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December 20, 2024 105 mins

“Bitcoin over the last five years has returned 55% CAGR. If you get a 10th of a Bitcoin right now, just sit on a 10th of a Bitcoin… You go 20 years… That's $64 f***ing million dollars.”

On this Bitcoin Talk episode of THE Bitcoin Podcast, Walker talks with George Bodine. George is a Bitcoiner and artist, but he’s also been an oil field worker, cab driver, miner, cop, Navy fighter pilot, Top Gun graduate, and airline Captain… needless to say he’s a fascinating guy. We get into a bunch of topics today including the transformative power of Bitcoin, the urgency for individuals to invest, Bitcoin market dynamics, the role of Bitcoin, ETFs, the importance of understanding dollar-cost averaging (DCA) and UTXO management, the strategic bitcoin reserve and first mover advantage for nation states, and the future of MicroStrategy as a Bitcoin bank. We also discuss the future of Bitcoin as a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account.

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Bitcoin over the last five years has returned 55% Kager.

(00:04):
If you get a tenth of a Bitcoin right now, just sit on a tenth of a Bitcoin over and
you know your audience I'm sure is not old farts like me, you're probably younger.
Well, guess what?
You go 20 years, 20 years.
That's 64 fucking million dollars.
That's enough.
It's plenty in today's purchasing power.
Now I don't know what it's going to be then.
That's cut bucks.
It could be like 200 million.

(00:25):
Who knows?
You buy in a cup of coffee, but in today's dollars in purchasing power, that tenth of
a Bitcoin is 64 million dollars.
Just let it sit there.
That's enough.
But you know, you're going to struggle to come up with 100 grand when Bitcoin's a million
a point.
And people that don't understand the train's leaving, anybody that's listening to this
or watching it, you're making a bet right now.

(00:46):
It's going to be about 30 days until President-elect Trump becomes President Trump.
And when he does, if you're betting on the wrong side of this, you're going to have your
eyes watered.
You're going to sit there.
We're going to put the dial on 11, cook noodles, and you're going to be sitting there going,
what the fuck just happened?
Because it's going to take off.
The train is leaving the station.

(01:08):
And in about 30 days, you're making a bet right now.
If you're not into Bitcoin or if you're trading your Bitcoin or if you're like these dipshits
that are selling as it gets to 73K, you've got to pull your head out and look around.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.

(01:30):
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 875-490 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin and whatever else
comes up.
And today, that guest is George Baudin.
George is a Bitcoiner and an incredibly talented artist, but he's also been an oil field worker,

(01:56):
cab driver, minor, cop, Navy fighter pilot, top gun graduate and an airline captain.
Needless to say, he is a fascinating guy.
We get into a bunch of topics today, including the transformative power of Bitcoin, the urgency
for individuals to invest, Bitcoin market dynamics, the role of Bitcoin ETFs, the importance

(02:17):
of understanding dollar cost averaging and UTXO management, the strategic Bitcoin reserve
and the first mover advantage of nation states, and the future of micro strategy as a Bitcoin
bank.
We also discuss more broadly the future of Bitcoin as a store of value, medium of exchange
and unit of account.
I think you're going to enjoy the heck out of this conversation.

(02:40):
I know I did.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin Podcast wherever you're listening
or watching, but personally, I recommend you check out fountain.fm because not only can
you send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters to give value for value, but you can earn
Bitcoin just for listening to podcasts.
Check out Bitcoin Podcast.net for episodes and additional resources.

(03:00):
Head to the show notes to grab discount links for my sponsor, Bitbox, or go directly to
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Send an email to hello at Bitcoin podcast.net.
If you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, and if
you find this show valuable, consider giving value back by giving a zap on no stir or a

(03:23):
boost on fountain.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with George Baudin.
George, and it's, it's good to see you.
I wish it was in the flesh, but at least you're coming through crystal clear.
That's what I'll have to do for now, but how, how's it going?

(03:44):
How's life?
Life's great.
I'm, you know, I'm, I'm really in a great place right now.
You're looking at my studio for the viewers right now.
This is where I work.
And I'm, in fact, this painting behind me on the easel there is something I just started.
It's going to be, believe it or not, this is going to be a painting art piece that mines

(04:04):
Bitcoin.
So I'm going to explain that a little more.
I'm going to have a bit acts, uh, Mars lander as part of the art piece.
And the Mars lander has like these neat little lights.
They glow neon lights and they've got a little miner that runs back and forth mining the
Bitcoin and then it flashes the Bitcoin price.
It's going to be in the painting.

(04:26):
So, uh, there's a plaque that goes next to it and it says, uh, this art, this painting
is mining Bitcoin.
As you view this painting, the Bitcoin it produces is going to the hardware wallet of
the person that owns this painting.
That's what it's going to be kind of like that.
And so whoever owns it, you know, they can just send it to their, whatever, lightning

(04:49):
wall or whatever.
I mean, that is pretty slick.
I've got to say, I've been wanting to get one of those, uh, bid acts is I need to just
pull the trigger and maybe I'll, maybe I'll get a couple of them, uh, and take her around
because that's a, it's a, it's a pretty sweet little product.
Like making it just super accessible for folks.
It's not going to cost you as much as a brand new ant miner, obviously, or bit main.

(05:11):
So that's, that's sweet.
But I've got, I haven't heard of a, a painting that is mining Bitcoin yet.
This sounds like it might be a first.
I don't know about that.
I just know it's going to be a lot of fun.
Yeah.
Maybe a fractal encrypt has put together something yet in one of those intricate designs that
also has a Bitcoin miner in there.
I wouldn't put it past him, but no, that's a, that's sweet.

(05:33):
And I've, I've got a couple of, uh, of your pieces here in the house.
They're, they're out of frame behind me, but, uh, the ones from, uh, that was from the
Bitcoin is Venice series that you did.
They're not the originals, obviously, but they're part of the limited prints.
And I just, I, I love those.
And for folks that don't know, uh, you did the cover for, uh, Bitcoin is Venice, uh,
as a, as an actual painting first.

(05:54):
And it's, I mean, it's beautiful.
Yeah.
I did that.
And then, uh, in fact, there's a kind of a neat story behind that because, uh, there
was a, uh, the author, Alan Farrington, and, uh, I didn't mention, but, uh, Sasha too,
but, uh, uh, Alan, he ended up, uh, kind of helping orange pill me into self custody.

(06:15):
That is, he showed me and demonstrated how easy it was to actually get Bitcoin through
the base layer.
I'd never seen that before.
And I tell you, it just blew me away.
It was like one of those sit on your ass moments.
And I thought, this is incredible.
And it helped solidify my, uh, descent into the rabbit hole where I've been mining down
there ever since.
Did you, uh, did you meet Alan as a result of him commissioning your work or was that,

(06:39):
was that how you guys got connected?
No, he actually had bought a painting for a friend, uh, just, uh, one of my floral paintings.
I, I'm represented in galleries around the country and he just bought one and connected
with me.
And then of course I was already into the Bitcoin and he was, and we connected through Twitter.
And the next thing you know, uh, he commissioned the piece and I'm really happy with that painting.

(07:00):
He's got paintings in the permanent collection with, uh, Bitcoin magazines.
I don't know if they call, I think they'd call it an art museum now.
They're trying to build a space for permanent collection.
And that's awesome.
And it's, it's such an incredible piece and just like an incredible, actually a series
of pieces.
There's a few, there's four total that go with it or a four total from that series, right?

(07:21):
Yeah.
Thanks.
It's, it's, it's something else.
You know, and I love this too.
I think the first time you and I met was at a dinner organized by Larry LaParde in, in
Miami, maybe that was 2022.
Is that sound right?
It was.
Yeah.
That was a, I met a nice shout out to Greg Foss for, for inviting Carla and I to that

(07:45):
dinner.
Larry was organizing, but that was just such a good time.
And you know, I, I meet you.
You've got on a pretty, uh, pretty awesome jacket like a blazer that was just over the
top and you're like, I'm, I'm George, I'm George the artist.
And I was like, okay, cool.
Like, you know, and then I got to know a little bit of your backstory.
And I was like, who the heck is this guy?
Like what you've, you've lived quite a, uh, a rich life and you continue to live quite

(08:10):
a rich life.
And I was just, uh, I was blown away and I'm glad that we've gotten the chance to, to
hang out a good amount since then.
And now finally, since I've started, you know, yet another Bitcoin podcast, I've got you
on here too.
It could be better, man.
It couldn't be any better.
I, you know, I think this is a really important time right now in Bitcoin.

(08:31):
And I think these podcasts are really important also.
I think that we've got a limited amount of time here to get people either get their
shit squared away or get them on board or whatever you want to call it.
But, uh, time is running out.
The train is going to leave the station soon.
Yeah.
I have a really unusual background.
And so we should stay right at the beginning before we start out here that this is not

(08:52):
financial advice in any way, shape or form.
You know, I'm often the village idiot when it comes to investing.
The only thing I'll say is with Bitcoin and, uh, my recent, uh, game playing with micro
strategy, you know, I've nailed it on these two assets.
And in fact, that's all my wealth is in is a Bitcoin or a Bitcoin proxy now with micro

(09:14):
strategy, but I have everything in Bitcoin.
So yeah, you know, it's, uh, it is important.
I think for people, there's so many people that talk about Bitcoin, especially now that
Bitcoin's, you know, pumping up in price or I guess actually now it's, it's crashed today.
It may be dead, you know, it's all the way down to $98,000 a coin or whatever it is.

(09:34):
And, you know, oh dear Lord, you know, it must be over.
But you see so many people coming out of the woodwork, uh, with the, you know, the bull
market cycle of the FUD, right?
Which is, well, this is clearly, you know, it's, you know, Ponzi scheme clearly going
to crash, crash and go to nothing.
It's, you know, oh, it went from the government's going to ban Bitcoin to, well, this is terrible

(09:56):
that the government might be buying Bitcoin.
And like the narratives just keep evolving for why Bitcoin is terrible.
And same, same people come out of the woodwork that Peter shifts, but also new people come
out who are, you know, financial experts in their field to tell you how bad Bitcoin is.
And it's very obvious that they, there's no skin in the game for them.
It's like, if you think that Bitcoin's going to zero, why don't you short it?

(10:17):
You know, go, like, go ahead.
There's no way for you to do that now.
But I think it's so, I wish that people would ignore that kind of noise, maybe make fun
of it a little bit, have a laugh with it.
But for the person, the people that are just getting into Bitcoin, I think that kind of
advice is so damaging because they're not getting an honest answer from people.

