February 1, 2024 • 58 mins
In this episode, we're joined by our friend Metamick, the co-founder and CEO of Geyser, a revolutionary Bitcoin crowdfunding platform. Discover how Geyser is breaking barriers and offering unprecedented access to creator funding across the globe.
Key Points Discussed: 🔹 Introduction to Geyser and its global impact 🔹 Metamick's journey to Bitcoin 🔹 Insights into Bitcoin's role in challenging financial barriers
What You Will Discover: 🔹 The transformative potential of Bitcoin in crowdfunding 🔹 Personal anecdotes and experiences from Metamick 🔹 Future prospects for Geyser and Bitcoin usage
Connect with Metamick: https://twitter.com/metamick14 https://twitter.com/geyserfund https://geyser.fund/
Connect with Us:
https://www.freedomfootprintshow.com/ https://twitter.com/FootprintShow https://twitter.com/knutsvanholm https://twitter.com/BtcPseudoFinn
Thanks to our sponsors - check out there websites for info: AmberApp: https://amber.app/ Wasabi Wallet: https://wasabiwallet.io/ Geyser: https://geyser.fund/ Orange Pill App: https://www.theorangepillapp.com/
Support the Show: If you value what we do here at the Freedom Footprint Show, consider sending us some value back. You can send us a boost or stream us some sats on Fountain. Check out https://www.fountain.fm/ You can support us directly with Bitcoin on Geyser Fund: https://geyser.fund/project/freedom/
Your engagement helps us keep bringing you the content that empowers and educates on bitcoin and freedom. Let's head towards the orange glowing light together!
Chapters: 00:00 Intro 02:34 Welcoming Metamick from Geyser 04:06 Overview of Geyser 17:57 Geyser's Roadmap 24:14 Bitcoin Lifetime Subscriptions 33:03 Introduction to Metamick 46:58 View of Bitcoin Going Forward 53:28 Wrapping Up
The Freedom Footprint Show is a Bitcoin podcast hosted by Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf.
In each episode, we explore everything from deep philosophy to practical tools to emit freedom dioxide to expand your freedom footprint.
Join us as we head toward the orange glowing light together!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
you know, we realized actuallyonly a few months after we
(00:02):
started building Geyser that.
Kickstarter and GoFundMe wereonly accessible in 30 countries.
So like if you're in Brazil orNigeria, you couldn't create a
project and raise money on GoFundMe.
And, and we realized like, that's bizarre.
. So, Bitcoin really, really, like, saves,saves mainly that because at the end
of the day in the West, we still dohave a lot of these tools and pretty,
(00:23):
pretty powerful and useful, but inother parts of the world, where the
banking system isn't as sophisticated.
And then also, it's not even just that,but one of the financial infrastructure
that exists today, PayPal, Stripe,they're sort of, there's massive
regulatory capture and they're notreally allowed to I'm not going to
extend their services beyond becausethey're deemed to be high risk, right?
(00:46):
So, It's just, uh, it's just aninsane way of just perpetuating
financial apartheid, right?
It's really dividing theworld into different caps.
You know, you cannot use digitalmoney and now we have Bitcoin.
It's like, well, noweveryone gets digital money.
Thankfully.
This is the Freedom Footprint Show,a Bitcoin philosophy show with
(01:07):
Knut Svanholm and me, Luke DeWolf.
And we love to expandour freedom footprint.
We hope you do too.
The best way to do that is ofcourse to try to emit as much
freedom dioxide as possible.
The best tool we have for doingthat is of course Bitcoin.
Before we dive into today's show,we'd just like to tell you a little
bit about how you can support us.
(01:27):
First, to support us directly withBitcoin, visit our Geyser page at Geyser.
fund slash project slash freedom.
Or you can send us satsdirectly to freedom at Geyser.
fund.
And for the month of February,Geyser is matching all contributions,
up to a total of 500, 000 sats.
This is the best time to supportthe show and get literally
double value for your sats.
(01:47):
You can also support us as you listenby listening to the podcast on Fountain.
The app is available on Apple and Androidand you can stream sats or send a boost.
It's the easiest way to support theshow just by listening normally.
And if you don't care too much aboutLuke, you can always visit knutsvanholm.
com where you can buy my fabulouswine, my books, and a t shirt or two.
(02:07):
And if you don't feel like supportingyour fellow Bitcoiners at all, at least
like, subscribe, and brush your teeth.
But seriously, that stuff actually helps.
It would be great if you could subscribeto the YouTube channel, like the
videos, send us a comment, or leave usa review if you're listening on Apple
or Spotify or something like that.
All this stuff really helps theshow, seriously, so yeah, we'd
(02:28):
appreciate that if you can do that.
Click the damn bell!
So thanks for tuning in to the show,and we hope you enjoyed today's episode.
welcome back to the Freedom FootprintShow, the Bitcoin Philosophy Show with
Knut Svanholm and me, Luke the pseudo-fin.
And today our guest is Metamickco-founder and CEO of Geyser, the Bitcoin
crowdfunding platform that we're happy tobe using as the best way to support our
(02:52):
show, and we're thrilled to have Mik onhere to tell us all about the platform
and his Bitcoin story and all this.
So, mik, welcome to the Freedom Footprint
Uh, so good to be here.
Thank you guys.
Thanks, Luke.
Thanks, Knut, for inviting me.
It's really an honor.
Yeah, good to see you, Mick.
We haven't seen yousince Lugano, I believe.
(03:13):
I think it was, yeah,I think you're right.
Lugano was the, was the last time.
I still remember the first time we went.
We were, uh, somewhere in some, uh,street in Riga, uh, discovering weird
plants on the side corner of the street.
I remember
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when Izzy.
Izzy
Yeah,
taking a piss in a dark corner somewhereand he comes out with this cannabis plant
(03:39):
right.
thingies and he foundthe in the in the wild.
He'll see who finds a two meter tallcannabis plant just growing in the wild.
Yeah, it was weird.
Yeah, that was a really goodintroduction to, to you guys.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was.
That was a fun night.
I remember that that was a long night.
(04:00):
My memories from that nightare blurry, to say the least.
Yeah,
all good fun.
Yeah, and how?
How is Geyser doing this these days?
Like, what's going on
yeah, so Geyser is, we're always building,always just listening to users, always
solving bugs, always, you know, makingthe platform better, but, uh, and lately
(04:23):
we've been, uh, just, uh, doing just abit of research in terms of how can we
move Geyser forward and what's our sortof broader vision and where are we going?
And, um, we definitely see aneed for, uh, More, um, kind of a
community based approach, you know.
Gaz is a place where people, you know,send, the creators send their fans to
(04:44):
support them, obviously, as you guys know.
but there's the potential to, to makeit also more interactive with the,
you know, making it a place where Youknow, special, uh, contributors get to
have special rights to get access tocertain, certain information, certain,
uh, uh, certain contents, um, andkind of creating more of a feeling
of community for, for the creators.
(05:06):
So, yeah, sort of exploring, uh, where,where we want to go next, and we're really
excited to be Yeah, supporting, I think,the hundreds of creators that are earning
in Bitcoin and, um, yeah, it's really,it's really an honor to be supporting
this, this, this, this community andthis, uh, this, uh, um, this niche
community that is the Bitcoin community.
But our aim is to also bring this,the tools that Bitcoin enables
(05:29):
to the broader market as well.
So for those of you that don'tknow that, Geyser is a crowdfunding
platform similar to Patreon, butwith lightning pavements enabled.
So you connect your lightningwallet to Geyser and you can
get funded by the community.
(05:49):
Right, right.
Yeah, more like, probably more or lessbetween GoFundMe and Kickstarter because
you can also sell rewards on Geyser.
Um, but Patreon is a good, uh, isa good point because that's sort of
trying to move also in, in, in, in thatdirection in providing subscriptions
and, um, and, uh, hidden content,uh, for, uh, payroll content for,
(06:10):
for subscribers and so forth as well.
yeah, and we started talking a bitabout this before we hit record here,
but during the Canadian trucker protesta bit more than a year back now.
Right, look, when the hellwas that Like two years?
The time goes too fast.
22, yeah,
Yeah, so that's when you guysthought you had just started.
(06:32):
And this is when they shut down all thefunding for the truckers via GoFundMe,
so that the Canadian population got areminder that the money in their bank
accounts are not really theirs becausethey can't use it as they please.
But it's not permissionlessby any definition of the word.
(06:54):
So they hopped onto something calledTallycoin, which is another sort of
crowdfunding platform for Bitcoiners,I guess, but more on-chain variants of
that's right.
Yeah, so, so when, when that whole thinghappened, Geyser was just in its infancy.
We had been born, uh, justa week before in a pilot.
It was just a pilot project.
(07:15):
There was only one project.
On Geyser, but was a little inputfield where you could say, Hey, you
have an idea, you know, drop yourname, drop your idea and we'll, you
know, get you on boarded becausewe just wanted to see, is this
something that people even would want?
Like, do people care about this stuff?
Um, and so we've released somethingsuper quickly, uh, in just a
matter of a few months, and wegot in a week more than like.
(07:38):
A hundred, not a week, maybe thefirst month we got 150 to 100
requests for creators wantingto use Geyser as a platform.
and, and that was for us likea signal that, okay, there's,
there's something here.
Uh, but on the first week ofbeing live, the whole Trucker.
Stuff happened with GoFundMe.
Actually, what happens is like,the whole trucker company happened.
(08:01):
You had GoFundMe raising funds, right?
And we're like, oh mygod, this is incredible.
And then a few weekslater, they shut down.
They froze the funds, right?
Because people have to understand,when you create a project on GoFundMe,
You receive the funds in GoFundMe,GoFundMe, uh, uses a third party bank,
uh, to custody the funds in GoFundMe.
(08:24):
GoFundMe is essentially like a bankaccount, and, and that's why they could
just freeze those funds and they said,okay, we're gonna freeze these funds
and reuse them for other projects.
And people were like,you know, don't do that.
They get sued.
Um, and then eventually I think theygive the funds back to the, the funders.
But not only did they freeze theGoFundMe funds, they also froze bank
(08:46):
accounts of those who sent the money.
And I have friends who sent 10, and theirbank accounts were frozen for a week.
So imagine that, how bizarre is that?
And so that's why we had builtGeyser in a non custodial
way, built on top of Voltage.
built on top of, um, uh, of yourown node, essentially, you could
connect to your own node and receiveBitcoin on-chain and on Lightning
(09:08):
to be fully censorship resistant.
And that went really well for, a while.
Um, but yeah, at that point, Tallycoin,you could essentially send donations
on-chain and you can still can, it'sstill a functional app, um, platform
that allows you to do donations on-chain.
I think also Lightning, if you connect.
(09:30):
Like a separate, uh, servicecalled, um, goodness, I cannot
remember the service they use.
But yeah, so we'll have to kind ofdo a few more hops, uh, and yeah, and
so, and I think it worked really well.
I think there's, um, BDC Sessions,right, who was one of the key
guys behind the whole initiative.
Has some, has done some podcasts andtalked about his experience and basically
(09:52):
says like, I think as soon as thegovernment started shutting down, he said,
like, you know, I was scared for my life.
I just still, I shot on the projectitself, um, uh, in order to just
Be sure that this one, you know,create troubles for him as well.
So, the best way to do in these typesof ultra sensitive scenarios is to use
(10:13):
a fully, you know, user owned node,um, uh, like you can do at Geyser,
or You can also, you know, use, um,you know, BTC, uh, Payserver, right?
A really good, uh, censorshipresistant, censorship resistant option.
And, Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's,it can, it can get tough, right?
In terms of government,government seizing funds.
(10:34):
So, but But Geyser, after Having anode approach, which is fully non
custodial and censorship resistant,we decided, look, there's actually
still massive limitations here.
running a node is not simple.
Most people were like, no thank you, Ihave to kind of manage channels to get
a 1 million sat donation, I need to have1 million sats in Lightning channels.
(10:56):
And I don't have anything.
How do I get started ifI don't have anything?
Voltage is great, but I still haveto pay 10 a month to get that going.
So now we've figured out a solution toallow creators to link their Lightning
address from their Lightning wallet.
And just start receivingthe funds directly in there.
And there's a lot of technical complexitywith Lightning, but there's, one thing
(11:20):
that really works is custodial Lightning.
So it really, really, it reallydoes work with all its limitations.
I'm not saying that's good.
In fact, I definitelyrecommend to move your funds.
Uh, out of custodial wallets as much aspossible, but it really works in terms
of usability in terms of mass adoption.
So, yeah, that's worked really welland that really has helped us scale.
Now we have over a hundred newcreators every month joining Geyser.
(11:43):
We have, you know, over, uh, youknow, sometimes we reach three
bitcoins in transactions per month.
So there's a lot of activity.
Yeah, so you can fund on-chain,and then what we do is we
swap it over to Lightning.
So you receive everything in one place.
Because we don't like the idea ofhaving, you receive your on-chain Bitcoin
(12:04):
in one wallet, and you receive yourLightning payments in another wallet.
Instead, we kind of reconcile itall over into your Lightning wallet.
okay, yeah, a couple ofthings come to mind here.
It's so, it's so funny how, howhistory is playing out right before
our eyes and we're in the middle ofit just seeing these things happen.
Like one thing that comes tomind the, the, the steep learning
(12:28):
curve, right when, when peopleRealize what's actually going on.
So you had, when the Ukraine Russia warstarted, there was a guy I don't remember
if it was a Russian or a Ukrainian,but someone trying to get out with a
briefcase full of a gold bar, a stack ofdollars, a stack of euros and a stack of
rubles, and, of course, he gets stuck incustoms and the customs officer takes it
(12:54):
all, or the lion's share of it anyway.
the comments under the tweet andunder the picture is just look at this
idiot who can't remember 12 birds.
And People are gonnalearn that lesson right.
And the second thing is the, the,of course, the trucker thing, when,
when people realize that their bankaccounts weren't theirs, and Then
(13:17):
they, they learn how to Bitcoin prettyfast after a thing like that happens.
So, so it's just so, and I, I think,where we, as I know, I am, as a as a
hardcore Bitcoiner, a bit biased andI think that, like things are already
developed and we've got this already,but we're so early like these things
(13:38):
are just being built and you're oneof the the the apps that are Literally
changing the world at the moment,even though it's baby steps at first.
Still, three bit coin is it's three
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, man, look, it's,it's, it's, you're right.
It's going to, it's goingto take a lot of learning.
It's going to take alot of painful lessons.
(14:00):
and the challenges ahead are not, andthere's technical challenges too, right?
Like non custodial lightning ischallenging, but, uh, uh, my, my
personal perspective and I'm super, youknow, super also hardcore Bitcoin maxi.
Like I, I love, you know, I'm for,for self, self, um, self sovereignty,
not censorship resistance.
(14:21):
But if we want to onboard the world,there will have to be some compromises
potentially, and it might take usDecades to figure out a non custodial
solution that works at scale, right?
Because even a non custodialsolution, uh, light means solution,
um, wouldn't actually scale tomore than a hundred million people.
So custodial, I think we're going to haveto reconcile with the idea that there may
(14:45):
be things like Bitcoin banks that custodyfunds, uh, for, for a lot of people.
but if people have to still, and thenas we develop the tools that are non
custodial, that are, that are more, thatare more censorship resistant, but these
are being developed, like there's ARK.
I'm really interestedin seeing how that goes.
(15:05):
There's, um, all sorts of super smartpeople that can find the ways forward,
but in any case, Bitcoin is still better.
So like the way that I see it is.
Custodial Bitcoin is still betterthan non custodial shitcoins, or, or
custodial fiat, you know what I mean?
exactly that.
That's the way I see it too.
Like it's unfortunate that we have touse custodial, but still your, your
(15:29):
stack is the important thing, and thatyou run your on-chain node and then you
can run custodial and you can have itin flows and outflows there, never if
it becomes too much at some point, justput them in cold storage, do a one-time
payment and then just keep it as a.
I mean, that's the way I do itwhen I go to conferences and stuff.
Like I I Sell some t-shirts, abook, so whatever, and then I
(15:53):
get a little pocket money for youknow, stakes and bears and whatnot.
So it and it works and you know it's all.
There's always a trade-offbetween convenience and security.
Right,
Yeah, and I'm not, I'm not suggestingwe should be complacent, right, or,
or that we should stack our statsin wallets or doshi, not at all.
(16:14):
Um, people should, but, but wealso need some easy first steps
for, for a lot of these newbiesthat, that need to get started.
it's tricky, though.
One thing I noticed is, like I used to,sometimes I recommend products, apps
and stuff and in hindsight, I wish Ihadn't, like blockchaininfo, for instance.
(16:34):
In back in 2017 I recommended itto everyone and it fucking sucks.
They went to total shit-concasino in KYC and crap.
Then I recommended Moon.
I still like Moon, but Moon shutdown their lightning channels.
So if they got like 10 euros in thelightning payment just to check it out,
(16:55):
that money is gone now because they don'thave their lightning channels anymore.
They come to me and askme okay, what happened?
And I'm like, yeah, they shutdown their lightning channels.
Didn't you get the memo?
Aren't you like following everysingle Bitcoin person on Twitter?
that was blue wallet connected just
Yeah, blue Wall.
(17:15):
you said no,
I said Moon.
Okay, that was Blue Wallet.
Sorry, moon, I love Moon.
I love Blue Wallet as well.
Still, I mean, anub wouldn'tunderstand that they need to keep
updated about their custodial app.
(17:37):
They expect it to be as safeas a bank account and well,
there's a bias there too.
They think their bankaccount is safer than it is.
But yeah, still, I prefercustodial lightning to fiat.
Custodial fiat.
That's what I'm saying.
we're going with this.
(17:57):
So, Geyser what's coming up ahead Like?
What's on the roadmap?
What's your ambition for the future?
Yeah, so, yeah, so.
So we, for this year, we reallyfocused on making the funding
experience seamless, right?
So we integrated on-chain payments,uh, we integrated, yeah, this lightning
address payment solution, um, that workssuper, super, super easy for creators,
(18:21):
um, and what we then spent the lastthree months on, three, four months
on, is, migrating Geyser over to Nostr.
So every Geyser project right now hasits own npub And so, what that does
is that it does many, many things.
First of all, it makes theproject more censorship resistant.
Because now you can take the private key.
(18:43):
of your project, and if, you know,if the project gets shut down on
Geyser, you can always take itsomewhere else if you wanted to.
Like, and it creates the potential,creates the potential for, say, other
crowdfunding platforms to sprout upand start pulling projects from Geyser.
Like, if there's someone else who'slike, I want to create another
project, another crowdfunding platform.
(19:04):
Geyser, Geyser has beencompromised, right?
We've become too successful, toocomplacent, we've been captured.
Well, now another platform can juststart taking projects, start viewing
activity, all the project data, anddisplaying it in their own platform.
And even if we were to censor them, thatdata exists across Nostr relays So that
(19:29):
is great for censorship resistance, butalso great for creators because it allows
them to reach more people because everytime they write an entry or an update.
That can spread across Nostr, and thatmeans more viewership, more funding,
more, uh, more attention, and so forth.
So, we spent quite a bit of time on that,but we have to still iron out some things.
(19:51):
But we're planning to integrate moreNostr features like notes, posts, on
Geysers, we can write quick updates.
And as I mentioned, trying to learn moreabout how we can create subscriptions in
some smart ways, uh, and enable You know,say if you're a subscription to Knut's
podcast, you know, you get to see some,some, some, some, uh, paywalled content.
(20:13):
Um,
dancing like you get access to my only
exactly.
Yes.
Who wouldn't want tosee Knut dancing, right?
Uh, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So there's stuff that you can do there.
And the point is to kind oflearn from what's been happening
in the creator economy, whetherit's Kickstarter, Patreon.
And what we see overall as, uh, you know,on the, in the world of the internet is
(20:38):
just the, the power of creators, right?
Like, I, I find it just, I find this sofascinating just to think about how much
the world has changed in the last, say,30 yeathe thanks to the internet, right?
You, you have first, you have, firstyou have the birth of social media.
Right?
With Twitter, with Facebook,around 20 or so years ago.
(21:00):
Then, five years after that, youhad crowdfunding platforms like
Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe.
It's like, oh, now you canreceive money, you know, send a
link to Twitter or to Facebook.
People follow you through thesocial media platform, they click
on your project and then theyfund you on these other platforms.
Then you have content platformslike YouTube, Verizon, YouTube,
(21:22):
Spotify, and all these creatorsthat are creating great content.
They don't just want to send them to likea Kickstarter GoFundMe, they want to send
them to a place where they can actuallysubscribe and pay recurring payments.
That's where Patreon Onlyfans, Substack,Gumroad, all these are subscription
based, well, Gumroad maybe not so much.
(21:44):
The others are all subscriptionbased models that allow the creator
to monetize in a way that they can'tthrough just a YouTube channel, right?
With YouTube, you can make, youknow, thousands of dollars if
your video gets millions of views.
But if you don't get millions ofviews, if you don't have millions of
subscribers, It's really hard to makea living as a creator, as a content
(22:07):
creator, as a creator in general.
Um, and so, and so, you know, there'sall sorts of models, like there's
subscription, there's advertisements,there's donations, uh, and so, um, and so
it's an ecosystem that is in development.
And, you know, there's allsorts of experiments happening.
but now with Bitcoin, you have aneven more powerful tool because With
(22:27):
Bitcoin, money flows a lot quicker.
You don't have to put inyour credit card details.
you, you, you have, you know, some,even a wallet on your own browser.
Um, like Albi you have, you can sendfunds not to Kickstarter, like you guys
have a Geyser Lightning address, right?
Which is freedom@geyser.Fund andsomeone types it in their Wallet of
(22:48):
Satoshi, they, they, they don't haveto go to Geyser.Fund to fund you.
It's an incredibly powerful propertyof interoperability, like you can send
money ubiquitously from wherever, andthis Lightning address is the key funding
identifier, and it's just, it's like100x better than using your credit card.
(23:09):
as creators ourselves, we, I mean,we know that we're playing this game
like we're trying to do it seriously.
So we're trying to run it somewhat as abusiness and, you know, having sponsors
and all that, and we, of course, everyonewho has sponsors says I only is, but I use
all of my sponsors products and there'ssome ball shaving kit and some stuff like
(23:33):
that that there's no way in hell thatthey're actually using it, but but we
actually like, have so many synergies withall the, all the people that that have
sponsored us like that we really reallylike and use their products, because
that this is the bitcoin ecosystem.
Everything's connected right and we'rewe all benefit from helping one another
(23:55):
and it's such a like we're really tryingto tap into that and live the live that
meme as well, because it's so powerful.
We don't have to compete, wecan just collaborate, all of us.
It's.
It's just fantastic.
Yeah, we went together, right?
yeah, so, yeah, yeah, we talked toStefan Livera yesterday and we, we went
(24:19):
down a funny part of the rabbit hole.
