Why Bitcoin Must Win | Matt Odell - What Bitcoin Did

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
We've been sold this idea that like the way that web works now is like the only way to do it.

(00:07):
Like massive data surveillance gets you addicted. There's a better path. It's just a harder path.
We always say like fix the money, fix the world. The money is just one piece of it.
We got to fix the other things too. The dollar is in such a bad position
that there's just no way out besides just inflation and irrelevance.
people are going to look for an option that doesn't require trust in a post-truth world

(00:32):
bitcoin is truth like it's the only thing that you know is real and tangible
but we need to accelerate time is of the essence it's not an emergency but sooner would be better
and so now you have a backup mic that's the odell mic yeah so we can't go wrong now i love
so you think of me every time you record i just think of you every day man there you go

(00:56):
How are you doing?
I'm doing all right.
How are you?
Good.
I don't know what we're going to talk about.
Good to have you back in Nashville.
It's good to be back in Nashville.
Your hometown.
I like it here.
We've got a lot to do.
Do you want to talk about Knott's or the treasury companies first?
I don't know.
You're the podcast host.
They're the two things you said you didn't want to talk about.
When are you going to get me in trouble for a second?

(01:17):
Well, that was the plan.
Now we kind of have to talk about it.
Is that really your top note?
This is Luke Roman's notes.
I've not even got yours here.
Does my show come out after Luke's?
Yeah.
It's like he's just going to crush me in the numbers.
Well, yeah, but you might go straight after him
and he might give you a little bit of a boost.
That's good, yeah.
Put me right after him.
Because everyone's kind of forgotten about you
and now you're not on Twitter.
That's the way it's supposed to be.

(01:38):
But you say you're not on Twitter.
I'm not on Twitter anymore, yeah.
Yeah.
Who runs 1031 account?
We have a...
An intern.
An intern that uses a LLM
that's trained on my Twitter archive.
Do you still have that Twitter account?
I have the archive.
Do you know when you closed that down for like a week afterwards,
I was desperately trying to get the Odell handle?

(01:59):
They still have it locked.
You have to pay for it.
I would pay for that.
It's a primo handle.
I think they're charging like 100k for it or something.
Okay, I wouldn't pay that for it.
Do you regret leaving Twitter?
It was definitely bad for business.
The 1031 guys deserve a shout for...

(02:23):
being supportive when I deleted our greatest asset
from a public messaging point of view.
So now you're just trying to grow the 1031 account.
But I don't know if it was even,
like in hindsight, I get why you did it.
I think it's kind of cool.
Like money where your mouth is, move to NOSTA.
But would it have been better to have kept that
and just push people to NOSTA from there?
I mean, that's always the argument.

(02:44):
I mean, once again, I think,
I mean, I think it's like, what is the goals, right?
If the goals were boost 1031's outward exposure,
so like from selfish goals, right?
The move would have been in hindsight

(03:04):
to just change that Twitter account to 1031
and just use that as the 1031 account
and it already would have 300,000 followers, right?
And at this point,
it probably would have like 500,000 followers.
The good news is
1031's in a great spot without it
I think OpenSats is in a great spot without it

(03:26):
Bitcoin Park's in a great spot without it
I think Noster's in a great spot without it
so those are my three projects
plus
you know a protocol that I've been intimately focused
with and I think
I think definitely if you look at it from just a
straight commercial point of view like I deleted
an asset right and
financially questionable decision.

(03:50):
I think if you think about it
from a personal priorities point of view,
it was like a massive success.
And I really do not regret it.
The worry I had is
the worry I had is that

(04:12):
I think we're all
have an unhealthy relationship
most of us
myself included
have an unhealthy relationship
with our devices
on the internet
yeah
and my only social media
was X
and Twitter before it
and I had definitely
had an unhealthy relationship
with it
and no matter how much
you try and ground yourself

(04:33):
you know
the dopamine hits
are just like the likes
and the retweets
is massive
and
And I think when I first started, I wasn't always a public individual within Bitcoin.
In the beginning, I would use NIMS, and I was very private in it.

(04:56):
And then it was after Trump won his first term that I became public.
And I kind of just stumbled into it.
And the next thing you know, it's like a top four Twitter account in Bitcoin.
And I stopped using it for six months, and it just kept growing.
it still was growing like super fast just on all the old posts and the whole time i was like oh well
you know like i've already made these decisions like now i'm here now i'm here like there's no

(05:19):
going back but then i just came to the conclusion i was like there actually is going back like i
could just fucking delete the thing and i could just live my life and like not be a public figure
and in that way i think it was a massive success like i think there's probably a whole slew of new
listeners to your show that i have no idea who i am and that is just beautiful like i do not want
to be a niche celebrity. I do not want to be a public face of Bitcoin. I want to live a quiet

(05:44):
life focused on trying to make freedom technologies more used at scale. And I think there's probably
a place for influencers in that, but I don't think that's the most key aspect of it. I think
the key aspect of it is actually how the tools get built out and how they get distributed to people

(06:06):
so that they can actually make those decisions themselves
and move forward.
It's funny.
I was talking to Sessions yesterday
and he said, he just had you on the show.
Yeah.
And he said, do a lot of comments being like,
who's this guy just saying Bitcoin catchphrases?
He's the guy that came up with them.
Yeah, they thought I was just like repeating
Stay Humble, Stack Sacks.
Like I hadn't come up with it.
But yeah, to me, that's a success, right?

(06:31):
Yeah, I just, look, it's always been something
I wrestled with.
It's something I still wrestle with at the podcasts.
And I know I,
and now it's like public that you're a father, right?
Because you made it public on your show.
In this room.
Which is a beautiful experience.

(06:52):
Yep.
And to me, like, it's like, okay,
so like in, in when I'm raising my children,
what is one of the number one things
that we're going to have to wrestle with?
And that's going to be healthy use of the internet
social media and devices.
And if I have to like look my kids in the eye

(07:14):
and I'm like addicted to social media
and I'm like an influencer or something,
to me, it's like,
it's a step away from OnlyFans.
Like people like look at OnlyFans
are like, OnlyFans is horrible.
But then they don't think of like
someone that posts on TikTok every day
or Twitter every day as the same thing.
But it's very close.
It's funny, like I have been really conscious

(07:35):
of trying to not use my phone too much
or my daughter.
Sometimes you have to.
And I don't let her watch an iPad
or any of that stuff.
We occasionally watch a really old Disney movie
because I think it's before all the dopamine hits
of new kids' TV.
But even still, she'll pick up my phone
and she holds it to her ear.
And she is obviously just mirroring things you've done.

(07:58):
So you set that example from such a young age.
It's so hard to not be on your device around them.
And I find myself getting a bit addicted to Twitter again.
Like I've always been quite good.
Like I don't like social media.
I don't like the way it makes me feel.
I'd feel useless after scrolling for 20 minutes or whatever.
Maybe I just need to delete it from my phone.
Like I still need it for the show.
At the very least, you should just delete it from your phone

(08:19):
and then just use it on your computer.
It's like a very easy way to reduce the...
The biggest problem is like the...
There's a moment, there's like a quiet moment.
And so what do you do?
You just reach for your phone,
and then before you know it, you're just doom scrolling.
It's an hour later.
Right?
And so this is something I think about a lot, right?

(08:39):
As we build out Primal and Noster,
is there a better way?
Because it's obviously clearly a useful tool.
We wouldn't be friends.
Most of my friends I wouldn't be friends with
if it wasn't for X.
Yeah.
Period.
But you can also trick yourself into thinking it's for work.
Because it is good for news.
But if I'm being honest for myself,

(09:00):
Most of the time, I'm just doom scrolling through stupid videos and stuff.
Well, like, so for instance, like Kagi, which is like a privacy focused search engine, whose business model, instead of harvesting your data, is they just charge you for a subscription.
They just released a news app like three days ago, four days ago.
And what they do is it's once a day.
They give you all the relevant news and they run it through AI and give you nice condensed AI summaries of it.

(09:29):
That's kind of cool.
With no ads and no clickbait.
And they're just using it as top of funnel for their other premium services.
But my point is, we've been sold this idea.
And technology-wise, that's not a hard thing to do.
There was just a will to do it and a business model that facilitated it.
And we've been sold this idea that the way that web works now is the only way to do it.

(09:53):
Massive data surveillance, get you addicted, get all the dopamine rush,
monetize your attention to its fullest,
monetize your data to the fullest.
That's not the only way to do things.
There's a better path.
It's just a harder path.
And so that's a much healthier way of,
so for example, this one app, right?

(10:15):
It's just a healthier way to consume news.
It's not based on addiction.
I'm smiling because I'm so paranoid that we're recording.
Are we recording?
Yeah, I've checked like five times.
We have that mic recording too, right?
Yeah, we're good.
Is the red over there mean we're recording?
No, that's something different, but we are recording.
Are you sure?
Yeah, I'm sure.

(10:36):
Anyway, so it's something I wrestle with.
And it's like, even so we're seeing with like the,
we had the Charlie Kirk assassination, right?
And we see there's a push to add more controls to the internet
because of this idea that youth are getting radicalized on the internet.
Yep.
and it's a very slippery slope

(10:59):
regulating the internet
and regulating speech
and regulating how people use these tools
and I just wholeheartedly disagree with it.
I do not think that's the path
but the reason I bring it up
is because there is a kernel of truth there.
There are youth getting radicalized on the internet.
100%.
And then farther down that line
there are just people that have
most people just have
a very unhealthy relationship with it

(11:21):
particularly children
but even adults.
and so as a society this is something we have to grapple with and as parents this is something that
we have to really grapple with if we want to raise our children right um and and i personally want to
be part of that solution even if it might not even if we might not be successful like i think that's
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coverage visit anchorwatch.com today that is anchorwatch.com i think people are getting
radicalized like people are definitely getting radicalized on the internet yeah but it's just
because that's where they hang out.

(13:39):
Like, if we still lived in meatspace
where people didn't have the internet,
they'd just be getting radicalized somewhere else.
We need to fix the issue of the radicalization,
not control the internet.
But, like, we're seeing it in the UK
with the digital ID and stuff.
It's really bad in the UK.
It's pretty scary.
Like, the...
It's, like, the one place that's worse than Australia.
Australia's...
Well, there's problems with Australia,

(14:00):
but it's nowhere near as bad as the UK.
Not at the moment.
But, like, I've noticed even traveling.
because in America, you have like,
you can't go on porn sites in like certain states
and all that sort of stuff.
A lot of them.
Yeah.
It's like 20 states or something.
And that's pretty new, right?
It's like the last year and a half.
And like that is the same thing.
I mean, it's more targeted,

(14:21):
but it's the same thing as having like a digital ID,
just having to verify yourself online.
But what I've noticed is since,
especially since the UK have started talking about this,
I've been trying to go to websites
that are just blocked if you use a VPN.
And so like-
Because that's the next step.
because if you're in a state
where you can't access something
you just use a VPN in another state

(14:42):
and so then they block VPNs to stop you from doing that
so is the idea of the free and open internet dead?
no
I think it's alive and well
I think we've been trending in the wrong direction
for a while
and I think
protocols like Nostra could be very helpful
for that
I mean if you look

(15:03):
you follow the incentives all the way down
too right
Right. So X, for instance, their policy and their government and policy initiative is actually pushing for states like Texas to add, in their own words, to add age verification at the app store level.

