Chat_158 - Is The Bitcoin Mission Fading? with Stephan Livera

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Yes, of course central banking, fiat money is bad, but nevertheless, maybe it's just like AI and robotics and this productivity is actually going to be really beneficial to the global economy, not just the US economy that actually, you know, we're going to start to see like the, like the liquidity, the whole US PMI thing go up and then that's going to cause bitcoin ngu. So obviously that's going to be good for us as bitcoin hodlers. So that's kind of loosely how I'm seeing this next year or two. Like I think we're going to see a lot of this AI and productivity and extra liquidity coming in. Right? Trump wants low rates, everyone knows that. And so I think we're going to see that. So I am very bullish on this coming year. [00:01:01] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know. And we've got a friend of mine, Stefan Lavera, host of the Stefan Lavera podcast, on the show today. And part of me just wanted to catch up with Stefan. He's a good friend and I really like the guy and I believe his heart is in the same place but on a lot of different issues when it comes to libertarianism and anarchism and the mission of bitcoin. And it's interesting, I've had a lot of conversations with people recently of the bitcoin mission is being whitewashed, that we're losing our ideological focus, that the culture is broken and then there's a bunch of infighting, there's a new divide with core versus knots, earth filters or whatnot, or the direction of the protocol maybe. And there's just a lack of consensus in direction and reason and what to build, or at least it seems that way. And I think a lot of people are getting that sense. And I personally, aside from the filter debate and that sort of thing, I haven't quite felt that. And maybe it's just the circles that I run in or the people that I talk to most often. I'm still at the edge where everybody seems to be talking about bitcoin providing that and bitcoin still being that mission. And so I wanted to get Stefan's thoughts on this. Are we losing the bitcoin purity, the purpose of bitcoin and are we being co opted by the suits or whatever you want to call it? And I thought because he has a conversation, talks with tons of different people in the space and was connected With a lot of people. I thought it would be interesting to get his take as well as just generally catch up on the interesting things or the most profound conversations that he has had in the past year or so, since I hadn't really bumped into him at conferences and stuff. And I thought this would be a really cool episode to dig into this concept and it would be interesting to see his take on it. A quick shout out to the hrf, the Human Rights foundation and their incredible work. The Oslo Freedom Forum that they put on every year to bring real freedom fighters and the real people together to share their stories, to share the tools to share how they have achieved resistance against tyrannical regimes. And also the Financial Freedom Report, which is the best newsletter I know of to stay up to date on that topic and all the new tools and software available to defend that. So check those out. Those links and details will be right down in the show notes. And. And with that, let's get into this episode of Bitcoin Audible Chat 158 with Stefan Lavera. Is the Bitcoin mission fading? Stefan Levera, welcome to the show, man. In fact, have we done. I know we've done a show together. [00:04:12] Speaker A: I think I've had you on my show. I don't think I've been on your show. Welcome to Bitcoin. Hey, first time for everything. [00:04:18] Speaker B: Welcome to Bitcoin Audible, man. How you doing? [00:04:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. [00:04:22] Speaker B: Oh, man. Before we kind of get deep into it, what conferences are you going to be at this year? [00:04:28] Speaker A: Oh, a bunch. So the Vegas1. Yeah. BTC Prague. I'll be there. What else have I got on the docket? [00:04:37] Speaker B: Big luck. Boom. [00:04:40] Speaker A: No, probably not. Just, you know, it's a long travel. Right. I will be in El Salvador for plan B. El Salvador. [00:04:48] Speaker B: Oh, wait, you'll. At the end of this month. [00:04:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you gonna be there? [00:04:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll be there. [00:04:52] Speaker A: I'll be there. Well, I'll see you there. Yeah. There you go. So, yeah, so a bunch of those. Obviously Bitcoin Mina in Abu Dhabi. Right. Like that was on just recently, but again this year because I live in Dubai, so that's only like an hour. [00:05:06] Speaker B: And a half drive. That's like a pop down the street. [00:05:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I typically hit like one or two conferences in Asia, so probably like if there's one in Korea or maybe if they do bitcoin Hong Kong again, like the bitcoin conference guys, I'll probably hit that. Maybe Bitcoin Amsterdam. We'll see. So I do, I do tend to hit a bunch of events. I try to hit a mix of different things. Like I see my quote unquote remit or my, I try to cover just, you know, anything related to Bitcoin, whether that's, you know, technology development side of things, whether that's treasury companies, whether that is protocol development, you know, just, just a bit of everything. And like whether it's like macro sort of more or like kind of high net worth finance kind of circles, which kind of ties in a bit with maybe the treasury company, say the suit coiner, quote unquote suit coiner world, you know. So I just sort of see it as I'm trying to cover a range of those things and just try to provide a broad sense of what's going on around Bitcoin, whether that is like the medium of exchange side of things or the store of value or the various aspects of it. [00:06:17] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Kind of in that vein of, you know, the various things you cover and you know, same with my show here is I, I, I feel like as being kind of a quote unquote generalist where like, you know, that we're both interested in essentially every corner of this thing. It's like, okay, well let's try, try to get the big picture together. What do you think has been one of the biggest changes in the last like year or two? And maybe actually let's just start on the idea because I've been hearing this a lot from people and I'm not sure I get this sense. I mean, I do and I don't and we'll dig into it, but this idea of like the libertarian ethos and the cyberpunk ethos being diluted and, or people losing focus on it and all of that stuff and I kind of get where it's coming from, but I also, I think it's just like they're looking at the wrong people. But I want to get your take on it and anything that you've like dug into in the past year and how you felt about it. [00:07:22] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. And I know obviously probably longtime listeners of your show and of my show know that you and I are both quite outspoken in our libertarian kind of ideas. And you and I have kind of been on shows together where we've been trying to explain it from a libertarian perspective. Like you and I were on Tom woods show and you know, various shows you and I have been trying to kind of show why libertarians should care about bitcoin and yet we've sort of struggled to get through to some of them now. Yes. Some others, it's maybe become, you know, accepted and understood amongst libertarian circles, of course, there's kind of the gold bug, whole holdouts who are like gold only. Whereas I think nowadays it's fair to say a lot of libertarians are kind of pro gold and pro bitcoin. Yeah, that's probably fair to say, I think. [00:08:07] Speaker B: Or at least not so anti bitcoin as they used to be. [00:08:11] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. They sort of see it like, okay, it's not going away. You know, it's here. It's not going away. And, you know, even if they're kind of more of a gold bug, they sort of see us as sort of fellow travelers if we're bitcoin maxis. Right. Yeah. So that's kind of how I would frame that. Probably the big, you know what, Maybe they tie in. Probably the big thing over the last few years for me, I would say, like some of this power law stuff or power trend analysis. I've found that quite interesting because, you know, when I was a noob, right, I, you know, December 2012, when I sort of first started really reading about bitcoin and like, going down the rabbit hole. I bought my first coins in early 2013. Now in those days, and I was like reading things like, you know, the Nakamoto Institute, like from, you know, Pierre and Bitstein and stuff like that. I probably thought, oh, it's all going to happen so quickly. Right. Like, it's a common thing. Many of us have this experience when we first come in, we're shouting from the rooftops. We're trying to get our friends and family on board because we, we don't want them to get left behind. We think bitcoin is coming and, you know, hyper bitcoinization or something like it, it's going to happen so soon. [00:09:16] Speaker B: I can't tell you how many times I was like, it's. It's three weeks. [00:09:18] Speaker A: It's three weeks. [00:09:19] Speaker B: We got do. This is. [00:09:19] Speaker A: It's happening in like a year from now. Like, I need to get my family on board quick. You got to install a bitcoin wallet and I'm going to show you. And, you know, I'm sure you and I, many of our listeners can relate to that because we all went through that. Right. The big learning. I would say now, you know, what is it now? Thirteen years on is, look, it's not going to happen that quickly. I wish it would, you know, and similar with my kind of libertarian views. Yeah. I believe hypothetically if we could have anarcho capitalism, yeah, great. But do I actually think anarcho capitalism happens in my lifetime? Probably not. Let's be honest. Right, probably not. So the best I can realistically hope for on the libertarian side of things is maybe, you know, free private cities, maybe to some extent like flag theory, like go and live in, you know, do the whole flag theory thing of living in other jurisdictions. Obviously, I understand for you as an American American, and for American listeners, that's kind of a bit harder. I would say if I was an American, I would probably do the whole New Hampshire Free State Project thing. I'm not, but, you know, if I was, that's probably what I would do because I see that as a viable pathway. But, yeah, I mean, bring you back to the point. I think this power law thing has made me sort of zoom out a little bit more and really understand. No, this is kind of the baseline of adoption that we can anticipate based on kind of the trend of what we have seen. Right. Whereas in our earlier days when our, when we were a noob, you know. [00:10:45] Speaker B: For the audience, I don't think I've read or done anything explicitly breaking down the power law. Why don't you just give an overview for, for everybody listening right now before we dig a little bit deeper? [00:10:57] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. So, you know, shout out to Giovanni Santa Stasi. He's the guy who's really, let's say, leading the charge on the whole power law. There's a bunch of other people who are using power law or power law influenced analysis, like Matthew Mazinskas, Plan C, Cena Smithston, Money or debt, Stephen. There's a few people like that, but if I had to kind of explain it in my own terms, it's basically, there are these mathematical relationships that show up just kind of in nature, in physics, and they, they can sort of explain things. And so to be honest, I'm not the best to kind of give a, an explanation, to be honest. But I, I see it as like, they have found this relation of how Bitcoin grows and how it adopts. And in. I think the way I think of it in, you know, Adiq simple terms is it's diminishing returns over time. Right. Like, whereas a lot of people kind of come from this mindset of, you know, exponential growth and, or maybe like stock to flow and hey, putting my hands up, of course, I, I interviewed Plan B, and at the time I thought, yeah, this is it. I was wrong. Um, I think power law is actually a more realistic baseline for how things are going. And actually what we have found is the R squared, the explanatory power of the power law and, or power trend, if you want to call it that, has actually been rising over time. And so instead of like this kind of constant look, I love Samson and his, you know, aqua wallet and stuff, what he's doing, but the whole 1 million can't like, it's just like, come on man, it's just not happening that soon. Of course, hey, many of us are either all in or highly invested in bitcoin, so of course we would love it if bitcoin went to 1 million. I just don't think it's happening soon. Like, I think more realistically on the power law trend, it's more like 2033, maybe 2034 ish. Now if we're lucky, like if we got a really big pump, maybe it comes in like 2030 or something. But that we might not sustain above, you know, we might tap a million but not actually stay above. And so I think that's something that maybe there's a tendency between or attention, let's say, for online content creators. Of course, you and I are in this bucket. But it's easy to kind of throw out big numbers and get big price predictions and. Or if you host a guest who's talking about like big numbers, you'll get lots of downloads. But is that right? Is that actually accurate? And are people building up unrealistic expectations of how quickly bitcoin is going to the moon? Yeah, right. So I see this as sort of a decent baseline of, look, it's not going to be like a constant cagr. Like an exponential would be like a constant cagr. What if it's doing like 50% a year every year? No, actually Power Lord's more like, you know, the next year might be 39%, the next year might be 37% and 35% and slowly kind of tapering down. And I understand for some people they might feel like, oh, that's not bullish enough. Me, you're a bear. Like, cancel this guy, he's a bear. But it's like actually it's growing at that pace. And don't forget, pretty soon you start to talk about very big absolute numbers. Right? So even though the relative percent growth is, is coming down over time, it's tapering down as you would expect, the absolute numbers are still massive. And so on the broad trend, yeah. [00:14:07] Speaker B: 30% of a million is a lot more than 50%. 