If you, if you envisionhyperbitcoinization and you know,
number go up forever and all of this.
I can see a subscription model that ispossible with bitcoin but not possible
with fiat, and that is a one-time payment.
If for a lifetime subscription, Imean, that exists in fiat also, but
(24:44):
it's very rare because you have toput up a hell of a lot of money for
that to make any type of sense at all.
But in bitcoin, given that the receiverbelieves bitcoin to go up forever, the
bar is much lower to where you just senda bitcoin donation once and there you go.
(25:05):
That's, that's all the bitcoinerneeds, and I think that's just
so fascinating to think about.
Like, what happens then?
do we just fund one another onceand then we'd just be awesome
to one another after that?
Like, is that it?
Like?
How does that
Yeah, it's a good question, man.
(25:26):
It's something I've beenthinking about a lot.
Like, what is the cadence?
How is that important?
In fiat, it's different than in bitcoin.
But in bitcoin, I feel like as much as Ilike to believe that that bitcoin will go
up forever the human brain the experienceof the human brain is such that Actually,
(25:46):
that, that will take time, right?
And, and because Bitcoin goesthrough these bear cycles and the
bear cycles feels like, feel likeinfinity as well, to some extent.
And so four years, you have to thinkfour years ahead of time of what that
might be worth and maybe multiplythat by, by some, by some amounts.
but yeah, but we don't, but wedon't know, how much that, that,
(26:08):
that, that multiplier actually is.
And in any case, in four years,depending also on what age you are,
four years can be a hell of a lot oftime, and so you might not be thinking
that far ahead, but for those who havea low time preference, uh, then yeah,
definitely, I can see that happening,
the real power there, as I seeit, is that you can have both.
You can have both a cash flow inflow and a cash outflow, and then
(26:32):
you can also have your, like yourstack growing from one time payments
every now and then, the one does not,
exclude the others.
exclude the others don't know.
Because you can have all of it.
All it requires is like okay, I needthis to exist during these cycles,
(26:54):
but to survive after the cycle andto thrive after the cycle, I need
to have this mindset of as well.
I need to yeah, so all of thesebasic, basic theories of economics
that I was taught as a child.
When you can still make money frominterest by by just saving money in a
bank account, no one can do that anymore.
But we were told, like pay 10% toyourself, save 10% for yourself or
(27:20):
whatever you make, which is verygood advice if you're on a Bitcoin
standard, if you're on a fiatstandard, it's not because you're
just gonna lose that money over time.
But, but it poses somefascinating questions.
Like makes you think about what.
Yeah, it's a weird future to go into,but but like I would say, like, when
(27:41):
you're talking about, like the internet,changing things over the last 30 years,
but I mean post lockdowns it has beenmore powerful than ever with these.
This thing, for instance, riverside,we asked just talking to one another
by the click of a button and recordinghigh quality content, of course, the
highest quality content, since it does.
(28:02):
But it's absolutely amazingthat we can do this and that we
can do Bitcoin back and forth.
It's truly erases borders in a way.
That just wasn't there
Totally, man, totally, and there's, andthere's, just like, people were mind blown
about, Say Airbnb, like, you know, youkind of think of Airbnb as a, as an idea,
(28:25):
as a business model before the internet.
And even when the internet was born,it would have been inconceivable.
And even when the guys started thatAirbnb, it's called Airbnb because
they, you could rent air mattresses.
But they couldn't even conceiveof how big it could be, right?
And this is true for so much intechnology, like, it's like, it's a
lot of just trial and error, peopletrying shit and stuff working, stuff
(28:49):
not working, and then realizing actuallythere's something much, much greater.
And, um, and I think the sameis true with Bitcoin and, you
know, Bitcoin businesses as well.
There's, there's, there's so muchpotential growth and new things
that can be done with Bitcoin.
Uh, as a, as a monetary technology,but as also as technology technology,
that's like programmable moneythat we are able to, you know, uh,
(29:13):
self custody, stand at our will.
And yeah, it's going tobe super interesting.
I mean, it is already superinteresting, but who knows what
even we can ideate, uh, you know,magic going forward, 10, 20 years.
just as a communication snapwork, it enables so much like ways
of interacting with one anothersimply weren't possible before.
(29:36):
Like it used to be a hassle to send asmall payment from one country to another,
or or a large payment for that, for thatmatter, but now it isn't like not at all.
It's super duper simple.
Yeah, changing the world one planet at a
Absolutely.
(29:56):
And maybe just to talk a bit aboutGeyser here as well, because, you know,
we realized actually only a few monthsafter we started building Geyser that.
that Kickstarter and GoFundMe wereonly accessible in 30 countries.
So like if you're in Brazil orNigeria, you couldn't create a project
on, and raise money on GoFundMe.
(30:17):
And, and we realized like, that's bizarre.
Like, that's absolutely bizarre.
Um, and then Patreon was ableto figure something out, but
it's super, super challenging.
To do it, you have to be KYC'dif you're, you know, in third
world countries and so forth, butit's still a horrible experience.
So, Bitcoin really, really, like, saves,saves mainly that because at the end
(30:39):
of the day in the West, we still dohave a lot of these tools and pretty,
pretty powerful and useful, but inother parts of the world, um, where the
banking system isn't as sophisticated.
And then also, it's not even just that,but one of the financial infrastructure
that exists today, PayPal, Stripe,they, they're sort of, there's massive
(31:01):
regulatory capture and they're notreally allowed to I'm not going to
extend their services beyond becausethey're deemed to be high risk, right?
So, I actually used to work in abank and remember once hearing this
thing, Oh, but we cannot allow ourpayment channels to open to, you
know, this country in Africa because,you know, there could be terrorism.
(31:23):
So, this excuse is just It's just,uh, it's just an insane way of just
perpetuating financial apartheid, right?
That's what Ray Youssef calls it.
I think it's absolutely spot on.
Financial apartheid is Uh, a reallygood way of putting it because
it's, it's, it's really dividingthe world into different caps.
You know, you cannot use digitalmoney and now we have Bitcoin.
(31:46):
It's like, well, noweveryone gets digital money.
Thankfully.
fascinating stuff.
(33:03):
yeah.
Why don't we take this in the directionwe're usually supposed to start with, but
we always skip because Canute has ADD?
Can you tell us a little bitabout yourself, mick, your
introduction how you got
about that.
Make you,
(34:35):
and it has this democratizingeffect and wealth generating
effect for all of humanity.
And I just, for my first time in my life,even though I had studied economics,
even though, you know, I was told, youknow, about the power of technology, I
didn't really, I really only understoodit then, like how, how, how powerful it
can be in terms of bringing up everyone.
(34:58):
Um, and then a few months afterthat I learned about Bitcoin.
I learned, I learned about it andI had been introduced to Bitcoin
in 2010 in my university dorm room.
My friend told me, hey Mike,let's buy some Bitcoins.
And I immediately thought, I don'tknow how, but I just, my association
was this is sort of virtualmoney that anyone can fuck with.
And then when I learned about it again in2016, 2017, I was like, oh, wow, this is,
(35:23):
this is money that nobody can fuck with.
Um, and I, I love that.
I love the idea of, of, of,of something that, that cannot
be tampered with, whether it'sgovernments, whether it's corporations.
And what really lured me in as well werethe memes, like, seeing all these crazy
memes of these crazy people on Twitter,uh, saying this, you know, like, just all
these Pepe, uh, uh, memes, all these memesabout, you know, not being able to And the
(35:47):
Neo meme really, really got to me, the Neomeme, you know, are we going to be able
to sell Bitcoin for a million dollars?
No, when you're ready,you're not going to have to.
At that point, I was like, okay, theseguys are either crazy, or they've
understood something so, so powerful,and Luckily enough, I was in a time
of my life that I was sort of humbleand open to, to being wrong because
(36:08):
everything I've been taught, you know,not everything, but a lot, you know,
economics, you know, as a lot of it hadto go down the trash and be challenged.
Um, but luckily anthropology, althoughit has a lot of flaws, helped me
to kind of basically say, okay.
What if these guys are right?
Well, let's consider the possibilitythat they're right and, um, and that
(36:30):
Bitcoin really is, is, is money.
And, um, and so, yeah, so with that, Iwent down the rabbit hole, and then I
ended up, and at that point, I was workingon UX design, user research, um, kind of
the design side of technology, becauseI really thought at that point that You
know, uh, uh, there's something quite,quite good, uh, like morally good about
(36:51):
building, building tools for people.
and I think building is, I think whatyou guys do, for example, education,
that's building, like, that'sabsolutely building, so, so powerful.
And then there's tools, andthere's information, and
then all of this can help.
Rise Humanity, uh, I think.
And so, after that I worked in so manydifferent companies, I worked in fintech,
uh, I worked in, uh, and ended up alsoworking in crypto for a year, which was
(37:16):
really an ethereal startup, God forbid.
Um, but, uh, it was, it was, I know, Iknow, uh, I lash myself every morning.
But no, it's funny.
Actually, I was very much a Bitcoiner.
I was like, let's seehere what we can learn.
And there's definitely a lot, a lotof products, a lot of great tools
that have been built on Ethereum.
(37:37):
There's all sorts of thingsthat I thought inspired me.
There were some coolcrowdfunding platforms out there.
I was like, why is this not in Bitcoin?
Why these tools don't exist in Bitcoin?
And so, and so I was like, that's it.
You know, I'm done here.
I'm going to start building them.
I'm going to start building them, alot of these tools, uh, a cross funding
platform on Bitcoin because it's needed.
And we need that creatoreconomy on Bitcoin.
(37:59):
so yeah, I decided to kind of, uh,quit my other job and just start
focusing on, on Geyser at the point.
super, super thankful for, for thisand, uh, super excited every day to
be, to be helping build on Bitcoin.
It's an absolute privilege.
super cool, cool story.
And yeah, as you say, like, an openmind is important, but it's useless
(38:23):
if you're not intellectually honest.
Like, as Terry Pratchett said, theproblem with an open mind is that
people would come along and tryto put stuff in it like Ethereum,
(38:50):
mention lightning to a guy namedEthereum, he will sort of literally
just put his head in the sand.
He'll, like, act as if that didn't exist.
They never talk about it, right?
And their solutions, their layer2s are built on blockchains, they
have their own shift coins as well.
Um, it's, it's, it's an absoluteaberration of, of, of everything,
(39:11):
it's like they're proprietary,closed, they have several layer
2s that don't speak to each other.
Like, and I started realizing whatthis was, just like a casino of sorts.
Um, a lot of gambling, just a lot ofgambling, a lot of, you know, JPEGs,
and at first sometimes You know, itcan be fun, but then it's like, what
the fuck are we doing here, guys?
Like, what's the point?
(39:33):
Like, what are we trying to do?
Are we trying to really, like, makethis a better world where we create
money for the entirety of humanity?
Are we trying here to changethe world and make the world a
better place through sound money?
And that, that idealism, those, those,that ethics is completely lacking, right?
(39:54):
Or it's, it's very superficialbecause they use the word
decentralization as a, as a, as asurrogate for, for, for freedom.
And it's not because it'snot true decentralization.
So, yeah, so I was completely outof place and that's why I wasn't,
yeah, I wasn't very welcome.
the.
(40:14):
This pisses me off so much because,like, first of all, the theorem
isn't decentralized at all, sothey're pretending that the users
are decentralized somehow or in,like this world computer narrative,
they add on everything but, like,the decentralization in Bitcoin is an
unfortunate means to a much greaterend, which is some money for the world.
