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THE Bitcoin Podcast
The Bitcoin Train is Leaving the Station - George Bodine (THE Bitcoin Podcast)
01:45:50
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- [00:00]
George Bodine
Bitcoin over the last five years has returned 55% CAGR. If you get a tenth of a Bitcoin right now, just sit on a tenth of a Bitcoin over. And you know, your audience, I'm sure, is not old farts like me. You're probably younger. Well, guess what, you go 20 years, 20 years, that's $64 million. That's enough. It's plenty in today's purchasing power. Now, I don't know what it's going to be then. That's cuck bucks. It could be like 200 million. Who knows? Could be buying a cup of coffee. But. But in today's dollars and purchasing power, that tenth of a bitcoin is $64 million. Just let it sit there. That's enough. But you know you're going to struggle to come up with 100 grand when Bitcoin's a million a coin and people that don't understand the trains leaving. Anybody that's listening to this or watching it, you're. You're making a bet right now. It's going to be about 30 days until President elect Trump becomes President Trump. And when he does, if you're betting on the wrong side of this, you're going to have your eyes watered. You're going to sit there, we're going to put the dial on 11 cook noodles, and you're going to be sitting there going, wonder what the fuck just happened? Because it's going to take off. The train is leaving the station and in about 30 days. You're making a bet right now. If you're not into bitcoin or if you're trading your bitcoin, or if you're like these dipshits that are selling as it gets to 73k, you know, you got to pull your head out and look around.
- [01:28]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the bitcoin podcast. The bitcoin time chain is 875490 and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. Today's episode is bitcoin Talk, where I talk with my guest about bitcoin and whatever else comes up. And today that guest is George Bodine. George is a bitcoiner and an incredibly talented artist, but he's also been an oil field worker, cab driver, miner cop, Navy fighter pilot, top gun graduate, and an airline captain. Needless to say, he is a fascinating guy. We get into a bunch of topics today, including the transformative power of bitcoin, the urgency for individuals to invest Bitcoin market dynamics, the role the Bitcoin ETFs, the importance of understanding dollar cost averaging and UTXO management and the strategic Bitcoin reserve and the first mover advantage of nation states and the future of microstrategy as a Bitcoin bank. We also discuss more broadly the future of Bitcoin as a store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account. I think you're going to enjoy the heck out of this conversation. I know I did. Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast wherever you're listening or watching. But personally, I recommend you check out Fountain FM because not only can you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value, but you can earn Bitcoin just for listening to podcasts. Check out bitcoinpodcast.net for episodes and additional resources. Head to the Show Notes to grab discount links for my sponsor Bitbox or go directly to Bitbox Swiss Walker and use promo code walker for 5% off. Send an email to helloitcoin podcast.net if you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast. And if you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by giving a zap on Noster or a boost on Fountain. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with George Bodine. George Ben, it's. It's good to see you. I wish it was in the flesh, but at least you're coming through crystal clear. This will have to do for now. But how, how, how's it going? How's life?
- [03:46]
George Bodine
Life's great. I'm really in a great place right now. You're looking at my studio for the viewers right now. This is where I work. And in fact, this painting behind me on the easel there is something I just started. It's going to be, believe it or not, this is going to be a painting art piece that mines bitcoin.
- [04:07]
Walker
Can you explain that a little more?
- [04:09]
George Bodine
I'm going to have a Bitax Mars lander as part of the art piece. And the Mars lander has like these neat little lights. They glow neon lights and they've got a little miner that runs back and forth mining the bitcoin and then it flashes the bitcoin price. It's going to be in the painting. So there's a plaque that goes next to it and it says this art, this painting is mining bitcoin. As you view this painting, the bitcoin it produces is going to the hardware wallet of the person that owns this painting. That's what's going to be kind of like that. And so whoever owns it, you know, they can just send it to their whatever, lightning wallet or whatever.
- [04:51]
Walker
I mean that is pretty slick. I've got to say. I've been wanting to get one of those bit axes I need to just pull the trigger and maybe I'll get a couple of them and tinker around because it's a pretty sweet little product like making it just super accessible for folks. It's not going to cost you as much as a brand new ant miner obviously or Bitmain. So that's sweet. But I haven't heard of a painting that is mining bitcoin yet. This sounds like it might be a first.
- [05:19]
George Bodine
I don't know about that. I just know it's going to be a lot of fun.
- [05:22]
Walker
Yeah, maybe Fractal Encrypt has put together something yet in one of those intricate designs that also has a bitcoin miner in there. I wouldn't put it past him, but. No, that's sweet. And I've. I've got a couple of of your pieces here in the house. They're. They're out of frame behind me, but the ones from. That was from the Bitcoin Is Venice series that you did. They're not the originals obviously, but they're part of the limited prints and I just, I love those. And for folks that don't know you did the COVID for Bitcoin is Venice as a, as an actual painting first. And it's. I mean it's beautiful.
- [05:57]
George Bodine
Yeah, I did that. And then in fact there's a kind of a neat story behind that because the author, Alan Farrington and I didn't mention, but Sasha too, but Alan, he ended up kind of helping Orange pill me into self custody, that is. He showed me and demonstrated how easy it was to actually get bitcoin through the base layer. I'd never seen that before and I tell you, it just blew me away. It was like one of those sit on your ass moments. And I thought this is incredible. And it helped solidify my descent into the rabbit hole where I've been mining down there ever since.
- [06:35]
Walker
Did you meet Alan as a result of him commissioning your work or was that how you guys got connected?
- [06:41]
George Bodine
No, he actually had bought a painting for a friend. Just one of my floral paintings. I'm represented in galleries around the country and he just bought one and connected with me and then of course I was already into the bitcoin. And he was. And we connected through Twitter and the next thing you know, he commissioned the piece. And I'm really happy with that painting. That paintings in the permanent collection with bitcoin magazines. I don't know if they call. I think they call it an art museum now. They're trying to build a space for permanent collection.
- [07:11]
Walker
And that's awesome. And it's. It's such an incredible piece and just like an incredible, actually series of pieces. There's a few. There's four total that go with it or four total from that series. Right?
- [07:22]
George Bodine
Yeah. Thanks.
- [07:24]
Walker
It's something else. And I love this too. I think the first time you and I met was at a dinner organized by Larry Lippard in Miami. Maybe that was 2022. Does that sound right?
- [07:37]
George Bodine
It was, yeah.
- [07:40]
Walker
I met a nice shout out to Greg Foss for inviting Carl and I to that dinner Larry was organizing. But that was just such a good time. And I meet you, you've got on a pretty. A pretty awesome jacket, like, blazer that was just over the top. And you're like, hey, I'm George the artist. And I was like, okay, cool. And then I got to know a little bit of your backstory, and I was like, who the heck is this guy? You've lived quite a rich life, and you continue to live quite a rich life. And I was blown away. And I'm glad that we've gotten the chance to hang out a good amount since then and. And now finally, since I've started, you know, yet another bitcoin podcast, I've got you on here, too. So what could be better, man?
- [08:25]
George Bodine
It couldn't be any better. I think this is a really important time right now in bitcoin, and I think these podcasts are really important also. I think that we've got a limited amount of time here to get people either get their shit squared away or get them on board or whatever you want to call it, but time is running out. The train is going to leave the station soon. Yeah, I have a really unusual background, and so we should stay right at the beginning before we start out here, that this is not financial advice in any way, shape or form. I'm often the village idiot when it comes to investing. The only thing I'll say is with bitcoin and my recent game playing with MicroStrategy, I've nailed it on these two assets. And in fact, that's all my wealth is in, is bitcoin or a bitcoin proxy. Now, with MicroStrategy, but I have everything in bitcoin.
- [09:18]
Walker
Yeah, it is important, I think for people. There's so many people that talk about bitcoin, especially now that bitcoin's pumping up in price or I guess actually now it's crashed today, it may be dead. It's all the way down to $98,000 a coin or whatever it is and oh dear Lord, it must be over. But you see so many people coming out of the woodwork with the, you know, the bull market cycle of the fud, right, which is, well, this is clearly, you know, it's, you know, Ponzi scheme clearly going to crash, crash and go to nothing. It's, you know, oh, it went from the government's going to ban bitcoin to well, this is terrible that the government might be buying bitcoin. And like the, the narratives just keep evolving for why bitcoin is terrible. And same same people come out of the woodwork that Peter Schiffs, but also new people come out who are, you know, financial experts in their field to tell you how bad bit is. And it's very obvious that they, there's no skin in the game for them. It's like, if you think that bitcoin's going to zero, why don't you short it? You know, go like, go ahead. Plenty of ways for you to do that now. But I think it's so. I wish that people would ignore that kind of noise, maybe make fun of it a little bit, have a laugh with it. But for the person, the people that are just getting into bitcoin, I think that kind of advice is so damaging because they're not getting an honest answer from people. They're not getting honest advice and they're getting advice from people who don't have skin in the game. And frankly haven't spent much time looking into this. They just have a knee jerk reaction, Ponzi, Tulip, whatever, whatever. They need to be listening to people who bitcoin has actually changed their lives for the better. And I think that you are one of those people. You've got a great story there and bitcoin is now really allowing you to live that life that you, that you want. But maybe for folks that don't know you. George, can you, can you tell us a little bit about. And start wherever you want with this? Because I know it's a long one, but, you know, who are you? How did you get here today to be, you know, George, the, the artist who is also a hardcore bitcoiner.