(15:23):
So they don't want to deal with it, but they want their users to be age verified.
And why is that? I think that's because then they're able to sell ads easier.
yeah right like like ad providers don't want to take advantage of children necessarily right they
want to wipe their hands clean a bit um so i think a lot of this just comes down to what is the core

(15:45):
business models of these things um and if the core business model is data we always hear the quote
like data is the new oil um if that's the asset if the asset's the data then ultimately you're
going to have a predatory relationship with your customers. Gmail is, on the surface, a fantastic

(16:05):
product. But the business model is literally harvesting all of your information and then
selling it. And training their AI.
There's no way that you'll ever be aligned with your users in that regard.
So it's actually, I just remembered, it was trying to go on YouTube yesterday. YouTube
blocked me because I was running a VPN. Like, it's pretty fucking crazy. But if Nostra is going

(16:26):
to be the fix for this,
does it,
do you not have to almost,
like at least in its iteration now
with social media
is really the only thing
that's being used widely on Noster.
Do you not have-
Not even really, but yeah.
No, like in context, relatively.
Do you not have to just make that
as addictive as Twitter?

(16:47):
Well, so this is the,
I mean, look,
a lot of these are,
I don't pretend to have the answers, right?
And I also don't pretend
And I think at this point, Bitcoin has had the time in the market and the proof in network effect that it's going to be around for a long, long time.

(17:10):
It'll probably outlive us all.
I, with high confidence, think, which maybe sounds less crazy, even though this is like probably the 20th time I've said it on the show.
And it gets less crazy every time I say it.
I still expect it to become the reserve currency of the world.
Nostra is very much in its infancy.
It might not be a protocol that is used in 10 years.
But something like that, right?

(17:31):
An open, verifiable, permissionless protocol for speech and identity is something we really, really need.
Now, once you have that and you have Bitcoin, Bitcoin is effectively an open API for the world, right?
Any developer can hook into Bitcoin and do payments around the world.
You don't need a Stripe API.

(17:52):
You don't need to get permission from them and get keys.
you don't need to register with them and attach bank accounts and do all this other stuff.
You can just plug right into this open API for the world.
Something like Nostrum becomes an open API for identity and speech and communications.
And so this becomes, and particularly at a time in the internet when we're seeing these big tech platforms become more closed, right?

(18:17):
It's harder than ever to use the XAPI.
It's more expensive than ever.
Reddit closes you off unless you use logins.
Instagram, Facebook, all of them do now,
except actually TikTok.
And that's just because the CCP wants as many people
on their website as possible.
And that probably changes now that Oracle bought it.
And we're going to see Oracle probably do a lot of the same things
in the US that we see with the other big tech companies.

(18:40):
So you have open API for speech and communication.
You have open API for Bitcoin.
And now you have vibe coding coming into it.
Right now we're at Global Bitcoin Summit.
It's the third year.
We're doing it in partnership with HRF here
in Bitcoin Park in Nashville.
And we're going to have a vibe coding session
right after this rip, right?
And so when you think about that,
there's a tool called Shakespeare

(19:02):
that's being developed by Alex Gleason
who built Trump's Truth Social platform.
And then I think he'll say it more kindly,
but like Trump kind of fucked him out of Truth Social.
And now he's building on Noster
and he's building this tool called Shakespeare.
And with Shakespeare, with a couple of prompts,
you can build any app that leverages

(19:22):
both Bitcoin and Noster. And it becomes really, really powerful. So this is a very long-winded
way of me saying, yeah, you'll have predatory apps that are built on top of Noster and Bitcoin.
The difference is the user will be able to switch with very little switching costs.
And my assumption, which could be wrong, is that users will use the better apps,

(19:44):
right? Like if there's one video app that's Noster and Bitcoin enabled that has ads and
censorship and then there's one that doesn't,
how many users are going to use the ones with ads and censorship versus the one
that doesn't, right?
Like they probably,
probably the majority are going to use the one that's,
that has a healthier relationship with the user and gives them more agency.
A hundred percent.
Like that's definitely true.
But how do you go from,

(20:05):
from sort of here to there?
Cause like network effects matter so much.
Like Noster can already have,
you know,
a video hosting protocol that's better than YouTube in loads of ways.
There's no ads,
no censorship,
but you're still not going to get people over from YouTube right now.
Like how do you do that?
YouTube has the users. I mean, even Rumble
has had trouble.
Look, I think it's two things.
First of all, I wear my Bitcoin hat with all this stuff because

(20:27):
my adult life has
just been focused on Bitcoin, so
that's where my bias is.
Save Indeed
says all the time, like, the biggest threat to Bitcoin
is governments responsibly handling their money.
The thing is, like, governments
are never going to responsibly handle their money.
And so, like, the biggest threat to something like
Noster adoption is
governments stop, you know,

(20:49):
trying to censor and control platforms,
and platforms stop trying to harvest as much data as possible
and corral their users into these walled gardens.
And I don't think either of those things are going to happen.
So then the question becomes of timing as people move.
But I also think the example I use a lot is something like Signal,
which is not an open protocol, but it's an open...

(21:15):
The apps are open source,
and it's a private and secure messenger
that is nonprofit that just receives donations.
So the project is aligned with its users.
And they have 100 million users, right?
Soon to be less when they have to leave the EU.
Right.
WhatsApp has 5 billion users, right?

(21:37):
I still think Signal's a success.
100%.
And the fact that users can choose not to use WhatsApp
and can go use Signal is a success.
So where am I going with this?
I think in a world where, you know, people are using freedom alternatives of popular tools that leverage Nostra and Bitcoin, and it's 1%, 2% of the population, and that's an option to people, it's a massive success.

(22:00):
Now, the question becomes, do we ever hit 50%, 60%, 70%?
I don't know.
I think the way you do that probably is build apps that are like in the middle ground that are just better apps.
And if they're better apps, people use them because they're better.
This is kind of like when we were talking last time on the show.
And I guess I'd had concerns around the way Bitcoin was trending.

(22:22):
In terms of the way people are actually going to use it,
whether it's going to be freedom money or just this financial asset.
And the thing you said then was that a small percentage of people
will use it as freedom money.
Yeah.
And that's okay.
Like as long as people still can, then it's kind of won.
Maybe this is just the same thing.
It's the same thing.
It's the same lens, at least.
It's the same way I'm thinking about it.
So just before we recorded the show, we were talking to Obi.

(22:43):
Yeah.
And you said that you think Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency, but things like privacy will be used by...
I actually said that on the show in 2022.
There you go.
People can go back to the clips.
Have you got anything new to say?
No not really It all been said But Obi said it a scary world when Matt O says something like that Yeah Why do you think that the case I think it just reality I think you have to set your expectations realistically

(23:09):
Otherwise, you're just going to be disappointed, right?
When it comes to tools that enable personal responsibility,
they rely on users to take personal responsibility.
You can't force people to use a freedom-oriented tool by definition.
So it's just the reality of the situation.
You need people to actually move and improve their lives.

(23:32):
So I think these things will take time.
And I think probably in an ideal world, we see them push the mainstream alternatives into healthier relationships with their users, which probably then slows down the adoption of the freedom tools, but still benefits everyone else indirectly.

(23:53):
And I think that's just what we've seen as these things play out.
Right? It's, I mean, the number that I like to point to is, it's something like 300 billion emails are sent per day on the internet. 50% of them are Gmail. So like, if you're at like an early email conference.

(24:17):
Whenever I'm running their own servers.
Yeah. And you ask them like, is one giant American tech company going to be sending and receiving half of the emails per day? They would have been like, ah, definitely not.
And then they would be disappointed.
But if you set your expectations properly
and you start chipping away at those kind of behemoths,
I think then we're winning, right?
And maybe it's a little bit of a perspective hack,

(24:38):
but I think also it's just,
it's a healthier way to approach the movement.
Because I've gotten caught up in the,
people love to hear like,
oh, like everyone's going to use it.
You know, it gets more clicks,
it gets more retweets, whatever,
but none of that shit matters.
Let's be realistic about it.
Let's be honest about it.
and let's just move forward step by step every person you get is a win

(24:59):
um i will say already now with something like nostr
you don't need we have maybe maybe there's i think they say there's 700 million
700 million users of x tiktok's at like one and a half billion or something facebook is

(25:22):
three to five billion
across their properties.
And Nostra's like 200,000.
Is that number growing or shrinking?
I think it's growing.
It's a little bit hard to measure
in an open system.
I think also like user numbers in general
are like mostly lies.
Like there's no way for us to verify
how many Twitter X users there are.

(25:43):
Period.
Like we're just trusting their numbers.
Everyone who's ever done a live stream on X
knows that the number that says
how many people watch
is a complete fucking lie, right?
Like, you know that for sure.
And there's more and more bots there than ever before.
And there was no incentive to really clean that up.
The bots are insane.
So follow numbers are mostly a lie already.
They're like directionally correct.

(26:04):
You can kind of compare them to each other within the same system.
It's like, oh, if you have 100,000 followers and I have 50,000 followers and it's on the same app, then, you know, relatively 2x the amount of audience size.
but my point is
even with that many users
the cool part about Noster
is that actually
anyone can look at the open graph
and make their own analysis

(26:25):
and in general
that's actually I think
hurt us because
people estimate low
because there's a lot of lurkers
there's like people
like I'll post a Noster post
and like people that
never use the Noster app
see that post
like they're not getting counted
in those stats
but if they had clicked the link
in Twitter
they'd be counted in the stats,

(26:47):
even if they're not signed in.
But anyway, my point is 200,000 people,
if there's breaking news or something interesting
that happens on the internet,
it usually gets cross-posted in NOSTER
already now in its infancy.
And so there's like a critical mass
where if there's enough people using NOSTER
that anything important that happens outside of NOSTER

(27:08):
gets cross-posted in NOSTER for engagement and zaps,
and vice versa, anything interesting
that gets posted as NOSTA gets cross-posted to X and TikTok and stuff for engagement,
then at that point, it's already good enough to be used as your primary tool.
And I think we're pretty close to that.
I've just thought, this is way too late in the conversation,
but I've got a lot of new people listening right now

(27:28):
that might even not know what NOSTA is.
I had someone the other day.
I introduced the show with Samson Mowers,
him coming on for the first time on the new what Bitcoin did.
And someone going to be like, what's the old one?
And there was a comment being like, Peter McCormack used to run it.
And it was, who's Peter McCormack?
Eternal September.
Yeah, exactly.
So do you want to actually explain what Noster is?
So Noster, I think I kind of said it already, but Noster is an open, verifiable, permissionless protocol for identity and speech.