200,000, right? [00:14:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, right. And so, yes, while we're not going to get going to the moon tomorrow, depending on how you define the moon, power law or power trend is sort of looking at, okay, in around 2033, we're going to be at a million dollars per coin. In 2045, we're going to be like $10 million a coin. Ish. Right. So to me, that sort of helps me get a sense of where are we at and what is a realistic projection or what is a realistic baseline. Right. It's not predicting exactly, but it just kind of gives you this sense of like, you know, and loosely speaking, if you sort of look at the trend, you can sort of get an idea of, okay, what's quote unquote, fair value right now based on how much time has passed. And so it sort of gives you an idea of like, are we above the trend line or are we below the trend line? And of course there have been times where above and below. Right. It's not, it's not going to say it's exactly this price. You know, there's a, there's a decent range of what it can be, but it just gives you a baseline anyway. Bring you back to what I was saying before is, or your question is, let me put it this way. I think we want it to all happen so quickly and it's very easy to get people kind of riled up about something happening really quickly. But the truth is it's a long process. Right. It's going to be like a multi decade process. And so we have to sort of strap in and be ready to, to do that as much as we might. [00:15:37] Speaker B: Wish it had lower our time preference. [00:15:39] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Right. And look at things like, even the Internet, like if you look at like Giovanni and some of his talks, they'll say, look, even the Internet didn't grow exponential. It grew on a power law. And until it hit kind of like a certain saturation. And then I think there's like another kind of distribution that they talk about, like a weird bull distribution that kind of makes more sense. Once you hit like a saturation point, like the Internet now, user base wise, it might be like 6 billion, over 6 billion or something like that. I mean the popular, the human population is like 8 billion. So there's not that, you know, once you hit a saturation point, there's not so much more you can go. Right. So I think it's a similar thing, but with Bitcoin, obviously we're much lower than that. We're, you know, maybe a couple hundred million People have some bitcoin and obviously we want to get that number higher. But I think that is driving some of this. Right. Because not that many people are going to be libertarians. Right. Like, think about the percent of. If you had to estimate, right. How many libertarians are there even in the usa, the country that kind of, you know, we most associate with this ideology. It's probably like 2 or 3%. [00:16:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Maybe. [00:16:40] Speaker A: Maybe 10%. If you're kind of very loose on. [00:16:43] Speaker B: How you assess that. Yeah, right. Go back and everybody who thought they were going to vote for Ron Paul. Right. Close. You get close as you get. [00:16:51] Speaker A: Right. And in other countries it's even worse. Like, I'm an Australian, okay. Originally born in Sri Lanka, but I was raised in Sydney, Australia. In Australia, it's even worse. Right. It's probably even less than that. [00:17:02] Speaker B: I don't even know. [00:17:03] Speaker A: Now there are libertarians there. There is a libertarian community. I was kind of. [00:17:06] Speaker B: They've killed all their libertarians. If there's. There's anybody left, they got put in camps, you know. [00:17:13] Speaker A: Now on one hand you can be sad about that, but on another hand you can say, well, I still believe bitcoin is going to drive these big social and cultural changes. It's just going to take some time. And maybe it's not going to happen the way maybe you and I all thought it would happen. Right. That every man's going to be holding his own keys, running his own node and so on. Of course I encourage people to do that, but I, I think I accept now that there'll be a lot of people who come in, in quote, unquote, impure, you know, ways that now, you know, it's easy to kind of virtue signal online about the kind of, the maximally, you know, hardcore tough guy position, but that's just not what, you know, Joe Blow, walking on the street, cares about. Like, he's just not care. He doesn't care about our purity testing and purity signaling and whatever. And I think what we see online is sometimes the, the positions that get really a lot of attention are the more maximally hardcore positions on things. And so that's just kind of where it's at, but at the same time it's being adopted. And so I think this ties into this whole quote unquote dilution. Right. Are we seeing a dilution of the libertarian and cypherpunk ethos? I think to some extent it's just bitcoin is becoming part of the plumbing. You know, I'm sure if you looked at the early communities of the Internet, there were some like, weird people who thought they were, you know, maybe they thought everyone would think like them when they came on to use the Internet. But no, actually nowadays most people using the Internet are whatever. Maybe it's like girls are scrolling on Instagram and men are on X or whatever. You know, it's like it's the largest. [00:18:42] Speaker B: Platform to spout your socialist nonsense in, in the world. You know, like, that's like a, that's actually a great example, right? Is that the Internet started as decentralized. It started with the cypherpunks, like the cypherpunk community and the cyberpunk ethos was kind of the birth of the Internet protocols. And they're, they're the four. I mean, if you just go back to the cypherpunk community and they're the core of so many SSL, BitTorrent. I mean, like, you go through there. I remember I did like a, a post and like an episode on it. There's like 20 things, like major things of the Internet. It's just like we just wouldn't have if we weren't for the cypherpunk community. It's the who's who of like WikiLeaks started there. So many different things. But how many, how many cypherpunks are there because of the Internet? Like, yeah, they, they born the Internet and everything that we think about it today. But how many people are cypher punks because they're on the Internet? Like, not that many like you. That's a, that's a different whole side of the thing. So I, I completely agree there, there's. It was inevitable for that kind of move. And you know, for, for me, when I kind of realized there's actually a great piece by Svetsky that I read called the three generations theory, or maybe it was called something else, but he talked about it and like it, it will take three generations. And I thought that was a really great framing and a really great, like, we gotta step back and realize how long the battle is that we're getting ourselves into. But I think probably the biggest thing that made me realize the change or the shift in timeframe was how much had to be built. This isn't a matter of can you convince enough people to want to buy Bitcoin? Like, the financial infrastructure of the world is so astoundingly complex. It has so many different layers and so many different businesses and so many different tools and so many different networks and so many different systems for understanding where a transaction is whether it's settled which institution. It went through the approval process to just get people to recognize whether something is a trustworthy stamp of approval from one institution or from another country or from over, across a border or across a currency or through Forex. Like most of these systems are like a hundred years old. You know, like these things like move like giants. They are, they are slow as hell. And it's exactly the thing where people are so reliant. They're more likely to just do the thing that they know because of how dangerous it is to move into new territory and, and ex. And anticipate, fail to recognize the risk or have something not meet the, the need that they are unfamiliar with. And then not even knowing what to do as a fallback because they've specifically moved into unfamiliar territory and this is everyone's capital. Like this is like they're not going to do that recklessly or slowly. Regardless of how shit the old system is. If it still works in any way, they're going to just do the thing that has been reliable. They're going to take the reliable 4% inflation or 5% inflation over going into something so unfamiliar that they think the whole thing could break or they don't even understand why a transaction hasn't happened or where their money is. You know, like they don't understand it. They're not going to want to touch it. [00:22:24] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. I mean think about like how many people will still do Fiat wires. Yeah, like you got to get all these details right. If you get one of them wrong, it get bounce, it gets bounced. You don't know. It's like the process of the transfer is very opaque. You know, something goes wrong, you don't like. It's just there's so much that can go wrong and yet that's still like an extremely standard way that people transfer money internationally. Right. They don't just use bitcoin, which obviously you and I would do. [00:22:48] Speaker B: But how many years did it take for us to be familiar with that too? And like myself, I didn't have prior, you know, like my, my wealth kind of came with bitcoin. You know, like, like I was basically hand to mouth for most of my time figuring out what I wanted to do. And then I found this new fascinating technology and just kind of went all in. But like my, my like relative like increase in access to capital occurred with my adoption of bitcoin. I didn't have tons of capital that I then was deciding whether or not I needed to move it over to bitcoin. Like I was, I was poor and had no idea what I was doing, you know, and trying to like run my own business when I was an idiot just out of college and none of that shit was working. I was just kind of scraping by and living with my brother in our trailer, so. And then also just recognizing that there just, there's so much to build. There's so much to build, like just a staggering amount, like we haven't solved technically. And from an infrastructure standpoint, like you can't just like everybody just wake up in the morning, everybody like log into Coinbase or River hopefully or you know, something a better exchange than Coinbase and then just, everybody just buys Bitcoin and it's like, oh, boom, we're on a bitcoin standard. That doesn't actually change much of anything except that you know, river or whoever now has like a shit ton of customers but they still don't even know or have anything to do with it because none of the infrastructure is there. You know, it's like expecting there to be a big beautiful city because you, you recognize that everybody wants there to be like a great city here, but you don't have plumbing, you don't have, you don't have gas lines, you don't have electricity, you don't have, you don't have infrastructure for like where and how things need to be shipped. You know, you don't even have an address system yet. You know, like who, how do you know what the name of this street is and where you are in the whole map of the whole thing? There's like 80 layers there and you have to build all of those things. And we kind of have like two, you know, like we, we maybe, maybe we're starting on number three and there's so much stuff to unpack to actually replace a global financial system that is about six centuries in the making. And we're like next year, you know. [00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. So at least now there's this alternative and you can use it. But yeah, to your point, it's like it's not mainstreamed yet. More and more banks need to have it available. Obviously we need like better and better self custody. We need and different forms of self custody, right? Like the day to day payments, self custody as well as like our cold storage multisig. And then what about your inheritance on top of that and the exchanges and the merchant payment processing and the mining and development and you know, all these different components of it that come into it and then like integrating this with all of society's systems Whether that's accounting software or other, you know, payments and merchant terminal, merchant stuff like merchant software that's needed. And I think it's not just that. It's like people, as to your point about it took a long time to build up this system, think about, like different generations and where they store their wealth. Right. Like, for now, a lot of the wealth is sitting with the boomers in their, like generally in their stocks, stock portfolios and in their housing portfolios, like, and maybe the bond portfolio. That's where most, like, a lot of society's wealth is sitting. How do you get that from there into bitcoin? That's, that's part of the question right now. Yeah, some of them are going to go on the ETFs, the Treasury companies, the whatever, preferred shares. Maybe there'll be a bunch of them who look at that, of course, first and foremost, self custody, Bitcoin. But a lot of these people, it's like they just, they either can't or they will not take that step for some time. And then maybe, you know, those people pass away and pass their wealth down and then it's the next generation who actually think about that. [00:27:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:01] Speaker A: You know, and like, think about it like this. Like, even younger generations today, how many of them are really caring about gold nowadays? Okay, now, yeah, there was a bit of a gold pump recently, but. And yeah, there was like, funnily a famous, famous image, I think, I think it was actually in Sydney of people lined up outside a gold thing to buy gold. But I think that was actually more driven by central banks anyway. Like this kind of that recent run, it's just sort of like maybe they've been buying a bit more gold as opposed to buying US Government debt. Because, you know, the world is going multipolar now. Right. Like, it's kind of this macro moment that's shifting and happening, you know, before our eyes. Even though, yes, there's a lot of things going on, obviously. There's like the Venezuela stuff, there's the Iran stuff, there's the Greenland stuff. There's just like all this, you know, stuff happening domestically inside the U.S. you know, like, and then over, you know, problems all around the world. Right. Like immigration is a big issue in many of the Western countries. You know, there's just so many big issues. How many, how many of these people are willing to just like, put that aside and actually focus on the bitcoin aspect of it? Right. Or even think of our friend Peter McCormack over in the UK he's trying to get involved in politics. And he's trying to sort of talk about politics stuff, but also inject in a bit of a bitcoin, you know, message where it's appropriate. Right? And even that, it's, it's difficult to sort of get that through to people because, you know, they're so focused on, you know, in the