(10:38):
They're not getting honest advice and they're getting advice from people who don't have
skin in the game and frankly haven't spent much time looking into this.
They just have a knee jerk reaction, Ponzi, Tulip, whatever, whatever.
They need to be listening to people who Bitcoin has actually changed their lives for the better.
And I think that you are one of those people.
You've got a kind of a great story there and Bitcoin is now really allowing you to live

(11:01):
that life that you want.
But maybe for folks that don't know you, George, can you tell us a little bit about and start
wherever you want with this?
Because I know it's a long one, but you know, who are you?
How did you get here today to be, you know, George, the artist who is also a hardcore
coiner?
So I do have an interesting background in the sense that it's not a traditional finance

(11:24):
background or anything even really remotely close to that.
I ended up, I lived out West in Colorado, didn't graduate from high school.
I actually was, I mean, I was expelled from high school, kicked out for hitting a teacher,
unfortunately.
So yeah, and you know, the funny thing is in today's world, you know, that could have

(11:48):
been the end of my life right there.
I could have just stopped 17 years old.
That's it.
You get into the system, maybe out of my parents might have lost me, you know, who knows what
could have happened.
But in those days, you know, I was very fortunate and my parents said you probably should not
go back to school.
So I was 17 years old.
I'd always loved flying.

(12:09):
My dad loved flying and he said, hey, I'll pay for you to get a private pilot's license.
After that, you're on your own.
But if you want to, and I'd always loved planes.
So I jumped at the chance and I got my license.
It was very cheap in those days.
I mean, it was like 800 bucks or something, or maybe less.
And it was great.
And I loved it.

(12:29):
But when you're done, there's nothing you can do with that if you want to do something
like in the commercial flying field.
You've got to go on.
You've got to build ours.
So I flew airplanes for a guy that was like a used car dealer with airplanes.
So I'm 17 years old.
He'd give me a bus ticket.
I'd go out somewhere and I'd, he'd buy a plane, sight unseen, and then I'd go and pick it

(12:49):
up.
Well, they were all different airplanes.
So you know, many a time, I'm not making this up.
I was in the cockpit.
I would get the owner's manual out and I'd read to how to start it, how to change the
gas, you know, from tank to tank, stuff like that.
And I did that, I got my 250 hours commercial license.
And at the time I went to college, then I started college again out west, but I dropped

(13:13):
out of college.
So I'm high school, dropped out, dropped out of college.
And I ended up working the oil fields out west.
And that was an interesting experience.
And then after a while, I had applied out west.
I became a cop out there in a cowboy, kind of a really rough, really rough town.

(13:34):
I mean, with cowboys and Indians and I, I'm not, I mean, real ones.
One time I went to a bar fight at night and outside in front of the bar, and these bars
had bullet holes in them.
Outside of the bar was a guy with his horse tied up to the bar.
I mean, that's the kind of place it was.
And in fact, you couldn't go in by yourself wearing a uniform.
They'd kick the shit out of you.
So I did that for quite a while.

(13:56):
And then I ended up drifting south down into Colorado and I worked as a miner, not, not
a Bitcoin miner.
I mean, an actual real miner between a mile and two miles down.
So it's really deep mining.
And I did that.
And then, you know, I know it sounds like I was trying to become like the world's most
interesting man, but, you know, really, I just, I just didn't know what to do in my life.

(14:19):
And, you know, if somebody would have looked at me working down in that mine two miles
down there and walking around in the mud and covered in muck and just living a crummy life,
I mean, they would have thought, what a loser.
So I felt like a loser after a while.
And I went back to college.
I drove a cab at night in Denver and made a lot of money to help myself in college.

(14:43):
At the time, the Navy was hurting for pilots.
And I ended up getting in the Navy.
You're too young, but there's an old movie called Officer and a Gentleman.
That's the kind of training I went to.
You show up and there's a Marine DI and he gets like four inches in front of your face
and starts screaming at you.
And I made it through that.
And because of my flying background, I actually graduated number one in my flight training

(15:05):
and I got to pick F-18s, Hornets, which is that plane that was in the last movie, the
Top Gun movie.
And that was, that was shit hot.
I mean, that was a lot of fun to fly that thing.
And then I did go through Top Gun and I ended up being an instructor, an adversary instructor.
So I got to fly those really neat little planes that were in the first movie.

(15:26):
I don't know if you remember, they were really fun.
I mean, you would go around real fast with your hair on fire and just pretend you were
a Russian and attack the guy.
It was to blast.
And then I got out and I flew for Delta.
And then after that, I became a captain.
I flown all over with Delta all around the world.
But unfortunately, I also just like painting here.
I like to do creative things.

(15:47):
And I built a chopper by myself, you know, did the welding and all that.
But unfortunately, it was dangerous as hell.
And I had a bad accident with a traumatic brain injury.
So that ended my flying career and I was kind of retired medically, which wasn't a bad deal
for me actually.
And I started doing the painting full time then.
So it's worked out really good.

(16:09):
But you know, the thing is, the thing to take from this story is you can always reinvent
yourself.
You know, you're not, I know it seems sometimes like things are almost at a dead end.
One of the beauties about Bitcoin is it gives you so much freedom.
I mean, look at me today.
You know, I'm all in on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the royal flush.
So when you understand that, you just take your chips, you put them in the table and

(16:32):
you're done.
And you know what?
That's what it's like.
And now I don't have to sit there.
I don't lay awake wondering about what the Fed's going to say next week.
I don't give a shit what they do with the money supply.
I don't worry about earnings reports, 10Ks, all the stuff that I used to study, all the
MACRA stuff.
I don't even do it now.
I just relax and enjoy myself.

(16:55):
Sorry for that.
I thought we did the answer.
Not at all.
That's a, I always say that this show is a safe space for, you know, long-winded answers,
rants, tangents, anything you want to go on.
There are no rules on this show.
But I appreciate that background.
I think that's such a good message too that like you do not have to be what you are today

(17:17):
forever, right?
Yeah, you know, that's not to say like that you, you know, maybe you like who you are
right now.
And that's fine.
If you like it, you know, keep going.
But for a lot of people out there, I think especially folks who are in my generation
right now and even in, you know, the Gen Z, the Zoomers, I think there's a lot of feeling
of like you were told that you have to go on this certain path, you know, and that these

(17:43):
are the steps that you must take if you want to be a successful, well-rounded member of
society and that it's this particular, you know, path, you know, and get good grades
and follow the rules and then, you know, graduate from high school and then go to college and
get good grades and follow the rules and then, you know, apply for jobs and work hard at
those jobs and put in lots of long hours and do that just, you know, for the next 45 years.

(18:05):
And then you can finally, then you can finally, you know, take a break, you know, after you've,
you know, crushed your spirit as a cog in the corporate machine for your entire life.
And I think people are starting to just wise up to that a bit and realize that, you know
what, maybe this whole thing is a bit of a scam.
I'm supposed to, you know, as Mahler's has said, you know, I'm supposed to work for money

(18:27):
that another guy can print for free.
I'm supposed to put all of my energy and my creative potential into creating for a corporate
behemoth that doesn't give a shit about me.
And I'm supposed to just kind of do that forever and accept that.
But I think people are realizing, especially Bitcoiners are kind of the vanguard of this,
that you don't have to do that.
There are other ways to go through life.

(18:50):
And as you said, you can reinvent yourself, you can grow, you should try to grow, right?
Whether that's professionally or, you know, creatively as a side project or even starting
a another silly, you know, Bitcoin podcast, like there are infinite ways to grow.
And I think that that's just a, it's a, it's a wonderful message.
And I'm curious too, you know, how did you end up like, what was the moment where you

(19:14):
realized, okay, I need to go all in on, on Bitcoin?
Like I've got the Royal Flush.
What was your, you know, your orange pill moment, your, your aha moment, your eureka
moment, whatever you want to call it.
Well, you know, it kind of ties in with what you were just talking about, because it is
important to just keep learning.
You've got to always challenge yourself.

(19:35):
You can't stop and, you know, from the time that I first, well, I heard about Bitcoin
in 2012, I think, and I thought it was stupid and scam all the typical stuff.
So I just blew it off.
But Lynn Alden came back.
She started in 2017.
I ran her blog on her blog on Bitcoin and I thought, yeah, she's not into it.

(19:57):
I can just tell.
I just passed it up again.
But unlike me, she kept studying and learning.
And you know, the next thing I know, it's like February or so of 2020, she comes out
with another article and I thought, uh-oh, it's changed.
I need some of this.
And you know, I started studying right there and initially I bought some Bitcoin.

(20:19):
I don't know if you remember that time.
It was really cheap and it started going way up real fast.
And I sold it.
I sold all of it.
I had it like three days.
And I thought, what the hell?
Like two days later, I was staring at the screen.
I remember thinking, what the fuck did I do that for?
Why did I sell that?
And I couldn't answer the question.
So I just kept studying.
And every month, year, I just got more and more convicted.

(20:45):
And I can't tell you when I actually pushed all my chips in.
But it wasn't very long after that.
And obviously, you know, volatility is very difficult to deal with.
And you guys have got some great videos on the downside of volatility.
But on the upside, it's difficult too.

(21:06):
It shakes people out.
You know, you mentioned the fact that Bitcoin price is down today.
You know, long-term holders, the people that we often think of as not selling their Bitcoin,
they've sold a million coins since, uh, like about 60K up to where we are.
They're selling 30,000 coins a day right now, long-term holders.

(21:27):
Now if you look at the money that's behind that sale, it's not much.
It's like they're in that 56 to 65K cohort, not the really deep long-term holders.
But it's still a significant pressure on the market.
I'm surprised that the market has held up as well as it has and that there's this continuous
buy behind all this cell pressure.

(21:48):
It's pretty remarkable.
I attribute a lot of it to the ETFs.
That is one of the most powerful forces right now driving Bitcoin price, but also even adoption.
You know, there are so many people that just saw the other day, 80% of the ETF purchases
are by, and this is according to Van Neck, retail.

(22:12):
That's a pretty powerful cohort of people that are behind that.
And what it really means is a lot of the institutions, the RIAs, the, basically the
warehouses, they haven't arrived yet.
When they get here, there's going to be more pressure.
Yeah, it is quite interesting the amount of, oh, you're good.
The amount of coins.

(22:33):
Oh, no, you still sound good.
You know, maybe take an extra orange pill just to clear that out of your system.
But no, looking at, because I'd seen that too with some of the, you know, what are classified
as long-term hodlers selling a good amount of coins into the market and it is getting
absorbed right up.

(22:54):
And you know, when I say, you know, yeah, Bitcoin is down today, it's like, come on
guys, we're still, we're at a rounding error still.
So I just always think that's funny.
But I'm very interested to see kind of what happens in this next kind of, well, next like
month for one and next year for another and then for the next kind of whole cycle, like,

(23:18):
you know, what happens up until this next having?
And you know, my plan hasn't changed.
It's continued to, you know, a dollar cost average with the money I make and the money
I can't afford to lose.
So I want to put that in Bitcoin.
I'm going to just keep trying to create value, dollar cost average.
But I think it still doesn't feel from, because you mentioned retail, it's like retail has
definitely arrived at the ETFs.

(23:40):
It doesn't seem that retail has really arrived as much at the just, let's say, spot Bitcoin
itself.
It still seems like there's, and I wonder how much of that is, I think a lot of it's probably
people for the first time had a vehicle, a very convenient vehicle to move like 401k
dollars into get some sort of Bitcoin exposure, right?

