip business doing what?
- [63:12]
C
I mean, I think that the companies like that though, to play devil's advocate, companies like that, that are going to actually have an underlying business and it's not just. No, we're just a pure play treasury company and we're just going to, you know, we're just going to raise money and buy Bitcoin and like that. That's it. Like, I just don't know. I don't think that that ends up living for too long. I think that if you have an underlying business and you're trying to invest in the bitcoin ecosystem and maybe you're acquiring other bitcoin startups, bringing them under your umbrella, you're trying to provide services, you know, for a bitcoin standard, I think that is a lot more legs than these pure play treasury companies like that don't have anything except for, look, we're raising more money to buy more bitcoin and just like all these other ones, you know, because that's the thing, there's no differentiating factor there besides how much size can you, can you raise? And like MicroStrategy is going to beat you at that. So like that, you know, like, like what do you have then? What's the. There's like you don't have a moat. If you're not like the big microstrategy has a moat because they can raise more money. All the other pure plays don't have a moat. And MicroStrategy actually has an operating business too. So that's not even fair to say. Like they, they, you know, yeah, it's small compared to their overall bitcoin holdings, but it's still like, I think hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which is not nothing.
- [64:26]
A
That's small business. It's like a billion a year. Yeah, it's a big business.
- [64:31]
C
They actually still have an operating business and they have more size and they have more products.
- [64:37]
A
Well, and he's the longest standing.
- [64:38]
C
What do they have?
- [64:39]
A
He's one of the longest standing public CEOs. He has a track record. He has deep, deep, deep relationships.
- [64:48]
I don't know, man. It's interesting. I realize how hypocritical it may sound, but I understand the risk of these things and I was fully prepared to lose everything on them. It didn't turn out that way. I don't know if I would invest in them again.
- [65:03]
But it's really hard to recommend that people even look into. They're just such a clown show right now.
- [65:11]
And I feel bad for, you know, there's a lot of really good people in the space that put everything into them.
- [65:18]
You know, all their whole, their whole reputation, their whole career. They pivoted completely to, to do this stuff.
- [65:27]
And I don't know, I don't know. We'll see what happens. I've been, I found actually Check. Checkmate. Check matey.
- [65:37]
To be a pretty good skeptic if you're looking for kind of counter signal, you know that's not just, just kind of a big hype machine or media machine about these, these treasure ecos. He's a pretty clear thinker.
- [65:52]
C
I love Checkmate. He breaks things down super well. And I think he has a very nice like just data driven, rationalist approach to these things, which I always appreciate. Like he's not going to overhype you, you know, like he may be very bullish on bitcoin but like he's also not going to even over hype bitcoin. Like he's going to be like, oh listen, this is my case. He always says like check the analyst versus check the Hodler. He separates the two. I wish I could separate those but I don't have the analyst side. So it's just like walker the bolt hard. You know, it's. That's, that's all I got.
- [66:22]
A
Yeah, yeah. I'm kind of in the same boat. You know, my analysis is kind of just, just feels, I mean for bitcoin, it's, you know what I know about bitcoin. There are people out there. It's interesting like as it grows, there are people that come into the space probably, you know, within the next year, within a year, short period of time and they will understand everything that we do and more. Everything that we've learned in decades. They'll come out of nowhere. Every cycle there's new people that come up that they're not spooks. There's nothing inherently wrong with them. They're just new. And it'll surprise you like, oh, wow, this is really, we're really kind of becoming a little bit older guard here. And these guys think about things completely differently. That's what happened this year for me. Like going to these conferences, I was like this. It's just become a different thing. It's not cypherpunk anymore. It's a big commercial for treasury companies and basically enterprise bitcoin and the collapse of bitcoin and the capture of it into traditional finance.
- [67:26]
It's kind of why I don't go to conferences anymore. It's just like, I don't know if that's for me not too bullish on the soup corners. I don't find them very interesting.
- [67:37]
C
Yeah, I just personally hate wearing ties. So like that's not for me. Like even if I got a suit jacket on, I just not, not a fan of ties. You know, I can't, can't, can't bring myself to do it. So I guess I'm, I'm out of that crowd. I mean have you or do you still have an interest in throwing kind of let's say smaller scale unconferences, like more, more let's say either developer focused or just like niche, you know, niche within a niche type thing?
- [68:03]
A
Yeah, there's one. I don't really have time right now. There was one. I was like asked to help with that. I ultimately didn't have time for like a Costa Rican retreat. Just really appealing to me. I love Costa Rica. I would like to start putting on my own again.