- [11:19]
George Bodine
So I do have an interesting background in the sense that it's not a traditional finance background or anything even really remotely close to that. I ended up, I lived out west in Colorado, didn't graduate from high school. I actually was, I mean, I was expelled from high school, kicked out for, for hitting a teacher, unfortunately. So. Yeah. And you know, the funny thing is, in today's world, you know, that could have been the end of my life right there. I could have just stopped. 17 years old, that's it. You get into the system. Maybe out of my. My parents might have lost me, you know, who knows what could have happened. But in those days, you know, I was very fortunate. And my parents said, you probably should not go back to school. So I was 17 years old. I'd always loved flying. My dad loved flying and he said, hey, I'll pay for you to get a private pilot's license. After that you're on your own, but if you want to. And I'd always loved planes. So I jumped at the chance and I, I got my license. It was very cheap in those days. I mean, it was like 800 bucks or something, or maybe less. And it was great and I loved it. But when you're done, there's nothing you can do with that. If you want to do something like in the commercial flying fields, you got to go on, you got to build hours. So I flew airplanes for a guy that was like a used car dealer with airplanes. So I'm 17 years old. He'd give me a bus ticket, I'd go out somewhere and I'd. He'd buy a plane sight unseen, and then I'd go and pick it up. Well, they were all different airplanes, so, you know, many a time, I'm not making this up, I was in the cockpit. I would get the owner's manual out and I'd read how to start it, how to change the gas, you know, from tank to tank, stuff like that. And I did that. I got my 250 hours commercial license and at the time I went to college. Then I started college again out west, but I dropped out of college. So my high school dropped out, dropped out of college, and I ended up working in the oil fields out west. And that was an interesting experience. And then after a while, I had applied out west. I became a cop out there in a cowboy, kind of a really rough, really rough town. I mean with cowboys and Indians and I mean real ones. One time I went to bar fight at night and outside in front of the bar, and these bars had bullet holes in them, outside of the bar was a guy with his horse tied up to the bar. I mean, that's the kind of place it was. And in fact, you couldn't go in by yourself wearing a uniform. They'd kick the shit out of you. So I did that for quite a while, and then I ended up drifting south down into Colorado, and I worked as a miner. Not a bitcoin miner. I mean, an actual real miner between a mile and two miles down. So it's really deep mining. And I did that. And then, you know, I know it sounds like I was trying to become, like, the world's most interesting man, but, you know, really, I just. I just didn't know what to do in my life. And, you know, if somebody would have looked at me working down in that mine two miles down there and walking around in the mud and covered in muck and just living a crummy life, I mean, they would have thought, what a loser. So I felt like a loser after a while, and I went back to college. I drove a cab at night in Denver and made a lot of money to help myself in college. At the time, the Navy was hurting for pilots, and I ended up getting in the Navy. You're too young, but there's an old movie called Officer and a Gentleman. That's the kind of training I went to. You show up and There's a Marine DI and he gets like 4 inches in front of your face and starts screaming at you. And I made it through that. And because my flying background, I actually graduated number one in my flight training. And I got to pick F18s, Hornets, which is that plane that was in the last movie, the Top Gun movie. And that was shit hot. I mean, that was a lot of fun to fly that thing. And then I did go through Top Gun, and I ended up being an instructor, an adversary instructor. So I got to fly those really neat little planes that were in the first movie. I don't know if you remember. They were really fun. I mean, you would go around real fast with your hair on fire and just pretend you were Russian and attack the guy. It was to blast. And then I got out and I flew for Delta. And then after that, I became a captain. I've flown all over with Delta, all around the world. But unfortunately, I also just like painting here. I like to do creative things. And I built a chopper by myself, you know, did the welding and all that. But unfortunately, it was dangerous as hell. And I had a bad accident with a traumatic brain injury. So that ended my Flying career and I was kind of retired medically, which wasn't a bad deal for me actually, and I started doing the painting full time then. So it's, it's worked out really good. But you know, the thing is, the thing to take from this story is you can always reinvent yourself. You know, you're not. I know it seems sometimes like things are almost at a dead end. One of the beauties about bitcoin is it gives you so much freedom. I mean, look at me today, you know, I'm all in on bitcoin. Bitcoin is the royal flush. So when you understand that, you just take your chips, you put them in the table and you're done. And you know what? That's what it's like. And now I don't have to sit there, I don't lay awake wondering about what the Fed's gonna say next week. I don't give a shit what they do with the money supply. I don't worry about earnings reports, 10ks, all the stuff that I used to study, all the macro stuff, I don't even do it now. I just relax and enjoy myself. Sorry for that long winded answer.
- [16:57]
Walker
Not at all. That's. I always say that this show is a, a safe space for, you know, long winded answers, rants, tangents, anything, anything you want to go on there. There are no rules on, on this show. But I appreciate that background. I think that's such a good message too that like you do not have to be what you are today forever. Right? If, yeah, you know, that's not to say like that you, you know, maybe you like who you are right now and that's, that's fine if you like it, you know, keep, keep going. But for a lot of people out there, I think, especially folks who are in my generation right now and even in the Gen Z, the Zoomers, I think there's a lot of feeling of like you were told that you have to go on this certain path and that these are the steps that you must take if you want to be a successful, well rounded member of society. And that it's this particular path and get good grades and follow the rules and then graduate from high school and then go to college and get good grades and follow the rules and then know, apply for jobs and work hard at those jobs and put in lots of long hours and do that just, you know, for the next 45 years. And then you can finally, then you can finally, you know, take take a break, you know, after you've, you know, crushed your spirit as a cog in the corporate machine for your entire life. And I think people are starting to just wise up to that a bit and realize that, you know what, maybe this whole thing is a bit of a scam. And I'm supposed to. You know, as Mahlers has said, you know, I'm supposed to work for money that another guy can print for free. I'm supposed to put all of my energy and my creative potential into creating for a corporate behemoth that doesn't give a shit about me. And I'm supposed to just kind of do that forever and accept that. But I think people are realizing, especially bitcoiners are kind of the vanguard of this, that you don't have to do that. There are other ways to go through life. And as you said, you can reinvent yourself. You can grow. You should try to grow, right? Whether that's professionally or, you know, creatively as a side project or even starting a. Another silly bitcoin podcast. Like, there are infinite ways to grow. And I think that that's just a. It's a. It's a wonderful message. And I'm curious, too. You know, how did you end up, like, what was the moment where you realized, okay, I need to go all in on bitcoin? Like, I've got the royal flush? What was your, you know, your orange pill moment, Your. Your aha moment, your eureka moment, whatever you want to call it.
- [19:27]
George Bodine
Well, you know, it kind of ties in with what you were just talking about, because it is important to just keep learning. You've got to always challenge yourself. You can't stop. And, you know, from the time that I first. Well, I heard about Bitcoin in 2012, I think, and I thought it was stupid, a scam, all the typical stuff. So I just blew it off. But Lynn Alden came back. She started in 2017. I read her blob on her blog on bitcoin, and I thought, she's not into it. I can just tell. And I just passed it up again. But unlike me, she kept studying and learning. And, you know, next thing I know, it's like, February so of 2020. She comes out with another article. And I thought, oh, it's changed. I need some of this. And, you know, I started studying right there. And initially I bought some bitcoin. I don't know if you remember that time. It was really cheap. And it started going way up real fast. And I sold it. I sold all of it. I had it, like, three days, and I thought what the hell? Like two days later I was staring at the screen. I remember thinking, what the fuck did I do that for? Why did I sell that? And I couldn't answer the question. So I just kept studying. And every, every month, year, I just got more and more convicted. And I can't tell you when I actually pushed all my chips in, but it wasn't, wasn't very long after that. And obviously, you know, volatility is very difficult to deal with. And you guys have got some great videos on the downside of volatility, but on the upside, it's difficult too. It shakes people out. You know, you mentioned the fact that bitcoin price is down today. You know, long term holders, the people that we often think of as not selling their bitcoin, they've sold a million coins since like about 60k up to where we are. They're selling 30,000 coins a day right now. Long term holders. Now if you look at the money that's behind that sale, it's, it's, it's not much. It's like they're in that 56 to 65k cohort, not the really deep long term holders, but it's still a significant pressure on the market. I'm surprised that the market has held up as well as it has and that there's this continuous buy behind all this cell pressure. It's pretty remarkable. I attribute a lot of it to the ETFs. That is one of the most powerful forces right now driving bitcoin price but also even adoption. You know, there are so many people I just saw the other day, 80% of the ETF purchases are by, and this is according to Vaneck retail, that's a pretty powerful cohort of people that are behind that. And it's, what it really means is a lot of the institutions, the RIAs, the, basically the warehouses, they haven't arrived yet. When they get here, there's going to be more pressure.
- [22:26]
Walker
Yeah, it's, it is quite interesting the amount of, oh, you're good, you're good. The amount of coins. Oh no. Well, you still, you still sound, you still sound good. You know, maybe take, take a, take an extra orange pill just to clear that out of your system. But no, you know, looking at, because I'd seen that too with some of the, you know, what are classified as long term hodlers selling a good amount of coins into the market and it is getting absorbed right up. And when I say, yeah, bitcoin is down today, it's like, come on guys, we're at a rounding error still. So I just always think that's funny. But I'm very interested to see kind of what happens in this next kind of, well, next month for one and next year for another and then for the next kind of whole cycle like what happens up until this next halving. And you know, my plan hasn't changed. It's continued to, you know, dollar cost average with, with the money I make and the money I, I can't afford to lose. So I want to put that in bitcoin. I'm gonna just keep trying to create value, dollar cost average. But I think it, it still doesn't feel from, because you mentioned retail, it's like retail has definitely arrived at the ETFs. It doesn't seem that retail has really arrived as much at the just let's say spot bitcoin itself there. It still seems like there's and, and I wonder how much of that is. I think a lot of it's probably people for the first time had a vehicle, a very convenient vehicle to move like 401k dollars into, get some sort of bitcoin exposure, right? And there's no unit bias problem with the ETFs. They're you know, trading at whatever, 50, 60 bucks a pop. That's much more approachable. Right. I can buy all these Bitcoin ETF units, whatever, but the, I think the 100K or 0.1 million, to use Samson Mo's nomenclature, that, that level as much as it was a psychological level, to reach it and hit it and surpass it, it becomes, I think, kind of like a psychological blocker for a lot of people where they have this idea that, oh, well, I missed the boat. You know, like it's at a, it's at 100k. Like I'm never going to make, you know, life changing money with this, so I may as well invest in, you know, whatever fart coin or whatever other than meme coin du jour is. And I'm just, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that for people. Like, do you think that because you mentioned trains kind of leaving the station, but do you think there's still plenty of time for folks to get on board?