UK now, it's a bit, you know, immigration and remigration is like a big, big topic for them now. So, you know, it's just all these different issues are happening. You know, you and I and our listeners, we think bitcoin is the most important issue, but how do you get other people to realize it is the most important issue? [00:28:43] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's also interesting from that context is in my thinking or whatever is bitcoin is very critical to a bunch of those issues, like the whole immigration thing, the government spending and this is like their focus, but they have an image in their head or how these things relate. And then you bring up bitcoin and they're going to be like, what does this have to do with anything? You know, like, I'm not, like, I don't care about, like, tech innovation stuff right now. Like, we have real problems to sort out, so you can't like, just bring up bitcoin. And they'll be like, oh, bitcoin is a solution to all of these problems. You have to go through this lengthy, like, try to get their attention pulled back from how they think the problem needs to be solved to, to give them this long explanation and this grounding in an economics that they don't even, they don't even probably agree with, to, to make them realize that, no, actually bitcoin is actually the solution to your problem. You know, you're, you're trying to change a belief while they're most focused on actually caring about the result. Like, like the thing itself, you know, in, in some ways, like when I looked at it like in the past, leading up to this, this kind of zone that we're in is that, oh, you know, governments will be distracted with like a million different things and, you know, like, there will be a lot of turmoil and a lot of kind of like political chaos and unsettled norms or power balances, which is absolutely true and has all occurred. But. And you know, that's a huge opportunity for bitcoin. But at the exact same time, it's just as much a hurdle for bitcoin because people go back to tradition, people go back to what they know, trying to deal with uncertainty. And bitcoin is just a different type of uncertainty to, to most people. So it has this same battle of, like, trying to get attention and getting the space to sit down with somebody and let them understand how it helps them when everything is chaos. And that's specifically why I think we're past the ideological adoption error era. [00:31:03] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:03] Speaker B: Is that we're not going to get anybody else talking about it. [00:31:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Who knows? Like, I think we'll still get some converts over time, but. [00:31:13] Speaker B: But it won't be the thing that drives it. [00:31:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I think we've probably tapped the, you know, the, you know, the avenues that we can in terms of getting new libertarians, you know, on board. Right. Like, I think there was an interesting poll, like, I think a couple years ago. I remember Brady ran this, like maybe four or five years ago. He ran this poll as like, hey, did you come into, like, Austrian economics before bitcoin, or did you come into bitcoin and then learn about Austrian economics? Yeah, and at that time it was like already, like 70%, a whole bunch of people are coming to bitcoin and then learned Austrian economics. Whereas, like, let's say you and I, we were already into. Well, I presume you were already. And I was already like into like Austrian economics and libertarian stuff before finding bitcoin. Right. [00:31:59] Speaker B: That was what made it easy to go down the rabbit hole very quickly. [00:32:01] Speaker A: Right. We were primed. We kind of already had a bit of a leg up, let's say, compared to like Joe Normie on the street. And so nowadays I think people will come into bitcoin and they won't necessarily care about all the libertarian Austrian economics sort of ideals. Right. Nowadays it's more just like, hey, what are you going to do for me? Right. It's like people don't think of it this way. Right. We might bristle a bit at that and be like, hey, no, you should learn about the history of bitcoin and the cypherpunks and the libertarians and all these things. But look, when I use the Internet, do I necessarily go and research who, who made the, you know, TLS and the SSL and the, you know. Yeah, yeah, maybe you and I might or whatever. But average people don't. Yeah, right. Most people don't. Or even like email. [00:32:48] Speaker B: They just want to know if it's, it does something for them. [00:32:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And like, of course you got to sell the benefit. Not necessarily like bore people with technical details. So that, that's, that's also fair too. But look, I, Yeah, I think you're right. That a lot of the new people coming in are not. We can't necessarily expect them to all go on the same ideological journey. That was typical in the, let's say, 2018 ish era of Bitcoin. Right. The bitcoin standard and all these things. And let's say the podcast golden era for bitcoin. Right. There was a bunch of us, we all kind of started our podcasts around that time or we all kind of became. We started to kind of get some traction on our podcast, even if we had been talking about it for years. That was kind of that era. I think nowadays there's just so many different things. Like it's just all around the world and there's just different. You know, you just can't be across everything. Right. Because like, whatever, there's like some new product here, something over there, some exchange here, some different language there. Like you're just not going to. It's just. It's hard to replicate the same kind of togetherness or community now, I think. [00:33:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree. Just because I was thinking about the power law thing again in the thought of like, okay, the timeframe and stuff is. And I remember that there's a really great chart that makes it much easier to see the power law idea. And you see bitcoin on the log chart, right. Is, you know, it's 1, 10, 100, 1,000, 1 whatever on the vertical. Yep. And. And when you put it on a log chart or whatever, it. It's a straight line. [00:34:34] Speaker A: Looks like a straight line, right? Yeah, that's correct. [00:34:36] Speaker B: And. But this is also an indication of like kind of forever exponential growth. And it's like. Okay, so what's being missed in this? Well, the power law theory also puts the time frame on a log, in a log. So. So it's like you have this like, okay, here's two years and then here's two years, and then here's two years, and here's two years, and here's two years, like. So it's like tighter and tighter and tighter, but there's still that straight line. So you're. You're compressing. Right. It's taking longer to do the same thing over time. And they're both on log scales to. So they, they gradually. It's. It's a gradual and slow stable growth, basically indefinitely. It's kind of like the having. It's just like, it's slow. It's a stair step thing. Yeah. [00:35:25] Speaker A: So I think the interesting thing with the like the power law stuff is it shows up in a lot of places in nature. [00:35:31] Speaker B: Right. [00:35:32] Speaker A: The amount of calories an animal consumes and its size. [00:35:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:36] Speaker A: You know, and things like the distance of the planets from the sun. Like there were predictions people could make and you know, and like planets would sort of line up on that line kind of incredibly. And the interesting thing is that like this power law stuff, it's not just bitcoin price, it's like bitcoin hash rate follows the power law. Bitcoin at new address creation has been following a power law. And people even do power law not just in fiat terms, but like bitcoin against gold or bitcoin against other things and sort of get a sense of where it is on those. So I think there's something to it that it's kind of like there's a deeper, like to. To the point you were making even about how cities or how there are different network effects required to grow. Like if you. And the parallel or the people that some of the power law guys talk about is like countries are actually not necessarily as long lasting as cities. [00:36:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:36:27] Speaker A: And what they try to say is exponentials are actually less stable. So exponentials can grow really quickly. Right. Like companies are more like an exponential, but they can die, they're less stable. Whereas a power law is actually a bit more of a stable thing. Like. And so in some cases, cities are more like a power law because they're like a network. All these network effects. Right. Like the plumbing network, the, you know, whatever, the electricity network, the police, the legal aspects of it, the road network, the garbage collection, you know, all these different things that go to make a city. There are literally cases where cities have outlasted the nation state surrounding it. Right. And so it sort of shows that there's a kind of resilience or robustness to that when something is growing on a power law trend. So that's also another really interesting thing about the whole power law aspect of it. So I just think you just have to accept that this is the pace of adoption and it can only grow so quickly. Right. Like as much as we wish it would grow faster. That's kind of just being realistic about it now. Maybe eventually it reaches a point where eventually we hit saturation and then it changes, you know, it goes into something else. But we're a while where, you know, we're decent, you know, at least 20 years away from that in my guess. [00:37:43] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And in addition, is having passed the ideological era, like the point where the talk isn't going to get us to the next level is that it requires us to find solutions to real problems. You know, like, like the Internet, when the web was born, that totally changed the conversation because you didn't have to, you didn't have to have a conversation. You just showed them what you could do with it. And bitcoin is that for many people around the world, but it's for people who have dead currencies. It's for, it's for people, it's for the people in Iran watching the real lose 90% of its value in a week. And the people in Venezuela and Argentina and Zimbabwe and Nigeria who live under tight, excruciating capital controls and have watched savings be devalued by half overnight. Those people understand because there is an immediate benefit. And there's an immediate benefit with all the frictions and pains of using Bitcoin from a technical aspect, but we don't have that really. [00:38:59] Speaker A: I'm with you there. But what, what we have seen though, of course, obviously first and foremost, bitcoin adoption. But what we've seen a lot of these countries is stablecoin adoption, right? And then for a while we were, we were all kind of coping on that a bit, right? Like, if you had asked me in, let's say, 2017, 18ish, in that era, like tether, oh, kind of, what is this stuff? Why are people into it? And then eventually I would have been like, no, I think the government's going to shut that down. You know, like aml, all this stuff. And to some extent, yeah, look, look what happened with Bitmex. The Bitmex founders and government went after them. The government went after CZ from Binance and all this stuff for aml, right? So I just thought the government would shut all these stable coins down. But they persisted, they survived, they lived on, and now they're kind of too big to fail almost, right? Like they have the genius act in the US and it's becoming, it's, it's, it's a thing. Unquestionably, it's a thing now. So we have to kind of gra grapple with that. And I think maybe in early and again, I'm be careful here. I'm not about to start promoting a shitcoin. Right. But my point is more like I, I see it more like you just have to be pragmatic now. Like we're just trying to pragmatically move bitcoin adoption forward. And if people have to like use some stablecoin or some custodial service or whatever, just use whatever you have to. But, you know, I want to try to get people to use Bitcoin eventually, right? Even if it's a step, if they're using something else as a stepping stone. Well, you know, I, I only have limited power, right? Like, I think I could try to be the Maximum Virtue Signaler or Wishcaster and say, no, don't ever touch anything else, only use Bitcoin. But I, I think this is where maybe there's like some of the clashes in the kind of online bitcoin community because some of them see it as like, no, you have to like just, you know, be a maxi and only denounce any other coin, right? Denounce any other thing. And the reality of it is is there's a ton of people who want stable coins. Like, we can't deny that. Like, we can't just kind of stick our heads in the sand and be like, hey, they don't want stable. Well, yeah, there's hundred, you know, hundreds of millions of people who want stablecoins, right. Tether. I've announced, like, it's like whatever, 400 or 500 million users of just of Tether. [00:41:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:09] Speaker A: And the thing is, yes, of course, RGB and Taproot assets and all this stuff, but objectively, a lot of people are using stablecoins on shit chains, like whether that's Ethereum and Tron and Solana and whatever else. So now, of course, let's try to find ways to bring them to using it on Bitcoin or maybe liquid, right? Like, at least it's kind of bitcoin aligned. So that's, that's one thing, but I think we have to grapple with that honestly and objectively instead of like sticking our heads in the sand about it. And I think that's what we're starting to see now amongst some of the builders as well. Like even Jack Mallows from Strike, they're talking about, you know, just like, yeah, use the Stablecoin if you need to. Need to, right? Like things like Aqua, right? Like the way Aqua is built, it's got those swaps built in the background, right? So you can take shitcoins or shit chain, you know, swaps of Tether and swap it into liquid tether. And then from liquid Tether you can flip it to liquid Bitcoin and, you know, now you can make your lightning payments using bolts swaps in the background and whatever, whatever other L2, right. Whether it's Arc or Spark or whatever, E Cash, Charmian Mint stuff, whatever. But to me, I think I'm sort of trying to take a pragmatic view and be an educator where possible and try to help put out educational content that helps sort of guide people into a bitcoin and yeah, libertarian and Austrian economics ideology. But I'm maybe not spending as much time like trying to attack shitcoins like I would have in let's say the 2018, 2019 era. Because I just don't think it's going to do as much. Not that, you know, people aren't going to necessarily listen to me, why they care what I have to say. I'm just like some, you know, 80 IQ Bitcoin bulltard posting into the Internet. You know, like, let's just focus on getting people to bitcoin. Right. And that's why for me, sometimes I'm clashing with people in the community a little bit on things like treasury companies as an example. Right. Like, because I see that as like, look, I wish they got straight to bitcoin, but I understand there'll be a bunch of people who maybe they'll take some exposure to like a Treasury company. Or maybe put it this way, if you're a boomer and you are like going to retire soon or you're retired and you want some income you're not ready to take, to take the full volatility of bitcoin, maybe you're going to do some of these like stretch or SATA or some of these things to get some fiat yield there so that you can live off that. Right. So I, I'm, I think we don't have to see it as like, oh, it's all or nothing. You're either all in on bitcoin or you're a shitcoiner. Like, it's like, no, actually there are people who have a need, you know, to have. Maybe they're going to have some bitcoin exposure, but they're going to have some treasury company equity or they're going to have some, you know, preferred share thing or, you know, there's just going to be these different ways to get people in because they won't come in the way we would ideally like them to. But you know, we have an opportunity to get them kind of on the track on the stepping stone journey to bitcoin. So that's kind of how I'm seeing it. I'm trying to be pragmatic about it in terms of how I promote bitcoin. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's. Stablecoins are such a good example. And Roy actually had a piece. Stablecoins are evolution, not revolution. Which I actually haven't read on the show yet, but I'll be getting audio out pretty soon, which was really good. And it was very much in line with a number of things we've talked about already on the show. But it was funny on the roundtable. Mechanic and I went back and forth a little bit about this because he's very ideological and like he see, like he sees stablecoins as like a net negative, but he was also like very much like, but I recognize that they have huge adoption. Like I'm, you know, I'm not an idiot. Like, like I, I see that like people are using it, but I have a hard time squaring like is this even. Is this good or is this bad? And he seemed to think that this way of framing it was useful. So I've, I've used it a couple times since then. Was that if Fiat, if Fiat Land is fractional reserve, totally like custody credit with a fiat bank that is leveraged 40 to 1 where all transactions are reversible, everything is surveilled and everything is kyc. If the Fiat world as it is today is like a zero or a one or something, and those are your two options, right, is you can kind of have it a little bit better, but it all sucks. And Bitcoin is a 10. Bitcoin with self custody on chain or, and, or lightning or whatever it is, you hold your own keys. You understand how it works. Whatever. That's a 10. That's, that's all the values of, of the Bitcoin ethos instilled in your actions. Right? Well, a Stablecoin is like a 3 because it actually improves massively. Like think. In fact, you almost could argue it's like a 4 or a 5 because a stable coin isn't fractional reserved and can't be because of how it's actually, it's actually set up. It will die like that if it's fractional reserve. We've seen it multiple times now. Stablecoins don't work if they are not fully reserved. And which is such a. Like, that's a. That's. That is even context. That is revolutionary. That is. That is massive shift from Fiat Land to, to. To stablecoin land is that you actually have to have real reserves to back up your stablecoin issuance. That's wild. That's wild. We're in 0% reserve land when it comes to a bank. And. But then in addition it actually behaves like cash. It's dependent on the trust of the institution that issues it and their ability to reserve, which means that they can collapse independently. The stablecoin will collapse in value if your institution is not reserved and it will stay perfectly fine with the institution that is reserved. Which means you're back to banknotes being respondent to the, the properties of the bank that issues them. Which means that you're back to banknotes prior to the entire thing being batched together in the kind of like Federal Federal Reserve concept and everything is it actually behaves like cash online. Like I can send it to you without you being KYC'd. You just have a key. Like there's. Those are significant improvements over the way fiat shit banks work today. It's not, it's not, it's, it's not 10, you know, it's not, it's certainly not Bitcoin. You're still using something that somebody, somebody else is going to print a trillion of extra this year, maybe 2 trillion next year. Who knows? Like you're subject and dependent on a lot of different layers, but you're actually not on a few layers that it's a, it's, it's a significant improvement over many other layers. Um, and so if we all went to stablecoins over the current structure, it would actually be a significant multi step forward into, into, into the state of the world. Like, like things would actually be more aligned. Not as aligned as if we went to bitcoin, but more aligned if we went to stablecoins. So very much in line with your thinking is that it's pragmatic and it's also a solution that gets people into the mindset of the bitcoin technology and the mindset of understanding when a transaction is done and what a key is, it's a mindshare thing without forcing them to shift their trust in the money, which is a much bigger step to take. And so it's baby steps. It is literally baby steps. And then there will be a point where the move to Bitcoin will just seem like another baby step. And they've already got it in their savings, they've already got it in their retirement portfolio because it's alongside gold. And then suddenly there's also a payment option where like, well, you can buy this and it can't be censored. And this just works easy because you know, bitcoin can simply do things that other money can't when it's open and completely independent. And it's like, okay, well yeah, let me just swap over Bitcoin real quick and use it. And then they're part of Bitcoin. [00:49:25] Speaker A: I'll give another example right now. Yeah, like, as I said, it's a pragmatic thing that. Okay, yes, first and foremost get Bitcoin. But if I can't get you into bitcoin, okay, like if you got to use a stablecoin thing, whatever. But the other aspect that is getting a bit difficult is some of these companies, like Coinbase and others, yes, on one side they're doing a good thing of helping onboard, but on the other, sometimes they are kind of doing a disservice because when you go into these commerce checkout things, you see like as an example, on some random side, you like pay with Bitcoin. Actually it's like pay with Coinbase. You know, it's not like. And then that's confusing because it's not. They don't just do the open qr, you know, they didn't just show you a Lightning QR then. You got to like either sign up with that thing. You got a KYC with that now. [00:50:08] Speaker B: I just ran into this yesterday, so it's a very sore spot. I was like, I was like, oh, snap, they take bitcoin or whatever. I clicked on it and it was like, pay with your coinbase while it's like, I don't have a Coinbase wallet. The hell is wrong with you? I was so mad. [00:50:21] Speaker A: And they can't just show you a Bitcoin QR or a Lightning qr. [00:50:24] Speaker B: Right? [00:50:24] Speaker A: They've got to like do this whole rigmarole of, no, you need to sign up with. Because they're using it as like their little on ramping thing, which is annoying because it kind of goes against the ethos and again, we're being ideological but genuine. I think there's a good reason for this, which is the point of Bitcoin and Lightning is that it's an open standard, right? You don't have to like sign up on that particular exact thing, their particular platform, use their exact wallet. You should be able to just scan and pay a standard, you know, Bitcoin or Lightning invoice. Right, That's. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Thanks for missing the whole point. Right, right. [00:50:55] Speaker A: You're unsolving the problem. [00:50:57] Speaker B: Right? [00:50:59] Speaker A: So, you know, obviously there's work to be done and then, yes, there's a need for like these kind of swapping, swap services in the background. So let's say it's like, whatever. And even like in shitcoin land, they've got a ton of these, right? Because it's like whatever. This, this particular stablecoin on this chain, on this thing. And, and, and if people pay with the wrong one and it kind of screws things up and they could like burn money or lose money if they do it wrong. So you know, some of that may end up having to come to bitcoin land because of people swapping in from this layer to that layer and whatever. But at least if there's a lightning qr, it's like you out of whatever layer you are starting on, whether it's arc or spark or liquid or ecash or whatever, ZK roll up or some other thing, even a custodial thing, but you're just paying a lightning qr. [00:51:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:51:44] Speaker A: So on the other side, the other guy's just getting his lightning payment and it's done. You know, like, but even then there could be swaps on the other side there too. Right. [00:51:51] Speaker B: But never swap to a swap. [00:51:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it could be. We don't know exactly. Yeah. So things can get built out in crazy ways. But yeah, so yeah, I see stablecoins as they can be. Look, it's hard to deny, we cannot deny their undeniable use among hundreds, amongst hundreds of millions of people around the world. So, you know, you can't deny that. The question is more like how do we get more people to understand the actual value of storing your value in Bitcoin as opposed to just, you know, replace, you know, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Right. Like you're just holding your value in fiat. Now look, another fair point for some of these people, they're, they're international, right. They're in some country with a currency and the US dollar is less bad than their currency. [00:52:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:37] Speaker A: So again, what do you say to that person, hey, you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't try to get out of the whatever hyper inflating or high inflation currency you were already in. You know, it's hard for us to like, we have to have a bit of empathy for that. [00:52:52] Speaker B: And I think like they just think they just had a huge win. Is it like I just, I just replaced a super, super mega exponential shitcoin with a crap coin. That's fantastic. That's like a. Yeah, it's an improvement. I just had a 10x and it. [00:53:07] Speaker A: Was super easy to do X and their quality of life. [00:53:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:53:10] Speaker A: So I think the pragmatic thing is, and I think we're starting to see this in builders now like Roy and others where they're just saying like, yeah, look, if you need a stablecoin kind of swap thing in the background. Okay. They'll build that and they'll have it available for people whether it's liquid or arc or spark or whatever. And so I think that's a pragmatic way to go about some of this stuff is just have some of these swaps. Obviously the goal is to get them into Bitcoin and kind of get them down the funnel to Bitcoin and self custody Bitcoin. That's an aspect of it. And to a limited extent, some of these stable coins may help in delivery of services. Right? Like if I'm thinking about like Hodl, Hodl or Debify, you know, they can do loans and you can get, you can borrow against your Bitcoin and get some stablecoin. And so that could also be another thing to help existing bitcoin users not have to sell because they can borrow against it. So that's maybe another angle. Of course there are custodial services, right, which people may use, whether it's, I don't know, strike or lead in or whatever else is out there. So you know, we'll see a different range of choices on that front. Also now I know this, you know, the, there's Firefish and there's Debify and some of these ideas where maybe you still hold one key and you know, maybe you have it or unchained, but you still hold one key. So you at least have better, you know, it's harder for them to rehypothecate your borrowed, you know, your collateralized coins. So that's, I mean, and the whole lending collateralized thing, that's like a massive conversation the last, let's say year, year and a half. Yeah, massive. Like so much interest in lending. [00:54:49] Speaker B: Well, it is the perfect collateral. Like it's an, it's an unbelievable collateral asset for like if you compare it to any other, any option in that, in that entire field, like bitcoin is really kind of unmatched. I still think that's a hugely undervalued piece of the bigger picture here. [00:55:09] Speaker A: But yeah, and so I think another corollary, kind of like power law is like diminishing returns and diminishing volatility over time. And maybe that's also another thing of like now of course you can still get wrecked if you are doing, you know, so not financial advice, you know, educational only. But when people borrow against their coins, maybe there's now over time less kind of a risk of like these massive flash crashes where people all get liquidated, you know, like as obviously you and I have Been around for a while, we've seen our fair share of these. Sometimes a flash crash can happen, right? Think about the COVID crash where I can't remember the exact numbers but it was something like 9 or 10k and it dropped to like 4k or 3k, something like extremely quickly. [00:55:52] Speaker B: His three it had bounced, it had slowly squeezed its way down to like, like just in the 7 range and it was like 2.5 and like. [00:56:02] Speaker A: Yeah, it was ridiculous. And then a bunch of people must have surely got liquidated, right? Oh yeah, at that point. So you know, I think now of course that was years and years ago now. That was like what's almost six years ago now. But I think over time bitcoin is maturing and so there are, you know, things like options and futures and all these different things. It's, it's part of bitcoin's growing up story. Right. But the trade off of that is to an extent there's some dilution of the quote unquote cypherpunk ethos. But at the same time I think it is going to have a good impact on humanity anyway. It may not just, it may not be a kind of 8 billion people self custodying and you know, having their own note at home, but I think, I think over time we will hopefully get some, you know, technological improvements to bitcoin and then it'll be enough to a point where you know, basically enough people who want to self custody, you know, it won't be perfect but it'll be enough. [00:57:04] Speaker B: Right. [00:57:05] Speaker A: And I think that's kind of where we're going to land or likely to land let's say none of us know the future can predict it exactly. But that's kind of how, where I see it going. So I guess navigating these sort of purity trade offs and even in like collateralized lending world, right? Because you could say hey, why are you doing custodial? Why don't you do like the you know, unchained or debify style where you get to hold one key or like the DLC style, right. Where it's kind of. But then there's UX difficulties with that. Or let's say people want to be able to have not just borrowing but like a card that they can spend. Right? Because they want to be able to spend the fiat easily. So you know, I think that's navigating this space of trade offs. I think it's going to require people who are pragmatic as opposed to doing their best to sort of tick every Ideological purity box. [00:57:51] Speaker B: Yeah. And I also think it's that like, we need to figure out how to build the solutions that have those benefits as. As easily or better than the alternative. The, the others, the, the centralized version. [00:58:07] Speaker A: Yeah, but there's just fundamental difficulties. You know what I mean? Like, I'm sure you might have seen Francis Paul. I think he did a post on like what they do, their approach with bull bitcoin and. Right. He was sort of saying the hard way. Right. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but I think he was trying to say like, I think I've read his article. [00:58:22] Speaker B: I think I, I think I've read that one in the show, if I'm not mistaken. [00:58:24] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Yeah. But I mean the gist of it is like he, I mean if you just looked at a graph, it was sort of like, here's what the custodial experience can be. Here's like. And like the hard mode non custodial is like, it's just not going to be that same level. Of course they're doing their best and you know, good on them, but it's just, it is hard mode that way. Right. Trying to do things like, that way. Of course, things like Liquid and ARC and these things that can help. And of course we want more people to really use those services. So wherever possible. Yeah, hey, drive people to those if that's the right choice based on what jurisdiction, what country, what services are available. [00:59:04] Speaker B: You know, I want to talk to you because you mentioned Spark a few times and what Roy has been working on as well, kind of integrating that. And I had known of Spark and you know, some people told me, like, this is pretty cool, but I had been more focused on ARC because of like the architecture and I had dug into the technicals. Okay, how does this work? How do connectors work and how do they create essentially the Covenant concept without a covenant and. Or in a practical sense, without actually having a covenant opcode. And. But I had not realized literally until I talked with Roy about it that Spark was a state chain. And I was like, oh, because I had played with Mercury when they, you know, just did their thing, just kind of showing that state chains work, you know, and that sort of stuff. And. But between that, like, I really think like the, the kind of theoretical space that ARC and statechain sit in, like both of them, like are non custodial in the sense that the user can, with or without the operator can take their keys, walk away and they can exit the situation. Like the unilateral Exit is the most important and kind of the fundamental piece of the puzzle that I find. Like we have two major solutions and importantly is the on ramp. The onboarding and the user experience of those solutions are dirt simple. Like we don't have everything we need to solve every problem, but we do have everything we need to essentially scale this through a market of providers to the whole world. Like, like a state chain and an ARK can handle. I mean granted I don't think ARK has like stress tested this yet, but conceptually both of them can absolutely handle tens of millions of users a piece like the, just in the structure of like how they work. Now offloading that on chain has, has trouble because the chain is limited. [01:01:17] Speaker A: Yeah, the idea is to stay off chain as much as possible. [01:01:20] Speaker B: Exactly. You, you do it only when things go wrong. And the whole idea is that like not everything goes wrong all at once. You know, like, like the, the whole world of a financial system isn't going to have to emergency settle at the exact same moment. There will be periods of like bad weather and good weather. But that's, that's the state of all things always. And, but that lends me again back to the idea that like now is the time that we have to prove it. We need to just be using and operating things like a spark state chain and an ARC and just implementing those things into like so that people can, I mean imagine like somebody just being able to boot up into a service and earn or zap. Get a. Get a zap or earn something or send money. But just like no friction. You just, you just have a wallet and then you just got some stuff, you know, like, and there was no complicated setup. You, you had your keys backed up with, you know, you, you have your Apple pass key or just general passkey support in the, in the ecosystem or the, the setup. And that is actually what protects your, your seed phrase. Unless you want to get more advanced, you know, and you given them all of the tools, the, the basically the best they can get with the simplest user experience and they have the ability to walk away. They might have to learn how, but they have the ability to walk away. They do have their coins. They might have to figure out how to get their seed phrase. Exactly. But they will have it. You know, like we can build those solutions and actually give them a user experience that's just better than everything else and we're kind of given a gift too. So many new frictions are constantly popping up in like legacy land. Like trying to just log into services now is Such a pain in the ass. Like it sucks more and more, especially if you're trying to be like behind a VPN or something. You're, you're, it's an email every single time to two factor, whether you even need a two factor anymore. Like you, like you don't even have to set it up. It's just like now you just have to log in with your email. So you like log in with your email and password but then also go to your email and click on the link or like put punch in the numbers or whatnot and then like put that on top of like financial services. Like the pain of setting some of that stuff up, like you can actually skip that for the user. You just have to build the, the tool that they want to use and integrate it. And now with things like the Breeze SDK, I really, I really feel like we're at a point where the network adoption because we solved problems could actually explode and really reinforce the Metcalfe's kind of power law theory of like this is where adoptions is going to come from. But we have to stop thinking we're going to explain people into adopting it. We have to show people into adopting it, you know. [01:04:23] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that's the approach Roy is taking with the whole Breeze SDK. And yeah, like you said, Spark is being built and Interesting. I was recently at Bitcoin Japan in Tokyo and I saw Daniel from Wallet of Satoshi. He gave a talk there and he was explaining how they adopted Spark and they have now their self custodial version of Wallet of Satoshi. [01:04:45] Speaker B: It's using Spark. Oh my God. I didn't even know that. Oh my God, that's amazing. It's got no idea. [01:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So there's a self custodial version. Right. And I think in some parts of, you know, Europe or Europoland they have even turned off the custodial version because of regulatory stuff basically. [01:05:00] Speaker B: Wow. [01:05:01] Speaker A: So yeah, they're using Spark and that's literally one of the leading world's leading Lightning wallets and there's a bunch of others who are plugging into it and using Spark. I think they got like X Verse and D Block which is like some Neo bank thing. [01:05:14] Speaker B: I think we're going to use it. I think we're going to use it with Paradrive. [01:05:18] Speaker A: It's interesting. Now personally I use Phoenix as my daily driver for lightning and just day to day lightning bitcoin payments. But if I was onboarding a noob today, I'd probably put them on Wallet of Satoshi and say use the self custodial version now. Yes. To be clear, there are trade offs with this. Right. It's arguably trustodial in the sense that you are trusting. Like because the state chain model is instead of moving the coin around, it's like you're transferring kind of using crypto fancy magic, you're transferring the private key for that coin around. [01:05:45] Speaker B: Right. [01:05:46] Speaker A: So it's a state chain but the there's like leafs of that state of that of those coins. Right. In the past iterations like mercury layer it was just like state coins set denominations. Whereas now it's like it can split down and you have these different leaves and things and that's kind of how it works in the background. Now there are some different trade offs and things around this. Like as an example, I think if you have to exit on chain in the unilateral exit case, it can be more expensive. So I did an episode for listeners with Kevin Hurley, CTO of Light Spark. [01:06:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:06:19] Speaker A: Where we kind of went deeply into Spark, how it works and stuff. That's one trade off. [01:06:24] Speaker B: You may need like a bunch of UTXOs or whatever to actually the on. [01:06:30] Speaker A: Chain unilateral, something like that. Yeah. So the cost can be higher. Right. And there's different trade offs around things like I think this is also coming back to Daniel from Wallet of Satoshi. I think this is part of his reasoning of picking Spark is because he wanted to be able to have like low value easy onboarding. Right. Like imagine you're getting zapped on Nostra or whatever that is for like 200sats. If you can't go to the dust threshold, you can't like you're not going to be able to take that on chain. And so for that reason I think he liked. I think that was one factor. I will say subjectively just at last, I mean last time I tried with Wallet of Satoshi it can feel maybe a little slower than like a Phoenix payment to do a light like a Wallet of Satoshi Spark payment. But I think they've done really well on the ux. So it's got like this, this progress bar. So the user feels like something's happening. It doesn't feel like it's just kind of. There's just this loading like this kind of dumb loading screen that doesn't tell me anything's happening. No, there's a bar, it's progressing, it's going up, a green bar going up and they can see when the payment goes through. [01:07:32] Speaker B: Nice. [01:07:33] Speaker A: And so I like that aspect of it. And I like that they do like cloud backup, you know, because again, what we're talking about here is for the spending money, right? Like, obviously it's not the same thing as your life savings that you do. Deep gold, multi sig, et cetera. But the point is to get people using bitcoin, right? Like we want to grow our mind, share. We want more people to think about bitcoin. We want people to even use it for small things so that they get comfortable and familiar so they can then make that, that jump, they can jump that hurdle to, oh, I want to store a large percent, if not all in on my life savings in bitcoin, right? So like that's kind of the journey that people, you know, go on if they go down this kind of bitcoin rabbit hole journey kind of colloquially. So I see it as that. But it's like, as you said, it's about getting, you know, lightning and bitcoin built into apps rather than, let's say evangelists, right? From the, let's say the Andreas Antonopoulos and Roger Vere eras of bitcoin where they're kind of like giving a talk on stage and everyone's really hyped up and motivated. And to be fair, you and I came in from that, right? Like that was us seeing those guys up on stage talking or giving talks about bitcoin. And it's this libertarian and this idea cypherpunk ideal. You know, I think the future of it is just going to be more about explaining the general benefits for people of like, hey, you need to be able to save and you need to be able to make these payments and earn or receive payments. So I think that's kind of where it's going to shift bitcoin getting built into apps and the new let's say, quote unquote classes of people coming in are not necessarily going to be as ideological as, you know, you and I are, or as we would hope. [01:09:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, which is inevitable. Which is completely inevitable. And going back to the UX though is there's something interesting like, because I. Phoenix is my main for lightning as well, aside from my start nine that's plugged into Albi. But typically I still will just go to Phoenix for, for most of my main lightning on mobile. And one of the interesting things about the UX for like let's say state chains. So like state chains are trustodial is like one of my favorite words about like how that sort of stuff like operates because there are, there are elements to you know, your transaction going through before someone in the past who had the private key prior, it's a cascading time decay which you can get through first if you go, if you do in fact publish it. But there's the, you know, there's the potential risk of which I think ARK solves this differently because of the settlement periods. But state chains, there's still like a collusion risk with the state chain operator and somebody in the past you had the private key to get ahead of your time decay and like that sort of stuff. So like you said, it's not everything has a trade off. And I think that's where kind of the excitement is though, is finding what the best trade off is for the user. Because being able to just receive 21sats and not have to open a channel. [01:11:06] Speaker A: Or think about inbound liquidity, you don't think about anything. [01:11:09] Speaker B: And you're not wondering why. This fee was huge. I just got paid 200 sats and my fee was 199sat. That doesn't make any sense. You know, like I have one at one sat, you know, what the hell just happened? And, and in addition to the