(27:56):
You can kind of think about like if Bitcoin, what Bitcoin is for money, Noster is for speech and identity.
Rather than having an account with like a big tech company, you have a public key, private key pair, just like Bitcoin.
and that is your user control.
So a company does not own that identity for you.

(28:17):
They don't own your followers.
They don't own your content.
It has an open server system,
so anyone can run a server.
Anyone can hold your posts for you.
You can run your own server.
And it's incredibly simple,
but as a result,
it can be very powerful in how you use it.
And I would just say to people
that if that kind of thing intrigues you,

(28:39):
I've been heavily focused on building out the Primal app, which you can just find in your app
stores by searching Primal. And my fund 1031 is the largest investor in Primal, and I'm very
focused on the day-to-day on help building that product out. It's completely open source,
and it leverages the Nostra protocol. But the cool part there is, first of all, because it's

(29:03):
open source, anyone can fork Primal and create their own version. Secondly, because it's on an
open protocol, if
Primal decided to be evil
and tried to block you from accessing
Primal or whatever, literally all you have to do is take your
private key, copy paste into
another Nostra app.
There's
dozens of Nostra apps that are stable

(29:25):
at this point that you can just paste them
into. And just think about that for a second.
The switching costs have never
been lower. Instead of walled gardens
you basically, I like to say, instead of walled gardens
what we want is open fields.
No one wants to hang out in a walled garden.
You want to hang out in open, beautiful fields.
You got mountains in the skyline, and you're out in nature.

(29:48):
And when you have those switching costs so low,
it keeps the companies that interact honest with the user
because the user ultimately has leverage and can just leave
and doesn't lose their followers, doesn't lose their content,
doesn't lose anything in the process.
You can leave X and go to TikTok, but you're starting fresh.

(30:09):
they're starting completely fresh.
There's massive switching costs
from going to YouTube to Rumble.
And historically,
one of the things that we're quite proud of at 1031
is most professional investors in startups
are pushing for the walled garden model.
It's the easier model.

(30:30):
You wall in your users,
you add switching costs,
you add friction,
maybe even petition regulators
to make regulatory moats around your businesses
and make it even harder for people to switch.
And then you monetize the fuck out of the users.
Not only do we support our founders pushing for more open models,
we actually push them in the direction of open models.

(30:51):
We prefer if they move to models that are more open fields than walled gardens.
And I think that alone, that little difference,
which is actually massive and foundational,
makes a way healthier experience with users and their apps.
Because it just switches the incentives entirely.
Completely different.
And so, like, I'll bring it back to Bitcoin.

(31:14):
Like, if you're using Moon Wallet and you don't like Moon Wallet,
or Moon Wallet makes some changes that you don't like,
you can literally, in one Bitcoin transaction, send to Phoenix Wallet.
And so, all of a sudden, Moon and Phoenix need to be good to their users.
Now, even that has more switching costs than Nostra apps.
Like, it's literally just Control-C, Control-V.

(31:35):
It's the lowest switching cost you could ever imagine.
Yeah.
And I think as you decrease those switching costs,
all of a sudden you have really beautiful,
healthy experiences start to really happen
on our devices and the tools we rely on.
Yeah, I don't spend enough time on Nasta.
Yeah, you should use it more.
I should.
I mean, I honestly would love to just not use any social media.

(31:55):
I know, but that's the problem.
The funniest part is it's being bootstrapped
by people that generally hate social media.
It's kind of cool to see the vlogging craze going on.
Is that still happening?
Yeah, American Idol, baby.
he's the one who started that craze
completely organic
if he leaned into the Bitcoin influencer thing
he would be fucking incredible

(32:16):
I mean he already kind of does
he's like a professional
yeah but if he did it on a broader scale
he's like a philosopher king
he is a philosopher king
but he needs to be doing it on Instagram and TikTok
most of your listeners probably don't even know
who American Hotels is anymore
no he's been on a few times
okay well he's Nostra only
do you know why he's Nostra only?

(32:36):
Yeah, because he lost his password.
He lost his phone.
I had Twitter.
Yeah, we came from different directions,
but we ended up in the same position.
I mean, look, I think people will use it.
If you use it in addition to your other stuff, fine.
I think ultimately it becomes the source of truth.
You use everywhere else,

(32:59):
but if someone actually wants to link back to your content,
the best place to link them to is Noster
because you know it's not going to have a paywall.
It's not going to have a login wall.
It's always verifiable.
Like in the land of deep fakes and AI,
like everything should be signed.
If you watch this podcast on YouTube,
there's no way for you to know
if YouTube didn't change what we said.

(33:21):
Like that's actually more insidious than censorship.
Like they could just dynamically,
and they could dynamically change
what we say in this conversation
depending on who is listening.
So like 99% of people could be listening
to this conversation
and they would hear what we're actually talking about.
And then maybe people that live in Kenya
hear a slightly different take.

(33:42):
That's a wild thought.
Mills was telling me about-
And there'd be no way for us to,
just to be clear,
there'd no way for you to verify if that happened or not.
But on Noster, even with the smaller user base,
every video is hashed and signed
so you know that video has not been changed at all.
This is complete tangent,
but that reminded me of something Mills told me.
I think it was in Riga.
she said that there's a supermarket here in nashville that has prices that adjust depending

(34:09):
on who you are well that's pretty fucked up have you heard that so like if you're on welfare you'll
get a different price for goods i didn't hear about that but that's what they're like i mean
people have theorized like that's what airline companies and stuff do yeah and dynamic price use
a vpn when you're buying a ticket but that's fucking scary um that's going to become the norm
like there's the thing that's weird about that though is data profiling but it's like what

(34:31):
what is the price of a dollar at that point?
Yeah.
Because if a dollar is different for me than it is to you,
then how do you have any confidence in the cost of anything?
Well, what I've always said is one of the coolest parts about Bitcoin is
in a post-truth world, Bitcoin is truth.
It's the only thing that you know is real and tangible.

(34:54):
It's a 24-7, 365 free market.
Nobody can fake it.
You know you own it.
You know its value.
Right now, we measure the value in dollars,
but in the future, it will be measured in how many cows you can buy,
how many houses you can buy,
and just pure purchasing power.

(35:14):
It's truth.
And so something like Nostra becomes that for,
we always say, like, fix the money, fix the world.
The money is just one piece of it.
We got to fix the other things too.
And in a post-truth world,
speech and identity is even more important on the internet and so like how are we actually
going to verify that and i use i'd like to use video as an example because i think it's more

(35:36):
um relatable to people it feels more insidious for it to be modified like people see a fake video
but like you know how many times you see like fake screenshots of tweets and stuff oh yeah all
the time but normally you can like this is something that ai has changed completely because
when you used to see those you could tell like the text was a bit different or something but

(35:56):
the deepfake of kind of anything
is like a real threat
to just knowing what the truth is.
Exactly. So I think that part
is what people are sleeping on. I think most people don't really
care about the censorship-resistant part.
I think it's the open and verifiable part
that is the most important.
But that can still happen on Noster, but then your
identity, your mpub is tied to that.

(36:17):
So you essentially get punished by
your social graph.
No, no, no. If
you open Primal,
and you look at what Bitcoin did that was posted there.
You know it's come from me.
My app is automatically in the background
verifying that you posted it
and no one in the middle has changed it.

(36:38):
Now, maybe you don't trust the app.
You can use a different app.
That app will also check and make sure it's true.
Maybe you don't trust that app.
You can actually do it by hand.
It's like raw Nostradite is actually very simple.
You see a hash of the video,
which is like the integrity of the video.
So if there's any change to the video, the hash changes.

(36:59):
So it's like a text string that you know hasn't been changed.
And then it's signed on top of that so you know who posted it.
So those two little pieces of basic tech in a very simple just text readout allow you to easily verify that that hasn't been changed.
right now um i don't think elon would mess with or zuckerberg i use elon as an example a lot because

(37:26):
i think most people don't trust big tech but they trust elon he's like better of the
of the worst he probably is yeah i think he is too i think that's completely fair
but let's use zuckerberg because he's actually like evil head honcho number one five billion
users. The only thing that's
stopping Facebook adoption
is internet access and birth

(37:47):
rate. They've literally saturated
the global internet
accessible population in the world. 5 billion
people. We're like 8.5 billion
people, but like 3 billion of them don't have internet.
I've been in the middle of rural Malawi
and people just use WhatsApp. Well, what they do
is they give them basically like free phone
plans that only work on Facebook services.
Like they can only, they have unlimited data
on WhatsApp, but nothing else.

(38:09):
Because they know they need people to get it.
Like Facebook will subsidize that just to harvest your data.
Yeah.
But Zuckerberg, imagine if you are a small nation state.
Let's use Kenya as an example again.
You're a president of Kenya, and you want to send a post out to your people.

(38:29):
The status quo right now is that Zuckerberg, first of all, controls whether or not you can send it, whether or not people see it.
And they could actually modify it in transit, and no one would know.
and once again
the most insidious part
is they can modify it
for a small subset
a small tribe
that is in
one region of Kenya
or whatever
will see a different
a slightly different post

(38:50):
than everyone else
and even if people
report that
everyone is going to be like
is that true
is that true
I don't know
I can't verify it
I'm trying to figure out
there's just massive confusion
and that's going to get
worse and worse
it's not how
it's not how
like digital society
should be built
our lives have never
been so digital
and is built on this complete shoddy foundation.

(39:13):
We need to fix the foundation.
And once again, I know Bitcoin will be a part of it.
I don't know if it'll necessarily be Nostra,
but something like Nostra
and the pace of improvement on Nostra
and just the organic developer community,
this open source community,
it's just been absolutely massive to watch.
I witnessed it and then I joined the fray.

(39:35):
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So we should talk about Bitcoin.
We've barely talked about Bitcoin yet.
Let's go back to Bitcoin.
What's your price prediction for the year?
I don't like price predictions.

(42:25):
What's your favorite Bitcoin stock?
higher than right now.
My favorite Bitcoin stock.
I know what your favorite Bitcoin stock is.
Tell me.
Well, I think it's probably,
is it right here on the...
I don't do that.
I mean, maybe by the time the show goes out.
No, it's not.
I do like iron there.
Do you not put them on the screen somewhere?
No.
Are they right here?