- [24:58]
George Bodine
No, I don't. I think the train is leaving the station and I just can't explain how important this particular period is. You know, you and I, we're set, we're sitting on the train, we got our bitcoin ticket. Carl is next to you, I've got everybody with me. You know, except a lot of my family members aren't with me. And you know, if you look out on that platform, you look through the window, there's a whole bunch of people that you love or that are, you know, your family members, your friends, and they're not with you. And quite frankly they're not going to in the future. They're not going to be able to accumulate the level of Bitcoin that you could have in this period that we have been going through.
- [25:37]
Walker
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- [26:54]
George Bodine
For instance, I mean, you know, let's just think for a minute. Let's just go back and talk about the train leaving the station. You know I bought Bitcoin when it dipped, I went, I bought Bitcoin at 17,000. Let's just say that I bought a tenth of a Bitcoin and it would cost me $1700. Now today, it's two years later, I got to come up with ten grand for that bitcoin. Same amount of bitcoin. Well, I'm here to tell you right now, I may be a village idiot on some things, but you know what, I do understand Bitcoin and Bitcoin is going to A million dollars a coin. And when it does, you're going to have to come up with a hundred grand. And as far as being too late, I mean what the hell do you want? Listen to this. Bitcoin over the last five years has returned 55% CAGR. That's cumulative annual growth rate per year. That's reinvesting, just leaving it sitting in there, 55% a year. If you get a tenth of a Bitcoin right now, just sit on a tenth of a Bitcoin over and you know your audience I'm sure is not old farts like me. You're probably younger. Well guess what, you go 20 years, 20 years. That's 64 fucking million dollars. That's enough. It's plenty in today's purchasing power. Now I don't know what it's going to be then that's cuck bucks. It could be like 200 million. Who knows, could be buying a cup of coffee. But, but in today's dollars in purchasing power, that tenth of a bitcoin is $64 million. Just let it sit there, that's enough. But you know you're going to struggle to come up with 100 grand when Bitcoin is a million a coin. And people that don't understand the trains leaving. You're, you're sitting there right now. Anybody that's listening to this or watching it, you're, you're making a bet right now. All those long term term holders are I told you about that are leaving bitcoin that you know a lot of lths the long term holder, they sold points into the 73 peak. Then a lot of them sold and are still selling in the 100k peak. And you know I, we usually call these people smart money. Long term holders sell into every bull run and you can just watch it on chain. And I do a lot of on chain analysis. I want to give a shout out right now for James Check if you're looking for him. He's checkmatey on Twitter. He puts out a premium. I only subscribe to two newsletters. His is one and he can help you stack 15 to 20% more bitcoin as you buy. If you'll just pay attention to on chain and know when to buy. So I do a lot of on chain and we usually call these people smart money that sell into these peaks and I'm here to tell you right now I think they're stupid money because you are making a bet right now. We've got, I don't know when this will come out, but it's going to be about 30 days until President Elect Trump becomes President Trump. And when he does, if you're betting on the wrong side of this, you're going to have your eyes watered. You're going to sit there, we're going to put the dial on 11 cook noodles, and you're going to be sitting there going, wonder what the fuck just happened. Because it's going to take off now if he doesn't, if he doesn't put out an executive order or doesn't use the bill, that's maybe before him from Congress. I don't know. I assume that bitcoin's price will probably fall a little bit. So again, you're making a bet. But do you want to be on the wrong side of that bet? What is the upside to what I'm talking about compared to the downside if it's going down? If I had any more chips left, I'd be buying. I don't have anything. I, you know, I'm bitcoin rich and I barely have enough money for a sandwich sometimes. So, you know, what I'm saying is the train is leaving the station and in about 30 days, you're making a bet right now, if you're not into bitcoin, or if you're trading your bitcoin, or if you're like these dipshits that are selling as it gets to 73k, you know, you gotta pull your head out and look around. Anyway, I don't mean to rant here.
- [30:57]
Walker
But it's just what I tell you about rants, it's a safe space for him. No worries. But no, I think this is a fair point. You know, there's always like that, you know, a meme at this point of, you know, your friend asking you, you know, like, oh, should I buy some bitcoin now or should I wait until it goes lower? And, you know, the, you know, whenever you get those kind of texts, it's always just kind of like, I don't know, man, do, do whatever you want with your own money. I'm still buying now, you know, because again, like, I'm not a trader. I'm not some sophisticated investor. I just dollar cost average and when I, you know, have a little bit of extra fiat lying around, I'll, you know, make a little bit of a, you know, a smash buy, but otherwise I just kind of set it and forget it and try to accumulate and again create value so that I can keep generating some fiat to sell that dirty fiat for bitcoin or earn in bitcoin when I can, whenever it's possible. Because that's a great feeling too. There's no fiat involved. That's a beautiful thing. But I think that as we're getting into, we're getting into this point, the whole gradually then suddenly the suddenly happens, very, very suddenly. And I think that maybe it's because after this last cycle with the whole FTX blowout and all of that stuff, you know, everybody thought, oh, this is, you know, we're going into a, a super cycle. We're gonna, you know, this is, the four year cycle is dead. It's gonna, you know, it's going up forever and it's like maybe that jaded some people to think, ah, okay, well we're just gonna have another, you know, another collapse like after ftx and bitcoin's probably going to take another, you know, massive haircut at some point. Maybe It'll take a 50% drop or a 60, 70% drop, but that might be dropping down from a million dollars, you know what I mean? Like the magnitude of these drops is going to get, and runs is going to get more violent, but the numbers we're dealing with are just so much larger. And I think that for people right now it's like again, the message that I give to friends and family and thankfully a number have actually listened is just set up a dollar cost average, you know, and you know, if you, if you've got the, you know, the balls to just say, you know, like screw it, I'm just going to, just going to dive all in on this, you know, good for you. If you've got a lot of excess fiat lying around. I don't have a lot of fiat just lying around. I, you know, I earn fiat and then I save in bitcoin and I think that that's good advice for most people. But right now it's like you're kind of right that you know, we're still early, but the magnitude of your earliness is going to potentially decrease exponentially in the coming months and years. And things are going to happen very, very quickly. And I don't think people are really mentally prepared for that either. Probably most bitcoiners are not, except maybe some of the psychos who have been around for a lot longer than I have. But certainly most no coiners are definitely not prepared for that. And if you're not holding bitcoin in the coming years, I think you're going to feel very angry, probably feel very foolish, but not want to admit your own foolishness. So you're going to find ways to take out that anger on the greedy bitcoiners who just got lucky. You know what I mean?
- [34:14]
George Bodine
We've seen a lot of that already. I mean, we're seeing some of that now, I would have to say. I think that the last cycle probably did cause a lot of PTSD for people. I believe personally that the last cycle was truncated, that we basically were on our way up to 100k and I did call for that. So again, I'm a village idiot sometimes. I got that wrong. You know, another thing I got wrong is I really did think that institutions would be arriving during that last cycle. I was wrong. They absolutely were not. I did not understand the barriers that were there to entry. The change in FASB accounting rules from intangible asset. If you wanted to make bitcoin the most toxic thing that you could make it so you couldn't hold it on a, on a Treasury sheet, you'd call it an intangible asset. Well, that's over. And in fact, on the 15th of December, that's done. FASB rules have changed. It's now at fair market value. But it wasn't then. The other thing is that January 1st MicroStrategy is going to start reporting in that next quarter the using those new guidelines. But the other thing is I didn't understand until recently how in depth and how deep the chokepoint 2.0 was and how the Biden administration was working so hard to curtail crypto and bitcoin development, causing tremendous harm with banks. And I'm not talking about silvergate, I'm talking about Silver or one of the other ones that was basically shut down and they weren't insolvent. I mean, so 2.0 was in full effect. And then the other thing is that I really think the unwinding of the GPTC Premium and what happened from that, because remember, the GBTC Premium went to a discount during that period and that was a huge under bid to bitcoin. Just day after day, like a roller coaster. And finally it stopped. And when it did, when it went to discount, people had to unwind. And that's when we discovered, you know, Three Arrows Capital, Genesis, eventually all of this leading into FTX and that, you know, that was paper bitcoin, that guy, that was fraudulent stealing of other people's bitcoin and that was paper bitcoin out there. So I think all those things contributed to the unwind of the market. Plus it had gone up so quickly. I think it just ran out of steam. You know, these legs that we're going through right now, even this one at 100k or so, that's really important. If we can stay in there and build a base, it's going to make our what comes next even more sustainable. But I do want to address one last thing you said. DCA is something that, you know, as bitcoiners we've talked about for years and I'm a big fan of dca. Bitcoin magazine just had a great article on it like four days ago. So the only thing I'm going to caution people is this, and we can talk about this later. We don't have to get into it now. But if you don't understand what you're doing with your DCA and you leave those UTXOs out there that you have bought and they are small like, like they even talked about $25 for a DCA average, you are going to lose that bitcoin. It's going to be gone forever. It's coming. I'd say again, you're flipping the coin because on January 20, on the next day, if he's in office and this happens, you're going to be stranded, economically stranded. All that bitcoin you got on the base layer is going to be sitting there. You won't be able to get to it if you don't know what you're doing.