(40:35):
Sensorship, resistant,peer-to-peer all that's good stuff.
You can have them in your head.
But if we, it's Unfortunate that weneed the decentralization, because the
decentralization makes it slow and clunky.
But we need it because we can'ttrust people with money, because
Absolute crap corrupt and makeseverything crap and all this crap,
(40:58):
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point of the Bitcoin,uh, both blockchain and the proof of
work, right, is that it's, it's reliable.
That's the only feature thatit needs because reliability
is fucking hard to get.
And the only way to get it is through alot of work and, uh, shit everything else,
right, because that's the key trade off.
yeah, and you can only get it once,because all it is is a number on the
(41:22):
internet that doesn't change and Any, anycopy of that is redundant by definition.
So, yeah, well, there's that.
Here's the thought I had before that Ilost about the when the ADD kicked in,
like, I think a lot of the problems withthese, like I think a lot of the problems
with these older things like PayPal andGoFundMe and whatnot and Also Robinhood,
(41:47):
for that matter like when, when theywhen the whole GameStop stock thing
people were hodling and using the hodlmeme and all this and then they all got.
Then they were all surprised whenthey were rug pulled, like you could
have done this with something thatthey couldn't take away from you.
You can do the exact same on Bitcoin overand over again, and you guys just don't
(42:09):
realize that that's a fact, and but.
But the thing I thought about waswith the other things is that a lot of
people, in a lot of cases, you need tobe a company in order to make money.
So for an individual, an individualneeds to start a company in the country
(42:30):
they're in, and that's usually a tediousand quite pricey thing to do from For
most people, if, if you're 18 yearsold and you just finished school and
like, that's not something you just goand do for most people, and so then if
you start making some serious money,you can get into a lot of tax trouble.
If you don't, if you don't have acompany In Bitcoin, there's no difference
(42:54):
between a company and a person.
It's just a fucking telegramgroup and that's it, and you
don't need a board, you don't needaccounting, you don't need anything.
You just need you know yourbrain, and maybe some other
people maybe not like that's all.
That's true Everywhere now, and theregulators will have to to realize that
(43:17):
that's the world we're living in already.
start Geyser, because he justsort of helped me understand
(43:39):
how powerful this was.
He said, literally, anyone canstart a company with Bitcoin.
You don't need a banking licenseto be a crowdfunding platform.
He didn't say this, but you don'tneed a banking license to operate.
You don't need to apply to a bank.
You don't need, you need, you, it'spermissionless, you can just start
building a product and, and, andtransmitting payments, receiving
payments, et cetera, without, withouta banking approval and to think that
(44:04):
GoFundMe, Kickstarter, when theystarted, like, I have immense respect
for them as well, because when theystarted, they must have, they must have
gotten some sort of massive success.
Partnership.
Like, they must have paid so much moneyto get these, these banking partners
to, to do what they were looking for.
Um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's insane.
(44:25):
Just the amount of effort, probablymonths, years to get this bank,
banking partnership in place.
To us, nothing.
We just, just connected to Bitcoin.
We just connected to Bitcoin, right?
And, uh, it's very, very low, low, low,low, low, low cost and infrastructure.
Luckily, we also were able to buildon top of an already existing Bitcoin
(44:48):
infrastructure like Voltage, which isawesome for routing payments and running
a node, that really helps as well.
But yeah, regulators have noidea, like, what's coming.
There's going to be an explosion ofjust products, services, tools that
you can plug and play on the internet.
(45:10):
when they hop in and try to regulateit, it will already be in place, like
it's already there and it's already soobvious that it's a better solution.
It's like when they tried to stop IPtelephony, like all the phone companies
had to surrender at some point becauseit's just obvious that the internet
(45:32):
is better than using dinosaur shit.
Like the same is truefor money, of course.
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
(46:58):
you,
(47:35):
and it's been, as I say, yeah, bearmarkets are for builders and it's amazing
that we've done so much, everything we'vedone so far has been in a bear market.
So, in some way, I have no idea whatto expect, um, uh, as to what the
next bull market will, will look like.
Uh, we know Bitcoin works through sciencecycles and, That's, you know, it's
(47:56):
going to probably do its thing, right?
Um, I don't know, yeah, I think, Ithink it could, it's interesting, right?
I think with this whole ETF stuff, it'sa chance, it's possible that I, I think
the way that it's been approved, I'mquite cynical with this stuff, right?
So, the reason it's been approvedis because at the end of the
day, Bitcoin as an ETF is reallyjust a speculative asset, right?
(48:21):
So, it's basically been approvedby the Wall Street bros, right?
Just like, just let us gamblewith Bitcoin regulators, right?
And the regulators are like,ah, we don't like Bitcoin, but
fine, we'll let you do that.
Because in any case, theymake the capital gains, right?
Every time the data gets tradedand they make money from that too.
Um, but, but I think it's just, again,Bitcoin doing it's thing and sort of
(48:46):
Being this mirror where everyone getsto see what they want and, and then just
expanding its, its breadth, expandingits, its, um, its adoption in all forms.
but ultimately what I am interestedin, and I definitely follow Ray
Youssef here quite a lot, is I seeBitcoin as, as money, as like, as,
as peer to peer electronic cash.
(49:08):
That people should use to trade, toexchange, that nobody can dictate,
right, what people are trading.
And I, uh, I, that's what I'm for, andthat's why, that's what we call Geyser.
And I think it's, you know, that'swhat we have to really keep pushing and
try to get Bitcoin as a legal standardin as many countries as possible.
Because that's whatBitcoin is meant to be.
(49:30):
So, although I don't, I don't reallygive a shit about the ETF per se, I see
it as again, a further infiltration toolby Bitcoin to increase its own adoption.
and, um, and yeah, it's possible thatit'll, it'll even lead to even greater
highs with the bull market, and thatpeople will get wrecked and, and
try to realize, okay, what the fuckis this, and start paying attention
(49:51):
and start doing the research andlistening to Knut and Luke's podcast.
Um, so that's sort of, I don'tknow, I see that as the same.
Same, that, the same, samething happening, right?
The same, uh, cycle of, greater attention,greater awareness, you know, wrecked.
Education building and so forth.
(50:14):
And this is just like a furtherescalation of that, which is incredible.
so, yeah, I mean, in terms of, Idon't know if that's sort of what
answers the question to wherewe're going, but, uh, I think, I
think that's, I think that's that.
I'm not sure in terms ofnumbers what we should target.
I don't know.
no, but that's great.
Like there are so many differentangles to view bitcoin from.
(50:37):
Like some view as love it, as a savingstechnology, and you, as you say, you're
in on team cash and the internationalfriction, less payments, and there's
like just so many different ways to lookat this thing and and learn from it.
Totally.
It's great saving technology.
Absolutely.
(50:58):
But if we don't use it asa means of payment, um,
Uh,
it's, it's going to die.
I think I'm afraid it's going to die.
I don't know that, I don't knowif it's gonna die, but but uh, but
we're, we're sort of missing outon a, on a great feature, a great
functionality of the thing, like that.
(51:18):
That's what it was builtfor to be teleportable.
That's one of the reasons whywe value it and can save in it,
belief that, yeah, who knows if it'lldie or not, probably not, of course
(51:40):
not, but, uh, but yeah, this idea that,like, sats need to flow for Bitcoin
to gain more adoption, like, Bitcoinin more people's hands, and, Spreads
the likelihood of, of, of Bitcoin andactually being used as, as music exchange.
Um, and in a world where, where, you know,say Bitcoin is legal tender everywhere.
(52:04):
Well, wouldn't you want to, youknow, you probably still wanna
remain very conservative interms of your spanning habit.
It doesn't mean go dj, right?
So going DGen is like on theother extreme, and then huddling
is complete other extreme.
Uh, where you're just completely justholding, and I think landing the sats
flow is somewhere, you know, somewherein the middle where you're not just
(52:28):
throwing money at JPEGs, you're, you'respreading Bitcoin through donations or
through purchases, which helps to spreadBitcoin further, uh, into more hands.
spend and replace.
it's better replaced.
That's a good, a good way to look at it.
And yeah, as far as legal tendergoes, like, we here on the freedom
(52:48):
footprint show are against legaltender laws we think I Think I speak
for Luke as well that we think thatanyone should be able to Transact
in whatever currency they want like.
So I prefer the melee approach tothe To the book a la approach there,
yeah, yeah, totally, totally agree.
(53:10):
I mean, Fiat was born,um, right, as a threat.
Like, you have to use this, right?
You have to use it by decree.
It only works because it's forced upon us.
So you don't need to force me touse Bitcoin, like, I'll use it.
yeah and yeah.
So I urge everyone listening to thisto go and try to use Geyser, and the
(53:33):
best way to do that is, of course,to Support the freedom footprint
show, and we have the best likeaddress in the world, don't we, luke?
Free Freedom at Geyserfund.
How awesome is that so?
So don't forget to like,subscribe, brush your teeth.
(53:53):
And here's me begging for money, I guess.
Yeah,
(54:23):
you like what you've been hearing, ifyou like what we've been doing, please
go to our Geyser page Geyserfundcom.
Slash project, slash freedom, or ouraddress is freedom at Geyserfund.
And, yeah, send us some sats, or we'regoing to do more with the page, especially
as new features come out with Geyser.
(54:43):
We're in this for the long haul andwe're going to take advantage of
absolutely everything that's coming out.
So, yeah, follow along and checkout Geyser for everything that
you're looking at like, see whatother creators are on there.
And if you have something that youwant to do, yeah, make a Geyser page
(55:07):
and start spreading the word on Nosteron Twitter, all the places, right.
So yeah, that's it.
That's the pitch,
Mick, you'll have to tell us wheneverthe new features come out so I
can start dancing in my underwear.
I will, I will, yeah, we'll makesure to do a partnership for that.
And, uh, let you know beforehand.
(55:30):
Yeah, that's interesting.
But yeah, look, and also if there'sany feedback, we're also super open to
feedback and questions or suggestions.
Also, feel free to reach out to me.
And, uh, um, yeah, the basic belief isreally that everyone's a creator, right?
Everyone has.
I can contribute to Bitcoin in some way,whether it's doing a podcast, uh, whether
(55:51):
it's writing a book or, uh, or dancingin the street, waving a Bitcoin banner,
people are going to be willing to send yousome stats for your awesome, awesome work.
So, uh, that's really, that'sreally the idea here that anyone can
contribute, contribute to Bitcoin.
Speaking of dancing naked in the streetwith the Bitcoin banner, did you see
(56:12):
when Jonah Camoto showed his QR codebar tab to Twitter and people started
ordering stuff for him at the restaurant
No way.
I
That was fantastic.
So he just got more and morefood, him and his girlfriend.
They couldn't eat it all because,like, yeah, it was great,
(56:33):
Speaking of what can be done, right?
Bitcoin and save.
yeah, it's insane.
Like I remember in the early days ofsocial media, when people realized that
they could like meme big gatheringsinto existence and, all of a sudden,
like the authorities didn't know whatto do because, all of a sudden, 200,000
people are gathering for a largeparty in some park somewhere, and that
(56:58):
was in the news every now and then.
Then, I guess, facebook andthe likes of it figured out
ways to make that not happen.
But now, with Nostrand and
Yeah,
Bitcoin, we can literallychange the world.
yeah, super powerful,super powerful tools.
(57:20):
yeah.
Any final thoughts before we move on?
Mick, mick, is there anythingwe have left out here that
Nah, it's been, it's beenawesome to chat, guys.
Uh, I have not much else to say.