(42:45):
No, they're not there either.
Just click on the description.
Click on iron.
Find out more.
What do you want to talk about with Bitcoin?
I'm pretty, look,
I've never been more bullish on Bitcoin.
I think...
Are we going to have 200K by conference day?
Finally.
Eventually, yeah.
Eventually, five years later.
I kind of do want to talk about treasury companies with you.

(43:07):
I know we said we wouldn't.
Yeah, let's talk about them.
Do you think they're good for Bitcoin?
People buying Bitcoin is cool,
but my fear is that there's a lot of people
who are going to treasury.
Literally every episode is just a treasury company episode for you now.
It should be what Bitcoin stocks did.
I own
two stocks

(43:28):
I've only ever owned two stocks
what two stocks do you own?
Iron
I wish you didn't ask me that question
and B-HODL
is this financial advice?
absolutely
this is not financial advice
but are they good for Bitcoin?
it depends on what you mean by that
I think
as a Bitcoin holder

(43:51):
if more people are buying Bitcoin
and increases the Bitcoin purchasing price.
It accelerates Bitcoinization.
And it is unequivocally a net benefit for everybody
that holds Bitcoin if the purchasing power goes up.
There's this weird subset of Bitcoiners
that almost fetishize being poor.

(44:13):
They would rather...
They're like, I'm not in it for the money.
It's like, no, I'm in it for the tech and the money.
My family relies on Bitcoin increasing in purchasing power,
or at least not going down
in purchasing power.
Yeah, we all want to see
number go up.
Anyone that pretends they don't.
At the very least,
not down, right?
Like our savings are in Bitcoin.
So I think in that way,

(44:34):
it's a win.
Now, I think
like in a lot of ways,
you can make that same argument
for shit coins.
Like when EOS did their,
when EOS did their ICO,
where did they take all the proceeds?
They put it all in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
where when tesla's did theirs where they still like if you go onto bitcoin treasuries or whatever

(44:55):
to the private companies page like two of the largest holders in private companies that we know
of are shit coins and specifically the shit coin founders not the individuals that bought the shit
coins that went down yeah so why do i say that i say that because i think first of all it's important
to isolate in this current dynamic you have you really have strategy and then you have everybody

(45:20):
else 100 and then there's some nuance in there like there's there's some players that are slightly
larger that are trying to differentiate themselves in some ways or not but it's still very early but
you very much have strategy and everyone else and i think when you look at mostly the long tail
it's predatory on individual retail investors who are looking for

(45:44):
for get-rich-quick schemes, essentially, right?
Which is the same dynamic that we saw with shitcoins.
Totally, and the crazy thing is,
it's as if Bitcoin is now not volatile enough for people.
Correct.
But this is, once again, eternal September.
Because it was the same thing with Ethereum and Solana and all these other things And BitMEX 100X Yeah Right But people are always they come in they think they late And they leverage themselves up in some way or another to try and get it back

(46:16):
They usually get wrecked.
They'd probably be better off staying on one stacking sets.
The insidious thing about this piece is, like, over the last 10 years, like, something beautiful happened on the internet.
with Bitcoin culture.
And I'm not going to pretend

(46:36):
that everyone was super ethical
and, you know,
that Bitcoiners were perfect or whatever,
but, like, we had a pretty strong ethical compass
in a wide swath of Bitcoin culture.
And now, a lot of the loudest voices
in Bitcoin culture have gone,
they've all been bought by,

(46:57):
they all joined treasury companies.
and they're effectively instead of saying
you should learn how to self-custody
Bitcoin and you should learn how to buy the real thing
and you should stay on stack stats
is like no, buy my stock
instead
and that part is painful to see
does it hurt the Bitcoin
movement long term? Nope
does it hurt individuals

(47:19):
that are holding self-custody Bitcoin themselves?
Nope. Do people have a
right to get wrecked?
Yep, I'm a free market
maximalist, like buy whatever the hell you want. I've always said this about shit coins too. I
think I've been relatively consistent. Shit coins are not a threat to Bitcoin. They're a threat to
users that choose to speculate on them and end up getting wrecked. Are there always

(47:43):
exceptions to the rule where people end up outperforming Bitcoin and it turns into a great
financial decision for them? Yes, that's true as well. You bought the Ethereum ICO and then sold
for Bitcoin at the right time.
You did quite well for yourself.
I think all these things are constants.
But I do think that at least, and maybe it's just a phase.

(48:09):
It's probably just a phase.
But in terms of mindshare, the treasury companies have just completely dominated this cycle.
um and just to once again bring it back in perspective is like spring 2017

(48:30):
summer 2017 like i was literally sitting there myself i thought the ethereum ico was a scam
thought the all the other icos were a scam it's really hard to explain it if you weren't there
but i was like sitting there i was like am i the retard am i the dumbass like are there just
going to be a thousand different pre-mined shit coins that all outperform bitcoin and it turned

(48:55):
out i wasn't but there i would be lying if i didn't say that there was like a couple month
period there where i was like maybe i'm wrong um and there's a lot of similarities over this year
with that apart from they're not performing particularly well on the whole well recently
like a uh a strategy bull will be quick to remind you oh strategy returns for the last two years

(49:18):
But the last year has underperformed Bitcoin.
But I agree with you that the strategy is almost like its own thing.
The stuff they're doing is actually interesting.
I think the preferreds are interesting.
I think they'll do pretty well.
I don't own any.
I don't plan to own any, but I still think it'll do quite well.
But if you bought MetaPlanet at the right time...
Yeah, MetaPlanet's done well.
There's a few.
Yeah, it's a timing thing.
But I do wonder if the story's kind of ending.

(49:39):
I don't know.
I mean, maybe to some degree, but maybe it's also just beginning.
I mean, you look what's happened with NACA.
It's been a fucking disaster for retail investors.
Yeah.
It's basically the same price it was a year ago
before the merger even happened.
It's lower, I think.
I mean, that's pretty rough.
Yeah.

(50:03):
I don't know.
I think the trend of companies buying Bitcoin
and putting it on their balance sheet
is definitely just beginning.
Now, I think the question becomes,
as someone who loves free markets
and believes they lead to human flourishing,

(50:24):
I think it's a question of how markets value different things.
And I think specifically companies
that don't have cash flow and revenue growth
and real business plans,
and they're just relying on a debt arbitrage play
or hoping that their MNAV is high

(50:45):
so they can just sell stock on retail at a premium to buy Bitcoin
will start to be valued accordingly.
And over the last year or so, they've probably been valued too high.
And that's when you can go back and forth on whether or not
strategies, preferred shares is genius or a recipe for disaster.

(51:07):
People swing both sides of it.
But the thing is, there is something interesting and unique there in the market that needs to be valued accordingly.
And the market has no idea how to value it right now.
And that's, I think, also what we saw in the early days of sell converts, sell ATMs, buy Bitcoin.

(51:32):
What do I value that at?
And is MNAV even the correct way to think about it?
I don't think anyone really has that answer.
I mean shout out to you
you called
Sailor making a stable coin
a long time ago
and he's essentially done that
yeah with STRC
but I think there's two lies
that are told about treasury companies
one is the jurisdictional arbitrage

(51:52):
I don't believe that exists
like I think there's certain edge cases
where it does
like I think MetaPlanet
just Japan basically
is the only one
but like these companies
that are starting
like
I know we talked about B-Hodl
it's also like
the term treasury company
is annoying
because like any company
putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet.
I think leverage Bitcoin equity
is a better term.
Yeah.
Treasury company has Linde.

(52:13):
Like we're just calling them
treasury companies.
That's what they're called.
No one wants to call them
leverage Bitcoin equity.
And B-Hoddle isn't doing that.
But anyway, regardless of them.
We don't have to argue
about your treasury company.
They're not my treasury company.
I have nothing to do with them at all.
But like the idea of creating
a treasury company in the UK
or in Australia
or in anywhere else in the world,
because that's some kind

(52:34):
of jurisdictional arbitrage.
It's bullshit.
It's nonsense.
I think that's bullshit.
You can still buy strategy
in the UK very easily.
And you can definitely
buy Bitcoin everywhere.
Of course.
And like really,
what are you actually
gaining from it?
You're, you know,
let's say you're worth
a billion dollars.
Like, are you really
going to tap into
like these pension funds
and like capital markets?
Well, I think that's also

(52:54):
part of the lies.
Like they keep saying
like it's for institutional investors.
If it's for institutional investors,
like why are you hiring podcasters?
Like it's very,
most of them are very
clearly retail focused.
Are you disappointed
in the podcasters
that have moved
into the boards of these treasury companies and look i um who's left you guys there's not many

(53:15):
free agents left me there's very few free agents left um i guess you're on the board of fold i'm
not on the board of fold are you not 1031 on the board of fold jonathan's on the board um
i've never told anyone to buy fold stock um but i we are an investor and then before they went public
we help them go public um look i mean we're in the business of if our founders want to do something

(53:39):
we'll help support them like it's their businesses um and i i there i do think um that they want
to have a strong cash flow positive bitcoin financial services business they're not trying
to play the same game that um the other treasury companies are trying to play and they're also

(54:01):
the market is not valuing them in that expectation they've almost never traded at a premium time now
um i do have some ethical concerns about spacks in general why um because like the way they do the
lockups they pretend it's like to protect retail but it actually usually creates a dynamic where
retail it's it becomes predatory for retail you end up you trade out a slight premium in the

(54:26):
beginning and then it collapses almost every time uh is is how that happens and the cool thing is
if you have bitcoin on your balance sheet it kind of tends to make a floor to a degree i mean it can
go negative but uh it's better than something like a virgin galactic or something where like
it literally just can go all the way to zero basically um but yeah i mean once again not an

(54:49):
expert on that stuff. I'm a very, my savings are, are, are, it's like a hundred percent in Bitcoin
and the investments we make through 1031 into Bitcoin startups, freedom focused startups in
general. We have some non-Bitcoin companies in there. But anyway, yeah, this is, I think like,

(55:10):
just to bring it back for a second, am I disappointed? Maybe that's a little bit too
harsh like you asked if i regretted deleting my twitter i actually don't regret deleting my twitter
at all um what i do i have some regret for is maybe i got a little bit ahead of myself

(55:31):
and i was i apologized to anyone who thought i was treating them like a dick and pompous and saying
like i'm better than you for deleting my twitter like if you want to use your twitter if you want
to use tiktok you want to use whatever use what you want i don't really fucking give a shit
who's who's me to judge how you live your life i i feel bad about that i was like especially i was
in all caps mode like i was a little bit aggressive um so like i don't want to like cast

(55:55):
broad disappointment on an industry people can live their lives and choose what they want to do
i think a lot of people are making mistakes though um there's a lot of reputational risk in doing it
yeah and i think reputation you know at the end of the day like i first of all like i'm also never
going to tell people that they should have children i think it's a beautiful experience
i think most people should consider it people should have children and and uh yeah but i never

(56:21):
want to be like the pushy parent i love it anyway at the end of the day you got to look your kids in
the eye 10 years you're gonna have to look your kids in the eye and tell them you know how you
acted and hopefully be a good example to them and i think a lot of people are not acting on that
first principle
i'm trying to think if i am

(56:41):
I think you mostly are.
Go on.
I think none of us are perfect, right?
Like, I think if you think you're not a hypocrite,
you're probably just blinded to your hypocrisy.
And so we should try and reduce our hypocrisy
as much as possible.
Like, I am definitely not perfect.
I'm not all seeing.