- [68:23]
But more for lifestyle stuff. I think all of us spend way too much time on the computer and I think people should be practicing, should be exercising and eating well and learning how to source and harvest their own food and just like a return to grassroots basically.
- [68:43]
Yeah. I would love to do more jiu jitsu and yoga retreats and bring in bitcoin, especially like vendors as a part of that local goods and services. You know, like buy a goat and bitcoin, slaughter it together, everybody eats it. Asados. I've had a lot of fun with small events like that around the world and I think that's really the way forward because it's like real community and you take away. The important part about those small events is like take away all enterprise value of them and everybody will be there for the right reasons and have a good time. You'll end up with good people and put some sort of hurdle on getting into. It can't just be the most successful thing, you know, Pubkey New York. No, it's got to be like in the boonies you got to put it in Patagonia you got to put. You got to make people travel to get there.
- [69:35]
C
That would be sick. I would go, I would go to a bitcoin adjacent retreat in Patagonia. That would be. I've never been and I would very much like to. That sounds, that sounds great. This is why, you know, this is why beefsteak events are so great too because they're. It's like, yeah, you're getting a bunch of bitcoiners together, but it's not about bitcoin, right? It's about the beef. It's about hanging out, you know, it's about eating meat with your hands and having a good time. And that's Like I think we, I think we start to see more and more of that kind of events. Like it's, it's a, it's a decentralization of the conference circuit, you know, because like once you've been to enough conferences, like I still enjoy them because I love hanging out with bitcoiners. Right. I like that. But that's what, that's why you go is like to spend time with your fellow bitcoiners in the meat space. But if you can do that in, in a way that's less, I don't know, less, less corporate, it just feels better. Like.
- [70:27]
A
Yeah, I think the, the most fun that I ever have at those events, you know, I've been to dozens of them is like at the side events, walking around looking for food, you know, going to the fish market with like NVK and whatever random, you know, developers are around. Like just doing nice early morning walk or late night, you know, at a pub somewhere together. Like it's the side events.
- [70:51]
For me. So that just means small, nimble. Yeah, I'd love to just throw them myself. Not for any sort of financial gain, but just out of, you know, fun like invite, you know, I'm building a place now or host, you know, bring out 100 people and plan a couple days or half day activities for everyone to do and try something new together.
- [71:17]
And yeah, you can have talks and all that or you could put bitcoin into practice and have self custody workshops. That's something I really like to give self custody workshops. I always end up giving some to the people around me, like friends and neighbors and stuff that have small businesses because I see that organic interest. But I don't know, it's like a practical way to give back, but it's also, it's just the most fun man, like we get. You can only do so much.
- [71:44]
Arguing online and participating. Like I'll have achieved my, my goals in this space when I don't have to be on, on, on you know, Twitter anymore or any of these social media apps. They're just, they're such a life, a life drain.
- [72:00]
C
Well, and you know, I think maybe just being conscious of time here, one thing we didn't get a chance to talk about yet, that, that follows from what you just said, is it feels like we're entering rage quit season. Not voluntary quit season, but rage, rage quit season.
- [72:15]
And I don't know how much of that is just a function of bitcoin of like the overall bearishness is just like seeping into people's subconscious. And obviously with the whole core Knots thing too, that adds a different layer. But like, if bitcoin were ripping everyone's faces off right now, if number was ripping up that, that debate would have a very different tone to it. You know what I mean? But because it's also like, because price action is bearish, I feel like that just like doubles up on people and I don't know. Again, it's like so many people are bearish right now for various reasons, whether it be price or because they think bitcoin is captured or bitcoin is doomed. I just continue to be super fucking bullish.
- [72:52]
A
I don't know about you, I should be bullish. I realize I've been taking pessimistic stance this whole podcast. Not good.
- [73:01]
I'm a very optimistic person.
- [73:05]
Dude, Knots is so funny. To me, it's just such a source of joy and entertainment. Oh my God. It's possibly the worst marketing team to ever exist in bitcoin or elsewhere. I'll tell you a story about the Nazis and about Ocean.
- [73:26]
Ocean was looking for funding. They're having all these meetings and they wanted to throw a conference.
- [73:32]
Kind of like unveiling conference. It's a really cool idea. At the beginning, this is before a lot of these guys.
- [73:40]
Got like a brain damaging virus or something, got obsessed with child porn. But like.