(24:02):
And there's no unit bias problem with the ETFs.
They're, you know, trading at whatever 50, 60 bucks a pop, that's much more approachable,
right?
I can buy all these Bitcoin ETF units, whatever.
But the, I think the 100k or 0.1 million to use a Samson Bose nomenclature, that level,
as much as it was a psychological level to reach it and hit it and surpass it, it becomes

(24:27):
I think kind of like a psychological blocker for a lot of people where they have this idea
that, oh, well, I missed the boat.
You know, like it's at a 100k, like I'm never going to make, you know, life changing money
with this.
So I may as well invest in, you know, whatever, fart coin or whatever other than meme coin
du jour is.
And I'm just, I'm curious what your thoughts are on that for people.

(24:49):
Like, do you think that, because you mentioned, you know, trains kind of leave in the station,
but do you think there's still plenty of time for folks to get on board?
No, I don't.
I think the train is leaving the station.
And I just can't explain how important this particular period is.
You know, you and I, we're set.

(25:11):
We're sitting on the train.
We got our Bitcoin ticket.
Carl is next to you.
I've got everybody with me, you know, except a lot of my family members aren't with me.
And, you know, if you look out on that platform, you look through the window, there's a whole
bunch of people that you love or that are, you know, your family members, your friends,
and they're not with you.
And quite frankly, they're not going to, in the future, they're not going to be able

(25:32):
to accumulate the level of Bitcoin that you could have in this period that we have been
going through.
And right now, if you are worried that the Bitcoin train is leaving the station, then
the best thing you can do is to get yourself some Bitcoin, then go to bitbox.swiss slash
Walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the easy to use Bitcoin only, Bitbox

(25:55):
O2 hardware wallet, then get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody.
Bitcoin has been ripping and will continue to do so.
And your stack will soon be worth a heck of a lot more in fiat value than it is today.
So now is the perfect time to make sure you have your security locked down tight with
Bitbox.
And the Bitbox also makes a great gift for the holidays.

(26:16):
Plus, and I cannot emphasize this part enough, but the Bitbox O2 is easy as hell to use.
Whether you're brand new to Bitcoin, it's your first time setting up a hardware wallet,
you're a little bit nervous, or you are a well seasoned psychopath.
It is Bitcoin only and again, fully open source.
You can head to their GitHub and verify that for yourself.
There is no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.

(26:39):
And when you go to bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use that promo code Walker, not only do
you get 5% off a great piece of open source Bitcoin only hardware, but you also help support
this podcast.
So thank you.
For instance, I mean, you know, let's just think for a minute, let's just go back and

(27:03):
talk about the train leaving the station.
You know, I bought Bitcoin when it dipped.
I went, I bought Bitcoin at 17,000.
Let's just say that I bought a tenth of a Bitcoin and it would cost me $1,700.
Now today is two years later, I got to come up with 10 grand for that Bitcoin.
Same amount of Bitcoin.
Well, I'm here to tell you right now, I may be a village idiot on some things, but you

(27:29):
know what?
I do understand Bitcoin and Bitcoin is going to a million dollars a point.
And when it does, you're going to have to come up with a hundred grand.
And as far as being too late, I mean, what the hell do you want?
Listen to this.
Bitcoin over the last five years has returned 55% keger.
That's cumulative annual growth rate per year.

(27:50):
That's reinvesting just leaving it sitting in there.
55% a year.
If you get a tenth of a Bitcoin right now, just sit on a tenth of a Bitcoin over and
you know, your audience, I'm sure is not old farts like me.
You're probably younger.
Well, guess what?
You go 20 years, 20 years.
That's 64 fucking million dollars.
That's enough.
It's plenty in today's purchasing power.

(28:12):
Now I don't know what it's going to be then.
That's cut bucks.
It could be like 200 million.
Who knows?
It could be buying a cup of coffee, but in today's dollars in purchasing power, that
tenth of a Bitcoin is 64 million dollars.
Just let it sit there.
That's enough.
But you know, you're going to struggle to come up with a hundred grand with Bitcoins,
a million a point.
And people that don't understand the train's leaving, you're sitting there right now.

(28:35):
Anybody that's listening to this or watching it, you're making a bet right now.
All those long-term holds are, I told you about that are leaving Bitcoin.
You know a lot of LTHs, the long-term holder, they sold coins into the 73 peak.
Then, a lot of them sold and are still selling in the 100K peak.

(28:58):
And you know, we usually call these people smart money.
Long-term holders sell into every bull run.
And you can just watch it on the chain.
And I do a lot of on-chain analysis.
I want to give a shout out right now for James Check.
If you're looking for him, he's CheckMadey on Twitter.
He puts out a premium.
I only subscribe to two newsletters.
His is one.

(29:19):
And he can help you stack 15% to 20% more Bitcoin as you buy if you'll just pay attention
to on-chain and no when to buy.
So I do a lot of on-chain.
And we usually call these people smart money that sell into these peaks.
And I'm here to tell you right now, I think they're stupid money because you are making

(29:40):
a bet right now.
We've got third, I don't know when this will come out, but it's going to be about 30 days
until President-elect Trump becomes President Trump.
And when he does, if you're betting on the wrong side of this, you're going to have your
eyes watered.
You're going to sit there.
We're going to put the dial on 11, cook noodles, and you're going to be sitting there going,
wonder what the fuck just happened because it's going to take off.

(30:04):
Now if he doesn't put out an executive order or doesn't use the bill that's maybe before
him from Congress.
I don't know, I assume that Bitcoin's price will probably fall a little bit.
So again, you're making a bet.
But do you want to be on the wrong side of that bet?
What is the upside to what I'm talking about compared to the downside?

(30:25):
If it's going down, if I had any more chips left, I'd be buying.
I don't have anything.
I'm Bitcoin rich and I barely have enough money for a sandwich sometimes.
So what I'm saying is the train is leaving the station and in about 30 days, you're
making a bet right now.
If you're not into Bitcoin or if you're trading your Bitcoin or if you're like these dipshits

(30:48):
that are selling as it gets to 73 K, you've got to pull your head out and look around.
Anyway, I don't mean to rant here, but it's just,
What I tell you, what I tell you about Rance, it's a safe space for him.
No words, but no, I think this is a, this is a fair point.
There's always like that, a meme at this point of your friend asking you, like, oh, what

(31:12):
should I, should I buy some Bitcoin now or should I wait until it goes lower?
And you know, the, you know, whenever you get those kind of texts, it's always just
kind of like, I don't know, man, do whatever you want with your own money.
I'm still buying now, you know, because again, like I'm not a trader.
I'm not some sophisticated investor.

(31:33):
I just dollar cost average.
And when I, you know, have a little bit of extra fee outlying around, I'll, you know,
make a little bit of a, you know, a smash buy.
But otherwise I just kind of set it and forget it and try to accumulate and again, create
value so that I can keep generating some fiat to sell that dirty fiat for Bitcoin or earn
in Bitcoin when I can, whenever it's possible.
Cause that's, that's a great feeling too.

(31:54):
There's no fiat involved.
That's a beautiful thing.
But I think that as we're getting into, you know, we're getting into this point, you know,
the whole gradually then suddenly, right?
Like the suddenly happens very, very suddenly.
And I think that, you know, maybe it's because after this last cycle with the whole FTX blowout
and all of that stuff, you know, everybody thought, oh, this is, you know, we're going

(32:17):
into a super cycle.
We're going to, you know, this is the four year cycle is dead.
It's going to, you know, it's going up forever.
And it's like maybe that jaded some people to think, ah, okay, well, we're just going
to have another, you know, another collapse like after FTX and Bitcoin's probably going
to take another, you know, massive haircut at some point.
Maybe it'll take a 50% drop or 60, 70% drop, but that might be dropping down from a million

(32:43):
dollars.
You know what I mean?
Like the magnitude of these drops is going to get and runs is going to get more violent,
but the numbers we're dealing with are just so much larger.
And I think that for people right now, it's like, you know, again, the message that I
give to friends and family and thankfully a number have actually listened is just set

(33:04):
up a dollar cost average.
You know, and, and, you know, if you, if you've got the, you know, the balls to just say,
you know, screw it, I'm just going to, I'm just going to dive all in on this, you know,
good for you.
If you've got a lot of excess fiat lying around, I don't have a lot of fiat just lying
around.
I, you know, I earn fiat and then I save in Bitcoin.
And I think that that's good advice for most people.

(33:27):
But right now it's like you're kind of right that, you know, we're still early, but the
magnitude of your earliest is going to potentially decrease exponentially in the coming months
and years.
Things are going to happen very, very quickly.
And I don't think people are really mentally prepared for that either.
Probably most Bitcoiners are not, except maybe some of the, you know, the psychos who have

(33:51):
been around for a lot longer than I have, but certainly most no coiners are definitely
not prepared for that.
And if you're, if you're not holding Bitcoin in the coming years, I think you're going
to feel very angry, probably feel very foolish, but not want to admit your own foolishness.
So you're going to find ways to take out that anger on the greedy Bitcoiners who just got

(34:11):
lucky, you know what I mean?
We've seen a lot of that already.
I mean, you know, we're seeing some of that now.
You know, I would have to say, I think that the last cycle probably did cause a lot of
PTSD for people.
I believe personally that the last cycle was truncated, that we basically were on our way
up to a hundred K. And I did call for that.

(34:34):
So again, I'm a village idiot.
Sometimes I got that wrong.
You know, another thing I got wrong is I really did think that institutions would be arriving
during that last cycle.
I was wrong.
They absolutely were not.
I did not understand the barriers that were there to entry.
The change in FASB accounting rules from intangible asset.
If you wanted to make Bitcoin the most toxic thing that you could make it so you couldn't

(34:58):
hold it on a treasury sheet, you'd call it an intangible asset.
Well, that's over.
And in fact, on the 15th of December, that's done.
FASB rules have changed.
It's now at fair market value.
But it wasn't then.
The other thing is that January 1st, MicroStrategy is going to start reporting in that next quarter

(35:18):
using those new guidelines.
But the other thing is I didn't understand until recently how in depth and how deep the
choke point 2.0 was and how the Biden administration was working so hard to curtail crypto and
Bitcoin development, causing tremendous harm with banks.

(35:40):
And I'm not talking about Silvergate.
I'm talking about Silver or one of the other ones that was basically shut down and they
weren't in Solvint.
So 2.0 was in full effect.
And then the other thing is that I really think the unwinding of the GPTC premium and
what happened from that.

(36:02):
Because remember the GPTC premium went to a discount during that period.
And that was a huge underbid to Bitcoin just day after day, like a roller coaster.
And finally, it stopped.
And when it did, when it went to discount, people had to unwind.
And that's when we discovered three arrows, capital, genesis, eventually all of this leading

(36:25):
into FTX.
And that was paper Bitcoin.
That guy, that was fraudulent stealing of other people's Bitcoin.
And that was paper Bitcoin out there.
So I think all those things contributed to the unwind of the market.
Plus, it had gone up so quickly.
I think it just ran out of steam.
Just legs that we're going through right now, even this one at 100K or so, that's really

(36:49):
important.
If we can stay in there and build a base, it's going to make what comes next even more sustainable.
But I do want to address one last thing you said.
DCA is something that, as Bitcoiners, we've talked about for years.
And I'm a big fan of DCA.
Bitcoin Magazine just had a great article on it like four days ago.