(57:01):
People shouldn't blindly trust me.
But you try and be better.
Always try and be better.
Always try and be less of a hypocrite.
If you're not trying to do that,
then you're failing.
So focus on that.
But then to bring it back to the Bitcoin treasury companies,
the example I like to use is like,
at some point, we're going to see
like an immensely profitable company like Apple

(57:22):
sweeping their cash flow into Bitcoin.
We already see it in the private sector.
You know, Strike is...
Tether.
Tether.
I mean, Tether is like the behemoth in the room.
Tether is, you know, on track to make $25 billion this year
and they sweep it all into Bitcoin and gold,
all the profits.
Not the reserves.
The reserves are held in treasuries.

(57:42):
But they have 75 people, and they just sweep it all into Bitcoin and gold.
Strike has been profitable five quarters,
and they just sweep everything into Bitcoin.
I think that's the next shift.
And I value those companies way higher than companies
that don't have a sustainable cash flow and business drive component.

(58:03):
Yeah, that seems healthy.
But I don't know how you—
I assume the trade-off that people like Apple are trying to make right now,
They must be aware of what Saylor's doing.
They must see how beneficial that spends to the company.
They'd be completely blind if they didn't see it, right?
But obviously, he did that presentation for Microsoft.
And they don't have to take leverage on Bitcoin,
but they could put a massive portion of their cash balance into Bitcoin.

(58:23):
They just have huge cash balances that they're not doing anything with.
But the only thing I can think of, and I could be totally wrong here,
but is that they see that as somehow if they made that move,
it would be seen badly in the market and their share price would be punished.
Yeah. I think there's career risks still.
how does that change well we're already kind of seeing it so like on the 1031 side we

(58:44):
interact with like a lot of family offices it's a rich families um institutions like endowments
college endowments and stuff and our bread and butter has been like someone works in a family
office or someone works in an institution and they're on the investment committee
and they're already bitcoiners i listen to the podcast and stuff and i know what nostr is

(59:06):
and so they see the value and they want to move into bitcoin but historically most of the people
you talk to they don't want to make a risky decision that might cost them their job if they
just if they just go into um equity indexes they just go into s&p 500 indexes they hold treasuries
and stuff like yeah they might underperform but like they're not going to make a drastic mistake

(59:28):
that will cost them their livelihood and then they're going to have to worry how to feed their
family right no one wants to do that no one wants to take that risk especially in an institutional
environment that has flipped like it's getting to the point now where if you're not even doing like
a little exposure and you're an investment community you're not doing a little exposure
to bitcoin you might you'll have probably have career risk because you're failing your fiduciary

(59:51):
responsibility to whoever your clients are um so we're already starting to see that flip and i
think we're going to start to see it flip on the public side are we recording we're recording
you just freaked me out i think we'll start to see that flip on the public side like i think
um a lot of us realize that it's grossly irresponsible for apple to be holding large

(01:00:13):
amounts of cash right now in an inflationary environment in an environment where inflation
is grossly underreported and is way higher uh to quote sailors a melting ice cube they're holding
a melting ice cube.
And maybe it's not Bitcoin.
Maybe it's some gold.
You know, I don't know.
I think they should put it in Bitcoin.

(01:00:35):
The example I use for my own projects
is OpenSats, 501c3 charity.
We don't take any kind of donations.
I volunteer my time to do that.
We support open source contributors.
Our treasury strategy is quite simple.
You give us dollars, we put it in Bitcoin.
We're sending out a million dollars
worth of Bitcoin a month.
We obviously have no business model

(01:00:55):
because we're a fucking charity.
So, you know, we're cash flow negative, right?
We're just sending out a million dollars a month.
And the amount we have in our treasury
is double the amount we've ever raised.
This is insane.
Like, that's just crazy.
And so, like, if we were holding cash,
we'd probably already be out of cash.
We'd have to go out and raise more money.

(01:01:18):
And, I mean, funnily enough, though,
the companies that have done that
are the ones that are going to start doing treasury plays.
I mean, maybe.
But the question is, once again, I think...
OpenStats Treasury Company coming soon.
We'll do the OpenAI model.
We'll just pivot to for-profit.
We'll pivot to for-profit.
We'll take a 49% investment from Microsoft.
Only invest in closed-source software.
I'll give myself 20% equity.

(01:01:41):
Fuck Sam Altman.
Oh, I want to talk about Sam Altman.
Once again, I think...
Look, for better or for worse, we're calling them treasury plays,
but it's important to distinct...
You got to distinguish.
What Bitcoin did is a treasury company.
But it's not, right, it's not because now treasury companies mean leverage Bitcoin equities.
Yeah.

(01:02:01):
So what Bitcoin did is a profitable private business that saves free cash flows in Bitcoin.
And like, well, maybe we're going to need to come up with a better one-liner term, but it's not similar scientific or...
They don't exist anymore.
I don't think the merger is actually finalized yet.
I don't really understand how public markets work.

(01:02:24):
Yeah, not financial advice.
I think people are waking up to that.
And I think the most clear sign of that
is the JP Morgan stuff that came out recently
with their debasement trade.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not trade.
That's the thing I think they're missing
is that a trade assumes you're going to go back
to cash at some point.
But I do wonder if that's the kind of thing
that tips Apple, Microsoft,

(01:02:45):
those big profitable companies over the edge
is that like, this isn't just us niche weirdos
on the internet shouting about Bitcoin being a hedge against debasement.
It's JP Morgan saying that.
Yeah, like Larry Fink.
Yeah.
Like BlackRock.
I think their most successful ETF ever is the Bitcoin ETF.
Yeah.
I mean, by the way, just to go back to this,
like in a better situation,
OpenSats would be like sustainable

(01:03:07):
without me having to go out and raise donations for free.
Like I don't get paid to do that.
And it sucks.
It sucks constantly going out to raise money.
So like, I think the way this all scales,
I think the way freedom scales is sustainable, profitable businesses that build on top of open source software and open protocols.
Because anyone who's ever tried to raise for charitable causes knows it's just a forever grind.

(01:03:31):
Like Bitcoin helps.
It makes operations easier.
It makes our treasury increase in value rather than decrease in value over time and spreads it out more and takes less pressure off of us.
But it still doesn't solve the underlying problem.
Where at the end of the day, it's a finite amount of money.
And you have to just constantly look for donors to try and do it.

(01:03:51):
So open source, open protocols, they compound beautifully.
They're viral in nature.
They're hard to control.
You know, you don't have a company you can pressure or an individual you can pressure.
Governments have a really hard time stopping them.
But then at the end of the day, how do they get scaled out?
They get scaled out by private companies that have sustainable business models.

(01:04:12):
It's a flywheel.
and historically the way they have been is with private businesses that have predatory business
models so but if those private businesses didn't have predatory business models then you kind of
get the best of both worlds you'd get the scale that you see with something like gmail
but you wouldn't see the predatory nature of their business model so you'd have something

(01:04:33):
maybe like a proton mail or something where they don't scan your email but they charge you
subscription fees and maybe it's a less profitable business but it's still profitable not taking
donations to sustain itself.
You know all the fights that are happening
in Bitcoin at the moment with...
I mean, Treasury Company is an obvious one.
Not so cool stuff. I know you're
scared to talk about it. I'm not scared to talk about it.

(01:04:53):
I just talk about it all the fucking time.
We don't have to talk
about it. People just get mad.
People are
very emotional. By the time
this comes out... When is this coming out?
Wednesday next week
probably. Corby 30 will probably already
released the world is not going to end um i uh i think the discourse around it has gotten um

(01:05:26):
very uh negative yeah it's degraded to an insane level i think it doesn't help anybody 100 um i
I think ultimately, Bitcoin is a generational project.
I think most participants believe that Bitcoin is the best money and we need to maintain it as such.

(01:05:47):
I think most participants believe that we need to be very conservative with how it's developed on the protocol level.
Specifically, we can move a little bit faster on apps and stuff.
But even with apps, someone's got their life savings in your app.
Don't fuck it up.
I want to even be more explicit there.
It's not just most people.
I think core also absolutely included in that.
But core is also not this.

(01:06:09):
It's not a business.
And it's also not this homogenous entity.
It's a bunch of developers.
Now, yes, there's a small subset of maintainers
and very active contributors
that are friendly with each other.
And there is an in-group there.
But the answer here is what I would like to see

(01:06:30):
is node operators have more options.
um this is something that we've been intimately focused on open sets open sets has funded over
320 open source contributors with bitcoin a very small subset of those or our core contributors
everyone we funded has been listed on our website we try and act you know with more transparency than

(01:06:53):
99 of charities in the world not just in bitcoin um and we're open to funding alternative
implementations give people more choice and i think that's better for core too like i think if
you're one of the few core maintainers like it'd be good on your soul and and stress and whatnot
if there was another team that was maintaining a compatible alternative

(01:07:17):
when you say an alternative you're not talking about not talking about a brand new implementation
i mean look i think knots could be one of those alternatives uh if if i'm gonna get so much shit
like it's just so vitriolic if luke was more open to making it not just a luke project
like it's very much just a luke project and i will say that from the very beginning i said to luke

(01:07:42):
i've said this publicly for about a year now like if knots wants to add more maintainers and more
review they can apply to open sets um for full disclosure i think we've gotten two applications
in the last year and they were quite they were just not up to our standards yeah and it was not
because it's not some conspiracy it wasn't because of knots yeah right like i would like to see 20

(01:08:07):
i would like to see 100 i would like to see a whole nother implementation um i would like to
see libitcoin be funded we just recently we've been funding floresta which is like a utreexo based
implementation and they're trying to add the same
API bindings as Bitcoin Core
so if you're using Bitcoin Core

(01:08:27):
in your stack you can easily
switch to Floresta
I think there's this weird
cancel culture
dynamic in digital
society now
where everyone wants to get everyone
fired they disagree with
and like in this situation
I guess I'm looked at as like the
manager so like the Karens on the internet

(01:08:49):
are like, hey, Odell, you got to fire this person or this person. Actually, most of the time,
they don't even pick people that they want to fire. They just say, all core devs are commies.
Like, okay, well, all the devs we support are listed. Why don't you tell me which ones are
commies And then they just go silent I mean we saw this You see this with people in non circles right It like they post a picture of someone they like find him Because he says something on the internet It like a gym teacher in Idaho And then they like they get the guy fired

(01:09:17):
It's like a crazy dynamic.
That's the tricky thing though,
where like free speech
doesn't mean free speech without consequence.
But my point is,
this is not Bitcoin specific.
Oh, absolutely not.
This is a trend we've seen much broader than Bitcoin.
Have you seen this?
So this happened today.
I did that interview with Antoine.
from court and someone said, pay attention to the setting.