I mean, yeah, thanks again for the invite.
Thanks for the, really lovewhat you guys are doing.
Keep doing the hard work, the good work.
Keep inviting awesome guests.
(57:40):
And, uh, um, yeah, looking forwardto keep growing with you guys and
spreading the word of Bitcoin.
right, by Katya Mick, welove what you're doing too.
So check out Geyserfundthat's the address right,
Yeah, that's it.
Geysercom as well.
Maybe
Guys with, no, guys withoutfun only at the moment.
(58:00):
give you Geyserfund, so yeah,
soon, soon.
and where can people find you?
I'm metamick14 on Twitter, on Telegram.
You can reach out to me, Mick, atguyswithoutfun, if you have any thoughts,
questions, feedback, or suggestions.
And yeah, super open to hearing back.
(58:24):
Fantastic, looking forward to along and prosperous relationship.
Let's do it.
All right, fantastic.
Thanks a lot for joining us, mick, andthis has been the Freedom Footprint Show.
Thanks for listening.
you know, we realized actuallyonly a few months after we
(00:02):
started building Geyser that.
Kickstarter and GoFundMe wereonly accessible in 30 countries.
So like if you're in Brazil orNigeria, you couldn't create a
project and raise money on GoFundMe.
And, and we realized like, that's bizarre.
. So, Bitcoin really, really, like, saves,saves mainly that because at the end
of the day in the West, we still dohave a lot of these tools and pretty,
(00:23):
pretty powerful and useful, but inother parts of the world, where the
banking system isn't as sophisticated.
And then also, it's not even just that,but one of the financial infrastructure
that exists today, PayPal, Stripe,they're sort of, there's massive
regulatory capture and they're notreally allowed to I'm not going to
extend their services beyond becausethey're deemed to be high risk, right?
(00:46):
So, It's just, uh, it's just aninsane way of just perpetuating
financial apartheid, right?
It's really dividing theworld into different caps.
You know, you cannot use digitalmoney and now we have Bitcoin.
It's like, well, noweveryone gets digital money.
Thankfully.
This is the Freedom Footprint Show,a Bitcoin philosophy show with
(01:07):
Knut Svanholm and me, Luke DeWolf.
And we love to expandour freedom footprint.
We hope you do too.
The best way to do that is ofcourse to try to emit as much
freedom dioxide as possible.
The best tool we have for doingthat is of course Bitcoin.
Before we dive into today's show,we'd just like to tell you a little
bit about how you can support us.
(01:27):
First, to support us directly withBitcoin, visit our Geyser page at Geyser.
fund slash project slash freedom.
Or you can send us satsdirectly to freedom at Geyser.
fund.
And for the month of February,Geyser is matching all contributions,
up to a total of 500, 000 sats.
This is the best time to supportthe show and get literally
double value for your sats.
(01:47):
You can also support us as you listenby listening to the podcast on Fountain.
The app is available on Apple and Androidand you can stream sats or send a boost.
It's the easiest way to support theshow just by listening normally.
And if you don't care too much aboutLuke, you can always visit knutsvanholm.
com where you can buy my fabulouswine, my books, and a t shirt or two.
(02:07):
And if you don't feel like supportingyour fellow Bitcoiners at all, at least
like, subscribe, and brush your teeth.
But seriously, that stuff actually helps.
It would be great if you could subscribeto the YouTube channel, like the
videos, send us a comment, or leave usa review if you're listening on Apple
or Spotify or something like that.
All this stuff really helps theshow, seriously, so yeah, we'd
(02:28):
appreciate that if you can do that.
Click the damn bell!
So thanks for tuning in to the show,and we hope you enjoyed today's episode.
welcome back to the Freedom FootprintShow, the Bitcoin Philosophy Show with
Knut Svanholm and me, Luke the pseudo-fin.
And today our guest is Metamickco-founder and CEO of Geyser, the Bitcoin
crowdfunding platform that we're happy tobe using as the best way to support our
(02:52):
show, and we're thrilled to have Mik onhere to tell us all about the platform
and his Bitcoin story and all this.
So, mik, welcome to the Freedom Footprint
Uh, so good to be here.
Thank you guys.
Thanks, Luke.
Thanks, Knut, for inviting me.
It's really an honor.
Yeah, good to see you, Mick.
We haven't seen yousince Lugano, I believe.
(03:13):
I think it was, yeah,I think you're right.
Lugano was the, was the last time.
I still remember the first time we went.
We were, uh, somewhere in some, uh,street in Riga, uh, discovering weird
plants on the side corner of the street.
I remember
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's when Izzy.
Izzy
Yeah,
taking a piss in a dark corner somewhereand he comes out with this cannabis plant
(03:39):
right.
thingies and he foundthe in the in the wild.
He'll see who finds a two meter tallcannabis plant just growing in the wild.
Yeah, it was weird.
Yeah, that was a really goodintroduction to, to you guys.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was.
That was a fun night.
I remember that that was a long night.
(04:00):
My memories from that nightare blurry, to say the least.
Yeah,
all good fun.
Yeah, and how?
How is Geyser doing this these days?
Like, what's going on
yeah, so Geyser is, we're always building,always just listening to users, always
solving bugs, always, you know, makingthe platform better, but, uh, and lately
(04:23):
we've been, uh, just, uh, doing just abit of research in terms of how can we
move Geyser forward and what's our sortof broader vision and where are we going?
And, um, we definitely see aneed for, uh, More, um, kind of a
community based approach, you know.
Gaz is a place where people, you know,send, the creators send their fans to
(04:44):
support them, obviously, as you guys know.
but there's the potential to, to makeit also more interactive with the,
you know, making it a place where Youknow, special, uh, contributors get to
have special rights to get access tocertain, certain information, certain,
uh, uh, certain contents, um, andkind of creating more of a feeling
of community for, for the creators.
(05:06):
So, yeah, sort of exploring, uh, where,where we want to go next, and we're really
excited to be Yeah, supporting, I think,the hundreds of creators that are earning
in Bitcoin and, um, yeah, it's really,it's really an honor to be supporting
this, this, this, this community andthis, uh, this, uh, um, this niche
community that is the Bitcoin community.
But our aim is to also bring this,the tools that Bitcoin enables
(05:29):
to the broader market as well.
So for those of you that don'tknow that, Geyser is a crowdfunding
platform similar to Patreon, butwith lightning pavements enabled.
So you connect your lightningwallet to Geyser and you can
get funded by the community.
(05:49):
Right, right.
Yeah, more like, probably more or lessbetween GoFundMe and Kickstarter because
you can also sell rewards on Geyser.
Um, but Patreon is a good, uh, isa good point because that's sort of
trying to move also in, in, in, in thatdirection in providing subscriptions
and, um, and, uh, hidden content,uh, for, uh, payroll content for,
(06:10):
for subscribers and so forth as well.
yeah, and we started talking a bitabout this before we hit record here,
but during the Canadian trucker protesta bit more than a year back now.
Right, look, when the hellwas that Like two years?
The time goes too fast.
22, yeah,
Yeah, so that's when you guysthought you had just started.
(06:32):
And this is when they shut down all thefunding for the truckers via GoFundMe,
so that the Canadian population got areminder that the money in their bank
accounts are not really theirs becausethey can't use it as they please.
But it's not permissionlessby any definition of the word.
(06:54):
So they hopped onto something calledTallycoin, which is another sort of
crowdfunding platform for Bitcoiners,I guess, but more on-chain variants of
that's right.
Yeah, so, so when, when that whole thinghappened, Geyser was just in its infancy.
We had been born, uh, justa week before in a pilot.
It was just a pilot project.
(07:15):
There was only one project.
On Geyser, but was a little inputfield where you could say, Hey, you
have an idea, you know, drop yourname, drop your idea and we'll, you
know, get you on boarded becausewe just wanted to see, is this
something that people even would want?
Like, do people care about this stuff?
Um, and so we've released somethingsuper quickly, uh, in just a
matter of a few months, and wegot in a week more than like.
(07:38):
A hundred, not a week, maybe thefirst month we got 150 to 100
requests for creators wantingto use Geyser as a platform.
and, and that was for us likea signal that, okay, there's,
there's something here.
Uh, but on the first week ofbeing live, the whole Trucker.
Stuff happened with GoFundMe.
Actually, what happens is like,the whole trucker company happened.
(08:01):
You had GoFundMe raising funds, right?
And we're like, oh mygod, this is incredible.
And then a few weekslater, they shut down.
They froze the funds, right?
Because people have to understand,when you create a project on GoFundMe,
You receive the funds in GoFundMe,GoFundMe, uh, uses a third party bank,
uh, to custody the funds in GoFundMe.
(08:24):
GoFundMe is essentially like a bankaccount, and, and that's why they could
just freeze those funds and they said,okay, we're gonna freeze these funds
and reuse them for other projects.
And people were like,you know, don't do that.
They get sued.
Um, and then eventually I think theygive the funds back to the, the funders.
But not only did they freeze theGoFundMe funds, they also froze bank
(08:46):
accounts of those who sent the money.
And I have friends who sent 10, and theirbank accounts were frozen for a week.
So imagine that, how bizarre is that?
And so that's why we had builtGeyser in a non custodial
way, built on top of Voltage.
built on top of, um, uh, of yourown node, essentially, you could
connect to your own node and receiveBitcoin on-chain and on Lightning
(09:08):
to be fully censorship resistant.
And that went really well for, a while.
Um, but yeah, at that point, Tallycoin,you could essentially send donations
on-chain and you can still can, it'sstill a functional app, um, platform
that allows you to do donations on-chain.
I think also Lightning, if you connect.
(09:30):
Like a separate, uh, servicecalled, um, goodness, I cannot
remember the service they use.
But yeah, so we'll have to kind ofdo a few more hops, uh, and yeah, and
so, and I think it worked really well.
I think there's, um, BDC Sessions,right, who was one of the key
guys behind the whole initiative.
Has some, has done some podcasts andtalked about his experience and basically
(09:52):
says like, I think as soon as thegovernment started shutting down, he said,
like, you know, I was scared for my life.
I just still, I shot on the projectitself, um, uh, in order to just
Be sure that this one, you know,create troubles for him as well.
So, the best way to do in these typesof ultra sensitive scenarios is to use
(10:13):
a fully, you know, user owned node,um, uh, like you can do at Geyser,
or You can also, you know, use, um,you know, BTC, uh, Payserver, right?
A really good, uh, censorshipresistant, censorship resistant option.
And, Yeah, it's, it's, um, it's,it can, it can get tough, right?
In terms of government,government seizing funds.
(10:34):
So, but But Geyser, after Having anode approach, which is fully non
custodial and censorship resistant,we decided, look, there's actually
still massive limitations here.
running a node is not simple.
Most people were like, no thank you, Ihave to kind of manage channels to get
a 1 million sat donation, I need to have1 million sats in Lightning channels.
(10:56):
And I don't have anything.
How do I get started ifI don't have anything?
Voltage is great, but I still haveto pay 10 a month to get that going.
So now we've figured out a solution toallow creators to link their Lightning
address from their Lightning wallet.
And just start receivingthe funds directly in there.
And there's a lot of technical complexitywith Lightning, but there's, one thing
(11:20):
that really works is custodial Lightning.
So it really, really, it reallydoes work with all its limitations.
I'm not saying that's good.
In fact, I definitelyrecommend to move your funds.
Uh, out of custodial wallets as much aspossible, but it really works in terms
of usability in terms of mass adoption.
So, yeah, that's worked really welland that really has helped us scale.