(37:14):
So the only thing I'm going to caution people is this.
And we can talk about this later.
We don't have to get into it now.
But if you don't understand what you're doing with your DCA and you leave those UTXOs out
there that you have bought and they are small, like they even talked about $25 for a DCA

(37:35):
average, you are going to lose that Bitcoin.
It's going to be gone forever.
It's coming.
I'd say, again, you're flipping the coin because on January 20th, on the next day, if he's
in office and this happens, you're going to be stranded, economically stranded.
All that Bitcoin you got on the base layer is going to be sitting there.

(37:57):
You won't be able to get to it if you don't know what you're doing.
That's a very important point.
And I think for people who may be wondering like, what the heck is George talking about
here, the very long story short, I did an episode with Wicked Smart Bitcoin, which he's
awesome.
And we dug into this because he's been super vocal about UTXO management.

(38:20):
Basically, if you are a dollar cost averaging using exchange, again, not financial advice,
but just some practical advice, it is a very foolish idea to have that, some exchange that
let you automatically transfer that DCA to your cold storage.
It's nice, terrible idea.
You should wait and accumulate until you have a decent stack, whatever you're comfortable

(38:44):
with on the exchange, and then transfer it in bulk so that you have one UTXO, one unspent
transaction output that ends up in your cold storage.
It's like, you don't have to leave it on the exchange forever, but just wait until you
have a bit of a stack built up there and then transfer it off in a lump.
Because otherwise, it becomes basically impossible to spend if your UTXOs are too small, because

(39:07):
literally the transaction fees will just eat it all up.
And maybe if they're higher than the amount of your UTXO, that's just unspendable then.
You can't do anything at all with it.
So it's a very easy thing to fix, especially when fees are low right now.
You can consolidate, take a bunch of those addresses and send them to yourself.
There are also privacy tradeoffs with that that you should be aware of.

(39:30):
But again, everything is tradeoffs, right?
Everything is a little bit of a deciding what side of the bet you want to be on.
But best advice I can give is do not automatically transfer your DCA buys from an exchange to
your cold storage.
That's the easiest way to fix this.
Let it build up a little bit, develop a decent sized stack of sats, and then transfer them

(39:52):
in bulk and you will thank yourself later.
Is there anything you would add to that bit of advice?
No, I really went down this rabbit hole after I attribute this to Bob Burnett, CEO of Barefoot
Mining, getting me down this rabbit hole.
But the more I've studied it, the more I've studied it.
I'm just telling you right now, people are not prepared for what's coming.

(40:13):
Let's just say, I'll tell you one of the reasons I'm so bullish right now is because of the
election.
I don't know if you remember this or not.
It was back in January of this year.
It was Peter McCormick in one of his episodes.
He had on Preston Pish and Luke Roman.

(40:38):
And Danny was there too.
And one of the things that came out in that discussion, this is second hand, is that someone
had overheard because Trump was involved in being orange-pilled at this time.
People were talking to him about Bitcoin.
Someone heard him over say on the phone, Bitcoin is the new oil.

(41:01):
Just think about if that's true.
I'm agnostic.
I don't give a damn about these politicians.
But I will tell you right now, if he meant that he understood that the petrodollar, which
came about in the mid-'70s with Kissinger Nixon, if he understands that oil is really

(41:23):
the basis of the petrodollar, and I'll bet he does, then is he saying that Bitcoin is
going to be taking some of that status away from oil?
In other words, are we going to start moving to Bitcoin as an underpinning layer to the
dollar?
And then the other thing is, when he came out, I thought the speech by Robert Kennedy,

(41:45):
Senator Lummis, and President-elect Trump too at the conference, I thought that that
was crossing the Rubicon.
You know where that term comes from?
It's 49 BC.
It's when Caesar was about to cross the river, Rubicon, and he was marching to Rome.
And at the time, that was an act of treason.

(42:07):
To cross the river with your army meant you were attacking the Senate and the Republic.
And so he crossed.
And Elena Jakta Est, he said, when he got to the other side, which means the dais cast,
he knew that when he had crossed the river, that was it.
He either went on and was victorious or he would be executed.

(42:29):
And of course, that was the end of the Republic and the start of the Roman Empire.
But I think that when these things happened at that Bitcoin conference, and I kind of
was against the idea of politics mixing with Bitcoin at the conference, but you know what?
When those three speeches were done, we had crossed the Rubicon.
We had made a commitment.
If the U.S. on day one does not establish an SBR, Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, or they

(42:55):
hesitate and put it into a vote for Congress, the longer they hesitate, the more their hand
is going to be forced because other nations aren't going to wait.
I believe, I honestly believe they're already stacking.
You know, if you go back to November 9th and you look at the buys that happened on that
weekend, that's when Bitcoin was really pumping and started pumping big time.

(43:16):
If you look at those buys, they're not normal buys.
You know, I've mentioned this before, but MicroStrategy, their goal and they're required
to buy, when they issue all that ATM at the market offerings of stock, they don't move
the market.
They purposely do not move the market.
They use, you know, dark pools, accelerators, OTC, they're doing everything they can, algos

(43:37):
that are just buying without moving that market.
They probably do provide support, but they're trying not to do it.
Whoever was buying that weekend, they didn't give a shit.
It was just smashed the green buy button, 100 Bitcoin, 200 Bitcoin, and they didn't care
about slippage.
Do you know what I'm saying?
Slippage, they didn't care if the price moved up or not.
They were agnostic to price.

(43:59):
So, you know, is that like one of these Middle Eastern countries?
Is it some wealthy sovereign state that has its own printing press or is so wealthy it
doesn't give a damn?
You know, imagine if the United States wants Bitcoin.
Do you think they're going to give a shit if it's $110,000 or $150,000?

(44:21):
They're not going to care.
If it's President Trump, he's just going to say, get me the Bitcoin.
And I don't think so, I guess what I'm trying to say is this, you have a narrow window now
to participate in this game.
And even if I'm wrong about us establishing a Bitcoin reserve, even if I'm wrong, your

(44:47):
time is narrow because other people get it.
We've already seen that.
What did Putin say at the news conference the other day?
Who can ban Bitcoin?
Nobody.
Nobody.
He gets it.
They just had a member of their parliament or their house put forth a bill to establish

(45:08):
it as a treasury.
So the nation states get this and it's going to happen.
Yeah.
And I want to first of all, well said.
And second, I want to dig into this a little bit because I think the game theory here is
really fascinating.
And it's, I mean, Bitcoin is a paradigm shift, right?

(45:29):
It's a fundamental shift in how the world works and how money works.
And that kind of shift can really only happen once.
I think it was either probably both American Hodel and Jeff Booth have basically said something
the effect of like, we've had gold for 5,000 years.
Fiat was an aberration.

(45:50):
It was kind of like this freak.
That's also existed, but not in the pure fiat way that it is now in this kind of destructive,
funding forever wars, destroying people's savings.
It hasn't existed to that extent as it has for the past 75 years or so.

(46:12):
But now we have Bitcoin.
And so it's gold for 5,000 years, a little blip of fiat, and then Bitcoin, what, for
another 5,000 years maybe?
Who knows?
And so as long as it stays decentralized and secure, to quote Jeff Booth again.
But I think that people really need to pay attention to what's happening right now.
Both Bitcoin, I mean, Bitcoiners hopefully are already paying attention.

(46:32):
You're already stacking sats.
But if you do not own any Bitcoin yet, you really, really need to ask yourself why.
And do you have a good reason for not owning any?
And you know, with this, you know, I wanted to get into kind of the game theory of the
nation state thing, because I think this is super fascinating.
Because even if you just look at, let's just consider the G7 countries, right, the big

(46:54):
players who are all, you know, they all have the ability to print their own currencies,
right?
They can make fiat like that.
Just a few keystrokes, right?
Make those zeros pop up on the screen.
The first country, the first major country that has its own fiat currency, that starts
printing that fiat currency to acquire Bitcoin, the hardest money that has ever existed, they

(47:19):
are going to have the first mover advantage.
And I think you're right that there is some of this stuff happening behind the scenes
already.
Yes, we know El Salvador, they don't print their own fiat, they're dollarized.
They've been doing it very publicly and good for them.
I think that's going to lift their nation into an amazing place already is.
But then in the future, it's going to be, you know, exponentially so.

(47:41):
Kingdom of Bhutan, mining Bitcoin with excess hydropower has accumulated, I think like a
billion dollars worth of Bitcoin just from excess hydro.
But where do you think, you know, we're getting this point where Trump is about to take office.
All signs seem to point to the fact that either via executive order or legislation, which

(48:02):
has already been proposed, Lummis already has this bill out there.
There's some other draft legislation out there as well, that the United States is going to
move forward with this.
Do you think they end up being the first?
Do you think we see some surprise prior to that where another country announces, oh,
we're actually doing this, you know, a week before Trump takes office?

(48:24):
How do you see this game playing out right now?
And you know, what do you think, I don't know, what do you think is going to happen here?
Because I think it's going to get very, very interesting, regardless of what the United
States does.
I don't think there's any stopping, you know, nothing stops this train.
There's nothing stopping these other countries that, you know, like it's, we're, as you said,

(48:48):
we've crossed the Rubicon and there is kind of no going back.
It's full steam ahead or I don't know what the other option is.
Well, you know, Michael Saylor said that micro strategy has utilized a lot of the things
that you just brought up there as far as accumulation and getting ahead.
They're un-catchable now.
I can talk about that later, but they're un-catchable.

(49:09):
They will not be caught.
So yeah, first mover is very important.
You know, just thinking for a minute here, let's, you know, let's look back at what's
going on with the administration over the last three weeks.
Let's look at the people that they put in, you know, he met with Senator Lummis.
So did David Sacks, whether I guess he's going to be the crypto head or something.

(49:32):
All I hear are positive things coming from them in regards to an SBR.
The other thing is, and I don't know if you saw this or not, but in Abu Dhabi, when Eric
Trump was talking, he said one line that every single Bitcoiners should have just gone and
sat up in their chair and saw, son of a bitch.
He said, and as an aside, I've known Michael Saylor for 20 years.

(49:58):
Have you?
Do you think?
Yes.
And do you think during those 20 years, maybe Michael Saylor had the ear of anybody else
in that family?
And not only that, you know, getting back to President-elect Trump, here's another thing
he said.
I don't know if you remember this because he got a lot of controversy about this.
The Bitcoiners didn't like it.
He said, we want to make sure going forward that all Bitcoin is mined in the U.S., in

(50:22):
the USA.
And then he coupled it, I thought pretty sharp with the idea that we want to be the dominant
energy supplier in the world.
But when he said that, you know, you've got to, when you talk about game theory, you talk
about transaction fees, you talk about the base chain and stuff, just imagine that this

(50:44):
actually happens.
The U.S. government starts to stack Bitcoin.
Let's say that other governments start to stack Bitcoin.
You know, to get a transaction on a block is not always going to be easy to do.
I mean, it's coming to a point where it's going to be very difficult.
You and I, we're privileged.