(01:09:39):
All white background, white t-shirts.
These guys are posing as the good guys.
White knights, top-notch propaganda.
I'm wearing a tan shirt.
I'm not in white either.
This is the evil episode.
But it's like people are going so far as to think
I'm picking the color of my t-shirt
to appear like I'm a good actor.
Yeah.
Like I feel like-
I mean, you're definitely a bad actor.
So we got that settled.
And it has nothing to do with your t-shirt.

(01:10:01):
Fuck you.
No, I mean, I think it's-
And look, I think it's good that people,
we want as many people to run nodes as possible.
I think that's a really good outcome of this.
I think a lot of people have been scared
out of self-custody though,
which is a negative outcome of this.
I don't think the world is falling.
You think people have been scared

(01:10:22):
out of self-custody from this?
Yeah, 100%.
I think, yeah, I mean,
I've had a lot of people text me like,
is Bitcoin about to fail?
Or is it going to be a problem
if I'm running a node
or from holding my own keys or like should i just hold the etf um and i think uh you know there's a

(01:10:43):
there's an appeal to outrage and panic and moral panic and whatnot and i it's and it's also there's
a conflation between individual node policy and consensus rules like if if this was a fight about
um like what is and what is not a valid transaction on bitcoin and it was about a

(01:11:03):
soft fork it'd be a little bit different depending on what the actual circumstances were and i will
say almost as a policy um open stats just does not fund really soft fork work or hard fork work
um on core like part of the part of the really frustrating thing about this is like the straw man
argument of like you don't care about bitcoin as money or you want to like change it it's like no

(01:11:29):
most people like agree on both of those things like we need to be very conservative and we
intimately care about bitcoin as money yeah um and it feels like a distraction tactic but anyway
like i feel like and then i talk about it constantly i've been very transparent about it
and i feel like it comes up all the time and then people are always like you never talk about it
it's like no i've been i've been talking about it for like a year and a half now i hear talk about

(01:11:50):
on every rhr yeah um so that's why i said i didn't want to talk about it it's it's something that i
I talk about all the time.
I think it is, you know,
it's important how people think about these things.
But I think the conversation has got to the point,
in my opinion, where it's almost,
like the people running NOTS feel like there's kind of
core of some elite that are trying to attack Bitcoin.

(01:12:12):
They think that, like, they think by me having a conversation
with Antoine, who works on Core.
You had a conversation with Samson, like, right before.
And mechanic.
But they somehow think that there's, like, some
co-option conspiracy thing going on.
And I think a lot of it's organic.
I think that some of it is not.
Like I post videos and I'll get a comment

(01:12:34):
being like run knots within a second.
Like some of it can't be organic,
but I don't know.
I definitely do not think like they're all bots.
I think there's like a lot of organic.
It's definitely not all bots.
Don't get me wrong, like 100%.
But I think most people involved
on both sides of this argument mean well.
Agree.
And a lot of them have gotten overly emotional about it
and have hurt their own sides in a discourse way i think there's been a lot of quote unquote

(01:12:57):
core supporters that acted aggressively and demeaning people that didn't understand things
um and and then heels were dug in and same on the opposite side yeah um and i i do think
like everyone is welcome to say what they want to say um the way i the way we run open sets because

(01:13:20):
it's not just me the whole thing is you know by design you need majority board approval for any
grant is was that in either direction like we're going to try our best to be immune from social
pressure just period that's why we're here we're like the independent funding organization for
open source in the world like everywhere else is relatively centralized and relatively opaque even

(01:13:45):
even if they mean well.
So that's just my promise to everybody.
Like that's how it's going to be.
So you can keep trying to get me to like cancel people or whatever.
And then last but not least, you can like try and cancel me.
Just don't really care.
Deleted my own Twitter account.
My family does not rely on podcast income.
I do not need more views.

(01:14:06):
If anything, less views would be better.
And I'm personally mission focused on making Bitcoin.
as usable as possible as freedom money
and as many people using it as possible.
That has been my mission for 10 plus years now.
It's going to continue to be my mission.

(01:14:26):
And we'll see how it plays out.
Yeah.
I mean, for me,
I don't mind what implementation people want to run.
That really matters to them.
But that's the worst part.
Ultimately,
that's where the discussion should have really ended.
And ideologically,
I understand the viewpoint as well.
When I speak to Mechanic, I get it.

(01:14:47):
I agree with him in a lot of ways.
It's just, I don't know the reality of the situation.
I think will be proven that Core30 is not the end of Bitcoin.
I really don't see that as a likelihood.
I think there's been a lot of uproar about a policy change
that I'll be proven right or wrong
seems inconsequential in a lot of ways.

(01:15:07):
I wonder, though, if this infighting
is almost just a symptom of us winning.
there's nothing else to fight about at this point.
I mean, I think there's plenty of other things to fight about.
What should we be fighting about instead?
I'm not going to start the next fight.
Go on, start the next fight.
No, I mean, look, I think some of it has been boredom.

(01:15:34):
Look, I just...
This would be such a drama-inducing...
Go on, do it.
No, no, no.
I just, I'm so sick of all the drama.
I, look, I mean, I think Bitcoin as freedom money is not a given.
Like, I think it's good that most Bitcoiners are adversarial.

(01:15:56):
I do think in this particular situation,
it seems to be a little bit of a, like, immune response disorder.
And, like, we're just attacking each other.
And I think some of it is because Bitcoiners that are more technical have become more irrelevant.

(01:16:18):
And I think there's a desire to be relevant in Bitcoin.
And I think people across the spectrum and outside of Bitcoin should just check their ego for a little bit.
And once again, I've never claimed to be the humble guy.
When I say stay humble, I'm reminding myself to stay humble.
But I think there's just a lot of ego involved.
you think there's a bit of main character syndrome going on everywhere everywhere you look it's main

(01:16:41):
character once again outside of bitcoin too um and i think it's a product of like modern social
experience like digital social media there's like a psychosis and that's why i think you know we need
to solve that or ideally i would like to see us solve that because i think our kids will grow up
in a better world because it's just been getting worse and worse like everywhere you look you see

(01:17:01):
it i mean like you see it with like the candace owens charlie kirk nick fuente stuff that's going
on right now completely outside of bitcoin they all want it to be about themselves there's always
something breaking um there's always this new news tidbit something you got to get in front of
the cameras or whatever and a lot of it is just like broken incentives all the way down
algorithms and engagement and addiction data surveillance all mixed into one

(01:17:27):
but yeah and then the last piece i would say on it is i've seen a lot of the anti-core sentiment be
that we're concerned about vc capture i agree with that concern high level i think that's
absolutely true what vc capture do you specifically the argument they use is citria

(01:17:50):
raised a bunch of money specifically peter thiel teal uh led that raise they want to do like
ethereum like stuff on bitcoin um 1031 did not invest in that uh
citria specifically um

(01:18:11):
i think even if this policy rule didn't change they were still going to proceed and they were
going to just do it in a worse way for Bitcoin.
I'm pretty sure that's what they explicitly said.
Yeah.
But just the idea of VC capture, the idea of investor capture, and it doesn't have to
be just VC, just rich people that are interacting with Bitcoin and want control over Bitcoin.

(01:18:34):
The way you solve that is by having more independent, transparent organizations that
are providing ethically aligned funding to developers.
It's not trying to defund the devs.
If you defund the devs, they're only going to get their funding from those people.
And I say this as someone who has a fund.
But there's also known bugs in Bitcoin that need fixing.

(01:18:55):
We need devs.
And we need maintenance.
And this is a generational project.
And we don't really have that many.
We have the most eyes on the code of any open source project in existence, really.
And it's not enough eyes.
It's still not enough eyes.
It's like 50 people working call.
And the alternative, and people are going to say, like, this is a straw man, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, OK, well, Knott's is just basically 100% funded by a single investor-funded company, which is Ocean.

(01:19:22):
That's the alternative you see.
That's what happens if you don't have a bunch of independent funding.
So I will just say that I think this is something that OpenSats has diagnosed very early on.
It's one of the reasons we exist.
It's one of the reasons the volunteers that contribute to their time alongside me do it.
um and that this is a long process and and let's not make you know overly emotional decisions

(01:19:48):
in the short term because we don't want to deal with drama or whatnot that will instead result in
negative knock-on effects in the future because there is a pipeline here you know you can't just
like if you if you alienate a bunch of open source contributors you can't just like immediately bring
them back in you know there's like years in the making and the old ones need to train the new ones

(01:20:10):
and you need like...
And they could go and earn...
Layover.
Five times as much money working at Google.
Or a treasury company.
Yeah.
What's your take on like BitVM stuff in general?
Like not specifically Citria,
but these kind of roll-ups,
layer twos that we're going to see
start coming to Bitcoin.
I think it's mostly a distraction.

(01:20:31):
I'd like...
As a Bitcoiner,
I haven't really seen...
use cases that I would like to see that don't exist,
that these things aim to provide.
For the users that do want to see some of these things,
I don't see why you couldn't just use a Tron or something.