- [38:01]
Walker
That's a very important point. And I think for people who may be wondering, like, what the heck is George talking about here? The very long story short, I did an episode with Wicked Smart Bitcoin, which he's awesome. And we dug into this because he's been super vocal about UTXO management. Basically, if you are dollar cost averaging using exchange. Again, not financial advice, but just some practical advice. It is a very foolish idea to have that some exchange will let you automatically transfer that DCA to your cold storage. Sounds nice. Terrible idea. You should wait and accumulate until you have a decent stack, whatever you're comfortable with on the exchange and then transfer it in bulk so that you have one utxo, one unspent transaction output that ends up in your cold storage. You don't have to leave it on the exchange forever, but just wait until you have a bit of a stack built up there and then transfer it off in a lump because otherwise it becomes basically impossible to spend if your UTXOs are too small because literally the transaction fees will just eat it all up. Like it. And maybe if they're higher than the amount of your UTXO that's just unspendable. Then you can't do anything at all with it. So it's very, it's a very easy thing to fix, especially when fees are low. Right now you can consolidate, take a bunch of those addresses and send them to yourself. There are also privacy trade offs with that that you should be aware of. But you know, it's again, everything is trade offs, right? Everything is a little bit of a deciding what side of the bet you want to be on. But best advice I can give is do not automatically transfer your, your DCA buys from an exchange to your cold storage. That's, that's the easiest way to fix this. Let it build up a little bit, develop a decent sized stack of sats and then transfer them in bulk and you will thank yourself later. Is there anything you would add to that bit of advice?
- [39:58]
George Bodine
No. I really went down this rabbit hole after I attribute this to Bob Burnett, CEO of Barefoot Mining, getting me down this rabbit hole. But the more I studied it, more I've studied it. I'm just telling you right now, people are not prepared for what's coming. Let's just say, you know, let's just say. I'll tell you, one of the reasons I'm so bullish right now is because of the election. I don't know if you remember this or not. It was back in January of this year. It was Peter McCormick in one of his episodes he had on Preston Kisch and Luke Grohman and Danny was there too. And one of the things that came out in that discussion, this is secondhand, is that someone had overheard because Trump was involved in being orange pilled at this time, people were talking to him about bitcoin and someone heard him over, say on the phone, bitcoin is the new oil. Now just think about, just think about if that's true. Now I'm agnostic, I don't give a damn about these politicians. But I will tell you right now, if he meant that he understood that the petrodollar, which came about in the mid-70s with Kissinger, Nixon, if he understands that oil is really the basis of the petrodollar, and I'll bet he does, then is he saying that bitcoin is going to be taking some of that status away from oil? In other words, are we going to start moving to bitcoin as an underpinning layer to the, to the dollar? And then the other thing is when he came out, you know, I thought the speech by Robert Kennedy, Senator Lummis and President elect Trump too. At the conference, I thought that that was a crossing the Rubicon, you know, you know where that term comes from. It's 49 BC. It's when Caesar was about to cross the river Rubicon and he was marching to Rome. And at the time, that was an act of treason. To cross the river with your army meant you were attacking the Senate and the Republic. And so he crossed and Elena jacta est. He said when he got to the other side, which means the die is cast, he knew that when he had crossed the river, that was it. He either went on and was victorious or he would be executed. And of course, that was the end of the Republic and the start of the Roman Empire. But I think when these things happened at that bitcoin conference, and I kind of was against the idea of politics mixing with bitcoin at the conference, but you know what? When those three speeches were done, we had crossed the Rubicon, we had made a commitment. If the US on day one does not establish an SVR strategic bitcoin reserve or they hesitate and put it into a vote for Congress, the longer they hesitate, the more their hand is going to be forced because other nations aren't going to wait. I believe I. I honestly believe they're already stacking. You know, if you go back to November 9th and you look at the buys that happened on that weekend, that's when bitcoin was really pumping and started pumping big time. If you look at those buys, they're not normal buys. You know, I've mentioned this before. Microstrategy, their goal and they're required to buy when they issue all that atmosphere at the market, offerings of stock, they don't move the market. They purposely do not move the market. They use, you know, dark pools, accelerators, otc. They're, they're doing everything they can. Algos that are just buying without moving that market. Market. They probably do provide a support, but they're trying not to do it. Whoever was buying that weekend, they didn't give a shit. It was just smash the green buy button. 100 bitcoin, 200 bitcoin. And they didn't care about slippage. Do you know what I'm saying? Slippage. They didn't care if the price moved up or not. They were agnostic to price. So, you know, is that like one of these Middle Eastern countries? Is it some wealthy sovereign state that that has its own printing press or is so wealthy it doesn't give a damn? You know, imagine, imagine if the United States Wants bitcoin. Do you think they're going to give a shit if it's 110 or $150,000? They're not going to care if it's President Trump. He's just going to say, get me the bitcoin. And I don't think so. I guess what I'm trying to say is this. You have a narrow window now to participate in this game. And even if I'm wrong about us establishing a bitcoin reserve, even if I'm wrong, your time is narrow because other people get it. We've already seen that. What did Putin say at the news conference the other day? Who can ban bitcoin? Nobody. Nobody. He gets it. They just had a member of their parliament or their house put forth a bill to establish it as a treasury. So the nation states get this, and it's going to happen. Yeah.
- [45:16]
Walker
And I want to. First of all, well said. And second, I want to dig into this a little bit because I think the game theory here is really fascinating. And it's. I mean, bitcoin is a paradigm shift, right? It's a fundamental shift in how the world works and how money works. And that kind of shift can really only happen once, I think, you know, it was either, probably both American Hodl and Jeff Booth have basically said something the effect of, like, we've had gold for 5,000 years. Fiat was an aberration. Like, it was kind of like this freak. You know, Fiat's also existed, but not in the pure fiat way that it. That it is now, in this, you know, kind of like destructive, like funding forever wars, destroying people's savings. It hasn't existed to that extent as it has for the past, whatever, 75 years or so. But now we have bitcoin. And so it's gold for 5,000 years. A little blip of Fiat, and then bitcoin, what, for another 5,000 years? Maybe, who knows? As long as it stays decentralized and secure, to quote Jeff Booth again. But I think that people really need to pay attention to what's happening right now. Both bitcoin. I mean, bitcoiners hopefully are already paying attention. You're already stacking sats. But if you do not own any bitcoin yet, you really, really need to ask yourself why, and do you have a good reason for not owning any? And, you know, with this, you know, I wanted to get into kind of the. The game theory of the nation state thing, because I think this is super fascinating, because if, even if you just look at. Let's just consider the G7 countries, right? The big players who are all, you know, they all have the ability to, to print their own. Print their own currencies, right? They can, they can make fiat like that, but just a few keystrokes, right, make those zeros pop up on the screen. The first country, the first major country that has its own fiat currency that starts printing that fiat currency to acquire bitcoin, the hardest money that has ever existed, they are going to have the first mover advantage. And I think you're right that there is some of this stuff happening behind the scenes already. Yes, we know El Salvador, they don't print their own fiat. They're dollarized. They've been doing it very publicly and good for them. I think that's going to lift their nation into an amazing place. Already is. But then in the future it's going to be, you know, exponentially so. Kingdom of Bhutan mining bitcoin with excess hydropower has accumulated, I think like a billion dollars worth of bitcoin just from excess hydro. But where, where do you think, you know, we're, we're getting to this point where Trump is about to take office. All signs seem to point to the fact that either via executive order or legislation which has already been proposed, Lummis already has this bill out there. There's some other draft legislation out there as well that the United States is going to move forward with this. Do you think they end up being the first? Do you think we see some surprise prior to that where another country announces, oh, we're actually doing this a week before Trump takes office? Or how do you see this, this, this game playing out right now? And you know, what do you like, I don't know. What do you think is going to happen here? Because I think it's going to get very, very interesting regardless of what the United States does. I don't think there's any stopping, you know, nothing stops this train. There's nothing stopping these other countries. The, you know, like it's, we're, as you said, we've. We've crossed the Rubicon and there is kind of no going back. It's full steam ahead or I don't know what the other option is.
- [48:57]
George Bodine
Well, you know, Michael Saylor said that microstrategy has utilized a lot of the things that you just brought up there as far as accumulation and getting ahead. They're uncatchable now, I can talk about that later, but they're uncatchable. They will not be caught. So, yeah, first mover is Very important. You know, just, just thinking for a minute here. Let's, you know, let's look back at what's going on with the administration over the last three weeks. Let's look at the people that they put in. You know, Bessant, he met with Senator Lummis. So did David Sachs. I guess he's going to be the crypto head or something. All I hear are positive things coming from them in regards to an sbr. The other thing is, and I don't know if you saw this or not, but in Abu Dhabi when Eric Trump was talking, he said one line that every single bitcoiner should have just gone and sat up in their chair and said, son of a bitch. He said, and as an aside, I've known Michael Saylor for 20 years. Have you, do you think? Yes. And do you think during those 20 years, maybe Michael Saylor had the ear of anybody else in that family? And not only that, getting back to President Elect Trump, here's another thing he said, I don't know if you remember this because he got a lot of controversy about this, that bitcoiners didn't like it. He said, we want to make sure going forward that all bitcoin is mined in the US in the usa. Then he coupled it, I thought, pretty sharp with the idea that we want to be the dominant energy supplier in the world. But when he said that, you know, you've got to. When you talk about game theory and you talk about transaction fees, you talk about the base chain and stuff, just imagine that this actually happens. The US Government starts to stack bitcoin. Let's say that other governments start to stack bitcoin. You know, to get a transaction on a block is not always going to be easy to do. I mean, it's coming to a point where it's going to be very difficult. You and I, we're privileged. We get, you know, we'll be able to tell our kids or grandkids someday that we, we did transactions on the base layer. They're going to go, what? No way, Pops. But yeah, so the thing is that imagine President Trump there is, you know, they're stacking bitcoin and he's moving it around. Senator Lummis says we should disperse it around the country. And they're moving bitcoin, you know, 4:00 in the afternoon, when President Trump calls down to somebody says, hey, move that bitcoin over to such and such. And they come back and go, well, we're going to put a high transaction fee on it to try and get your load into the transaction, into the mempool and hopefully it'll be in the block. President Trump's going to just hang out the phone. He's going to get me somebody else who can guarantee me that I can get a transaction into the blockchain. And, and you think other countries, you know, you talked about other countries. Well, I can tell you right now, hash rate is coming from other countries. It's coming from Russia, China, it's coming from all kinds of countries right now. And these nation states, when they're moving their bitcoin, there's not going to be any of this. Let's, let's fight with the plebs to get a high transaction fee so we can get a transaction in the blockchain. That's not happening. And so you know what that really means. It means that the United States in MicroStrategy too, by the way, this is going to happen. They've got to start mining their own bitcoin. They have got, they've got to control. They don't, they don't give us, they shouldn't give a shit at all about making bitcoin. They're going to mine it only so they have control of that mempool and the block space. They are, that block space is going to be, you know, say, say President Trump just calls down, he says tomorrow between 4 and 5pm we are doing this on the blockchain. Make sure we have two or three spots on that blockchain. Well, the only way you're going to get it as a country is if you have your own mining and you, you are contributing the hash rate. You can get about, you can get about 5% of the hash rate right now and you can maybe get out, I don't know, five to seven transactions guaranteed during a day. So that is going to become a source of contention. People are going to start fighting over that. And for those plebs that haven't consolidated UTXOs, you're going to be sitting there, you're going to be fighting the US Government or companies. For instance, I know where this is going with MicroStrategy and Saylor's already told us. I'll take a break now, but I can expand on that. I know what he's going to do.