(51:05):
We get, you know, we'll be able to tell our kids or grandkids someday that we did transactions
on the base layer.
They're going to go, what?
No way, Pops.
But yeah.
So the thing is that, imagine President Trump there is, you know, he, they're stacking Bitcoin
and he's moving it around.
Senator Lomis says we should disperse it around the country and they're moving Bitcoin.

(51:25):
You know, four o'clock in the afternoon when President Trump calls down to somebody says,
hey, move that Bitcoin over to such and such and they come back and go, well, we're going
to put a high transaction fee on it to try and get your load into the transaction, into
the mem pool and hopefully it'll be in the block.
President Trump's going to just hang out the phone.
He's going to get me somebody else who can guarantee me that I can get a transaction into

(51:50):
the blockchain.
And you think other countries, you know, you talked about other countries.
Well, I can tell you right now, hash rate is coming from other countries.
It's coming from Russia, China.
It's coming from all kinds of countries right now.
And these nation states, when they're moving their Bitcoin, there's not going to be any

(52:11):
of this, let's, let's fight with the plebs to get a high transaction fee so we can get
a transaction in the blockchain.
That's not happening.
And so you know what that really means?
It means that the United States in micro strategy too, by the way, this is going to happen.
They've got to start mining their own Bitcoin.
They have got, they've got to control.
They don't, they don't give a, they shouldn't give a shit at all about making Bitcoin.

(52:33):
They're going to mine it only so they have control of that mem pool and the block space.
They are, that block space is going to be, you know, say, say President Trump just calls
out and he says, tomorrow between four and five PM, we are doing this on the blockchain.
Make sure we have two or three spots on that blockchain.

(52:53):
Well the only way you're going to get it as a country is if you have your own mining
and you're, you are contributing the hash rate, you can get about, you can get about
5% of the hash rate right now and you can maybe get out, I don't know, five to seven
transactions guaranteed during a day.
So that is going to become a source of contention.

(53:15):
People are going to start fighting over that.
And for those plebs that haven't consolidated due to TXOs, you're going to be sitting there.
You're going to be fighting the U.S. government or companies.
For instance, I know where this is going with MicroStrategy and Sailor's already told us.
I'll take a break now, but I can expand on that.

(53:38):
I know what he's going to do.
Oh no, I'm curious.
Are you saying also you think that MicroStrategy is going to try to start spinning up hash rate
themselves as an entity?
Because sometimes they're going to have to.
So you know, I don't know if I told you this, but I know I mentioned Bitcoin.
Well, I bought MicroStrategy also like years ago and I got it, I don't know, like 12 bucks

(54:04):
a share or something.
It was crazy.
And it went way up.
And what did, what did, they used to call me Jethro in the Navy because I sometimes
wasn't bright.
You know, Jethro Bodhi, you wouldn't even know that show.
It's an old show called the Beverly Hobullies, but I actually, I actually do know that show.
Oh, well, you know, Jethro has to use his fingers to count.
So the thing is that I sold it all and it's stupid that two days later I was sitting again,

(54:27):
I was right in front of the computer.
I'm just staring at it going, it's still going up.
But I thought, why did I do that?
Why did I sell that?
But anyway, about just over a year ago, I started doing a really deep dive into MicroStrategy
because here's what was bothering me.
You know, Michael Saylor is not stupid.

(54:49):
And why would he be buying all this Bitcoin?
What is the point?
Is he going to sit on it like an egg?
I mean, is it like he's got some fixation on Bitcoin?
There's got to be a point of purpose to it.
And so I thought for a long time about it.
And I finally, about a year ago, it hit me.
I realized I was talking to Larry LaParde.

(55:11):
And by the way, I want to give a shout out right now to Larry.
He's got a new book that's coming out and I read the, I got to read the galley.
Man, it's a really shit-hot book.
But anyway, I was talking to him and I said, I think I know MicroStrategy is going to become
the world's first Bitcoin bank, biggest bank in the world.

(55:31):
And what did, what did Saylor begin to drop as far as hints?
And by the way, if you, if you go back to 2010, how many talked about this in Bitcoin
talk forum?
He talked about Bitcoin banks.
He felt that that was where the future was going to go as far as off the base layer was
Bitcoin banks, Bitcoin backed banks.

(55:52):
So Saylor has already given us the hints.
Do you remember that conversation that he had with Safe, Safe and Dunn Amuse about two months
ago?
Yeah.
It's the one where they're kind of a little butt heads.
They're going at it a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, that was called four years to Bitcoin.

(56:14):
If you go to one hour and 32 minutes into that podcast, and I've played it about four
or five times now, there's a reason why Michael Saylor had that conversation.
Because what was the conversation about Bitcoin yield?
Now for anybody watching me right now, just pay attention while I say this one thing.

(56:34):
If you have Bitcoin on a wallet and it's yours, it does not generate yield.
But if you get yield on Bitcoin, you better figure out where it's coming from.
So anyway, Saylor said, and he was pushing back on this.
He said, well, what if it was in a country that was large with its own printer, it's

(57:01):
fed in a too big bank to fail.
You could generate yield on your Bitcoin.
You could live like the wealthy live now.
Why does the royal family still have all their lands?
Why do some families, the Rothschilds, why do they still have all their wealth?
Because they never sell the wealth.
The things that are wealthy like Bitcoin, and you're going to do that.

(57:24):
You personally are going to be able to do that in the future.
You never sell your Bitcoin.
You'll be able to live off that Bitcoin going forward.
That's going to happen.
So Saylor's already interested in this.
And then did you see the interview on the 11th of December with Ayers?
I think his last name is, it's in a white hall.
They're talking back and forth.

(57:45):
Did you watch that one?
I saw, I didn't watch the whole thing, but I saw some of the clips from it.
Same thing.
Same discussion comes up.
And when safe, he mentioned JPMorgan.
Who's he mentioned again in this latest one?
JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs.
Who big to fail banks holding Bitcoin?
In fact, there he takes it farther.
He actually goes down the Hal Fennie discussion, which is tokenized banks that are backed by

(58:10):
Bitcoin or in stablecoins, treasuries.
Because then he has a discussion about stablecoins.
So that is coming.
And when those things happen, again, imagine Jamie Dimon, Mr. Evil.
You think at four o'clock in the afternoon when he calls down to some pleb down there
on the eighth floor down there in the basement, and he says, hey, move 100 million to such

(58:34):
and such because banks, they want to do that.
They're going to custody, sell, and they're going to trade.
And then they're going to buy Bitcoin.
And when they do it at four o'clock in the afternoon, they're going to demand that they
have block space.
They're going to demand that the transaction gets into the block space.
If that pleb says, well, Mr. Dimon, we got to put in a transaction, high transaction.

(58:57):
I mean, he's going to get fired and they're going to start mining their own Bitcoin.
Because again, you have to have the hash rate.
I'll tell you how.
I'll tell you before I take a break real quick here, just let me figure.
Let me put this out to the people that don't understand.
If you have a hardware wallet, like God's God for sake, not a ledger, but a cold car

(59:20):
or something.
A good box maybe since they're a decent wallet.
Yeah, exactly.
A good wallet.
So if you have a wallet like that, if you don't run your own node, whenever you transact
with your Bitcoin, you're using somebody else's node.
You cannot get a transaction on the base layer without a node.
So you go through a note.

(59:41):
All the miners are running nodes.
Now the miners themselves, people mining right now are directing their hash rate to mining
pools, but those pools have all got nodes.
They're the ones that build what's called the template, the mempool template.
That template is what decides whether you get to go into the block or not with your

(01:00:01):
transaction.
So imagine at the end of the day, you're sitting there.
And by the way, you can only put, last year we put in 4,094 transactions per block for
a whole year on average, every 10 minutes.
That's not a lot.
So those nodes, when the blocks found, they broadcast the transaction.

(01:00:25):
Whoever won the block, let's say it's a mining pool this time because that's where most of
are gone.
And they already have a template built with all the transactions in it.
It broadcasts to the other nodes instantaneously.
They all check to see if it's by protocol signed.
And then it's broadcast.
And within two to three blocks, it's in the blockchain.

(01:00:46):
So to get in there, it's going to be a war.
We're going to be fighting over that block space.
It's coming.
I think this is kind of another reason why, first of all, UTXO consolidation is important
for the average person just so that you can actually spend your Bitcoin on chain at a
later date when transaction fees are both higher in Bitcoin denominated terms and much

(01:01:11):
higher in dollar or fiat denominated terms.
But also, it's just such a, it's one of the reasons that things like lightning or or
fediments are so important as we go forward because it's the entire eight point, whatever,
3 billion people, however many people we have in the planet now, they're not going to be

(01:01:35):
holding Bitcoin in on chain Bitcoin in self custody, most likely.
That's a nice thing to hope for.
But just the reality of this situation is that it's probably not going to happen.
Right?
I'm not going to say it will not happen.
I'm saying it's probably not going to happen, but these other solutions exist.
You're right on.
You've got it.

(01:01:55):
I mean, it's not going to happen.
You know, to put half of them, 4 billion on there would take 25 years.
I mean, if they took over the whole blockchain, you know, if you give them half, it takes
50 years.
You put the whole planet on there, it takes a century.
So it's not going to happen.
And like we talked about with Hal Fennie, he knew that, you know, Satoshi knew that,

(01:02:15):
and we are not going to be able to do that going forward.
So something's going to have to give on this base layer, or yeah, for a secondary layer.
Like you mentioned lightning, lightning is great.
I love lightning.
We'll use it all the time for like zaps and stuff, but it can't do it either.
FedEvent is a very interesting idea.

(01:02:36):
I'm really looking into peg side change right now, like liquid.
I think that that could be a model going forward.
And that could be a model that these banks end up using that same model.
It could be the blueprint for how they do that.
And eventually, I hate to keep talking about yield, but eventually we might be able to

(01:02:56):
legitimately with the world's best capital on the planet.
I mean, it is the greatest capital that you could possibly the most pristine asset and
banks are going to want it.
So if you're willing to understand the risk involved and where the yield comes from, that
could work.
And I think that's such a key point is, you know, and speaking of, you know, Alan Farrington,

(01:03:19):
he's always the one, especially when some of these Bitcoin yield thing, you know, like
Celsius, for example, blew up, you know, he was always the one, you know, where does the
yield come from?
Where does the yield come from?
Because you should know.
And also, you know, you should know that you are taking a risk with that because I struggle
with saying that anything is risk free from a lending your Bitcoin out perspective.