service provider themselves, a person who's like building the wallet, they don't have to think about like, okay, do I have a, do I allocate a hundred sats to this user because they might use this, or are they going to do this one time, get bored with it and leave? And now I've got a hundred sats locked up. Like, my liquidity cost is massive. The risk of me locking up capital with dormant users is just huge. It's almost like a forced 3x5x reserve without even intent being intentional about it. Because you just don't know which user is going to be reliable and which one's not to solve those, all of those problems. And then you could literally have it where like after it's like a hundred thousand sats or two hundred thousand sats, you could just be like, you know, open a channel, right? [01:12:08] Speaker A: This all graduated wallet, you could turn. [01:12:10] Speaker B: It into Phoenix where like, okay, now that they have like a certain amount of value, it's at a higher stage of security and you can like move it. You could, you literally have three buckets. It's like, okay, this is your hot, this is your warm and this is your cold. And, and that's all they have to know is that it's safer here. And this could be state chain, this one could be a lightning channel and then the other one is your on chain. You know, and like, you don't even have to tell the user what's happening, but you have that. That's where the innovation is in the market. It's like, okay, how do you provide the best for each situation so that the trade off for the user makes sense from a how much capital is at risk perspective. [01:12:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think Mutiny Wallet was sort of pioneers on this. Ben, Carmen and those guys. Now Mutual Wallet shut down. Yeah, but I know has like E Cash. I think Zeus is doing a similar kind of idea. And I think, yeah, there are people working on various ideas of like graduated wallets similar to this as we were talking about. But I guess the devil's in the detail. Of course, it takes, you know, implementation, technical detail and so on. So of course, you know, I think there's also an element of just building something and having a professional sales team and a professional kind of integrations and like, I think that's where kind of the whole Spark versus Ark battle comes. And maybe it's funny, like, Spark maybe has more interest in like the U.S. because it's kind of like a U.S. it's a U.S. company. Whereas, like, Ark sort of has more European, like some of the European startup scene is like, maybe more into that because it's like, it's from, you know, the European bitcoin builders scene. So it's kind of interesting. It's sort of funny to see that the American kind of bitcoin world and the European bitcoin world, they're sort of, I, let's say friendly competition, but maybe sometimes it's personal relationships too. [01:13:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:13:59] Speaker A: Because if you're in the continent or you're just there, you kind of tend to see each other. Easier for you to just talk to this guy and be like, oh, hey, I know this guy doing that thing. Let me, you know, look at that. And whatever. So, so be it. Right? Like, whatever. You know, if you're a free market capitalist, you believe in just let. Let the best idea win, let the best product win. It's out there, people are going to use it, and let's see what happens with it. [01:14:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious. I mentioned just before we got started is that I get to listen to almost no other podcast. I still try to, like, listen to a bunch of audiobooks, but that's usually on my, like, clear through list. And so one of the things that. One of the reasons I wanted to bring you on is I was curious. I've gotten so many things recently in like, the last, like five or ten episodes of like, I didn't even know until I had this conversation with this person. So the. The chat episode is just, like, what exposed me to something new. And I was curious what, like, in the past year, what are some of the most interesting conversations you've had or things that you've learned while operating the show that kind of, like, shocked you or that you were surprising or were just, like. Just fascinating ideas? [01:15:17] Speaker A: Well, there's a few things, yeah. Like, I think this. Some of this, like, Ark and Spark stuff, um, I think just some of the treasury company stuff and the lending aspects of it. I think the treasury company stuff I did, like, I touched on this a little bit earlier, but I think there's. There's this kind of clash between, like, hardcore bitcoiners who are sort of against treasury companies. They see it as, like, they're against us, or they're trying to, like, pump and dump onto retail. Like, their mental model for it is like, 2017 ICOs. Whereas I see it as like, no, there's actually a business model there. Like, think about it this way. If you can borrow at 10% or less and Bitcoin is cagling at 30%, there's a business model there. [01:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, sabotage. [01:16:00] Speaker A: Sabotage, right. Yeah. And there. And there are reasons why people would. You engage in these different products. Right. Whether you are a. You know, you are looking for increased performance and. Okay, you believe that MSTR or some of these other treasury companies can outperform bitcoin over a certain time period into just. In terms of ngu. Now, of course, it's not all or nothing. Like, I still. The way I see it is you should keep most of it in cold storage. But if you're in a dabble, then, yeah, you can dabble in some of these things. You know, let's say if you have some fiat income, like, I'm not saying sell your bitcoin to do treasury company stuff. I'm saying it's more like if you have, like, some fiat income and you're like, okay, I want to dabble in this, or whatever. That's how I'm seeing it. But the point is there's. There are reasons people will engage in these things. And I think a lot of people are missing that because they. They just think of it as like, oh, it's a scam, or it's ico. It's like, it's that it's some kind of extracting from retail sort of thing. Whereas the way I'm seeing it is more like, no, there's actually a business model Here there's actually a reason to engage in some of these things because of leverage and, or amplification, they are effectively getting more coins and yielding and compounding over time. And so that's like an interesting factor because we need to draw people in. And NGU obviously is a big draw card. We want to draw people into Bitcoin. I think treasury companies are one way that people can do that. And not just that there are like these different audiences. Right. Whether if you're like an older person and you need income, then I think that's where this whole, the preferred shares aspect of it could get really interesting for people. Another thing that I think is not so well understood is that as these companies grow, they start getting included inside of indexes and then they start tapping into passive flows. So as an example, like, you know, a couple months ago, I think Simon Garovich of Meta Planet said, hey, Meta Planet just got included in this Japan index. Mm. So think about like, if you're some like, person who wants exposure to Japan, you might be like, yeah, get me exposure to Japan and your guy goes and buys the Japan index. What's inside that? Meta Planet. What's inside that? Bitcoin. So I see it as these are ways that we can draw people in in a kind of a stepping stone way. And then whether they are directly getting exposed on the common equity side of things or whether they're kind of they want yield, which in turn they're buying that product that then goes back to buying Bitcoin. So I see it as these things are supporting the network effect of Bitcoin and they now disclosure. I'm an investor and advisor for Orange, Right, which is a Brazilian bitcoin treasury company, the largest in Brazil. But I think there's something to this and I believe it's going to help bitcoin adoption because there are professional investors who either cannot or will not be able to just directly buy Bitcoin. And some of them can't even just buy the etf. They have to buy some kind of equity because of their mandate. [01:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I was about to say mandate. There's so much capital locked up into certain buckets where they have to have certain characteristics or they have to invest in certain things and they can't just like take it out and buy bitcoin. And sometimes they can't even just redirect it at an etf. The ETF did open up into a massive market, but it's still not. There's a lot more buckets. You know, there's there's buckets all over this place with all sorts of different restrictions or mandates or obligations as to how they allocate and when and how they can actually move things. So the bitcoin treasury thing is really interesting. And there's a clip actually that got shared in the audionauts and there were a couple people going back and forth about it. And it was the. One of the ones from Sailor on what bitcoin did with Danny. And he was talking about like. So the clip was Sailor talking about how, like, sometimes equity, equity can be even better than just buying bitcoin. And it's funny how many. Like, like, I think, I think it was under the context of like, that's it, that's it. There it is. We're. We're done. Something. This, this notion or whatever that, like, that was a ridiculous idea. And from like the bitcoiner perspective for what we're thinking of as risk or like what the, what the major push and pull or the major reason for bitcoin's existence is. Absolutely from that perspective, that's exactly what it sounds like, right? Is that when you're talking about equity, you have counterparty risk. Somebody else has to actually perform well. Somebody actually has to do their job. You're reliant. It's a trusted situation. When bitcoin is about having an untrusted or a trust minimized or trustless ownership. So purely from that context, it's like, okay, well, yeah, duh. Like, if that's where you're standing and that's what you're thinking about as like your main concern, then that, that comment sounds ridiculous. But like, like think about it from Saylor's perspective is he's been in business for his entire adult life. He's been in the finance world. He's talking about an investment from an investment perspective. And if you listen to the rest of the things. So I just like, you know, somebody like Clarke or whatever jumped in and he was like, just listen to the whole section. It's from this to this. And he says afterward, he's clearly talking about it from what's your return? Like, what's your investment perspective? And he explains it from an investment perspective after the fact. He says, well, the thing, the reason it could be better to have equity as opposed to just owning bitcoin directly is because the corporate, the corporation can actually structure themselves to get tax advantages. So there's not as great an ongoing cost that they can turn around and they can take out a loan to buy more bitcoin. But Then that will take up the, the, the price which allows them to access additional loans in a very structured, very positive, like, low interest that you can't normally get. Like, if you just directly bought it yourself, what are you going to get? A 12% loan to, to buy more Bitcoin. But a corporation might be going to be able to get a 1%, 2% loan, you know, depending on their, their position. So in that sense, the, the investment return or the ability to accumulate Bitcoin in a corporate entity or whatever that you get equity of could actually increase far faster. I mean, look at how much Bitcoin microstrategies or strategies able to buy. Clearly, it's more than somebody who's just like taking their earned cash and buying Bitcoin. So from that perspective, what he said also makes sense. But it's a question of like, which thing are you maximizing? Are you maximizing trustless or are you maximizing return? Are you maximizing your investment? And in the context of people thinking that bitcoin treasury companies are a scam or whatever, is that. Sure, there's anything, anything that has like a kind of a hype cycle, which I'm kind of surprised. Like, Bitcoin treasury companies kind of had a hype cycle for like a short period, but it was really kind of numb. It was like a little blip. You know, it wasn't really that much, you know, like, and it's not even hugely talked about anymore. It's not like huge news. But like, if we're on a bitcoin standard, every company is a bitcoin treasury company. The only thing that's lost is the arbitrage opportunity. So it's like, like eventually I expect literally every single company to have a bitcoin treasury. Like all of them maybe 30 years from now, but all of them. And for the exact same way that every company has a website like you just do. If you don't, everybody's like, does this even exist? You know, and, but during this era, being a bitcoin treasury company before or having a bitcoin treasury as a company before others actually gives you an outsized benefit. It gives you an arbitrage opportunity because you're doing it before everybody else. So, so there's a price discrepancy between the price of fiat credit and the cost, the time cost of owning Bitcoin, which are not the same. Bitcoin is not determining what the interest rate is. Fiat Land is still determining the interest rate, but the real interest rate, when you move to a bitcoin standard to a bitcoin world. Bitcoin will determine the interest rate. Those conditions will reverse. And so if you can get fiat interest at sound money, at bitcoin, sound money ownership, you have a massive arbitrage opportunity. And that'll probably last for 15 years until Bitcoin is a part of everybody's treasury strategy. [01:24:38] Speaker A: Exactly. So I see this as, it's a window until hyper bitcoinization. Post hyperbiconization, it's going to be harder to exactly tell. But nevertheless, owning more bitcoin going into hyperbitcoinization is better than earning less. [01:24:50] Speaker B: Yeah. And then it's just a saving strategy. People with more savings are better than people with less savings. [01:24:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And so I just think people are a bit shortsighted there or they sort of have a certain purity kind of idea of what bitcoin should be. Or the only company should do it are operational companies. No financial engineering allowed. But then it's like, think about how many people have debt, like have mortgages and whatever, like, and that's kind of sailors pointing that into you, which is like, hey, why aren't you focusing on all the hundreds of millions of companies and the billions of people who have no bitcoin, like, focus on them. Like, instead of spending all this time kind of, you