- [53:39]
Walker
Well, no, I'm curious. Are you saying also you think that MicroStrategy is going to try to start spinning up hash rate themselves as at.
- [53:49]
George Bodine
Some time, entity, at some time, they're going to have to. So, you know, I don't know if I told you this, but I know I mentioned Bitcoin. Well, I bought, I bought MicroStrategy also like years ago. And I got it, I don't know, like 12 bucks a share or something. It was crazy and it went way up. And what did, what did they used to call me? Jethro in the Navy because I sometimes wasn't bright. You know, Jethro Bodine. You wouldn't even know that show. It's an old show called the Beverly Hillbillies.
- [54:16]
Walker
But I actually do know that show.
- [54:18]
George Bodine
Oh well, you know, Jethro has to use his fingers to count. So the thing is that I sold it all and it's stupid that two days later I was sitting again, I was right in front of the computer. I'm just staring at it going, it's still going up. And I thought, why did I do that? Why did I sell that? But anyway, about just over a year ago, I started doing a really deep dive into MicroStrategy. Because here's what was bothering me. You know, Michael Saylor is not stupid. And why would he be buying all this bitcoin? What is the point? Is he going to sit on it like an egg? I mean, is it like he's got some fixation on bitcoin? There's got to be a point of purpose to it. And so I thought for a long time about it and I finally, about a year ago it hit me. I realized I was talking to Larry the Pard. And by the way, I want to give a shout out right now to Larry. He's got a new book that's coming out. And I read the Gal. I got to read the Galley man. It's a really shit hot book. But anyway, I was talking to him and I said, I think I know MicroStrategy is going to become the world's first bitcoin bank. Biggest bank in the world. And what did, what did Saylor begin to drop as far as hints? And by the way, if you, if you go back to 2010, Hal Finney talked about this in Bitcoin Talk forum. He talked about bitcoin banks. He, he felt that that was where the future was going to go. As far as off the base layer was bitcoin banks, Bitcoin backed banks. So Saylor has already given us the hints. Do you remember that conversation that he had with Safe? Safe had done a moose about two months ago. Yeah, it's the one where they're kind of a little button heads.
- [56:08]
Walker
They're going at it a Little bit, yeah.
- [56:10]
George Bodine
Yeah. Well that was called four years to Bitcoin. If you go to one hour and 32 minutes into that podcast, I've played it about four or five times now. There's a reason why Michael Saylor had that conversation, because what was the conversation about? Bitcoin yield. Now for anybody watching me right now, just pay attention while I say this one thing. If you have bitcoin on a wallet and it's yours, it does not generate yield. But if you get yield on bitcoin, you better figure out where it's coming from. So anyway, Sailor said, and he was pushing back on this, he said, well what if it was in a country that was large with its own printer, its fed in a too big bank to fail. You could generate yield on your bitcoin. You could live like the wealthy live. Now why does the royal family still have their all their lands? Why do some families, the Rothschilds, why do they still have all their wealth? Because they never sell the wealth, the things that are wealthy like bitcoin. And you're going to do that. You personally are going to be able to do that in the future. You never sell your bitcoin. You'll be able to live off that bitcoin going forward. It's going to happen. So Saylor's already interested in this. And then did you see the interview on the 11th of December with Ayers, I think his last name is. It's in a white hall, they're talking back and forth. Did you watch that one?
- [57:47]
Walker
I didn't watch the whole thing, but I saw some of the clips from it.
- [57:50]
George Bodine
Same thing, same discussion comes up and when safe, he, he mentioned J.P. morgan. Who's he mentioned again in this latest one? J.P. morgan, Goldman Sachs, too big to fail banks holding bitcoin. In fact there he takes it farther. He actually goes down the Hal Finney discussion, which is tokenized banks that are backed by bitcoin or in stablecoins, treasuries, because then he has a discussion about stablecoins. So that is coming. And when those things happen again, imagine Jamie Dimon, Mr. Evil, you think at 4:00 in the afternoon when he calls down to some pleb down there on the 8th floor down there in the basement and he says, hey, move 100 million to such and such because banks, they want to do that, they're going to custody sell and they're going to trade and then they're going to buy bitcoin. And when they do it at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, they're going to demand that they have block space. They're going to demand that the transaction gets into the block space. That if that pleb says, well, Mr. Diamond, we got to put a transaction high transaction, I mean, he's going to get fired and they're going to start mining their own Bitcoin because again, you have to have the hash rate. I'll tell you how, I'll tell you before I take a break real quick here. Just let me figure, Let me put this out to the people that don't understand. If you have a hardware wallet, like, God forsake, not a ledger, but a.
- [59:20]
Walker
Cold car or something, or a bitbox maybe, since they.
- [59:24]
George Bodine
A decent wallet. Yeah, exactly. A good wallet. So if you have a wallet like that, if you don't run your own node, whenever you transact with your bitcoin, you're using somebody else's node. You cannot get a transaction on the base layer without a node. So you go through a note, all the miners are running nodes. Now. The miners themselves, people mining right now are directing their hash rate to mining pools. But those pools have all got nodes. They're the ones that build what's called the template, the mempool template. That template is what decides whether you get to go into the block or not with your transaction. So imagine at the end of the day, you're sitting there and by the way, you can only put. Last year we put in 4,094 transactions per block for a whole year, on average every 10 minutes. That's not a lot. So those nodes, when the, when the blocks found, they broadcast the transaction. Whoever won the block, let's say it's a mining pool this time because that's where most of them are going. And they already have a template built with all the transactions in it. It broadcasts to the other nodes instantaneously. They all check to see if it's by protocol signed and then it's broadcast and within 2 to 3 blocks it's in the blockchain. Well, to get in there, it's going to be a war. We're going to be fighting over that block space. It's coming.
- [60:55]
Walker
I think this is a kind of another reason why, first of all, UTXO consolidation is important for the, for the average person, just so that you can actually spend your bitcoin on chain at a later date when transaction fees are both higher in Bitcoin denominated terms and much higher in, you know, dollar or fiat denominated terms. But also it's just such a. It's One of the reasons that things like lightning or, or Fediments are so important as we go forward because you know, it's the entire eight point whatever, three billion people, however many people we have on the planet now, they're not going to be holding bitcoin in on chain bitcoin in self custody most likely. That's, that's a nice thing to hope for, but just the reality of this situation is that it's probably not going to happen, right? I'm not going to say it will not happen, I'm saying it's probably not going to happen. But these other solutions exist.
- [61:53]
George Bodine
You're right on, you've got it. I mean it's not going to happen. To put half of them, 4 billion on there would take 25 years. I mean if they took over the whole blockchain, if you give them half, it takes 50 years. You put the whole planet on there, it takes a century. So it's not going to happen. And like we talked about with Hal Finney, he knew that, you know, Satoshi knew that and we are not going to be able to do that going forward. So something's going to have to give on this base layer or. Yeah, for a secondary layer like you mentioned lightning. And lightning is great, I love lightning. We'll use it all the time for like zaps and stuff, but it can't do it either. Fediment is a very interesting idea. I'm really looking into peg side chains right now, like liquid. I think that that could be a model going forward and that could be a model that these banks end up using that same model. It could be the blueprint for how they do that. And eventually, I hate to keep talking about yield, but eventually we might be able to legitimately with the world's best capital on the planet. I mean it is the greatest capital that you could possibly the most pristine asset and banks are going to want it. So if you're willing to understand the risk involved and where the yield comes from, that could work.
- [63:15]
Walker
And I think that's such a key point. And speaking of Alan Farrington, he's always the one, especially when some of these bitcoin yield things like Celsius for example, blew up. He was always the one. Where does the yield come from? Where does the yield come from? Because you should know, and also you know, you should know that you are taking a risk with that. Because I, I struggle with saying that anything is risk free from a lending your bitcoin out perspective, you know, and granted one could make the argument the counterpoint that, okay, well, there's also risks to self custody if you, if you screw something up or you have a multi sig and you, you know, you lose, you know, two of the keys or whatever it is. And so there, there's, there's risks everywhere, right? There's risks in anything you do. Your life is basically a series of decisions based on what kind of risk you are willing to take or not to take. And that's a decision that like, that comes down to human action, right? What do you as an individual want to do? What are you comfortable with? What are you not comfortable with? So like, nobody's going to be able to tell you if that's the right decision for you. What's the right decision for Michael Saylor may not be the right decision for you. And that's okay too, you know. But I'm glad, you know, Liquid's a great example because it's been around for a while now. For anyone that hasn't used it, it works exceptionally well. And yeah, it's a federated model, right? It's a federated model. So you are putting a certain, there's a trade off of trust there. You're trusting these federations. But they've been operating pretty damn well so far. I would rather have Bitcoin on the base chain in my own multi sig cold storage. But for certain things, Liquid is super, super useful. And like I like the, I just had Prince Philip who's, you know, hereditary prince of Serbia and Yugoslavia, but also the chief strategy officer of Jan3 on the show a few days ago or. Yeah, beginning of this week, been a long week already. But we were talking about Aqua Wallet, which January has come out with, which I've personally been using a lot more lately. I think it's super nice that it handles a lot of the stuff for you behind the scenes, like swapping between Lightning and Liquid. And I think that's, that's really nice. That's a nice user experience for people who don't want to have to, you know, still in your own custody, you're still holding the keys, but giving you a smoother user experience that allows you to still do a lot of different things. And you know, convert to USDT if you want on Liquid, not on, you know, Tron or on ethereum, you know, ERC20. So that's even better. Like if you're going to use usdt, may as well use it on a Bitcoin sidechain instead of a shitcoin main chain. You know what I mean, yeah, I do.