- [73:48]
They, they were, they were running around like looking for funding and, and I was working at Lightning Ventures at the time, giving funding to bitcoin companies that were good. And I got a call with them just like, personally. So I was like, well, you know, I know you want to do an event. I can help you with that. And I know you want funding. I can help you with that. You know, let's, let's get you talking to Jack, get some funding. So we all like get on this call and.
- [74:21]
The first thing I wanted to know was like, what? Where have you guys worked in the past? Like, I don't, I don't really know where you came from. I know Luke, that's fine. Everybody else, like, what have you done? None of them have any kind of background in running a business. And I was like, okay. For the time of the market. I was like, you're asking for like 10x the valuation. A company in your position with no real plan to generate revenue would ask for. Like, you're asking for a tremendous valuation, a tremendous amount of money up front. You want, you know, you're trying to raise 5, $10 million.
- [75:00]
Okay, so what have you guys done in the past? No Real answer for that. What are you going to do with the money that we will give you? Let's say we give you a couple hundred thousand, couple million dollars. Like what are you going to do with the money? What are your plans for the money?
- [75:14]
No answer from anyone on the Ocean team. No plan for the millions of dollars that they raised.
- [75:22]
You know, I doubled down on that. Just like what, you don't have any? Just tell me something. You're gonna hire anyone? Like what do you, what's the plan here? Like how does the startup. Like, what are you gonna do? You know what, how many engineers? How many, what are you gonna pay them? What are you paying yourselves? You know, oh, we need 2,300k a person per year we need to hire. You know, these engineers are going to be very, very expensive. Okay, how many do you need? What do you need them for? What's the product there? It was just clear from the get go that it was just a really poor business idea. And if you just go back to like how we started the conversation, it's just like this thing would never survive on a free market. The only reason they exist is because Jack gave them charity because it was an interesting idea. I could support the idea in theory, but they've lost their way. This is not about mining anymore. It's not about decentralizing mining, it's not about running Ocean.
- [76:25]
And it's the most disastrous marketing campaign I've ever seen for a company. These are totally irrational, unhinged, very deranged people. You just read what they're writing for a day or two between any given day. It's not like a one off mechanic had a temporary bout of insanity. We can forgive him. It happens to the best of us. Bitcoin is high pressure and it's hard to have a failing startup in the space. I feel for the guy, no problem. No, it's every day you show up with that same energy and accusations and calling people out and rambling about child porn every single day. It's like, okay, this is the like severe physical and mental illness. Like on all fronts, the whole team.
- [77:12]
I.
- [77:16]
I don't know how they're going to rate. They're going to use up all that money if they haven't already. So I'd be interested to see what happens. I've been asking, no one will answer me but like, how's revenue? I did invest in Ocean because I wanted to support the idea. Even though they had no answers for what they're gonna do with the money. I was like, we'll give you some money, see what happens.
- [77:40]
I don't know, I don't know how much money they'd have. I would, I'd love to know if somebody could tell me if they're making any money.
- [77:47]
But man, it's a. Yeah, it's a mess, but it's very entertaining at the same time. It's like our own little like, it's like our own little Epstein files. You know what I mean?
- [78:01]
C
Oh yeah. And quite literally now too with everybody being like, see look, Epstein was funding all the core developers and it's like.
- [78:09]
All right, like that it was through like the MIT Media Lab, right? And he was giving money to the media lab who was then finance like funding some core developers. It's like, I'm not saying that there's, there's nothing there, but it's like the implications that are drawn from that. It's like, you know.
- [78:27]
A
Yeah, think about Jeremy's job at the time. It was just to go and ask people for money. Of course you're gonna. Everybody would ask that guy for money. All of them. Like, I don't think he was engaged in anything nefarious. I think his job was to go find money for this lab. And he did.
- [78:45]
C
Yeah, man, it's like, boy, I would just love to see.
- [78:52]
We've got Bill and Keone, the samurai wallet devs who are now both been sentenced to spend multiple years in prison. Massive fines, all these things. Meanwhile, the Jeffrey Epstein's bankers at JPMorgan Chase just paid a slap on the wrist fine for admitting that they were aiding and abetting.
- [79:14]
Sex trafficking and laundering money for this guy. And, but nobody goes to jail there. Like that's just a cost of doing business, you know, that's just a, that's a cost of doing business. It's like when, when these big banks launder money for the cartels and they're like, oh shit, you're right. Okay, we'll pay the fine and then like we'll just keep doing it. Like it's just, it's so insane to me that you've got this incredible double standard where you just like you, you'll, you'll just forgive a big bank for laundering money for a. Sex trafficking, you know, blackmailing. Yeah, probably, probably government asset, you know, not going to say which government asset guy, but then a couple of guys who write open source software, you slam them with money transmitter license, you know, failure to get a money transmitter license, even though the institution responsible for issuing those licenses said they don't need a license. But you're going to get them anyway. And you're like, fuck, man. It's fucking ridiculous. Free samurai. Pardon samurai. Like, those guys do not. They should not be going to jail. And I truly hope that President Trump does something.