know, eating your young per se, as he said in that interview, or just as I kind of summarized, like, it's just unnecessary, unnecessary friendly fire, really. Like, I just think this is too much kind of infighting about things that we can't necessarily stop. But at the same time, I think if my, if we can grow bitcoin mindshare, if bitcoin just becomes part of everybody's portfolio, it's too big to, it's too big to stop. You can't stop this thing now. And so that should be part of. If you're a bitcoin advocate or a maxi or whatever, Bitcoin accelerationist or whatever the word is nowadays, which we are, then yeah, let's just get more people to think about Bitcoin and you know what you think about, you start doing, you start, you know, like, so if we can get more people to even think about this stuff, but that. Who otherwise would have just been doing fiat investment, that's a win. That's good. We're getting more people in eventually. [01:26:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:26:26] Speaker A: So I, yeah, I just see it as like, it's unnecessary, friendly flyer. And sometimes people are, they say they're capitalist, but actually they sometimes have almost like a crabs in a bucket mentality as opposed to a, hey, abundance mentality like we're all going to. It's a rising tide. It's going to lift all boats. Now, to be clear, I'm not endorsing all bitcoin treasury companies at any price. Yes, there was a hype cycle. I'm not saying every single one of them is going to do well, but I think a decent number of them will do well, assuming obviously competent management, the right, you know, the right structure, the right, you know, the right stuff that goes into it. But yeah, I think a bunch of these will do well despite people sort of saying no, only MSTR and that's it sort of thing. No, I think a bunch of these will do well as long as they structure well. Yes, there's risk. Understand, like, understand what you hold, right? Do you hold bitcoin on chain? Do you hold equity or do you hold debt? Right. These are different things. Understand what you hold, right? And you know, as I've said, I think most of it should be in cold storage, multisig. But maybe dabble is kind of how I see it. And again, to be clear, what works for me is not necessarily what works for you, because other listeners out there, they may be younger and willing to take more risk or they may be older and willing to take less risk. You know, they've just got different life situations. So what works for me is not necessarily what works for everyone else. But I think this can make sense and there are a lot of people for who it can make sense to you to do this stuff. And I think it's, it's, it's a new onboarding pathway for people. Just like the stable coins are an onboarding pathway for people and some of the treasury company stuff is a pathway for them. So that's, I think that's probably something that's, you know, the last year or so I've seen a lot of kind of online battles and maybe I've been a part of some of them, but I just think this is something where people are missing a little bit. And so, you know, let's, let's be pragmatic, let's get people on board however we can. And you know, I think things are going to go well for us. I think the other really interesting thing is all the AI stuff, right? Like there's all this talk now about like exactly how many jobs are people going to lose? Like is it a disaster? Right? Or even, I mean you might have seen this recent print. I think it was the Atlanta Fed Now GDP print was like 5% or something and there was like 4, 4.9% productivity growth or something. And it sort of makes you wonder, okay, is that money printing or is it AI and productivity? Yeah, I'm kind of, maybe it's a bit of both. Maybe there is genuinely productivity gain. Right. Maybe people are using AI tools to be more effective, to be more productive, to kind of amplify their impact kind of colloquially. What I'm hearing is, okay, yeah, there's been some layoffs, but for the most part it's almost like companies are just saying, okay, we'll just keep the people we've got, but if someone leaves, we just won't replace them. We'll just try to use AI and obviously tell our current user, current employees, use AI. We need you to be, you know, productive, be, enhance, amplify your productivity, use AI tools, you know, whatever. And people like talking, raving about like Claude code and you know. [01:29:32] Speaker B: Literally been using it all morning. Yeah, right. [01:29:35] Speaker A: Well, there you go. Right. Or grok or whatever, whatever. People just, I, I think it's going to expand. Like, I think this is the other thing that's kind of commonly missed is when ATMs, bank, you know, bank ATMs came out, people thought it was gonna like kill all the bank jobs. Right. Or bank teller jobs. Paradoxically, there were more bank teller jobs. Why? Because they could open more branches. Yeah, right. It amplified. Right. Or another example that Jensen Huang uses from Nvidia, he says, hey, what about all these radiologist jobs? AI is being used a lot in that. Is it that all the radiologists are losing their jobs? No, they've gone further up the value chain. Now radiologists are able to amplify their impact and they spend more time doing kind of higher value stuff. Actually the number of radiologist jobs has gone up. And I think it's a similar phenomenon. [01:30:26] Speaker B: Right. [01:30:26] Speaker A: Because for most people they're coming from this mindset of like, scarcity, of like, oh no, I'm going to get replaced, I'm going to lose my job. Oh, it's all over. You know, it's the doomer vision. But actually, no, there's going to be new jobs created now. Yes, it's going to be bumpy, it's going to be a bumpy ride. There'll be some disruption, but there will be new jobs created. We just can't predict exactly where all the new jobs are going to be created. [01:30:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:49] Speaker A: So I think that's really interesting. And then I guess the other comment I would make from like a macro government perspective, the state wants to like the state wants this, right? Especially the US government, like 38 trillion in debt or whatever. And plus the unfunded liabilities, which is like multiples of that, right? Like hundreds of trillions of dollars. So they are really hoping for a productivity boom because if not, they're going to have to print a ton. But if they get a massive productivity boom, then you might sort of get a massive amount of growth that sort of helps you outgrow that debt problem. And, you know, many countries around the world are in a lot of debt. So we'll see exactly how much productivity comes, you know, like how much of AI is a bubble versus how much of it is real and legit and going to lead to real productivity. AI and robotics, let's say. So we'll see. But I think it's really a fascinating time to see and like, are we actually going to see, you know, productivity growth? And contrary to, let's say, the Duma view, actually, maybe, yes, of course central banking, fiat money is bad, but nevertheless, maybe it's just like AI and robotics and this productivity is actually going to be really beneficial to the global economy, not just the US economy that actually, you know, we're going to start to see like the, like the liquidity, the whole US PMI thing go up and then that's going to cause bitcoin ngu. So obviously that's going to be good for us as bitcoin huddlers. So that's kind of loosely how I'm seeing this next year or two. Like, I think we're going to see a lot of this AI and productivity and extra liquidity coming in. Right. Trump wants low rates, everyone knows that. And so I think we're going to see that. So I am very bullish on this coming year. Of course there's a downside chance none of us knows, none of us can predict, but I'm sort of rating it like, I think pretty solid 80% plus maybe even higher chance that we, you know, we get a good solid year, you know, we're going up. [01:32:55] Speaker B: I kind of think so too. I kind of think so too. Like everybody's like, oh, we're going to go into like a bare market. It's like, well, every bare market that we've had has been explicitly a, a contraction, like a movement back to the mean of an overhyped over leveraging period. And I don't think we ever really had that. Like, so. [01:33:18] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:33:19] Speaker B: So I don't see, I don't, I don't see the structural like, like coinbase. [01:33:25] Speaker A: Would have to blow up or something. [01:33:26] Speaker B: Yes, there, there'd have to be some sort of serious problem to actually cause us. Like, I feel like we are back at the mean, like kind of like the 80 to $90,000 range is kind of that trend line that we've been, we've been chugging on for 11 years. [01:33:42] Speaker A: You know, and as we speak now it's like 96k, right. So everyone's sort of like excited now. Maybe we're coming out. [01:33:48] Speaker B: It's like, it's like, no, we're just, we're just sideways right now. Like, we're just like literally Bitcoin is just kind of chilling because it never actually took off. And so there's not this deep correction that needs to happen to find the balance again. I feel like we never really were super out of balance. Like we were just on a stable growth pattern. And this is the new lower volatility movement that we're looking at. Which is why I think 2026 will be a good year is because I think we'll just keep growing like in a stable kind of power law way. And. But there's clearly there was and maybe still is a little bit of space for a kind of like one quarter, two quarter correction because we had kind of a three quarter boom. You know, like we, we had a small, we had a small boom. So it made sense that we have, we have a pullback because undoubtedly everybody's looking at the four year cycle and they're expecting 25, 2025 to be that big green candle. Like if you do, if you do the, the red candle, little green, little green, big green red candle, little green, little green, big green. 2025 was the big green candle. And it turned out to be nothing. It's just a flat. Like literally it was a, it was a, was it doji star or whatever the hell the charters say. But yeah, I'm, I'm with you there. I think, I think we're just seeing real growth. I think we're seeing legit adoption that's slow and measured. And I also think we have so much room to just finally release and realize all of the tools that we have been building for the last four to five years or so. And that's usually something that we see during the hype cycles too, is that you finally release all these new tools. And we really haven't gotten to do that yet either. Like, you know, like, we just kind of have like expected things to happen. It's like, well, but fundamentally what's changed not A lot. We've just kind of expanded in new markets and we've been chilling. Yeah, but going back to two of the things that you said, so we, we started on the whole bitcoin treasury thing and one of the things that I really think you hit on really well and, or the way that I like to put it is that like we, we fail to recognize other perspectives. There's so many bitcoiners who are just like if it's not the bitcoiner perspective as to what solution can be solved or, or what benefit can be given, then it's like I'm not interested or, or it's just total, it's just a shit going perspective, you know, like everything. That's not the bitcoin maximalist perspective. It's like you have to meet people where they are. You can't like demand that the world think about everything the way you think about it. Even if you are technically right about one thing, you might not be right about what's necessary or most important at that one time. That's exactly why we have a market, is because nobody has the answer to everything and nobody even has a picture of what all needs at all times or all concerns are. Like, in fact, we don't have a decent picture of our own lives, let alone billions of other people. You know, one of the things I always think, like, think of the unbelievable complexity of your own life. The number of times where you know not to reach out to that person because you're probably going to be, you know, 10 days late on anything you want or they're not going to deliver, but you will go to this person and they may even do it for free. But you'll want to offer them money because they're helping you out and they're very reliable. Like think about the level of your, of complexity of your relationships and what you would consider and how you reach out to people, how you rely on things, what resources that you know about. Because like, well, you know, I got like 22 befores that I never actually did anything with out in the shed and I could build a thing if I needed to. The market doesn't know that's there, but it's actually accounting for that because of your behavior, because of your choices in the market. Now go on a hill, on a major highway during like high traffic and just look into the distance and look at the tens of thousands of people who are sharing that highway with you at that one instant and understand that that's 0.1% of 0.1% of 0. 