- [65:55]
George Bodine
I agree 100%. I really, I've used the Aqua Wallet also and a shout out to Samson Mao. It's been a great experience. You know, just like you said, it's a fluid, easy experience between, you know, BTC liquid, BTC tether and lightning. And it's cheap, you know, it's not expensive to use. And it's private, you know, it's private. I mean, that's pretty cool. So I, you know, I'm not sure where things are going. I just know that we're going to have some, we're going to have some major disruptions coming over the next year. This is going to be a volatile, a difficult journey I think for a lot of people to handle.
- [66:35]
Walker
What do you think? You know, what advice do you have for folks that are maybe just starting to get into bitcoin or just thinking about getting into bitcoin, like what mistakes can they avoid? Or what's the, I guess, what's the biggest mistake that they could make that you would advise against?
- [66:53]
George Bodine
Well, you know, I always approach it as like a. I know it sounds stupid. It's a three legged stool. So I'm sitting on a three legged stool. And that's a really old piece of furniture. Thousands of years. It's. You can see pictures of it on the inside of the pyramids. So the first leg is you gotta stack bitcoin. You got to get as much bitcoin as you can right now. You know, this is your opportunity to get bitcoin and then you've got to hold on to it. And how, you know, how do you hold onto your bitcoin? Well, first off, you've got to study, you've got to read, you've got to understand volatility. You don't want to do like Jethro, you don't want to have it going way up. Or like these idiots at 73k, sell your Bitcoin. Don't do that. And the only way you'll not do that is if you just study. And then the last thing is you can't lose the bitcoin. You just can't, you cannot lose it. It's too precious. So, you know, you've been stacking, working your ass off. We've talked about dca, that's really important. The next thing is, you know, you can't be using leverage. There are all these idiots out there, you know, microstrategy. Bitcoin's volatile. I just told you. Bitcoin returned 55% a year for five years. That's good enough for anybody. If you want more volatility, do like I did and get some MicroStrategy and you'll get more excited. If you're an idiot, get the new leveraged ETFs on top of MicroStrategy, MSTX or MSTU because they'll give you four times the volatility. And why would people do that? It's because every single cycle is the same thing. I'm late, I've got to make it up. I'm going to start shit coining. I'm going to use these leverage products. I'm going to go ahead and use options trading. You know, if you don't know what a covered call is or you don't understand what volatility decay is, you already have lost. Don't do this. You know, speaking of MSTX and you, they, in their prospectus, they tell you we have tracking error, meaning they can't settle. Sometimes they can't make the price at the end of the day match the bitcoin they've got. They're having slippage. It's because the swap market's not big enough and they're using options. So if you, and if you don't understand what a covered call is, you can make a lot of money with a covered call. Right now you could sell MSTR stock and make 200% interest in a year. But at some point as you're doing it, you sell the same thing with Bitcoin. If you do covered call with bitcoin, at some point it sells. And if you're a miner, that's fine. Or if you got 100 bitcoin and you say, hey, guess what? I'm going to get rid of three bitcoin this year. So you just put your three in there and you earn your yield knowing the risk. I kind of forgot what we were talking about other than, oh yeah, okay, so, so you can't do that. You can't get caught in a mark to market leverage where you're called, you know, margins calling. At the end of the day and you don't have the money, it's gone and you're not going to get it back. So you got to be smart, just stack Bitcoin, it's, it's enough return. You know, I mean, like I said, if you just get a tenth of a bitcoin and hold on for 20 years, you're, you're the wealthiest person around. So just, just, just do those three things. That's all.
- [70:17]
Walker
I think that People. And it's good advice, especially on the leverage side of things, because I think people have this idea that they can. Hodl described it as thinking you can teleport to being an OG if you just get enough leverage and you won't. Maybe one or two lucky people don't get completely wrecked, but odds are that probably won't be you. You probably will get wrecked. And if you would have just, you know, stayed humble, stacked sats, kept those sats safe, educated yourself, tried to go out and create value for the world so you can stack more sats, you would have been a lot better off and with a lot less stress about, you know, watching numbers on a chart all day long, wondering if you're going to lose all of your money. Like, that's just, I think for most people it's just, it's not worth it. And that's just also not a. It's. That's not an enjoyable thing. I don't think to, to be so, to need to be so obsessed with watching numbers go up and down in a chart, wondering if you're going to get absolutely destroyed. Like, wouldn't you rather, you know, work hard, create some value, spend time with your family and just, you know, like I, for dca, it's just like I just set it and forget it, right? It's just, it just keeps coming out. Like, I think for most people that is the right advice and it's also the advice that's going to keep you the most sane and mentally healthy. Like, you don't want to need to obsess over these things too much. Like, you know, everybody likes checking the price chart when the number is going up, right. You're feeling like a genius. It's not so fun when it's going down. Unless you're just dcaing all the way up and all the way down. And then it's like, great. Price went down. My DCA is going to get me more sats today. It's a good day. And now back to time with my family.
- [72:00]
George Bodine
Yeah. Good advice.
- [72:02]
Walker
Yeah. You know, I am, I am curious because there's a, you know, I wanted to, to get in a little bit as well. Just about, you know, these ETFs. I think it's, it's interesting because this has certainly brought in a ton of hype. I mean, they've been like the best performing ETFs ever. They've blown the gold ETFs out of the water by a massive amount and they're still just getting started. Do you See, you know, any, any downside to these ETFs, like, I'm assuming that you would say, you know, hold, you know, better to hold on, chain bitcoin, real bitcoin, than a bitcoin derivative, you know, instrument than, you know, an ETF or whatever else. But do you see any, any additional risk in terms of just, you know, like BlackRock now has a very vested interest in bitcoin. They're accumulating a lot of bitcoin on behalf of their ETF buyers. Do you see any risks that, you know, now we have, you know, governments, you know, that are going to be getting into the mix soon too, with bitcoin reserves. Does any of that freak you out at all? Or are, are you confident enough in the game theory of nobody really wants to mess with bitcoin too much because messing with that bitcoin messes with their, it messes with their money. Now, if you're a large bitcoin holder, like, it's in your interest not to mess with it. I'm, I'm just curious where you sit on that.
- [73:29]
George Bodine
Yeah, that's a, that's a tough subject because there is a risk, I mean, to some of the stuff that's going on right now. You know, the majority, I think it's 9 out of 11 of those ets have got their, their coins with Coinbase and micro. MicroStrategy has same thing. They've got most of their coins, I think, with Coinbase and some with Fidelity. I mean, it's a honeypot and it is a threat vector. And you know, the discussion around the 6102 and seizure of Bitcoin, I think that that's been blown off a little bit because you have to realize that bitcoin's not like gold. You know, when the US government tried to seize gold, people voluntarily gave up gold, but not everybody. And the other thing is, a lot of it was held in banks. It was easily feasible, but it's nothing compared to how easy it would be to seize bitcoin. You know, bitcoin has an asymmetric reward in the sense that once you get the keys to it, once it's on a different, you know, once you have it in your, your wallet, it's gone, it's gone forever. So I do think it's a risk. I, I, the thing is though, you know, Walker, I think it just was inevitable and I, I never thought that it wasn't going to happen once they approved the CME futures. I mean, it just, it was over I mean, that they, that was a violation of law that the SEC was doing when they were denying all that spot and it came out, it was a violation. That's why the, they lost in court. You know, the thing is that it's like options trading. You know, that was inevitable. It's got to happen. In fact, you know, you and I, I mean, I want Bitcoin to be a hundred trillion dollar asset. It will never get to be gold's market cap if you don't have options and liquidity. And we've got that now. And it's growing. The larger it gets, the more flywheel, the more this reinforces itself. It's like escape velocity or approaching a black hole. You know, you get to the event horizon, everything inside past that point, you don't get to see it on the outside. That's it. And it's all going to one little point in the middle. The singularity. Well, we're kind of headed that way. And that singularity is Bitcoin just exploding as a, you know, the world's store of value, the most pristine capital that taking wealth that we've misallocated into all these stupid assets like multiple houses, jackass stuff that we're trying to, I don't know what we're spending stuff on. It's everybody's trying to store their value somehow and beat the S&P 500 or the cost of capital. And so these things were inevitable. I just think that the, maybe the key to mitigating the risk is to keep that flywheel going until it's so innocuous. You know, when MicroStrategy entered the NASDAQ 100 this week, you know, that meant so many people who would never have invested in Bitcoin are now exposed to Bitcoin. When they go into the S, they're going to get in the S&P 500 next year. I think it'll be in June when they're in the S&P 500. It's going to be huge. I mean, the amount of inflows, people that have never held bitcoin are going to be exposed to bitcoin. All these ETFs are in every, from Congress, members of Congress to, you know, every pleb, to every, you know, Peter Schiff. If he hates, you know, bitcoin and he's got anything, he might even have exposure to it now. So I, I think there's a risk, but I just don't see how it could have been. There's no answer to this is what.