Now we have over a hundred newcreators every month joining Geyser.
(11:43):
We have, you know, over, uh, youknow, sometimes we reach three
bitcoins in transactions per month.
So there's a lot of activity.
Yeah, so you can fund on-chain,and then what we do is we
swap it over to Lightning.
So you receive everything in one place.
Because we don't like the idea ofhaving, you receive your on-chain Bitcoin
(12:04):
in one wallet, and you receive yourLightning payments in another wallet.
Instead, we kind of reconcile itall over into your Lightning wallet.
okay, yeah, a couple ofthings come to mind here.
It's so, it's so funny how, howhistory is playing out right before
our eyes and we're in the middle ofit just seeing these things happen.
Like one thing that comes tomind the, the, the steep learning
(12:28):
curve, right when, when peopleRealize what's actually going on.
So you had, when the Ukraine Russia warstarted, there was a guy I don't remember
if it was a Russian or a Ukrainian,but someone trying to get out with a
briefcase full of a gold bar, a stack ofdollars, a stack of euros and a stack of
rubles, and, of course, he gets stuck incustoms and the customs officer takes it
(12:54):
all, or the lion's share of it anyway.
the comments under the tweet andunder the picture is just look at this
idiot who can't remember 12 birds.
And People are gonnalearn that lesson right.
And the second thing is the, the,of course, the trucker thing, when,
when people realize that their bankaccounts weren't theirs, and Then
(13:17):
they, they learn how to Bitcoin prettyfast after a thing like that happens.
So, so it's just so, and I, I think,where we, as I know, I am, as a as a
hardcore Bitcoiner, a bit biased andI think that, like things are already
developed and we've got this already,but we're so early like these things
(13:38):
are just being built and you're oneof the the the apps that are Literally
changing the world at the moment,even though it's baby steps at first.
Still, three bit coin is it's three
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, man, look, it's,it's, it's, you're right.
It's going to, it's goingto take a lot of learning.
It's going to take alot of painful lessons.
(14:00):
and the challenges ahead are not, andthere's technical challenges too, right?
Like non custodial lightning ischallenging, but, uh, uh, my, my
personal perspective and I'm super, youknow, super also hardcore Bitcoin maxi.
Like I, I love, you know, I'm for,for self, self, um, self sovereignty,
not censorship resistance.
(14:21):
But if we want to onboard the world,there will have to be some compromises
potentially, and it might take usDecades to figure out a non custodial
solution that works at scale, right?
Because even a non custodialsolution, uh, light means solution,
um, wouldn't actually scale tomore than a hundred million people.
So custodial, I think we're going to haveto reconcile with the idea that there may
(14:45):
be things like Bitcoin banks that custodyfunds, uh, for, for a lot of people.
but if people have to still, and thenas we develop the tools that are non
custodial, that are, that are more, thatare more censorship resistant, but these
are being developed, like there's ARK.
I'm really interestedin seeing how that goes.
(15:05):
There's, um, all sorts of super smartpeople that can find the ways forward,
but in any case, Bitcoin is still better.
So like the way that I see it is.
Custodial Bitcoin is still betterthan non custodial shitcoins, or, or
custodial fiat, you know what I mean?
exactly that.
That's the way I see it too.
Like it's unfortunate that we have touse custodial, but still your, your
(15:29):
stack is the important thing, and thatyou run your on-chain node and then you
can run custodial and you can have itin flows and outflows there, never if
it becomes too much at some point, justput them in cold storage, do a one-time
payment and then just keep it as a.
I mean, that's the way I do itwhen I go to conferences and stuff.
Like I I Sell some t-shirts, abook, so whatever, and then I
(15:53):
get a little pocket money for youknow, stakes and bears and whatnot.
So it and it works and you know it's all.
There's always a trade-offbetween convenience and security.
Right,
Yeah, and I'm not, I'm not suggestingwe should be complacent, right, or,
or that we should stack our statsin wallets or doshi, not at all.
(16:14):
Um, people should, but, but wealso need some easy first steps
for, for a lot of these newbiesthat, that need to get started.
it's tricky, though.
One thing I noticed is, like I used to,sometimes I recommend products, apps
and stuff and in hindsight, I wish Ihadn't, like blockchaininfo, for instance.
(16:34):
In back in 2017 I recommended itto everyone and it fucking sucks.
They went to total shit-concasino in KYC and crap.
Then I recommended Moon.
I still like Moon, but Moon shutdown their lightning channels.
So if they got like 10 euros in thelightning payment just to check it out,
(16:55):
that money is gone now because they don'thave their lightning channels anymore.
They come to me and askme okay, what happened?
And I'm like, yeah, they shutdown their lightning channels.
Didn't you get the memo?
Aren't you like following everysingle Bitcoin person on Twitter?
that was blue wallet connected just
Yeah, blue Wall.
(17:15):
you said no,
I said Moon.
Okay, that was Blue Wallet.
Sorry, moon, I love Moon.
I love Blue Wallet as well.
Still, I mean, anub wouldn'tunderstand that they need to keep
updated about their custodial app.
(17:37):
They expect it to be as safeas a bank account and well,
there's a bias there too.
They think their bankaccount is safer than it is.
But yeah, still, I prefercustodial lightning to fiat.
Custodial fiat.
That's what I'm saying.
we're going with this.
(17:57):
So, Geyser what's coming up ahead Like?
What's on the roadmap?
What's your ambition for the future?
Yeah, so, yeah, so.
So we, for this year, we reallyfocused on making the funding
experience seamless, right?
So we integrated on-chain payments,uh, we integrated, yeah, this lightning
address payment solution, um, that workssuper, super, super easy for creators,
(18:21):
um, and what we then spent the lastthree months on, three, four months
on, is, migrating Geyser over to Nostr.
So every Geyser project right now hasits own npub And so, what that does
is that it does many, many things.
First of all, it makes theproject more censorship resistant.
Because now you can take the private key.
(18:43):
of your project, and if, you know,if the project gets shut down on
Geyser, you can always take itsomewhere else if you wanted to.
Like, and it creates the potential,creates the potential for, say, other
crowdfunding platforms to sprout upand start pulling projects from Geyser.
Like, if there's someone else who'slike, I want to create another
project, another crowdfunding platform.
(19:04):
Geyser, Geyser has beencompromised, right?
We've become too successful, toocomplacent, we've been captured.
Well, now another platform can juststart taking projects, start viewing
activity, all the project data, anddisplaying it in their own platform.
And even if we were to censor them, thatdata exists across Nostr relays So that
(19:29):
is great for censorship resistance, butalso great for creators because it allows
them to reach more people because everytime they write an entry or an update.
That can spread across Nostr, and thatmeans more viewership, more funding,
more, uh, more attention, and so forth.
So, we spent quite a bit of time on that,but we have to still iron out some things.
(19:51):
But we're planning to integrate moreNostr features like notes, posts, on
Geysers, we can write quick updates.
And as I mentioned, trying to learn moreabout how we can create subscriptions in
some smart ways, uh, and enable You know,say if you're a subscription to Knut's
podcast, you know, you get to see some,some, some, some, uh, paywalled content.
(20:13):
Um,
dancing like you get access to my only
exactly.
Yes.
Who wouldn't want tosee Knut dancing, right?
Uh, yeah, yeah, exactly.
So there's stuff that you can do there.
And the point is to kind oflearn from what's been happening
in the creator economy, whetherit's Kickstarter, Patreon.
And what we see overall as, uh, you know,on the, in the world of the internet is
(20:38):
just the, the power of creators, right?
Like, I, I find it just, I find this sofascinating just to think about how much
the world has changed in the last, say,30 yeathe thanks to the internet, right?
You, you have first, you have, firstyou have the birth of social media.
Right?
With Twitter, with Facebook,around 20 or so years ago.
(21:00):
Then, five years after that, youhad crowdfunding platforms like
Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and GoFundMe.
It's like, oh, now you canreceive money, you know, send a
link to Twitter or to Facebook.
People follow you through thesocial media platform, they click
on your project and then theyfund you on these other platforms.
Then you have content platformslike YouTube, Verizon, YouTube,
(21:22):
Spotify, and all these creatorsthat are creating great content.
They don't just want to send them to likea Kickstarter GoFundMe, they want to send
them to a place where they can actuallysubscribe and pay recurring payments.
That's where Patreon Onlyfans, Substack,Gumroad, all these are subscription
based, well, Gumroad maybe not so much.
(21:44):
The others are all subscriptionbased models that allow the creator
to monetize in a way that they can'tthrough just a YouTube channel, right?
With YouTube, you can make, youknow, thousands of dollars if
your video gets millions of views.
But if you don't get millions ofviews, if you don't have millions of
subscribers, It's really hard to makea living as a creator, as a content
(22:07):
creator, as a creator in general.
Um, and so, and so, you know, there'sall sorts of models, like there's
subscription, there's advertisements,there's donations, uh, and so, um, and so
it's an ecosystem that is in development.
And, you know, there's allsorts of experiments happening.
but now with Bitcoin, you have aneven more powerful tool because With
(22:27):
Bitcoin, money flows a lot quicker.
You don't have to put inyour credit card details.
you, you, you have, you know, some,even a wallet on your own browser.
Um, like Albi you have, you can sendfunds not to Kickstarter, like you guys
have a Geyser Lightning address, right?
Which is freedom@geyser.Fund andsomeone types it in their Wallet of
(22:48):
Satoshi, they, they, they don't haveto go to Geyser.Fund to fund you.
It's an incredibly powerful propertyof interoperability, like you can send
money ubiquitously from wherever, andthis Lightning address is the key funding
identifier, and it's just, it's like100x better than using your credit card.
(23:09):
as creators ourselves, we, I mean,we know that we're playing this game
like we're trying to do it seriously.
So we're trying to run it somewhat as abusiness and, you know, having sponsors
and all that, and we, of course, everyonewho has sponsors says I only is, but I use
all of my sponsors products and there'ssome ball shaving kit and some stuff like
(23:33):
that that there's no way in hell thatthey're actually using it, but but we
actually like, have so many synergies withall the, all the people that that have
sponsored us like that we really reallylike and use their products, because
that this is the bitcoin ecosystem.
Everything's connected right and we'rewe all benefit from helping one another
(23:55):
and it's such a like we're really tryingto tap into that and live the live that
meme as well, because it's so powerful.
We don't have to compete, wecan just collaborate, all of us.
It's.
It's just fantastic.
Yeah, we went together, right?
yeah, so, yeah, yeah, we talked toStefan Livera yesterday and we, we went
(24:19):
down a funny part of the rabbit hole.
If you, if you envisionhyperbitcoinization and you know,
number go up forever and all of this.
I can see a subscription model that ispossible with bitcoin but not possible
with fiat, and that is a one-time payment.
If for a lifetime subscription, Imean, that exists in fiat also, but
(24:44):
it's very rare because you have toput up a hell of a lot of money for
that to make any type of sense at all.
But in bitcoin, given that the receiverbelieves bitcoin to go up forever, the
bar is much lower to where you just senda bitcoin donation once and there you go.
(25:05):
That's, that's all the bitcoinerneeds, and I think that's just
so fascinating to think about.
Like, what happens then?
do we just fund one another onceand then we'd just be awesome
to one another after that?
Like, is that it?
Like?
How does that
Yeah, it's a good question, man.
(25:26):
It's something I've beenthinking about a lot.
Like, what is the cadence?
How is that important?
In fiat, it's different than in bitcoin.
But in bitcoin, I feel like as much as Ilike to believe that that bitcoin will go
up forever the human brain the experienceof the human brain is such that Actually,
(25:46):
that, that will take time, right?