- [80:12]
A
I know, and I'd like to see the full force of the community come out in the same way they did for Ross, if not more so. My God. Like, this is. This is even more cut and dry. There's no mal. Mal intent here that I can see. This is a total. This is just.
- [80:30]
This is basically a judge and the legal people involved in the legal system not doing their job. Like, they did not learn about the subject that they were ruling over.
- [80:40]
At all. You could tell by her, you know, her own. Her. I don't know what you call it. Her own thoughts on the subject. Like, at the sentencing, the things that she said that he said, the judge. And it's. I don't know, it's just a shame. We gotta. Yeah, we gotta get him out.
- [80:59]
I don't know how to do that. I think it's always been apparent that there's this huge double standard, though. It's. Our government's very, very corrupt. That's ultimately why we're here. It's very broken. I don't really. The hard part is it's really disheartening when you. When you point out, like, all the different ways that it's broken and manipulated. And.
- [81:20]
I think the way to have a clear goal in mind is to try to fix the money. Like, that is the root cause of most of the corruption and the problems that we face, and if we can get a grasp on that, can at least swap out fiat currency for Bitcoin wherever possible, get people to ditch the fiat system will be in a much better place, and a place where people have at least retained property rights and freedom of speech and wealth and sovereignty.
- [81:48]
C
I say amen to that. And it's like, that's the beautiful thing, is that any one of us can opt in at any time and start moving. Jeff Booth is always. I just talked to him earlier this week. And whenever I talk to Jeff, I, like, I just leave, like, buzzing for a few days, you know, being like, okay, I need to be better. I need to be better about moving more of my time and attention into this parallel system and. And doing whatever I can to spend as much time existing in that parallel system and contributing value to it as possible. Because, like, that is ultimately, I don't think the beast gets fixed from inside the beast. You know what I Mean, I think the beast has to be. Has to be drained of blood, but by another, you know, another system basically just sucking it dry, sucking the monetary energy, sucking the intellectual talent, sucking all of the good parts of this system that are currently, you know, encased in this fucking, I don't know, wall of shit, whatever you want to call the. What the fiat Panopticon is becoming and moving that into this parallel system. And the more time and energy and attention and economic power that moves into this parallel system, the stronger it becomes and the less powerful this existing entrenched power structure becomes. And so it's like, that's. It's why it's incumbent on each of us to just do what you can. Figure out how you can move a little bit more time and a little bit more attention and a little bit more energy over to the parallel system every day. And if you can do that, like, you are. You are actually, you know, like, it's like the meme like, I'm doing my part, but really, like, that's how you do your part. You do your part just by acting and choosing to act every day and making individual, subjective value judgments. And you make the world just like a little bit of a better place by putting more of your energy into the better system, the fairer system. And that's like. It gives me hope. This is why conferences are great, because you get to hang out with a bunch of bitcoiners and see what they're doing in that lane, right? See what they're doing to make that parallel system better. But I don't think the system can fix itself from within the system.
- [83:43]
A
Right.
- [83:43]
C
Like, I think bitcoin helps externally, not so much internally. Like, it only helps internally in that it will help accelerate the existing system's demise. I think. I don't think bitcoin can save the existing system. Does that make sense?
- [84:00]
A
Yeah.
- [84:03]
Well, I think both are. Things are true. Like, there's one just kind of like, opt out on all fronts, you know, preserve yourself. Like, put on your oxygen mass before helping others. But once you're in a stable place, you have a good stack and you kind of. There's a really big question everyone has to answer for themselves, which is like, what do you do with your time? You have all this wealth. Like, how are you going to live your life? How are you going to get healthy? How are you going to promote your own production of your own genes and longevity and inhibit kind of.
- [84:36]
Bad things from happening around you and the people around you? And it's like, you have to. You have to go out and, like, exemplify that life. And I think part of that means actually interacting with a lot of normal people and leading by example. Like, in my immediate.
- [84:52]
Friend group, the people I spend the most physical amount of time with.