1% of the people just in your area, just in the scope of the world that you tiny little world that you exist in. And every single person has that same massive complexity and level of variation and nuance for their world as you do for yours. Like, we know nothing. We know nothing. There's no one solution for anybody about anything. And to not recognize that somebody else might have a different concern for this immediate moment or a different thing that needs to be solved is to just kind of miss the point of all of this. You know, not, not everybody's worried about what we're worried about. And even if we think they should be, it's our obligation, it's our obligation to demonstrate that to them. Not theirs, not them to come to us. You know, and you're just going to be mad at the world if you're just waiting for everybody to be concerned about what you're concerned about and you just think they're stupid for not doing it. Like, as I get older, it's just like, what, what obligation does anybody really have to listen to me give a shit about what I care about? So. And I think that's kind of what we've, we've missed. We're, we've lost the stay humble side of the stack sats. Of course we did we ever really have it. We wanted to be humble, but I was not. I was never. Well, I was always certain bitcoin is going to do everything and fix everything. And bitcoin standard was two, two weeks away, you know. [01:39:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's just, to me, that's just been like, probably the biggest learning is just sort of understanding it's going to take time and we're not going to get everything we want, but we're going to get a decent amount of what we want. So be patient, keep working and hopefully, you know, we make it in the end. [01:39:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it's funny, I actually do think we get everything we want. It's just on. It's just about the time, it's just about timescale, you know, like everybody at the beginning of the Internet had this idea that it was going to decentralize the world and all this stuff. And it decentralized so many networks, it has so many leaps forward. But then there were like a couple of major steps back. But then bitcoin was born because of the Internet, like without the foundation, without laying the groundwork, Bitcoin would not have been possible. It's not technically feasible. You know, it's technically feasible on a piece of paper but some practically feasible without actually the Internet to do the coordination. Which means that Bitcoin is realizing the Internet's dream and it's, it's taking us on the next two steps forward, and then we'll have another one step back, and then we'll have another two steps forward. We, we are moving in that direction, but there's no end game. It's just, it's, it's a forever game. Right. It just keeps going further and further towards solving more and more problems. And this is actually goes in line with the AI Thing is Jevons paradox is it doesn't matter. And it's so funny too how, how stubborn people are to, to fail to realize this is that no technology, no better technology has ever actually done like made the economy poor. Like it's axiomatically the opposite. You know, like if things cost less resources to do or to get results, then that is better for everyone. Like maybe not for someone in some very particular job or piece of a thing for a particular moment, but overall it is better for everyone because for the exact same reason that computers used to be a job, you used to be hired to be a computer and your job was to sit down with a piece of pen and a paper to compute things and. [01:41:43] Speaker A: Right, like a calculator. [01:41:44] Speaker B: Right, yeah. And now everybody has a computer and it's not a job. But are we wealthier or poorer? Because I can like imagine if I had to hire someone to compute things instead of just using my computer. That would be, I would be a lot poorer. We would all be a hell of a lot poorer. That's an easy job. That, that doesn't, that doesn't deserve a salary. My computer's like a thousand bucks. In fact, like God knows how many devices I have that can compute, you know, compute a hundred times faster than somebody who would need a, you know, $80,000 a year salary. Nah, man, nah. I'm just gonna buy a device that does that. That's AI. That's AI. The number of jobs, the number of projects, the number of things that will exist because of AI, like Jayvon's paradox. Every time like will just explode. It will just absolutely explode. [01:42:41] Speaker A: I think it's just going to really increase the quality of what people can deliver. [01:42:45] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:42:45] Speaker A: Like a small team can now deliver things that used to take a big team. [01:42:49] Speaker B: We're going to have Hollywood budget movies, Hollywood looking movies from a team of five people from like skeleton crews in, in under three years. [01:42:59] Speaker A: And they'll use like those AI replacement things and they'll use like all kinds of generated stuff. [01:43:04] Speaker B: Yep. [01:43:05] Speaker A: Right. But yeah, I think it's, it's like the, it's like this whole new blue sky and there's like, there are opportunities out there. So I think that's kind of the, a bullish message in a way that, you know, there's opportunity. It's kind of, it comes down to your agency, your imagination, your willingness to try and try something new and be willing to experiment, to try to like, go and pioneer something new or create something that hasn't already been created. You can just do things, you know? [01:43:35] Speaker B: Yeah, you can just do things. [01:43:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. [01:43:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Especially with AI. It's so much easy. It's so easy to just do things now. Like, like your barrier just like plummeted by like 95%. Go do it. You know, I don't know. That's like the end of every, every show now is like, go build a thing. Go do a thing. Like, the tools are so freaking good now. But dude, I've already kept you for an hour and 45 minutes. I don't want to take your whole day. I know. We could probably jibber jabber about God knows what. What do you see? Let's, let's bring it, let's bring it a little bit of that closer to home. What do you see for the next year? You said you think 2026 is going to be kind of good, a good year. What do you, what do you hope to see happening in the next year? And what do you hope bitcoiners focus on and like kind of push, like, what would be your message to be like, if you're doing something right now, what, what should you be looking at and, and pushing for people? [01:44:32] Speaker A: As I said, I think it's just being pragmatic. Right. Like, let's just pragmatically grow the pie. Right. Like, I think we're going to grow the pie. Let's grow this, you know, adoption and not spend as much time. Friendly fire or kind of infighting. Yes. There'll be some arguments that, like, that's kind of, you know, it's always going to be there. There will always be some arguments, but I think, I think it's time to focus less on the kind of the purity aspect of things and time to focus more on the pragmatic doing and, you know, growing adoption. And whether that's like your meetups and your conferences and your events or it's your products that you're doing or whether it's content you're doing, whether it's investing. I think it's just try to be pragmatic and try to just sort of move the ball forward in whatever way you can. Whether that's like getting involved in your local meetup or whether it's like creating content to help people learn about Bitcoin. Like, I think there's lots of things that we can do, you know, talking to family and friends, things like this. I think it's, you know, it's, it's not always easy, but you have to try to think about what you can do to be effective. [01:45:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I would say on, on exactly those. I completely agree. And I would say two things on, on what they mean to me is like being pragmatic, I think is like focus. Like we should focus on getting tools into people's hands and, and also ask them what do you need this tool to do? Like, like what do you need out of bitcoin? What is it, what is it that you are looking for from your perspective? What, what can help your situation? Because bitcoin can provide all of these things, but we can't tell them what to care about. We have to know what they care about and figure out how bitcoin solves that. And then in the point of content creation and stuff, and one that I hope to get deeper into myself and have been working on, but I think looking at past the ideological era is that if you want to up your game into explaining something to someone is learn how to turn it into a story. [01:46:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great point. I should actually do more of that myself. [01:46:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we should get together and we should talk privately about like what, what that might look like because I, I want to do some projects and, and going back to the point of like AI and things will make Hollywood looking movies or content or whatever with a skeleton crew could not be a more perfect time for some serious bitcoiners to get together and start talking about what it means to tell a story that teaches something about bitcoin or that teaches something about what it means to, to a person to have bitcoin. How does that change who you are? We talk so much about what that means from articles and, and you know, time preference and all that. But how does that play out in a character? How does that, what does that actually mean to someone's life? And if you can tell that stories, stories are it, that's how you reach people and so on. Those two things that you brought up pragmatic is ask someone what they need and figure out how the tools Solve their problem. And if you're trying to explain something to someone, stop lecturing to them and figure out how to make it into a story. Those would be my extensions to that. But I think that's a great, great way to think about where we are and what to focus on going forward. Dude, thank you. Thanks for coming on the show, man. It's good hanging out. [01:48:15] Speaker A: Hey, thanks to having me. It was great to see you. I'm sure I'll see you around. Yeah, see you soon. In El Salvador, it's like a. [01:48:21] Speaker B: It's like two weeks. I'm not ready for that. What is it? Are you giving a speech? [01:48:27] Speaker A: I've got like a bunch of panels. [01:48:29] Speaker B: And a bunch of panels. [01:48:30] Speaker A: Actually. I'm hosting some debates, actually. So I'm hosting some fiery debates. No, no, not this time. Last. That was last. Yeah, so that was fiery, but you know, some different debates this time. [01:48:44] Speaker B: Those are good. Those are good. I love, I love a good debate. I love some throwing, man. Especially with bitcoiners. They know how to throw some shit. Which panel are you most excited about or what's a good one? [01:48:57] Speaker A: Well, I've got a panel on lending as well, so that'll be interesting. Got some heavy hitters on that panel too. Sweet. But yeah, man, I've got to run. But great to chat. Yeah, Listen to this. You can find me online. Stefan Lavera podcast. Stefan lavera.com and yeah, Guy, thanks for having me. And yeah, hope to see you soon. [01:49:13] Speaker B: Later man. [01:49:15] Speaker A: See you. [01:49:18] Speaker B: All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that conversation and I want to give a follow up thought to where we actually are in the fulfillment of the bitcoin mission and why I think we actually haven't diluted to the purpose of bitcoin. And largely it's that feeling is more likely to come from focusing on the wrong thing because there's just a lot more people in bitcoin who aren't really that concerned with the purpose because it is becoming normalized. And I just don't think we should pay much attention to them because they're not the ones that will build and ensure. Bitcoin does in fact solve that problem. And it does in fact become the unstoppable money of the world. So what I really think has occurred here is not that we've diluted the mission, but more that we have a clear roadmap, a clear, a concrete idea of the architecture and the systems to build in order to actually have it be the new financial system. And that includes from the establishment stack and the International political stack and everything in between is the idea is that Bitcoin takes over everything. And the apolitical and unstoppable layer of this, there will still be an external to the political structure or establishment infrastructure version or side of the network, so to speak. And the idea is that they cannot stop the bandwidth between the establishment version and the real version, so to speak, or the real infrastructure. And the bedrock is simply unstoppable because of the consensus network that it is built on. If you can't stop the communication of the Bitcoin network, then it doesn't matter how many surface layer or layer three things that you can limit because everyone can always go down to layer one. Layer one keeps things connected. It keeps the world on the same monetary infrastructure. And I think recent things, especially with what's going on in Iran, has made me realize the very practical realities of keeping people connected to the Internet. Like they are trying to set up the full on China like new black wall technology and create an Internet that has practically no leakage into and out of the country that they do not control. This is a far, far more difficult problem that I think us in the west have just kind of whitewashed or hand waved away. It's like, oh, everybody's got great Internet, everybody. You can always communicate with the rest of the world. And that's simply not true. Like imagine If Bitcoin had 1 gigabyte blocks, there would just be no Bitcoin nodes in Iran. And sure there are tons of people focused on number go up and ETFs and political regulatory clarity and all of that stuff. But, but why are you giving them attention? Like we simply shouldn't consider them the important voices. That's us doing that. If the news on the ETF is the thing that we believe is the most important is the voice of Bitcoin, so to speak. And then we say the voice of Bitcoin or the mission of Bitcoin has been diluted. That's just us saying that those are the important people and the important messages. And I just don't think that's the case. And I think if we want to keep the mission alive, that's how we should think about it. Sure there's suits and politicians, but why? Why are they the important voices? I never really thought they were. And there's still a ton to build. There's so much left to build. The whole thing is still left to build. We've basically got bedrock and no skyscraper and we're just putting the first floors together where we can see just how big this thing can be. So anyway, that's just my summing up of my thoughts after my conversation with Stefan and a shout out to him. I thought this was a really cool conversation and respect for him and his show. And don't forget to check him out. I details in the show notes, links to everything that he mentioned right there at the end so that you can follow him so that you can listen to the Stefan Levera podcast. And I guess I will see him in El Salvador and maybe at a couple other conferences this year and we'll stay in touch and we will be back here with another episode in just a few days on Bitcoin Audible. So stay tuned. Don't forget to subscribe. Share this out with everybody. You know, check out our amazing sponsors. We we have some links, some affiliate links that are a great way to help out this show as well as the HRF has the Financial Freedom Report, which you should definitely subscribe to. It's a fantastic newsletter. And tickets for the Oslo Freedom Forum are also right down there. I try to collect all of both of my affiliates, but then also just a bunch of different services and tools and businesses and people that I like and I really trust in Bitcoin and have them available to you down in the show notes as well as on Bitcoin Audible. So thank you guys. Share this out with everybody. You want to have a better future and don't share it out with the people you don't like so much because that would be bad. You don't want them to get into bitcoin. And with that I'll catch you on the next episode. Until then, everybody, I am Guy Swan and that is my two sats. [01:55:17] Speaker A: Sam.