(01:03:42):
You know, in granted, one could make the argument the counterpoint that, okay, well, there's
also risks to self-custody.
If you screw something up or you have a multi-sig and you, you know, you lose, you know, two
of the keys or whatever it is.
And so there's risks everywhere, right?
There's risks in anything you do.
Your life is basically a series of decisions based on what kind of risk you are willing

(01:04:03):
to take or not to take.
And that's a decision that like that comes down to human action, right?
What do you as an individual want to do?
What are you comfortable with?
What are you not comfortable with?
So like nobody's going to be able to tell you if that's the right decision for you.
What's the right decision for Michael Saylor may not be the right decision for you.
And that's okay too, you know, but I'm glad, you know, liquids a great example because

(01:04:26):
it's been around for a while now for anyone that hasn't used it.
It like it works exceptionally well.
And yeah, it's a federated model, right?
It's a federated model.
So you are putting a certain, there's a trade off of trust there.
You're trusting these federations, but they've been operating pretty damn well so far.
It's not, you know, I would rather have Bitcoin on the base chain in my own, you know, multi

(01:04:50):
sag cold storage, but for certain things, liquid is super, super useful.
And like I like the, I just had Prince Philip, who's, you know, hereditary Prince of Serbia
in Yugoslavia, but also the chief strategy officer of Jan three on the show a few days
ago or yeah, beginning of this week been a long week already.

(01:05:12):
But we were talking about Aqua wallet, which Jan three has come out with, which I've personally
been using a lot more lately.
I think it's super nice that it handles a lot of the stuff for you behind the scenes,
like swapping between lightning and liquid.
And I think that's, that's really nice.
That's a nice user experience for people who don't want to have to, you know, still in
your own custody, you're still holding the keys, but giving you a smoother user experience

(01:05:36):
that allows you to still do a lot of different things and, you know, convert to USDT if you
want on liquid, not on, you know, Tron or on Ethereum, you know, ERC 20.
So that's even better.
Like if you're going to use USDT, may as well use it on a Bitcoin side chain instead of a
shitcoin main chain.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, I do.
I agree at 100%.
I've really, I've used the Aquawallet also in a shout out to Samson, Mal.

(01:06:02):
It's been a great experience.
You know, it just like you said, it's a fluid, easy experience between, you know, BTC, liquid
BTC, tether and lightning.
And it's cheap.
You know, it's not expensive to use and it's private.
You know, it's private.
I mean, that's pretty cool.
So I, you know, I'm not sure where things are going.
I just know that we're going to have some, we're going to have some major disruptions

(01:06:25):
coming over the next year.
This is going to be a volatile, difficult journey, I think, for a lot of people to handle.
What do you think, you know, what advice do you have for folks that are maybe just starting
to get into Bitcoin or just thinking about getting into Bitcoin?
Like, what, what mistakes can they avoid?

(01:06:46):
Or what's the, I guess, what's the biggest mistake that they could make that you would
advise against?
Well, you know, I always approach it as like a, I know it sounds stupid, but it's a three
legged stool.
So I'm sitting on a three legged stool and that's a really old piece of furniture, thousands
of years.
It's, you can see pictures of it on the inside of the pyramids.

(01:07:08):
So the first leg is you got to stack Bitcoin.
You got to get as much Bitcoin as you can right now.
You know, this is your opportunity to get Bitcoin.
And then you've got to hold on to it.
And how you not, how do you hold onto your Bitcoin?
Well, first off, you've got to study, you've got to read, you've got to understand volatility.
You don't want to do like Jethro.

(01:07:29):
You don't want to have it going way up or like these idiots at 73K sell your Bitcoin.
Don't do that.
And the only way you'll not do that is if you just study.
And then the last thing is you can't lose the Bitcoin.
You just can't, you cannot lose it.
It's too precious.
So, you know, you've been stacking, working your ass off.
You've talked about DCA, that's really important.

(01:07:50):
The next thing is, you know, you can't be used in leverage.
There are all these idiots out there, you know, micro strategy, Bitcoin's volatile.
I just told you Bitcoin returned 55% a year for five years.
That's good enough for anybody.
If you want more volatility, do like I did and get some micro strategy and you'll get

(01:08:11):
more excited.
If you're an idiot, get the new leveraged ETS on top of micro strategy, MSTX or MSTU,
because they'll give you four times the volatility.
And why would people do that?
Because every single cycle is the same thing.
I'm late.
I've got to make it up.
I'm going to start shit coin.

(01:08:31):
I'm going to use these leverage products.
I'm going to go ahead and use options trading.
You know, if you don't know what a covered call is or you don't understand what volatility
decay is, you already have lost.
Don't do this.
You know, speaking of MSTX and you, in their prospectus, they tell you we have tracking

(01:08:52):
error, meaning they can't settle.
Sometimes they can't make the price at the end of the day match the Bitcoin they've got.
They're having slippage.
It's because the swap market's not big enough and they're using options.
So if you don't understand what a covered call is, you can make a lot of money with

(01:09:13):
a covered call.
Right now, you could sell MSTR stock and make 200% interest in a year.
But at some point as you're doing it, you sell the same thing with Bitcoin.
If you do covered call with Bitcoin, at some point it sells.
And if you're a miner, that's fine.
Or if you've got 100 Bitcoin and you say, hey, guess what?

(01:09:35):
I'm going to get rid of three Bitcoin this year.
So you just put your three in there and you earn your yield knowing the risk.
I kind of forgot what we were talking about other than, oh yeah.
Okay.
So you can't do that.
You can't get caught in a mark to market leverage where you're called, you know, margin's calling
at the end of the day and you don't have the money.

(01:09:55):
It's gone and you're not going to get it back.
So you've got to be smart.
Just stack Bitcoin.
It's enough return.
You know, I mean, like I said, if you just get a 10 of Bitcoin and hold on for 20 years,
you're the wealthiest person around.
So just do those three things.

(01:10:15):
That's all.
I think that people, and that's good advice, especially on the leverage side of things,
because I think people have this idea that they can, a hodl described it as thinking
you can like teleport to being an OG.
You know, if you just get enough leverage and you won't, maybe one or two lucky people

(01:10:37):
don't get completely wrecked, but odds are that probably won't be you.
You probably will get wrecked.
And if you would have just stayed humble, stacked sats, kept those sats safe, educated
yourself, tried to go out and create value for the world so you can stack more sats,
you would have been a lot better off and with a lot less stress about watching numbers on
a chart all day long, wondering if you're going to lose all of your money.

(01:11:00):
Like, I think for most people, it's just, it's not worth it.
That's just also not a, that's not an enjoyable thing, I don't think, to be so, to need to
be so obsessed with watching numbers go up and down the chart, wondering if you're going
to get absolutely destroyed.
Like wouldn't you rather, you know, work hard, create some value, spend time with your family,

(01:11:22):
and just, you know, like I, for DCA, it's just like, I just set it and forget it, right?
It's just, it just keeps coming out.
Like I think for most people, that is the right advice.
And it's also the advice that's going to keep you the most sane and mentally healthy.
Like you don't want to need to obsess over these things too much.
Like, you know, everybody likes checking the price chart when the number is going up, right?

(01:11:45):
You're feeling like a genius.
It's not so fun when it's going down.
Unless you're just DCA-ing all the way up and all the way down.
And then it's like, great, price went down.
My DCA is going to get me more sats today.
It's a good day.
And now back to time with my family.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Good advice.
Yeah.
You know, I am, I'm curious because there's a, you know, I wanted to, to get in a little

(01:12:07):
bit as well, just about, you know, these ETFs, I think it's, it's interesting because
this is certainly brought in a ton of hype.
I mean, they've been like the best performing ETFs ever.
They've blown the gold ETFs out of the water by a massive amount and they're still just
getting started.

(01:12:28):
Do you see, you know, any, any downside to these ETFs?
Like, I'm assuming that you would say, you know, hold, you know, better to hold on-chain
Bitcoin, real Bitcoin than a Bitcoin derivative, you know, instrument than, you know, an ETF
or whatever else.
But do you see any, any additional risk in terms of just, you know, like BlackRock now

(01:12:51):
has a very vested interest in Bitcoin.
They're accumulating a lot of Bitcoin on behalf of their ETF buyers.
Do you see any risks that, you know, now we have, you know, governments, you know, that
are going to be getting into the mix soon too with Bitcoin reserves.
Does any of that freak you out at all?
Or are you confident enough in the game theory of nobody really wants to mess with Bitcoin

(01:13:17):
too much because messing with that Bitcoin messes with their, it messes with their money
now.
If you're a large Bitcoin holder, like it's in your interest not to mess with it.
I'm just curious where you sit on that.
Yeah, that's a tough subject because there is a risk, I mean, to some of the stuff that's

(01:13:37):
going on right now.
You know, the majority, I think it's nine out of 11 of those ETFs have got their coins
with Coinbase.
And MicroStrategy has the same thing.
They've got most of their coins, I think, with Coinbase and some with Fidelity.
I mean, it's a honeypot and it is a threat vector.

(01:14:00):
And you know, the discussion around the 6102 and seizure of Bitcoin, I think that that's
been blown off a little bit because you have to realize that Bitcoin is not like gold.
You know, when the US government tried to seize gold, people voluntarily gave up gold,
but not everybody.

(01:14:21):
And the other thing is a lot of it was held in banks.
It was easily seizeable, but it's nothing compared to how easy it would be to seize
Bitcoin.
You know, Bitcoin has an asymmetric reward in the sense that once you get the keys to
it, once it's on a different, you know, once you have it in your wallet, it's gone.

(01:14:42):
It's gone forever.
So I do think it's a risk.
The thing is though, you know, Walker, I think it just was inevitable.
And I never thought that it wasn't going to happen.
Once they approved the CME futures, I mean, it just, it was over.
I mean, that was a violation of law that the SEC was doing when they were denying on that

(01:15:04):
spot.
When it came out, it was a violation.
That's why they lost in port.
You know, the thing is that it's like options trading.
You know, that was inevitable.
It's got to happen.
In fact, you know, you and I, I mean, I want Bitcoin to be a $100 trillion asset.

(01:15:26):
It will never get to be gold's market cap if you don't have options and liquidity.
And we've got that now.
And it's growing.
The larger it gets, the more flywheel, the more this reinforces itself.
It's like escape velocity or approaching a black hole.
You know, you get to the event horizon, everything inside, pass that point, you don't get to

(01:15:47):
see it on the outside.
That's it.
And it's all going to one little point in the middle, singularity.
Well, we're kind of headed that way.
And that singularity is Bitcoin just exploding as a, you know, the world's store of value,
the most pristine capital that taking wealth that we've misallocated into all these stupid
assets like multiple houses, jackass stuff that we're trying to, I don't know what we're

(01:16:11):
spending stuff on.
It's everybody's trying to store their value somehow and beat the S&P 500 or the cost of
capital.
And so these things were inevitable.
I just think that maybe the key to mitigating the risk is to keep that flywheel going until

(01:16:32):
it's so innocuous.
You know, when microstrategy entered the Nasdaq 100 this week, you know, that meant so many
people who would never have to invest in Bitcoin are now exposed to Bitcoin.
When they go into the S, they're going to get in the S&P 500 next year.