And, and because Bitcoin goesthrough these bear cycles and the
bear cycles feels like, feel likeinfinity as well, to some extent.
And so four years, you have to thinkfour years ahead of time of what that
might be worth and maybe multiplythat by, by some, by some amounts.
but yeah, but we don't, but wedon't know, how much that, that,
(26:08):
that, that multiplier actually is.
And in any case, in four years,depending also on what age you are,
four years can be a hell of a lot oftime, and so you might not be thinking
that far ahead, but for those who havea low time preference, uh, then yeah,
definitely, I can see that happening,
the real power there, as I seeit, is that you can have both.
You can have both a cash flow inflow and a cash outflow, and then
(26:32):
you can also have your, like yourstack growing from one time payments
every now and then, the one does not,
exclude the others.
exclude the others don't know.
Because you can have all of it.
All it requires is like okay, I needthis to exist during these cycles,
(26:54):
but to survive after the cycle andto thrive after the cycle, I need
to have this mindset of as well.
I need to yeah, so all of thesebasic, basic theories of economics
that I was taught as a child.
When you can still make money frominterest by by just saving money in a
bank account, no one can do that anymore.
But we were told, like pay 10% toyourself, save 10% for yourself or
(27:20):
whatever you make, which is verygood advice if you're on a Bitcoin
standard, if you're on a fiatstandard, it's not because you're
just gonna lose that money over time.
But, but it poses somefascinating questions.
Like makes you think about what.
Yeah, it's a weird future to go into,but but like I would say, like, when
(27:41):
you're talking about, like the internet,changing things over the last 30 years,
but I mean post lockdowns it has beenmore powerful than ever with these.
This thing, for instance, riverside,we asked just talking to one another
by the click of a button and recordinghigh quality content, of course, the
highest quality content, since it does.
(28:02):
But it's absolutely amazingthat we can do this and that we
can do Bitcoin back and forth.
It's truly erases borders in a way.
That just wasn't there
Totally, man, totally, and there's, andthere's, just like, people were mind blown
about, Say Airbnb, like, you know, youkind of think of Airbnb as a, as an idea,
(28:25):
as a business model before the internet.
And even when the internet was born,it would have been inconceivable.
And even when the guys started thatAirbnb, it's called Airbnb because
they, you could rent air mattresses.
But they couldn't even conceiveof how big it could be, right?
And this is true for so much intechnology, like, it's like, it's a
lot of just trial and error, peopletrying shit and stuff working, stuff
(28:49):
not working, and then realizing actuallythere's something much, much greater.
And, um, and I think the sameis true with Bitcoin and, you
know, Bitcoin businesses as well.
There's, there's, there's so muchpotential growth and new things
that can be done with Bitcoin.
Uh, as a, as a monetary technology,but as also as technology technology,
that's like programmable moneythat we are able to, you know, uh,
(29:13):
self custody, stand at our will.
And yeah, it's going tobe super interesting.
I mean, it is already superinteresting, but who knows what
even we can ideate, uh, you know,magic going forward, 10, 20 years.
just as a communication snapwork, it enables so much like ways
of interacting with one anothersimply weren't possible before.
(29:36):
Like it used to be a hassle to send asmall payment from one country to another,
or or a large payment for that, for thatmatter, but now it isn't like not at all.
It's super duper simple.
Yeah, changing the world one planet at a
Absolutely.
(29:56):
And maybe just to talk a bit aboutGeyser here as well, because, you know,
we realized actually only a few monthsafter we started building Geyser that.
that Kickstarter and GoFundMe wereonly accessible in 30 countries.
So like if you're in Brazil orNigeria, you couldn't create a project
on, and raise money on GoFundMe.
(30:17):
And, and we realized like, that's bizarre.
Like, that's absolutely bizarre.
Um, and then Patreon was ableto figure something out, but
it's super, super challenging.
To do it, you have to be KYC'dif you're, you know, in third
world countries and so forth, butit's still a horrible experience.
So, Bitcoin really, really, like, saves,saves mainly that because at the end
(30:39):
of the day in the West, we still dohave a lot of these tools and pretty,
pretty powerful and useful, but inother parts of the world, um, where the
banking system isn't as sophisticated.
And then also, it's not even just that,but one of the financial infrastructure
that exists today, PayPal, Stripe,they, they're sort of, there's massive
(31:01):
regulatory capture and they're notreally allowed to I'm not going to
extend their services beyond becausethey're deemed to be high risk, right?
So, I actually used to work in abank and remember once hearing this
thing, Oh, but we cannot allow ourpayment channels to open to, you
know, this country in Africa because,you know, there could be terrorism.
(31:23):
So, this excuse is just It's just,uh, it's just an insane way of just
perpetuating financial apartheid, right?
That's what Ray Youssef calls it.
I think it's absolutely spot on.
Financial apartheid is Uh, a reallygood way of putting it because
it's, it's, it's really dividingthe world into different caps.
You know, you cannot use digitalmoney and now we have Bitcoin.
(31:46):
It's like, well, noweveryone gets digital money.
Thankfully.
fascinating stuff.
(33:03):
yeah.
Why don't we take this in the directionwe're usually supposed to start with, but
we always skip because Canute has ADD?
Can you tell us a little bitabout yourself, mick, your
introduction how you got
about that.
Make you,
(34:35):
and it has this democratizingeffect and wealth generating
effect for all of humanity.
And I just, for my first time in my life,even though I had studied economics,
even though, you know, I was told, youknow, about the power of technology, I
didn't really, I really only understoodit then, like how, how, how powerful it
can be in terms of bringing up everyone.
(34:58):
Um, and then a few months afterthat I learned about Bitcoin.
I learned, I learned about it andI had been introduced to Bitcoin
in 2010 in my university dorm room.
My friend told me, hey Mike,let's buy some Bitcoins.
And I immediately thought, I don'tknow how, but I just, my association
was this is sort of virtualmoney that anyone can fuck with.
And then when I learned about it again in2016, 2017, I was like, oh, wow, this is,
(35:23):
this is money that nobody can fuck with.
Um, and I, I love that.
I love the idea of, of, of,of something that, that cannot
be tampered with, whether it'sgovernments, whether it's corporations.
And what really lured me in as well werethe memes, like, seeing all these crazy
memes of these crazy people on Twitter,uh, saying this, you know, like, just all
these Pepe, uh, uh, memes, all these memesabout, you know, not being able to And the
(35:47):
Neo meme really, really got to me, the Neomeme, you know, are we going to be able
to sell Bitcoin for a million dollars?
No, when you're ready,you're not going to have to.
At that point, I was like, okay, theseguys are either crazy, or they've
understood something so, so powerful,and Luckily enough, I was in a time
of my life that I was sort of humbleand open to, to being wrong because
(36:08):
everything I've been taught, you know,not everything, but a lot, you know,
economics, you know, as a lot of it hadto go down the trash and be challenged.
Um, but luckily anthropology, althoughit has a lot of flaws, helped me
to kind of basically say, okay.
What if these guys are right?
Well, let's consider the possibilitythat they're right and, um, and that
(36:30):
Bitcoin really is, is, is money.
And, um, and so, yeah, so with that, Iwent down the rabbit hole, and then I
ended up, and at that point, I was workingon UX design, user research, um, kind of
the design side of technology, becauseI really thought at that point that You
know, uh, uh, there's something quite,quite good, uh, like morally good about
(36:51):
building, building tools for people.
and I think building is, I think whatyou guys do, for example, education,
that's building, like, that'sabsolutely building, so, so powerful.
And then there's tools, andthere's information, and
then all of this can help.
Rise Humanity, uh, I think.
And so, after that I worked in so manydifferent companies, I worked in fintech,
uh, I worked in, uh, and ended up alsoworking in crypto for a year, which was
(37:16):
really an ethereal startup, God forbid.
Um, but, uh, it was, it was, I know, Iknow, uh, I lash myself every morning.
But no, it's funny.
Actually, I was very much a Bitcoiner.
I was like, let's seehere what we can learn.
And there's definitely a lot, a lotof products, a lot of great tools
that have been built on Ethereum.
(37:37):
There's all sorts of thingsthat I thought inspired me.
There were some coolcrowdfunding platforms out there.
I was like, why is this not in Bitcoin?
Why these tools don't exist in Bitcoin?
And so, and so I was like, that's it.
You know, I'm done here.
I'm going to start building them.
I'm going to start building them, alot of these tools, uh, a cross funding
platform on Bitcoin because it's needed.
And we need that creatoreconomy on Bitcoin.
(37:59):
so yeah, I decided to kind of, uh,quit my other job and just start
focusing on, on Geyser at the point.
super, super thankful for, for thisand, uh, super excited every day to
be, to be helping build on Bitcoin.
It's an absolute privilege.
super cool, cool story.
And yeah, as you say, like, an openmind is important, but it's useless
(38:23):
if you're not intellectually honest.
Like, as Terry Pratchett said, theproblem with an open mind is that
people would come along and tryto put stuff in it like Ethereum,
(38:50):
mention lightning to a guy namedEthereum, he will sort of literally
just put his head in the sand.
He'll, like, act as if that didn't exist.
They never talk about it, right?
And their solutions, their layer2s are built on blockchains, they
have their own shift coins as well.
Um, it's, it's, it's an absoluteaberration of, of, of everything,
(39:11):
it's like they're proprietary,closed, they have several layer
2s that don't speak to each other.
Like, and I started realizing whatthis was, just like a casino of sorts.
Um, a lot of gambling, just a lot ofgambling, a lot of, you know, JPEGs,
and at first sometimes You know, itcan be fun, but then it's like, what
the fuck are we doing here, guys?
Like, what's the point?
(39:33):
Like, what are we trying to do?
Are we trying to really, like, makethis a better world where we create
money for the entirety of humanity?
Are we trying here to changethe world and make the world a
better place through sound money?
And that, that idealism, those, those,that ethics is completely lacking, right?
(39:54):
Or it's, it's very superficialbecause they use the word
decentralization as a, as a, as asurrogate for, for, for freedom.
And it's not because it'snot true decentralization.
So, yeah, so I was completely outof place and that's why I wasn't,
yeah, I wasn't very welcome.
the.
(40:14):
This pisses me off so much because,like, first of all, the theorem
isn't decentralized at all, sothey're pretending that the users
are decentralized somehow or in,like this world computer narrative,
they add on everything but, like,the decentralization in Bitcoin is an
unfortunate means to a much greaterend, which is some money for the world.
(40:35):
Sensorship, resistant,peer-to-peer all that's good stuff.
You can have them in your head.
But if we, it's Unfortunate that weneed the decentralization, because the
decentralization makes it slow and clunky.
But we need it because we can'ttrust people with money, because
Absolute crap corrupt and makeseverything crap and all this crap,
(40:58):
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point of the Bitcoin,uh, both blockchain and the proof of
work, right, is that it's, it's reliable.
That's the only feature thatit needs because reliability
is fucking hard to get.
And the only way to get it is through alot of work and, uh, shit everything else,
right, because that's the key trade off.
yeah, and you can only get it once,because all it is is a number on the
(41:22):
internet that doesn't change and Any, anycopy of that is redundant by definition.
So, yeah, well, there's that.
Here's the thought I had before that Ilost about the when the ADD kicked in,
like, I think a lot of the problems withthese, like I think a lot of the problems
with these older things like PayPal andGoFundMe and whatnot and Also Robinhood,
(41:47):
for that matter like when, when theywhen the whole GameStop stock thing
people were hodling and using the hodlmeme and all this and then they all got.