- [77:26]
Walker
I'M saying no, I know what you mean because I would agree that this was an inevitable part of adoption. Like you, you can't think that hyper bitcoinization was going to happen and not think that thing that, you know, ETFs and options and companies and countries buying it was not going to happen. Like those two things are inconsistent, right? So this, this, this was going to happen because why? Because bitcoin is the greatest money that has ever existed, is the hardest asset that has ever existed. Of course everyone wants it. Once they realize that, if you realize that and don't want it, well, that's pretty stupid. But anyone who has gotten to the point where they realize that they want bitcoin and they want as much bitcoin as they can have and luckily they don't have to worry about how much they can carry because it doesn't weigh anything unlike gold. But I think that this is why it's also so important in parallel to this that all of these other technologies, all these other open source technologies, you know, whether it's lightning, liquid, Fediment, E cash that's being built out, all of these other tools become even more important because you need to have these other very, these tools that encourage sovereignty, that encourage privacy, that make it more difficult for the government to see every last little thing that you're doing. These tools become really, they were always important, but I think they're more important now than ever. And I'm very thankful to all of the open source devs who are hacking away, building these great pieces of freedom technology because we are going to need them. And I think those are the antidotes to the centralization risks that happen with bitcoin ownership, with bitcoin, hash rate, with mining pools, with everything else. I also don't think that again back to this point because I think it is important. I've seen a lot of people say like, ah, you know, you wanted the separation of money and state, but now you're cheering for the state to buy bitcoin. And it's like, I think that people get a little bit mixed up here because the separation of money and state does not mean that the state is not going to interact with the money that it is separated from. It means that the state is separated from the creation of that money. And I think that's a very important point. Of course the state, you know, all nations were eventually going to use Bitcoin. You're not going to. Separation of money and state doesn't mean they're not allowed to touch Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't care if you're, you know, me or you or, you know, a nation state. It doesn't know. It doesn't care. That's the point of it. What matters is that they cannot print more Bitcoin out of thin air. What matters is that they can't change the inflation schedule to suit themselves. That is what matters, that the separation of the creation of money and state becomes complete. And we already have that with Bitcoin. That separation was already, that already happened when Bitcoin was created. And it just gets stronger and stronger and stronger as the hash rate grows, as more and more people adopt Bitcoin, that separation, because that, that money now is worth a heck of a lot in their fiat cuck bucks, you know, two, you know, $2 trillion now, maybe now slightly under it since we had a mega crash today. But, you know, that's. I just think that that's an important point for people to really make sure that they understand is that it's about the separation of the creation of money from state. And we have that. And now thanks to so many other tools, you know, like Lightning, Liquid E, Cash, Fediments, these allow us to have other tools that can be used in a more localized, decentralized level to retain our privacy, our anonymity, and to be able to cheaply and, you know, efficiently transact with each other. And I hope that those sorts of tools encourage more of a movement towards localism, towards smaller communities interacting with each other, because I think that's ultimately the most beneficial for those people who live in those communities.
- [81:33]
George Bodine
I think that's spot on. I especially like what you point out about the fact that I want to have the optionality. So, you know, I've got, you know, I've got Bitcoin, all kinds of buckets, you know, and some of them are in etf. I mean, I've got some ETF because of a retirement account. I've got some in cold storage and multisig. I'm using MicroStrategy as a proxy. So I do it. I have a lot of different buckets, but I want to be able to move everything into my wallet if I need to so that I can cross borders or I can escape if I have to. And you're right. I mean, right now you can do that with Bitcoin. And I think it's that optionality that is so important that we keep track of going forward.
- [82:22]
Walker
Sorry, just realized I was muted. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that that's the that's the beauty of Bitcoin, right, Is that it gives you optionality in a general sense, right? It gives you the option to opt out of the state's and the central bank's inflation. It gives you the option to opt out of that physical location and take your wealth with you. It gives you the option to send that wealth to anyone you want without anyone being able to stop you. Bitcoin is optionality, and I think that, you know, it's that again, that's why on chain, Bitcoin, I think is. Is still absolutely the best thing that you can own if you're able to, you know, and. And right now, you still are. You can still buy bitcoin. You don't even have to earn it. You can trade your fiat petrodollars, your war currency. You can trade it for Bitcoin right now. What an amazing deal. Like, that's still, you know, that is still a great trade. And it will be until you have to earn Bitcoin by creating value rather than just spending infinite government paper on it. And so I'm glad that we still have the option to do that. For how much longer that happens. And that actually leads me to something else I wanted to ask you, which was do you think that fiat currencies still stay around for a very, very long time? You know, a lot of people are saying, you know, when hyper bitcoinization happens, fiat, fiat's gone, right? It's toast. No more fiats ever. I'm not so sure about that. And the other part of this question is, do you think that the United States or any country that prints its own fiat adopting a strategic reserve of bitcoin, prolongs the life of that fiat currency or perhaps may accelerate its own demise?
- [84:10]
George Bodine
Well, I'm gonna get some maxi throwing at me here. I can just tell, because it, you know, let's just talk about the dollar. For. Let's talk about the dollar. Let's talk about fiat currency. The dollar, in my mind is. Is not going anywhere for quite a while. And why I say that is because if you look at history, and you look at the history of world reserve currencies, they die a very slow death, and it's painful. And even when the power that is underlying that world's reserve currency loses its superpower status, or however you want to call it, whether it's Spain or whatever or England, that currency is. It still has legs. It still flops around out there for a long, long time. You know, I don't think that the idea of Bitcoin taking over currencies is a valid. I don't think that's going to happen. And what I mean by that is this. You know, to get to understand what money is, it passes the stage of what's called a collectible. And then it goes into and in order, medium of exchange, or, excuse me, store of value, medium exchange, and then a unit of account. You know, the most important layer in that is store of value. That's the one that makes a, an asset become the most valuable store of value or the most valuable capital that you can have on the planet. And right now, that's bitcoin. And I can prove that to you. I can just ask you, I can say, you know, opportunity cost. That's the, that's the idea of if you pass up buying bitcoin right now, what is the next best alternative asset to own? So if I told you, hey, you know, I've got a beachfront property in Miami, of course, what's, what are you passing up to get that asset? It's bitcoin that, that is the best asset. If I tell you there's nothing I can name that you won't go, it's bitcoin. Bitcoin's the best answer. So bitcoin has done that. It's, it has become, and it soon will be recognized as the greatest store of value we have ever, ever seen on the planet. Bitcoin is the greatest monetary invention in the history of mankind. And it is just being discovered. But what inhibits it from moving past that right now is the fact that, and this is true for me, and it may not be for you, but for many people, I don't like to spend my bitcoin. I don't like to go out. If I have to buy a car, I'm going to use cuck bucks. And if I have to buy groceries next week, I'm using cutbucks. Now, I've used bitcoin before, but what I do is I put it into a spend and fill wallet. I just, I fill it up, I spend it, I fill it up, I spend it. There's no capital gains, so it doesn't mean anything. I did it in El Salvador when I met you and we had dinner. I was just spending like a drunken sailor down there. But it was money that I just put in and spent to just kind of keep it circulating. But real bitcoin that I hold in that cold storage, I don't want to spend it. I think going forward, more and more people are going to understand that, that aspect of Bitcoin and they're going to realize that it's the most precious asset on earth. And as that happens, it's going to become the base layer of whatever you want to call it. But to try and tie a fiat currency to it, it's going to be very difficult. I thought what Saylor was discussing the other day in regarding stable coins, or like Hal Finney discussing tokenized banks or something like that, I can see how bitcoin could become the prime, the pristine capital that could fuel all kinds of credit expansion even. And you know, the things that we don't sometimes, like when we associate fiat currencies, but based on a real store of value, I mean a real base layer that you can audit immutable and you can understand. So the idea that fiat is going to somehow be based on Bitcoin, I don't think you're saying that and I don't see that as possible. I think that fiat is going to exist and this idea of maybe coupling it to stable coins so that it has a backing of U.S. treasuries and some Bitcoin and other assets, that's possible. You know, just look around in the world for a minute. Just, just take a, let's zoom out for a second. You know, last year everybody's talking about brics, everybody's talking about the yuan, everybody's talking about the threat to the dollar. You know, last year an international trade, the yuan, it accounted for like 4, just over 4% of all trade in dollars. It's nothing, it's zilch. Not only that, it doesn't even freely float. I mean, if you had, if you let it free, it would deflate like a balloon because everybody'd escape. The people that are being held into the Iwan onshore, they can't get out. You know, there's a capital restriction, like 50 grand or something. They can't get out. They want out. Everybody wants out. You think that people in Russia right now don't want out? If they had a way to get either bitcoin or even, even a stable coin. And again, the maxi is going to throw some shit here. But the bottom line is when you travel, if you go to south and Central America, what do people want down there? They're always looking for tether or circle. They're constantly, that's what they want. You give them bitcoin, they turn it into tether. What would be wonderful is if instead of having this conversation, we could accept Bitcoin for what it is. The greatest monetary Invention in the history of mankind. The greatest storage of capital that we will ever find, the greatest storage of wealth, the best final settlement layer, even on the international scale ever developed. There will never be another one. It's zero to one. This is it. If we just understand that and it's adopted at that rate. And then we work on the cuck buck side of this, meaning that we actually almost like sailors discussing really, I guess, is the fact that we use the US dollar and we back it up with a strategic bitcoin reserve and we, we bring the stable coins like tether, you know, build the fucking regulations out and have them come back. Have them come back to have them come to the United States and build all of it here so that we are like that beacon that we used to be, that we're that energy, that we're the next hundred, 200 years of nothing but just pure light that everybody wants to come to. And we can do that. We can do it with bitcoin and even with the dollar, if we just get on board and make this happen.