- [84:57]
They don't have any bitcoin. They're not. They're increasingly interested in it. They have a lot of questions just by virtue of, like, being around me a little bit. I don't. I don't promote it in front of them. They just, like, happen to know what's up. And then they see. You know what I mean? They see like a level of.
- [85:17]
Kind of like clarity of vision. They see inherent skepticism of. They've been, you know, repeating the company lines, the government lines for a long time. They'll see that I don't tolerate at all, like, so lies, actually, you know what I mean? Like, you're. You're the odd one out when you're the bitcoiner in a group of, like, normie friends. But I think that's important. I don't think it's a good idea to reject them completely because they're good people. They just. They're just not there yet.
- [85:44]
And you can only get them there by leading by example and succeeding and your success. Like, they will. They will try on your ideas and beliefs to try to replicate that.
- [85:57]
So I think it's important to get out your local community. Yeah. And spend time with those people.
- [86:04]
C
I totally agree with that. There's a lot of good people out there who just need to hand them an orange pill and eventually they'll take it on their own. But there's a lot of people that are very much worth saving out there and can't save everyone. But you're right, once you get to a certain point, it's like, what are you going to do? Like, what are you gonna do with yourself? You're gonna retreat back and, you know, never talk to anyone ever, and just guard yourself away in your citadel. Like, you know, it sounds kind of nice, but it's also like, we. We, like, we need people like you. You want. You want. You want good people to be with you on this journey through this fourth turning. You want people to come out the other side with that aren't gonna come, you know, to the gates of your citadel with pitchforks and be like, we gotta burn this motherfucker down because there's this fat cat bitcoiner in there. Like, no, no, no. We need. So you need to get as many people on board with bitcoin as possible because when things get really dark, you don't want them to be like, that's the fucking bitcoiner. It's all his fault. Elizabeth Warren told me so like you don't want to get to that place. You know what I mean?
- [87:03]
A
No, I think it's going to be. The transition's a little bit hard. You're going to lose some friends over it. It happens. I think just even the, the whole Trump grift of like the last couple of years definitely got a lot of people that are like, oh, you're like, they just make the assumption you're Republican, you're a big Trump guy. It's like actually never voted in my life. It couldn't be further from the truth. So don't know what you're talking about. But like everyone at any given time I, I would like urge people to not think in terms of like ultimatums and like non redemptive paths. Like everyone is not either good or bad. Like if you're a bitcoiner, everyone's either their actions are net positive or negative for bitcoin or neutral at any given time. It's not forever. Trump will not always be good for bitcoin. There's some days he does things that are really the antithesis of what we're going for. It's the same with Howard Ludnick. It's the same with.
- [88:04]
Pick your favorite CEO in the space. It's a double edged sword. It's just like we're all humans, we're all fallible. So it's just at any given time this is also like the.
- [88:16]
Editorial thesis that Roxum as a media company is founded on. It's like everything that happens might not all be directly related to bitcoin, but it's probably good or bad for it in some way. So rather than red versus blue, that's the lens that we take on things. Obviously we want to point out those things that are good for it, but we understand we're not going to endorse political candidates because they're not always going to be good for it. They're going to do some things that are good and some things that are bad and we should be able to talk about and weigh those things.
- [88:51]
As we go.
- [88:54]
C
Amen to that. I think that's a perfect note to end on. McShane. Where do you want to send people?
- [89:01]
A
You can send them to Wroxham tv. Yeah, watch the stream. Watch Walker on stream. It's really good. Yeah.
- [89:09]
C
Every Tuesday at 1:00pm EST, I'm on that wrong stream. So yeah, come hang out. But dude, I'm glad we got a chance to do this. It's been long overdue. Great catching up a bit. And yeah, I would also just to echo your last message, you know, remember that like you don't need to get sucked into this red blue political dichotomy wherever you happen to be in the world, like there, everyone wants to force a binary on you. Everyone. There's a non binary joke here somewhere. But yeah, I'll leave it at that and I'll just say like, remember that like there is a third path and bitcoin represents that third path and you can meaningfully take steps down that path at any time. Try to do your best not to rage quit, because when you rage quit, you end up with less bitcoin. You don't want that to happen. So try to stay, you know, stay cheerful, stay optimistic and spend more time with bitcoiners whenever you can. Because generally that makes me more cheerful and optimistic. And if you can't do that in the meat space, you should probably just start a bitcoin podcast because then you get to do stuff like this. So it's a win win there. But dude, great hanging with you. Thanks to everyone who joined on the NOSTR live stream. Appreciate you guys. See you next time. Cheers, McShane.
- [90:19]
A
Catch you later.