Then they were all surprised whenthey were rug pulled, like you could
have done this with something thatthey couldn't take away from you.
You can do the exact same on Bitcoin overand over again, and you guys just don't
(42:09):
realize that that's a fact, and but.
But the thing I thought about waswith the other things is that a lot of
people, in a lot of cases, you need tobe a company in order to make money.
So for an individual, an individualneeds to start a company in the country
(42:30):
they're in, and that's usually a tediousand quite pricey thing to do from For
most people, if, if you're 18 yearsold and you just finished school and
like, that's not something you just goand do for most people, and so then if
you start making some serious money,you can get into a lot of tax trouble.
If you don't, if you don't have acompany In Bitcoin, there's no difference
(42:54):
between a company and a person.
It's just a fucking telegramgroup and that's it, and you
don't need a board, you don't needaccounting, you don't need anything.
You just need you know yourbrain, and maybe some other
people maybe not like that's all.
That's true Everywhere now, and theregulators will have to to realize that
(43:17):
that's the world we're living in already.
start Geyser, because he justsort of helped me understand
(43:39):
how powerful this was.
He said, literally, anyone canstart a company with Bitcoin.
You don't need a banking licenseto be a crowdfunding platform.
He didn't say this, but you don'tneed a banking license to operate.
You don't need to apply to a bank.
You don't need, you need, you, it'spermissionless, you can just start
building a product and, and, andtransmitting payments, receiving
payments, et cetera, without, withouta banking approval and to think that
(44:04):
GoFundMe, Kickstarter, when theystarted, like, I have immense respect
for them as well, because when theystarted, they must have, they must have
gotten some sort of massive success.
Partnership.
Like, they must have paid so much moneyto get these, these banking partners
to, to do what they were looking for.
Um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's insane.
(44:25):
Just the amount of effort, probablymonths, years to get this bank,
banking partnership in place.
To us, nothing.
We just, just connected to Bitcoin.
We just connected to Bitcoin, right?
And, uh, it's very, very low, low, low,low, low, low cost and infrastructure.
Luckily, we also were able to buildon top of an already existing Bitcoin
(44:48):
infrastructure like Voltage, which isawesome for routing payments and running
a node, that really helps as well.
But yeah, regulators have noidea, like, what's coming.
There's going to be an explosion ofjust products, services, tools that
you can plug and play on the internet.
(45:10):
when they hop in and try to regulateit, it will already be in place, like
it's already there and it's already soobvious that it's a better solution.
It's like when they tried to stop IPtelephony, like all the phone companies
had to surrender at some point becauseit's just obvious that the internet
(45:32):
is better than using dinosaur shit.
Like the same is truefor money, of course.
Yeah, yeah, it's great.
(46:58):
you,
(47:35):
and it's been, as I say, yeah, bearmarkets are for builders and it's amazing
that we've done so much, everything we'vedone so far has been in a bear market.
So, in some way, I have no idea whatto expect, um, uh, as to what the
next bull market will, will look like.
Uh, we know Bitcoin works through sciencecycles and, That's, you know, it's
(47:56):
going to probably do its thing, right?
Um, I don't know, yeah, I think, Ithink it could, it's interesting, right?
I think with this whole ETF stuff, it'sa chance, it's possible that I, I think
the way that it's been approved, I'mquite cynical with this stuff, right?
So, the reason it's been approvedis because at the end of the
day, Bitcoin as an ETF is reallyjust a speculative asset, right?
(48:21):
So, it's basically been approvedby the Wall Street bros, right?
Just like, just let us gamblewith Bitcoin regulators, right?
And the regulators are like,ah, we don't like Bitcoin, but
fine, we'll let you do that.
Because in any case, theymake the capital gains, right?
Every time the data gets tradedand they make money from that too.
Um, but, but I think it's just, again,Bitcoin doing it's thing and sort of
(48:46):
Being this mirror where everyone getsto see what they want and, and then just
expanding its, its breadth, expandingits, its, um, its adoption in all forms.
but ultimately what I am interestedin, and I definitely follow Ray
Youssef here quite a lot, is I seeBitcoin as, as money, as like, as,
as peer to peer electronic cash.
(49:08):
That people should use to trade, toexchange, that nobody can dictate,
right, what people are trading.
And I, uh, I, that's what I'm for, andthat's why, that's what we call Geyser.
And I think it's, you know, that'swhat we have to really keep pushing and
try to get Bitcoin as a legal standardin as many countries as possible.
Because that's whatBitcoin is meant to be.
(49:30):
So, although I don't, I don't reallygive a shit about the ETF per se, I see
it as again, a further infiltration toolby Bitcoin to increase its own adoption.
and, um, and yeah, it's possible thatit'll, it'll even lead to even greater
highs with the bull market, and thatpeople will get wrecked and, and
try to realize, okay, what the fuckis this, and start paying attention
(49:51):
and start doing the research andlistening to Knut and Luke's podcast.
Um, so that's sort of, I don'tknow, I see that as the same.
Same, that, the same, samething happening, right?
The same, uh, cycle of, greater attention,greater awareness, you know, wrecked.
Education building and so forth.
(50:14):
And this is just like a furtherescalation of that, which is incredible.
so, yeah, I mean, in terms of, Idon't know if that's sort of what
answers the question to wherewe're going, but, uh, I think, I
think that's, I think that's that.
I'm not sure in terms ofnumbers what we should target.
I don't know.
no, but that's great.
Like there are so many differentangles to view bitcoin from.
(50:37):
Like some view as love it, as a savingstechnology, and you, as you say, you're
in on team cash and the internationalfriction, less payments, and there's
like just so many different ways to lookat this thing and and learn from it.
Totally.
It's great saving technology.
Absolutely.
(50:58):
But if we don't use it asa means of payment, um,
Uh,
it's, it's going to die.
I think I'm afraid it's going to die.
I don't know that, I don't knowif it's gonna die, but but uh, but
we're, we're sort of missing outon a, on a great feature, a great
functionality of the thing, like that.
(51:18):
That's what it was builtfor to be teleportable.
That's one of the reasons whywe value it and can save in it,
belief that, yeah, who knows if it'lldie or not, probably not, of course
(51:40):
not, but, uh, but yeah, this idea that,like, sats need to flow for Bitcoin
to gain more adoption, like, Bitcoinin more people's hands, and, Spreads
the likelihood of, of, of Bitcoin andactually being used as, as music exchange.
Um, and in a world where, where, you know,say Bitcoin is legal tender everywhere.
(52:04):
Well, wouldn't you want to, youknow, you probably still wanna
remain very conservative interms of your spanning habit.
It doesn't mean go dj, right?
So going DGen is like on theother extreme, and then huddling
is complete other extreme.
Uh, where you're just completely justholding, and I think landing the sats
flow is somewhere, you know, somewherein the middle where you're not just
(52:28):
throwing money at JPEGs, you're, you'respreading Bitcoin through donations or
through purchases, which helps to spreadBitcoin further, uh, into more hands.
spend and replace.
it's better replaced.
That's a good, a good way to look at it.
And yeah, as far as legal tendergoes, like, we here on the freedom
(52:48):
footprint show are against legaltender laws we think I Think I speak
for Luke as well that we think thatanyone should be able to Transact
in whatever currency they want like.
So I prefer the melee approach tothe To the book a la approach there,
yeah, yeah, totally, totally agree.
(53:10):
I mean, Fiat was born,um, right, as a threat.
Like, you have to use this, right?
You have to use it by decree.
It only works because it's forced upon us.
So you don't need to force me touse Bitcoin, like, I'll use it.
yeah and yeah.
So I urge everyone listening to thisto go and try to use Geyser, and the
(53:33):
best way to do that is, of course,to Support the freedom footprint
show, and we have the best likeaddress in the world, don't we, luke?
Free Freedom at Geyserfund.
How awesome is that so?
So don't forget to like,subscribe, brush your teeth.
(53:53):
And here's me begging for money, I guess.
Yeah,
(54:23):
you like what you've been hearing, ifyou like what we've been doing, please
go to our Geyser page Geyserfundcom.
Slash project, slash freedom, or ouraddress is freedom at Geyserfund.
And, yeah, send us some sats, or we'regoing to do more with the page, especially
as new features come out with Geyser.
(54:43):
We're in this for the long haul andwe're going to take advantage of
absolutely everything that's coming out.
So, yeah, follow along and checkout Geyser for everything that
you're looking at like, see whatother creators are on there.
And if you have something that youwant to do, yeah, make a Geyser page
(55:07):
and start spreading the word on Nosteron Twitter, all the places, right.
So yeah, that's it.
That's the pitch,
Mick, you'll have to tell us wheneverthe new features come out so I
can start dancing in my underwear.
I will, I will, yeah, we'll makesure to do a partnership for that.
And, uh, let you know beforehand.
(55:30):
Yeah, that's interesting.
But yeah, look, and also if there'sany feedback, we're also super open to
feedback and questions or suggestions.
Also, feel free to reach out to me.
And, uh, um, yeah, the basic belief isreally that everyone's a creator, right?
Everyone has.
I can contribute to Bitcoin in some way,whether it's doing a podcast, uh, whether
(55:51):
it's writing a book or, uh, or dancingin the street, waving a Bitcoin banner,
people are going to be willing to send yousome stats for your awesome, awesome work.
So, uh, that's really, that'sreally the idea here that anyone can
contribute, contribute to Bitcoin.
Speaking of dancing naked in the streetwith the Bitcoin banner, did you see
(56:12):
when Jonah Camoto showed his QR codebar tab to Twitter and people started
ordering stuff for him at the restaurant
No way.
I
That was fantastic.
So he just got more and morefood, him and his girlfriend.
They couldn't eat it all because,like, yeah, it was great,
(56:33):
Speaking of what can be done, right?
Bitcoin and save.
yeah, it's insane.
Like I remember in the early days ofsocial media, when people realized that
they could like meme big gatheringsinto existence and, all of a sudden,
like the authorities didn't know whatto do because, all of a sudden, 200,000
people are gathering for a largeparty in some park somewhere, and that
(56:58):
was in the news every now and then.
Then, I guess, facebook andthe likes of it figured out
ways to make that not happen.
But now, with Nostrand and
Yeah,
Bitcoin, we can literallychange the world.
yeah, super powerful,super powerful tools.
(57:20):
yeah.
Any final thoughts before we move on?
Mick, mick, is there anythingwe have left out here that
Nah, it's been, it's beenawesome to chat, guys.
Uh, I have not much else to say.
I mean, yeah, thanks again for the invite.
Thanks for the, really lovewhat you guys are doing.
Keep doing the hard work, the good work.
Keep inviting awesome guests.
(57:40):
And, uh, um, yeah, looking forwardto keep growing with you guys and
spreading the word of Bitcoin.
right, by Katya Mick, welove what you're doing too.
So check out Geyserfundthat's the address right,
Yeah, that's it.
Geysercom as well.
Maybe
Guys with, no, guys withoutfun only at the moment.
(58:00):
give you Geyserfund, so yeah,
soon, soon.
and where can people find you?
I'm metamick14 on Twitter, on Telegram.
You can reach out to me, Mick, atguyswithoutfun, if you have any thoughts,
questions, feedback, or suggestions.
And yeah, super open to hearing back.
(58:24):
Fantastic, looking forward to along and prosperous relationship.
Let's do it.
All right, fantastic.
Thanks a lot for joining us, mick, andthis has been the Freedom Footprint Show.
Thanks for listening.
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