(01:16:52):
I think it'll be in June.
When they're in the S&P 500, it's going to be huge.
I mean, the amount of inflows, people that have never held Bitcoin are going to be exposed
to Bitcoin.
All these ETFs are in every from Congress, members of Congress to, you know, every pleb
to every, you know, Peter Schiff, if he hates, you know, Bitcoin and he's got anything, he

(01:17:16):
might even have exposure to it now.
So I think there's a risk, but I just don't see how it could have been.
There's no answer to this is what I'm saying.
Now, I know what you mean because I would agree that this was an inevitable part of adoption.
Like you can't think that hyperbitcoinization was going to happen and not think that, you

(01:17:40):
know, ETFs and options and companies and countries buying it was not going to happen.
Like those two things are inconsistent, right?
So this was going to happen because why?
Because Bitcoin is the greatest money that has ever existed, is the hardest asset that
has ever existed.
Of course, everyone wants it once they realize that.

(01:18:02):
If you don't, if you realize that and don't want it, well, that's pretty stupid.
But you know, anyone who has gotten to the point where they realize that, they want Bitcoin
and they want as much Bitcoin as they can have.
And luckily they don't have to worry about how much they can carry because, you know,
it doesn't weigh anything unlike gold.
But I think that this is why it's also so important in parallel to this, that all of

(01:18:26):
these other technologies, all these other open source technologies, you know, whether
it's lightning, liquid, sediment, e-cash that's being built out, all of these other tools
become even more important because you need to have these other very, these tools that
encourage sovereignty, that encourage privacy, that make it more difficult for the government

(01:18:50):
to see every last little thing that you're doing.
These tools become really, they were always important, but I think they're more important
now than ever.
And I'm very thankful to all of the open source devs who are hacking away, building these
great pieces of freedom technology because we are going to need them.
And I think those are the, you know, the antidotes to the centralization risks that happen with,

(01:19:15):
you know, with Bitcoin ownership, with Bitcoin hash rate, with mining pools, with everything
else.
I also don't think that, again, back to this point, because I think it is important, like,
I've seen a lot of people say like, ah, you know, you wanted the separation of money and
state, but now you're cheering for the state to buy Bitcoin.
And it's like, I think that people get a little bit mixed up here because the separation of

(01:19:39):
money and state does not mean that the state is not going to interact with the money that
it is separated from.
It means that the state is separated from the creation of that money.
And I think that's a very important point.
Of course, the state, you know, all nations were eventually going to use Bitcoin.
You're not going to, separation of money and state doesn't mean they're not allowed to
touch Bitcoin.

(01:19:59):
It doesn't care if you're, you know, me or you or, you know, a nation state.
It doesn't know.
It doesn't care.
That's the point of it.
What matters is that they cannot print more Bitcoin out of thin air.
What matters is that they can't change the inflation schedule to suit themselves.
That is what matters, that the separation of the creation of money and state becomes

(01:20:21):
complete.
And we already have that with Bitcoin.
Like, that separation was already, that already happened when, you know, when Bitcoin was
created and it just gets stronger and stronger and stronger as the hash rate grows, as more
and more people adopt Bitcoin, that separation, because that money now is worth a heck of
a lot in their fiat cuckbox, you know, two trillion dollars now, maybe now slightly under

(01:20:46):
it since we had a mega crash today.
But you know, that's, I just think that that's an important point for people to really make
sure that they understand is that it's about the separation of the creation of money from
state.
And we have that.
And now, thanks to so many other tools, you know, like lightning, liquid, eCash, Fedemints,

(01:21:07):
these allow us to have other tools that can be used in a more localized, decentralized
level to retain our privacy, our anonymity, and to be able to cheaply and, you know, efficiently
transact with each other.
And I hope that those sorts of tools encourage more of a movement towards localism, towards
smaller communities interacting with each other, because I think that's ultimately the

(01:21:29):
most beneficial for those people who live in those communities.
I think that's spot on.
Especially like what you point out about the fact that I want to have the optionality.
So, you know, I've got, you know, I've got Bitcoin, all kinds of buckets, you know, and
some of them are in ETF.
I mean, I've got some ETFs because of a retirement account.
I've got some in cold storage and multi-seg.

(01:21:54):
I'm using MicroStrategy as a proxy.
So I do, I have a lot of different buckets, but I want to be able to move everything into
my wallet if I need to, so that I can cross borders or I can escape if I have to.
And you're right.
I mean, right now you can do that with Bitcoin.
And I think it's that optionality that is so important that we keep track of going forward.

(01:22:18):
Sorry, just realized I was muted.
Yeah.
I totally agree.
And I think that that's the beauty of Bitcoin, right?
Is that it gives you optionality in a general sense, right?
It gives you the option to opt out of the states and the central banks inflation.

(01:22:39):
It gives you the option to opt out of that physical location and take your wealth with
you.
It gives you the option to send that wealth to anyone you want without anyone being able
to stop you.
Bitcoin is optionality.
And I think that, again, that's why on-chain Bitcoin, I think, is still absolutely the

(01:23:01):
best thing that you can own if you're able to.
And right now you still are.
You can still buy Bitcoin.
You don't even have to earn it.
You can trade your fiat petrodollars, your war currency.
You can trade it for Bitcoin right now.
What an amazing deal.
Fiat is still a great trade, and it will be until you have to earn Bitcoin by creating

(01:23:23):
value rather than just spending infinite government paper on it.
And so I'm glad that we still have the option to do that for how much longer that happens.
And that actually leads me to something else I wanted to ask you, which was, do you think
that fiat currencies still stay around for a very, very long time?
A lot of people say, when hyper-Bitcoinization happens, fiat's gone, right?

(01:23:46):
It's toast.
No more fiat's ever.
I'm not so sure about that.
And the other part of this question is, do you think that the United States or any country
that prints its own fiat, adopting a strategic reserve of Bitcoin, prolongs the life of that
fiat currency or perhaps may accelerate its own demise?

(01:24:08):
Well, I'm going to get some maxis throwing shit at me here.
I can just tell because, you know, let's just talk about the dollar.
Let's talk about the dollar.
Let's talk about fiat currency.

(01:24:32):
The dollar in my mind is not going anywhere for quite a while.
And why I say that is because if you look at history and you look at the history of world
reserve currencies, they die a very slow death and it's painful.
And even when the power that is underlying that world's reserve currency loses its superpower

(01:24:58):
status or however you want to call it, whether it's Spain or whatever, or England, that currency,
it still has legs.
It still flops around out there for a long, long time.
You know, I don't think that the idea of Bitcoin taking over currencies is valid.

(01:25:23):
I don't think that's going to happen.
And what I mean by that is this.
You know, to get to understand what money is, it passes the stage of what's called the
collectible and then it goes into an order, medium of exchange or excuse me, store of
value, medium of exchange and then a unit of account.

(01:25:43):
You know, the most important layer in that is store of value.
That's the one that makes an asset become the most valuable store of value or the most
valuable capital that you can have on the planet.

(01:26:04):
And right now that's Bitcoin.
And I can prove that to you.
I can just ask you, I can say, you know, opportunity cost.
That's the idea of if you pass up buying Bitcoin right now, what is the next best alternative
asset to own?
So if I told you, hey, you know, I've got a beachfront property in Miami, of course,

(01:26:27):
what are you passing up to get that asset?
It's Bitcoin.
That is the best asset.
If I tell you, there's nothing I can name that you won't go, it's Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is the best answer.
So Bitcoin has done that.
It has become and it soon will be recognized as the greatest store of value we have ever

(01:26:47):
seen on the planet.
Bitcoin is the greatest monetary invention in the history of mankind and it is just being
discovered.
But what inhibits it from moving past that right now is the fact that, and this is true
for me, and it may not be for you, but for many people, I don't like to spend my Bitcoin.

(01:27:09):
I don't like to go out.
If I have to buy a car, I'm going to use Cuckbucks.
And if I have to buy groceries next week, I'm using Cuckbucks.
Now I've used Bitcoin before, but what I do is I put it into a spend and fill wallet.
I just, I fill it up, I spend it.
I fill it up, I spend it.
There's no capital gains, so it doesn't mean anything.

(01:27:31):
I did it in El Salvador when I met you when we had dinner.
I was just spending like a drunken sailor down there, but it was money that I just put
in and spent to just kind of keep it circulating.
But real Bitcoin that I hold in that cold storage, I don't want to spend it.
I think going forward, more and more people are going to understand that aspect of Bitcoin,

(01:27:57):
and they're going to realize that it's the most precious asset on earth.
And as that happens, it's going to become the base layer of whatever you want to call
it, but to try and tie a fiat currency to it, it's going to be very difficult.
I thought what sailor was discussing the other day in regarding stablecoins, or like
how Fannie discussing tokenized banks or something like that.

(01:28:21):
I can see how Bitcoin could become the pristine capital that could fuel all kinds of credit
expansion even, and the things that we don't sometimes like when we associate fiat currencies,
but based on a real store of value, I mean a real base layer that you can audit immutable

(01:28:43):
and you can understand.
So the idea that fiat is going to somehow be based on Bitcoin, I don't think you're
saying that and I don't see that as possible.
I think that fiat is going to exist, and this idea of maybe coupling it to stablecoin so

(01:29:05):
that it has a backing of US treasuries and some Bitcoin and other assets, that's possible.
Just look around in the world for a minute.
Let's zoom out for a second.
Last year, everybody's talking about BRICS, everybody's talking about the Iwan, everybody's
talking about the threat to the dollar.
Last year in international trade, the Iwan, it accounted for just over 4% of all trade

(01:29:28):
in dollars.
It's nothing, it's zilch.
Not only that, it doesn't even freely float.
If you let it free, it would deflate like a balloon because everybody would escape.
The people that are being held into the Iwan onshore, they can't get out.
There's a capital restriction like 50 grand or something.

(01:29:50):
They can't get out.
They want out.
Everybody wants out.
You think that people in Russia right now don't want out if they had a way to get either
Bitcoin or even a stablecoin.
Again, the maxi's going to throw some shit here, but the bottom line is when you travel,
if you go to South and Central America, what do people want down there?
They're always looking for tether or circle.

(01:30:11):
They're constantly, that's what they want.
You give them Bitcoin, they turn it into tether.
What would be wonderful is if instead of having this conversation, we could accept Bitcoin
for what it is, the greatest monetary invention in the history of mankind, the greatest storage
of capital that we will ever find, the greatest storage of wealth, the best final settlement

(01:30:38):
layer even on the international scale ever developed.
There will never be another one.
It's zero to one.
This is it.
If we just understand that and it's adopted at that rate, and then we work on the cut-buck
side of this, meaning that we actually almost like sailors discuss, really, I guess, is

(01:31:02):
the fact that we use the US dollar and we back it up with a strategic Bitcoin reserve
and we bring the stablecoins like tether, build the fucking regulations out and have
them come back.
Have them come back to the United States and build all of it here so that we are like that

(01:31:24):
beacon that we used to be, that we're that energy, that we're the next 100, 200 years
of nothing but just pure light that everybody wants to come to.
And we can do that.
We can do it with Bitcoin and even with the dollar if we just get on board and make this
happen.
I agree with a lot of what you just said.