(01:20:53):
Would you not rather just see it on Bitcoin?
But why? What are you trying to do on it?
But it feels like the argument, this isn't my argument,
but the argument you saw a lot was anything useful
that happens on Ethereum will eventually be on Bitcoin.
Yeah, well, let me use the argument of Tether
because i think tether is actually probably the most compelling argument and you don't need bitvm
or sit here or whatever to do that um i mean you could do it today on liquid

(01:21:19):
i know spark wants to do it with spark it's a the state chain from light spark
if you are connecting to a real world asset like tether you are intimately trusting tether
has the actual treasuries backing it so the underlying protocol technology that you use

(01:21:46):
to interact with that does not actually change the trust model for how you interact with it
if you're using Tron Tether and Justin Sun rugs you,
Paolo can just send out a tweet and be like,
we moved your balance to Solana and then you're on Solana.
Like that's all it is.
So why do we need that on Bitcoin?
And if we put it on Bitcoin,

(01:22:06):
if you actually want to see users,
it needs to be cheaper and it has to have better UX.
Otherwise, they're just going to keep using Tron.
And if it's cheaper and has better UX,
then it's probably also incredibly centralized.
so you're not actually even getting
a lot of the trust benefits.
You're not getting a lot of benefits
if any
from using it in a Bitcoin

(01:22:26):
quote unquote native way.
But I guess the other
like side of that is
let's say you're a massive fan
of like covenants.
One of these BitVMs
can do something that allows that
not without changing Bitcoin
you can go have unilateral exit.
Yeah but then I think the question is
like what is the trust
what is the trust elements there?
Well as long as you have
unilateral exit
like I'm not saying
it's definitely not as good
as just having Bitcoin

(01:22:46):
but it's quite good.
Look, I would say that I am personally not interested
in changing Bitcoin at a protocol level
to facilitate this type of stuff.
But it doesn't need to be.
Yeah, if it doesn't need to be,
then let people build it
and we'll see if it's useful or not.
We can't stop them anyway.

(01:23:07):
But I will say putting my funding hat on,
on the 1031 side specifically,
we don't fund that.
Like that's just, it's too out there on the risk curve.
I don't really, the business models aren't clear.
I think there'll be a load of shit that falls by the wayside.
Maybe it makes more sense on like an open source nonprofit side.

(01:23:30):
But I will say that we haven't really seen many compelling,
if any compelling applications to OpenSats on that front.
But I know you think that at some point mempools are going to be full and never empty.
I don't know if I believe that anymore.
Oh, really?
No, I think I still believe that, but it's been hard out here.
You were right for a long time.
And then I wasn't.
Yeah.
But if we did get to that point where it was really hard to get into, you know, the next block or, you know, anything really, it's, you're going to need something else.

(01:23:59):
And like, there's obviously...
But I think there's an argument that, there's an argument that in that environment, and once again, I, look, I think the only thing more scarce than our time is,
time and then bitcoin is our time and one of the ways i protect my time in bitcoin is
i try not to waste too much time on like white papers and theoretical stuff

(01:24:24):
until there's like actually a working product in my hand so i will admit
um that like i haven't spent a lot of time like diving deep exactly into like bitfm and some of
these other proposals on how to do this type of stuff because i want to see it and use it yeah and
I guess there is the risk that if they could get priced out of those transactions too.

(01:24:45):
But that's where I was going with this, is my basic understanding
is that it would get quite expensive for those setups without a soft fork.
The way that they're kind of hacking it in without doing a change to Bitcoin at the consensus level
gets quite expensive.
And then once again, you're better off using Tron.
If Tron is 100x cheaper, they're going to use Tron instead.

(01:25:07):
Matt O'Dell says use Tron.
No, I'm not saying that.
honestly i think people should just stay on success like once again i wonder like what the
use case is like i first of all i've never used tether um i understand that there's places in the
world that people want access to dollars they can't get access to dollars to the traditional
financial rails and they want to use tether if you do just understand the trust dynamic i would

(01:25:28):
say that the trust dynamic in like chase bank or something um it's kind of similar if anything maybe
chase is more likely to freeze your funds than tether is but like in terms of like defy stuff
and everything like i think that's completely overrated like i think if you want dollars in
your bank account from a loan then you pick a trusted counterparty and you like get the dollars

(01:25:50):
in your bank account because of course there's going to be trust relying on it and most of the
times when people say like oh this is like a trustless loan or whatever it's like not and it
just adds a bunch of complexity that you can get rugged by the complexity as well um so you're just
overcomplicating it when eventually you're dealing with a centralized party anyway.

(01:26:10):
So I question what the use cases are.
Is the use case like a sushi swap or something where you're trading meme coins with each
other natively on Bitcoin?
Who the fuck gives a shit?
Yeah, no one cares.
I've not heard sushi swap name in a long time.
So I was speaking to Luke Groman this morning.
Nice.
It was a fucking great conversation.
Did you ask him what kind of note he runs?

(01:26:31):
I don't want to speak for Luke
but I doubt he's running a node
Nor should he have to
I guess if he doesn't want to
It's his prerogative
But he was saying something super interesting
So he's been talking about this idea
that the Middle East is shifting away from the petrodollar
after Israel bombed Qatar
Yeah
And that obviously has a massive impact

(01:26:54):
on the US treasury market
Right
And I do wonder if Tether ends up
being like the geopolitical play that the US makes
in terms of trying to back up their debt.
Yeah, I mean, they already kind of are.
Do you think this would be the weirdest world possible?
We're in a simulation,
but could Tether end up being the reserve currency of the world?

(01:27:17):
Even if it's for an interim period?
I mean, no, probably not.
I mean, I don't even think Tether thinks...
Actions speak louder than words, right?
so like what is tether doing tether is uh buying treasuries to back up their stable coin their usd

(01:27:37):
token inherently unstable it's just going down and personally power over time um they're buying
treasuries to back their usd token they're taking the the interest off of that the yield off of that
and that's their cash flow that's their business they're providing the usd tokens to users usd

(01:27:58):
tokens aren't providing the users with the interest so then they're making
you know 20 plus billion a year it's like 70 employees just pure profit and then what are
they doing with it they are buying bitcoin and gold right so they're making a calculated
very clear investment strategy that they think that they're in basically a transitory business

(01:28:20):
and then ultimately we will move to either bitcoin standard or gold standard or some
mix of the both maybe mix of the both is most likely um so that's what they clearly i think is
what they think is going to happen um i think the dollar is in such a bad position that there's just

(01:28:42):
no way out besides just inflation and irrelevance um i think tether slows it down but it doesn't
really matter how many treasuries they buy like they're so far away from being able to like
reverse the pain um so then the question becomes like do they switch to do they release a new so

(01:29:03):
they have i forget what they call it but they have tether gold um which is gold back tether
so they switch to that um do they have like a different tether that's a basket of bitcoin
and gold and stuff and then that becomes the reserve currency i think all of these are just like

(01:29:24):
complicated like rube goldberg machines that like don't need to exist when bitcoin exists
and so i think what happens is um i mean like luke obviously spends more time on this type of stuff
than I do. But we've already watched the move away from the dollar. I would pinpoint a critical

(01:29:46):
inflection point was when we weaponized the financial system using sanctions against Russia
and their treasuries. So this trend has been accelerating. It has been happening for a while
and it has been accelerating. And so what I think happens is the countries in the non-U.S. sphere
of influence or countries that just in general are losing trust in the US.

(01:30:11):
Are we recording?
I tried to do that without you noticing.
We'll move to a non-US method of trade.
What does that look like?
Maybe it's gold.
Maybe it's some kind of BRICS currency, like just a separate reserve currency that's managed

(01:30:31):
by all of them together.
Maybe China's the main leader of it.
But in either situation, whether it's a multi-country fiat competitor or gold, or a mixture of both, where gold backs a multi-currency fiat competitor, it requires trust.
And so what I think happens is maybe they first move to something that requires trust.

(01:30:54):
And once again, that could be managed by Tether.
Maybe it's not managed by Tether.
It doesn't really matter.
That's just a footnote.
Something that requires trust.
and then trust breaks down and then bitcoin stands as the only way to interchange globally
without trust right like can can can long term china and russia trust each other can china and

(01:31:15):
brazil trust each other like no i don't think so can india and china trust each other i don't think
so and even if they're settling in gold that requires a lot of trust because you're basically
like if you want to settle physically you're just flying fucking planes of gold everywhere
Bitcoin is strictly superior to that.
So I think in a world where the US currency continues to erode in faith, value, people are going to look for an option that doesn't require trust.

(01:31:47):
And that option is Bitcoin.
And so there might be a transitory period where we move to something in between, but I don't think it'll be very long just because Bitcoin exists.
if Bitcoin didn't exist
maybe it would be longer
it's funny
you love the mandibles
American Harder Lawyers
I was just really
protecting myself
are you trying to say it
no I was trying not to say it
Harder Lawyers

(01:32:07):
reminds me that
he's the person
that told you about mandibles
yeah on my show
on Robert O'Rica
how was it
it was on TFTC
but yeah it was me
him and Marty
It was like three hours into a very drunk episode.
I actually listened to that episode back probably like a year ago.
It was a good one.
But in that...
And Alex Gladstein recommended it to me too.
To be fair, Hoddle recommended it first and then Alex recommended it second.

(01:32:30):
I was like, okay, if they both recommend it, I should read it.
And now you've become the Mandibles Influencer.
I mean, look, I think it's not like the best book, but it's an easy read.
and i do think the u.s is going through an increasingly inflationary environment it's
pretty obvious if you have eyes um and she just kind of spells it out for you and it and then
after that but i think it it won't be as bad as what's in the book um because people will have the

(01:32:56):
option for bitcoin like what people don't realize is when argentina goes through hyperinflation
it's really bad for the people but the fact that they can escape to the dollar makes it less bad
in a world without Bitcoin
if the US went through
an inflationary period
hyperinflation
and they didn't have

(01:33:17):
anywhere to escape to
it'd be really really bad
but if you have Bitcoin
to escape to
it'd still be bad
but it lessens the pain
and it gives you a path forward
but in that book
a stable way to move forward
in that book
it's basically about the US
going through hyperinflation
and they have a bank or
which is essentially bricks
yeah
and Bitcoin fails in the book
yeah
at the end of the book,

(01:33:39):
spoiler alert,
turn this off now
if you've not read it.
You should go and read it.
But the last page
is basically saying
and then the increased tax
and everything kind of
started again.
Do you think
if we do go through
something Mandibles-esque
that Bitcoin surviving
and thriving in that
can change the story?
Yeah, 100%.