- [91:45]
Walker
I agree with a lot of what you just said. One thing that I will push back on to play devil's advocate is I think that it is important for bitcoin to be used as a medium of exchange. Now, I hear you when you say I don't want to spend my bitcoin, like the bitcoin that's in my cold storage. I feel the same way. I do the same thing with, especially if I'm going to somewhere where I can physically spend, you know, bitcoin, for example, El Salvador, where you can spend it in a lot of ways and a lot of places. You know, I'll. I use one of the many lightning wallets that I have and, and top that up with some sats that I just bought and exchanged my cuck bucks for. And, and that's, you know, that's what I'm using for it. Right. I also, but I, I don't think that those two things, like, I don't think that the fact that people right now don't want to spend bitcoin that they've been accumulating in cold storage, I don't think that that negates bitcoin as a store of value. I think that that's a preference and that's a natural preference for where we are right now in this adoption phase. I also think it's important to point out that the quote, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. I think that's the case with the monetary transformation that goes from store of value to medium of exchange to unit of account, I think that many people are at, you know, you're at different points in that. It's not that everyone goes through that cycle at the same pace or at the same time or at the same place in the world. Different people are going through that in completely different ways. And this is why I also think these L2s and L3s are so important on Bitcoin. Things like lightning liquid Fediment, E cash. Because these allow you to have a really great, better privacy preserving way to utilize Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. And yes, you're using, you know, if it's a, you know, a Fediment, you're using that, you know, federated E cash there, right? If it's on E cash, you're using non federated E cash from.
- [93:50]
George Bodine
Exactly.
- [93:51]
Walker
But, but, but the point being that, excuse me, I think it is so important for, for Bitcoin to be used and continue to be used and be used more as a medium of exchange for Bitcoin to truly fulfill that promise. Now that doesn't mean that you need to be using layer 1 bitcoin as that moe. Bitcoin is just the backbone. It's the, you know, it's the TCP ip, right? It is the base layer and whatever else is built on top of that can be used to execute that medium of exchange function. And I don't know about you exactly, but personally I already use Bitcoin as my unit of account. I think a lot of bitcoiners are the same. You're already thinking and you know, yeah, you look at the Bitcoin fiat price but when you're looking at, you know, something you want to buy or something else, you're saying, oh boy, that's, that's going to cost me a lot of sats. I don't know about that. Like you're, you already have moved into that phase. You've already used Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. You do. I think I believe when I bought, bought the pieces that I have from you, I believe I paid in Bitcoin. If I'm not, if I'm not mistaken, you know, so you know, like I.
- [95:01]
George Bodine
Said, that's, you know what I do think that the conversation, that the conversation really boils down to what you just said, that there's a difference between understanding the base layer and hopefully where this is going in the future. You know, one of the greatest banks of the entire planet was the Medici bank formed in 1397. The Dietzsche family, they basically founded the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment. It was a family very wealthy, almost think of them like a fediment. Very wealthy Fediment members who came together, formed their bank and then let that bank germinate all through Northern Italy and then out out all across the world. You know, that can be a future too. So it's not like. I guess what I'm trying to say is the medium of exchange is going to be very nuanced going forward. What you also said is very true about understanding the value of bitcoin. Where I live right now, I did this experiment eight years ago and I noticed other people are doing this. They're talking a lot about this. But this was a while ago. This is probably a year ago. Eight years before, I had looked at houses, house prices in my neighborhood and the average number of bitcoin, I figured it out. It was 666. Oh, that is the mark of Satan. But 666 to buy a house, right? And four years later, the prices went up like about $90,000. And I'm sure my neighbors were going, damn, this is awesome. But for me, that price had gone from 666 to 44 Bitcoin. And then this last year it went to five. And the house, the houses went up 100 grand. So from 666 Satan, 444 or 44 to five in eight years. So the reason I mentioned that is once you understand the value of that, there's a reason why we have a tendency to not want to let it go. And perhaps the answer is to use that wealth to try and build these layers and to help other people through, you know, interacting with the base layer and these either fediment liquid chains, you know, liquid is not something that you and I couldn't do. We could do the same thing. You know, there's 20 some odd functionaries and there's 11 of 15 that have to sign the block to get the transaction out. And they block every one minute. It's fast. Two minutes you got settlement. But you. And there's nothing to prevent using blockchains technology to develop that with a group of people who couldn't then provide that service. Whereas where's liquid used? I mean, Aqua is used mainly in south and Central America. It helps people. It helps them a lot. So maybe that is the future for us, which is a very hopeful future.
- [98:04]
Walker
That's. I think you're exactly right. And I. What Fedi has done with the Fedimint protocol, I think, is exactly in that vein where it's like anyone can set up a federation and be able to transact anonymously and basically freely within it. And that is incredibly powerful stuff. And another interesting thing too about not wanting to spend your bitcoin. It's at a certain point when you've gotten basically, you know, all into bitcoin, well, there's nothing else for you to spend, you know? You know what I mean? Like you're still. I, I enjoy watches too, but I prefer to get some original replica watches, as they're lovingly called, from, from other parts of the world because, boy, I just can't, I can't justify spending, spending too much on one. But I do love a nice timepiece. But speaking of time, George, I want to be conscious of yours as well, and I want to kind of move to sort of wrap this up a little bit. And I was thinking maybe kind of a. We've covered a lot today and maybe just a good place to kind of end with would just be, you know, what is. Do you have a message for people who still are on zero bitcoin who are looking at this and they're saying, you know, maybe they're saying it's too expensive. Maybe they're saying I missed the boat. Maybe they're saying, I'm actually, I'm going to buy bitcoin, but I'm going to buy later when it, when it crashes down to whatever, you know, whatever price level is acceptable to me. But then I'll probably adjust that later and say, well, it crashed so much, I'll wait for it to go even lower. What do you say to the people who are still on zero?
- [99:46]
George Bodine
Well, I think I would talk first to the bitcoiners. We bitcoiners, we come across as like an evangelical, evangelical cult. You know, we have a tendency to want to orange pill people pretty intensely. And I've kind of found as going forward that it just doesn't work. You know, the only thing that's kind of worked for me is to, to ask people about inflation and then they start complaining about it and then I tell them, well, in my world, I actually, I. My money, I get more money every year. I actually have more wealth and I can buy stuff. And if they ask me, I'll tell them, well, I just keep my wealth in bitcoin. I don't keep it in cash or anything that's dollar denominated. But, but you know, I have had a really tough time with my family trying to discuss this with them. And I don't know why. You'd almost think you'd think that, you know, I've got a lot of kids. You'd think they'd look at me and go, well, you know, dad might know something, but for some reason, I don't know what it is, you'll get to see this as your. As your boy grows up. You'll get stupider and stupider. Eventually you'll be so. You'll be as dumb as a rock. That little kid's gonna look at you like, man, boy, that Dad's stupid. But the thing is that I tell people bitcoiners, you know, when you're sitting on that train station, we were wrong about institutions. They're here now. You know, we set up the trip wires, they're tripped. Flares are in the air. The institutions, they're in the perimeter. They're with us. They're sitting on the train. Blackrock gets on board, he takes 20 seats, you know, and we're going to leave people behind. And if it's your family members or the people you love and you look out there and you're thinking, well, they're going to miss the boat. You have ability, you know, you have a unique position right now. Remember what I said about just one tenth of a bitcoin? You have a unique position right now. You can create generational wealth. What I was discussing earlier about banks, you're going to have the opportunity to create a family like the Rockefellers if you do this right. And so your kids and the people you love, your friends, maybe the people you're going to help in the future with a Fediment, you know, they're sitting out there and the train's leaving, and they might try to run along the side, but eventually they'll be looking at the back of the train. It's gone. But someday in the future for me, probably when I die and they read the will, but my kids are going to look down on their hand. They're going to go. When they read the will, they're going to go, damn, I've got a bitcoin ticket. I'm going to go somewhere, and my grandkids, too. And so, you know, don't just stack for yourself, stack for other people. As far as the people that are maybe oscillating right now or going, you know, well, what if. What if President Trump doesn't announce SBR and Bitcoin crashes down to 80,000, I'll have lost money now, you know, just start reading. Just start understanding. Once you understand Bitcoin? If it, if it clicks for you, you're done. It's like you just push your chips in, you're finished. It just, it's over. You can just relax in life every year as the years go by, you'll just have more wealth and you can sit there and if you want to buy a nice watch, you can, or, you know, you can help your kids and stuff. So just, just stop fighting it. Start reading. Educate yourself if you have any, you know, if you're not convicted enough. And then hopefully you'll get in a place where you'll be able to make a difference in people's lives.
- [103:36]
Walker
Amen to that. And that's a beautiful note to end on, George. Anywhere you want to send people, direct them to. I'll link your X.
- [103:46]
George Bodine
If you just type my name into the Internet, George Bodine into Google, you'll see my art. I'm the first thing that comes up. And if you want to find me on Twitter, you can type in my name or use my call sign from the Navy. It's Jethro. And it's spelled J E T h r o e111 because I don't know, I'm a boomer. And that's it. You'll find me on there.
- [104:11]
Walker
Good deal. Well, I really appreciate you sharing your time. Looking forward to the next time we can do this in person over a beer. And yeah, thanks again. I think there was a lot of great signal and great advice in here today, so I appreciate you sharing.
- [104:25]
George Bodine
You're welcome, bud. We got to help people as much as we can here in. It's nice talking to you too again, Walker. You have a great day.
- [104:32]
Walker
You too. And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast. If you are a bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, head to bitcoin podcast.net Sponsor or send an email to hello@bitcoin podcast.net if you are enjoying the Bitcoin podcast and find it valuable, give it a boost on Fountain a five star review wherever you're listening. Or better yet, share this show with your network so more people can learn about bitcoin or don't. Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do appreciate it. You can grab links in the show Notes to watch or list this show wherever you get your podcasts or go to Bitcoin Podcast Podcast and you'll also find the links to follow me and the show on NOSTR and on X Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million. But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.