(01:31:47):
One thing that I will push back on to play devil's advocate is I think that it is important
for Bitcoin to be used as a medium of exchange.
Now I hear you when you say like, I don't want to spend my Bitcoin, like the Bitcoin
that's in my cold storage.
I feel the same way.
I do the same thing with, especially if I'm going to somewhere where I can physically

(01:32:08):
spend Bitcoin, for example, El Salvador, where you can spend it in a lot of ways and a lot
of places.
I use one of the many lightning wallets that I have and top that up with some sats that
I just bought and exchanged my Cuckbucks for.
And that's what I'm using for it.

(01:32:29):
I also, but I don't think that those two things like, I don't think that the fact that people
right now don't want to spend Bitcoin that they've been accumulating in cold storage.
I don't think that that negates Bitcoin as a store of value.
I think that that's a preference and that's a natural preference for where we are right
now in this adoption phase.

(01:32:50):
I also think it's important to point out that the quote, the future is here.
It's just not evenly distributed yet.
I think that's the case with the monetary transformation that goes from store of value
to medium exchange to unit of account.
I think that many people are at, you're at different points in that.
It's not that everyone goes through that cycle at the same pace or at the same time or at

(01:33:15):
the same place in the world.
Different people are going through that in completely different ways.
And this is why I also think these L2s and L3s are so important on Bitcoin, things like
Lightning Liquid, Fedement, eCash, because these allow you to have a really great, better
privacy preserving way to utilize Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.

(01:33:40):
And yes, you're using, you know, if it's a, you know, a Fedement, you're using that federated
eCash there, right?
If it's on eCash, you're using non-federated eCash from.
Exactly.
But the point being that, excuse me, I think it is so important for Bitcoin to be used

(01:34:01):
and continue to be used and be used more as a medium of exchange for Bitcoin to truly
fulfill that promise.
Now that doesn't mean that you need to be using layer one Bitcoin as that MOE.
Bitcoin is just the backbone.
It's the, you know, it's the TCP IP, right?
It's the, it is the base layer and whatever else is built on top of that can be used to

(01:34:24):
execute that medium of exchange function.
And I don't know about you, but personally, I already use Bitcoin as my unit of account.
I think a lot of Bitcoiners are the same.
You're already thinking and, you know, yeah, you look at the Bitcoin fiat price, but when
you're looking at, you know, something you want to buy or something else, you're saying,
oh boy, that's, it's going to cost me a lot of sats.
I don't know about that.

(01:34:44):
I think you're, you already have moved into that phase.
You've already used Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
You do.
I think, I believe when I bought bought the pieces that I have from you, I believe I paid
in Bitcoin.
If I'm not, if I'm not mistaken, you know, so, you know, like I said, that's, you know
what, I, I do think that the conversation that the conversation really boils down to

(01:35:08):
what you just said that all there's a difference between understanding the base layer and hope
for the, hopefully where this is going in the future.
You know, one of the greatest banks of the entire planet was the Medici Bank formed in
1397.
The Medici family, they basically founded the Renaissance, the age of enlightenment.

(01:35:29):
It was a family, very wealthy, almost think of them like a fedamant, very wealthy fedamant
members who came together, formed their bank and then let that bank germinate all through
Northern Italy and then out, out all across the world.
You know, that can be a future too.

(01:35:51):
So it's not like, I guess what I'm trying to say is the medium of exchange is going
to be very nuanced going forward.
You know, what you also said is very true about understanding the value of Bitcoin.
You know, where I live right now, I did this experiment eight years ago and I noticed other

(01:36:11):
people are doing this, they're talking a lot about this, but this was a while ago.
This is probably a year ago, eight years before I had looked at houses, house prices in my
neighborhood and the average number of Bitcoin, I figured it out.
It was 666, uh-oh, that is the mark of Satan, but 666 to buy a house, right?

(01:36:32):
And four years later, the prices went up like about $90,000 and I'm sure my neighbors were
going, damn, this is awesome.
But for me, that price had gone from 666 to 44 Bitcoin and then this last year it went
to five and the house, the houses went up a hundred grand.
So from 666, Satan, 444 or 44 to five in eight years.

(01:37:00):
So there, there, the reason I mentioned that is once you understand the value of that,
there's a reason why we have a tendency to not want to let it go.
And perhaps the answer is to use that wealth to try and build these layers and to help
other people through, you know, interacting with the base layer and these either Fedement,

(01:37:25):
Liquid Change, you know, Liquid is not something that you and I couldn't do.
We could do the same thing.
You know, there's 20 some odd, uh, functionaries and there's 11 of 15 that have to sign the
block to get the transaction out and they block every one minute.
It's fast.
Two minutes, you've got settlement.
But you and there's nothing to prevent using blockchain technology to develop that with

(01:37:49):
a group of people who couldn't then provide that service.
Whereas where's Liquid used?
I mean, Aqua is used mainly in South and Central America.
It helps people.
It helps them a lot.
So maybe that is the future for us, which is a very hopeful future.
And I think you're exactly right.
What FETI has done with the Fedement protocol, I think is exactly in that vein where it's

(01:38:12):
like you, you know, anyone can set up a federation and be able to transact anonymously and basically
freely within it.
And that is incredibly powerful stuff.
And you know, another interesting thing too about like the, you know, not wanting to spend
your Bitcoin.
And at a certain point when you've gotten basically, you know, all into Bitcoin, well,

(01:38:36):
there's nothing else for you to spend, you know, you know what I mean?
Like, I like watches.
I enjoy watches too.
But I prefer to get some original replica watches as they're lovingly called from other parts
of the world because boy, I just can't justify spending too much on one.

(01:38:59):
But I do love a nice timepiece, but speaking of time, George, I want to be conscious of
yours as well.
And I want to kind of move to, to sort of wrap this up a little bit.
And I was thinking maybe a kind of a, we've covered a lot today and maybe just a good
place to kind of end with would just be, you know, what is, do you have a message for people

(01:39:19):
who still are on zero Bitcoin who are, who are looking at this and they're saying, you
know, maybe they're saying it's too expensive.
Maybe they're saying I missed the boat.
Maybe they're saying I'm actually, I'm going to buy Bitcoin, but I'm going to buy later
when it, when it crashes down to whatever, you know, whatever price level is acceptable
to me, but then I'll probably adjust that later and say, well, it crashed so much, I'll

(01:39:40):
wait for it to go even lower.
What do you say to the people who are still on zero?
Well, I think I would talk first to the Bitcoiners.
You know, we Bitcoiners, we come across as like an evangelical cult, you know, you know,
we have a tendency to want to orange pill people pretty intensely.

(01:40:04):
And I've kind of found as going forward that it just doesn't work.
You know, the only thing that's kind of worked for me is to, to ask people about inflation
and then they can start complaining about it.
And then I tell them, well, in my world, I actually, I, my money, I get more money every
year.
I actually have more wealth and I can buy stuff.

(01:40:25):
And if they ask me, I'll tell them, well, I just keep my wealth in Bitcoin.
I don't keep it in cash or anything that's dollar to nominee.
But, but, you know, I have had a really tough time with my family trying to discuss this
with them.
And I don't know why you, you don't always think you'd think that, you know, I've got

(01:40:48):
a lot of kids, you think they'd look at me and go, well, you know, dad might know something,
but for some reason I don't know what it is, you'll get to see this as your, as your boy
grows up, you'll get stupider and stupider.
Eventually you'll be so, you'll be as dumb as a rock that little kid's going to look
at you like, man, boy, that dad's stupid.
But the thing is that I tell people, Bitcoiners, you know, when you're sitting on that train

(01:41:13):
station, we were wrong about institutions.
They're here now.
You know, we set up the trip bars, they're tripped, flares are in the air.
The institutions, they're in the perimeter, they're with us, they're sitting on the train,
black rockets on board, he takes 20 seats, you know, and we're going to leave people

(01:41:33):
behind.
And if it's your family members, the people you love and you look out there and you're
thinking, well, they're going to miss the boat, you, you have ability, you know, you
have a unique position right now.
Remember what I said about just one tenth of a Bitcoin, you have a unique position
right now.
You can create generational wealth.

(01:41:55):
What I was discussing earlier about banks, you're going to have the opportunity to create
a family like the Rockefellers if you do this right.
And so your kids and the people you love, your friends, maybe the people you're going
to help in the future with a sentiment, you know, they're sitting out there and the train's
leaving and they might try to run along the side, but eventually they'll be looking at

(01:42:17):
the back of the train, it's gone.
But someday in the future, for me, probably when I die and they read the will, but my
kids are going to look down on their hand, they're going to go, when they read the will,
they're going to go, damn, I've got a Bitcoin ticket, I'm going to go somewhere.
And my grandkids too.
So you know, don't just stack for yourself, stack for other people.

(01:42:41):
As far as the people that are maybe oscillating right now or going, you know, well, what if
President Trump doesn't announce the SPR and Bitcoin crashes down to 80,000, I'll have
lost money now.
You know, just start reading, just start understanding.
Once you understand Bitcoin, if it clicks for you, you're done.

(01:43:02):
It's like you just push your chips in, you're finished.
It's over.
You can just relax in life every year.
As the years go by, you'll just have more wealth and you can sit there and if you want
to buy a nice watch, you can or you know, you can help your kids and stuff.
So just stop fighting it, start reading, educate yourself if you have any, you know, if you're

(01:43:27):
not convicted enough and then hopefully you'll get in a place where you'll be able to make
a difference in people's lives.
Amen to that.
And that's a beautiful note to end on, George.
Anywhere you want to send people, direct them to all link.
If you just type my name into the internet, George Bodine into Google, you'll see my art.

(01:43:51):
I'm the first thing that comes up.
And if you want to find me on Twitter, you can type in my name or use my call sign from
the Navy.
It's at Jethro and it's spelled J-E-T-H-R-O-E-1-1-1 because I don't know, I'm a boomer.
And that's it.
You'll find me on there.
Good deal.
Well, you know, I really appreciate you sharing your time.

(01:44:14):
Looking forward to the next time we can do this in person over a beer.
And yeah, thanks again.
I think there was a lot of great signal and great advice in here today.
So I appreciate you sharing.
You're welcome, bud.
We got to help people as much as we can here.
It's nice talking to you too, again, Walker.
You have a great day.
You too.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast.

(01:44:44):
You are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin Podcast.
Head to bitcoinpodcast.net slash sponsor or send an email to hello at bitcoinpodcast.net.
If you are enjoying the Bitcoin Podcast and find it valuable, give it a boost on Fountain,
a five star review wherever you're listening, or better yet, share this show with your network

(01:45:06):
so more people can learn about Bitcoin or don't Bitcoin doesn't care, but I sure do
appreciate it.
You can grab links in the show notes to watch or list this show wherever you get your podcasts
or go to Bitcoin podcast.net slash podcast.
And you'll also find the links to follow me and the show on NoSTER and on X. Bitcoin
is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.

(01:45:30):
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to the Bitcoin Podcast.
Until next time, stay free.
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