(01:33:59):
I think, I mean,
I would implore people
to read the book
and then they should go
listen to my
Still Dispatch
with Lionel Shriver
uh the author um where we talk about this stuff and i was like very soft touch on bitcoin with
her it was like only at the end um but first of all she deserves some leniency because when was

(01:34:20):
the one of the book come out you're the mandibles influencer i think the book came out um i'm on
airplane mode i'm gonna say the book came out in like 2015 so she was writing it in like 2013 or
something um so like i mean if you're a casual observer like it's almost logical to assume that

(01:34:42):
bitcoin was going to fail at that point um did you look it up 2016 it came out yeah so she was
like writing in 2014 2015 2015 we fell from we were in high of a thousand in 2013 we fell all
the way to like 150 ish in 2015 if you're a casual observer like of course bitcoin's dead by like
whenever the book's set in like 2032 or 2035 or whatever um so like i don't falter for that and

(01:35:08):
actually it's kind of cool that she even was aware of it enough to like just it was in passing she's
like oh bitcoin failed um but yes i do think bitcoin changes that dynamic like she had first
of all in it she has gold confiscation which i think will likely happen in this type of situation
much harder to confiscate bitcoin bitcoin confiscation will probably also happen but

(01:35:29):
it's just much more difficult to confiscate bitcoin period strictly better than gold in
that situation you want to cross the border with gold what are you going to do it's very very
difficult bitcoin's super easy um so so bitcoin provides this base this escape that people have
second of all it uh really uh increases the potency of jurisdictional arbitrage and competition

(01:35:54):
because states that are less predatory to their residents will naturally encourage more
Bitcoin wealth to move into them. And I think in that type of failure mode, right? Like I think
the fiat currency experiment is actually quite young in the course of human history. And yes,

(01:36:20):
like if you don't think something like bitcoin will succeed then we probably will just repeat
another fiat cycle or maybe we switch to gold you know um but then gold has its own issues which results in us going back to fiat eventually but with Bitcoin there a different path Will there be taxes Yeah of course there probably still be taxes
But I think in a world where people have more agency and control over their own money,

(01:36:47):
that relationship between governments and taxation and whatnot will be ideally less predatory
because it'll be more competitive.
And the last thing I would add is the mandibles is mostly focused on New York.
I think in general, like in a societal degradation collapse type of scenario, a hyperinflation type of scenario, a scenario where trust and institutions break down, like dense population centers are just going to strictly do worse wherever you are.

(01:37:19):
So it's important to realize that that's from where the lens is.
and we have no idea
like in that scenario
like what's going on
in like Tennessee
for instance
or the American West.
When I was at your place
earlier this year
one of the things
we were talking about
before we did the show
was the idea that

(01:37:39):
what if we're wrong
and what if gold
was always the play?
Yeah.
Do you think that's likely?
non-zero chance
probably
I mean I don't
I own some gold jewelry
you're wearing it
yeah this is
madex.art

(01:38:00):
if you want to pick up
there's an end nav on madex stuff
dope bitcoiner jewelry
probably will not outperform bitcoin
but it's cool
yeah I mean like gold has been ripping
I think there's two ways to look at it.
First of all, gold is Lindy.

(01:38:22):
The market buying gold is showing that there's obviously demand
for an independent store of value asset that is not sovereign controlled,
which is like the Bitcoin value prop, right?
Digital gold.
Like one of the most well-known Bitcoin value props.
So as a Bitcoiner, that's a good sign.
directionally correct. The other piece is like market cap wise, it's pretty crazy how much,

(01:38:50):
how big of a move it was. It's having like one Bitcoin market cap every week at the moment.
Yeah, exactly. So like people that think like Bitcoin can't go from like 120K to like 250K in
a matter of a week or so are like just objectively wrong based on that gold depreciation. But yeah,

(01:39:11):
I mean, look, I'm humble enough to not rule that out.
Who knows?
Obviously, actions speak louder than words.
If I thought that was the most likely case,
I would just sell all my Bitcoin for gold.
Haven't done that.
But yeah, that also wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Financially, it would suck,

(01:39:32):
but especially in the short and medium term.
Second of all, I don't know how employable I would be.
You can't be a gold influencer.
I'd have to work on a construction crew.
something um because my entire career professional career has been bitcoin focused
so that would be embarrassing but we'd make it work but like it wouldn't be the it's a it's a

(01:39:52):
world on the gold standard is way better than a world on a fiat standard 100 just like strictly
for my kids but i think bitcoin is superior in every way and i think the market will figure out
eventually that's just one of those um i call it like my like 2 a.m you're like drinking with a
a Bitcoin buddy at 2 a.m. and you just...
What if I'm wrong?
Yeah, what if we're wrong?
What if it's gold?

(01:40:14):
It's like you're directionally correct, but wrong.
But I think that'll probably be the other way.
Although I think gold people will be fine.
I think there's a world where just hard money
as a whole wins out.
Yeah, I mean, I think the gold devaluation
into Bitcoin is slower.
Yeah.
Like gold isn't going to be like removed

(01:40:34):
from society overnight.
There's always...
there's a there's a value there and just the fact that's thousands of years old as a monetary asset
I am I do the conversation that I been thinking about a lot lately is I guess just to flip the script is top user adoption of Bitcoin

(01:41:05):
It kind of feels like it's stalled a little bit,
like of real Bitcoin.
And I mean, I don't even know what the question is.
What do you mean top-level adoption, though?
Is that people buying Bitcoin or people using Bitcoin?
How many people do you think own 10 million sats worth of Bitcoin in self-custody?

(01:41:30):
So that's $12,000.
I've thought about this from like how many people own one Bitcoin.
That number is really low.
Yeah.
That's a tiny fucking number.
I would get, so this is where.
This is a more important number than,
like Bitcoin is not just for people
that have more than $120,000 in savings.

(01:41:51):
Like you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin.
You'll all have more than $120,000 in savings
if you wait long enough.
I don't know.
I think this is where,
I love the stuff that Troy Cross does
in terms of those surveys.
I think it's interesting.
I think Ella Huff's done some cool stuff with Cornell
in terms of like collecting data.
That was a cool episode you guys did.
But I think this is the area
where the numbers are just way off.
I think it's way lower.

(01:42:12):
It's way lower.
So I was actually talking to Checkmate about this privately, not on the show.
So he has like a chart I'll put up on the screen of people who, not right now, on the video.
Of people who own more than, I think it's maybe point, maybe it's 10 million.
Is it addresses or?

(01:42:32):
Addresses, yeah.
So this is where it gets really hard.
And I think it's like more than one address.
There's like 25 million addresses that hold more than that.
And so if you had to try and.
So that's the ceiling.
But in reality, I would guess.
But that's not even the upper bound
because someone might own 10 addresses
that have a million sets in them.
Correct.

(01:42:52):
So it's actually not even the upper bound.
I kind of want to pull this.
Oh, I won't pull it.
But it is probably less than that.
I would guess maybe three to five million people.
Yeah.
I mean, it's mostly a gut thing
because you're ultimately making guesses.
What do you think?
i think over what bitcoin is probably less than 200 000 people like 100 to 2000 200 000 people

(01:43:18):
and um in a single address or no not in a single it's just self-custody okay self-custody one
bitcoin 100 000 to 200 000 people hopefully they're not holding it in one address like you
should be using multiple addresses it's just better practice um most modern wallets for years
have defaulted to that so like we should assume most people are doing that um 10 million sets

(01:43:41):
self-custody to twelve thousand dollars at the time of this recording yeah like five to ten million
people and so when we go back to our earlier conversation about what does success look like
like i feel like that's the number to look at because first of all holding is using

(01:44:05):
you're using as a savings mechanism you're going to eventually spend it at some point otherwise
you can't realize the value you need both spending and holding they're both using
bitcoin that's actually a quantifiable metric an objective metric
one percent of the population would be a hundred million people
so if we're counting that as like

(01:44:29):
a user is someone that holds at least twelve thousand dollars worth of bitcoin
and ultimately spends it at some point in the future
if we want to get to five percent we have to hit what 500 million
so we need we need a 100x growth just to hit five percent if that original assumption is correct

(01:44:56):
and so i would just say to people it's like this is a long fucking grind this is a century project
right like this this is something we say internally at 1031 it something we definitely believe in open sets it like we building for the next century yeah you need to It a long long grind There are less users out there than you think there are

(01:45:18):
And that number will be way smaller now.
We need to grow that pie.
We definitely need to grow that pie, but that number will be smaller now than it would have been
if we hadn't had ETFs and treasury companies and things like that.
Yeah. I mean, I think there's two different dynamics there, right? I think the ETFs definitely
increase the purchasing power of Bitcoin. 100%. I think the treasury companies do as well.

(01:45:44):
And I think the purchasing power of Bitcoin has been the largest, when Bitcoin price goes up,
it's the largest driver of new user growth. It's hard to argue that's a net negative. I think it
definitely, in individual cases, has slowed down retail coming into actual self-custody Bitcoin.
um i think if someone gets wrecked on a treasury company in fidelity their transition to move into

(01:46:09):
self-custody bitcoin is actually much more difficult than if they got wrecked on eath if
they got wrecked on eath and they're in ledger or coinbase they can just like press the swap
button and go into bitcoin yeah fidelity they have to like withdraw it and do it or whatever
um the other piece here is that etfs i wouldn't i mean competitively i know they want to offer
in-kind withdrawals where you can just withdraw bitcoin from the etf without a tax hit

(01:46:31):
didn't BlackRock announce that?
they would love to do it, they just haven't yet
oh I thought they announced it recently
they announced they want to
I don't think any users are doing it right now
are able to do it
they have it in Australia
so in that case that actually would directly provide a path
to people
but I think that's the number we want to grow

(01:46:53):
and I think it's important for us to be realistic
about where we currently are
and I think the way you accelerate
that i think something like bitcoin that has this natural network effect growth growth engine in the
purchasing price increase is if like we do basically nothing we'll probably still get

(01:47:17):
global adoption at some point in the future um just because like right now even if there's only
10 million of us and we're all stacking like we're gonna drive that price there's not there's
not that much bitcoin out there right we're still going to drive the price up and as we drive the
price up like more bitcoiners will come in um so it's not like i'm not like coming at it from like

(01:47:38):
uh um like a ponzi economics kind of point of view it's like oh we need more new money into the system
um so we want we want new money in the system because we want more people to have bitcoin yeah
no no but so what i'm saying is like i think it's going to happen regardless
but i would like to accelerate it i think life is short i don't want my kids to be like 70 years old

(01:48:00):
by the time they're able to like really take advantage of like a beautiful bitcoin global
economy that they can like spend and save without permission on whatever they want to do
and the best way to accelerate is to pour money and support into the system whether that's on the
for-profit side or whether that's on the non-profit side because we need both we need foundational
open source software and open protocols and then we need private profitable ethical aligned

(01:48:25):
businesses that scale those out even further in a sustainable way um and that's what i'm that's my
that is what i've been mission focused on doing and then i have the two tangential pieces which is
bitcoin park in the podcast for education and bitcoin policy institute to keep us out of the
gulags and like that is that is my playbook it's open out there for the world that's how

(01:48:50):
how I'm thinking about things.
But we need to accelerate.
Time is of the essence.
It's not an emergency,
but sooner would be better.
I love it.
Bitcoin's winning.
We just need to win
a little bit harder.
Let's win faster.
I love it, man.
Thank you for doing this.
Thanks for having me.
Should we go and drink some beers?
Thanks for coming back to Nashville.
Of course, man.
I love it here.
Cheers.
Cheers.

(01:49:20):
Thank you.

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