Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] The bitcoin community possesses a unique advantage that will ultimately allow us to prevail. Not only do we have skin in the game, we have soul in the game. Our tribe of a few thousand cypherpunk bitcoin maximalist fanatics stand against an empire of fiat clones. Millions of faceless cogs in a soulless machine. I like our odds the best in bitcoin made. Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is bitcoin Audible.
[00:00:51] 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 have got a great little read today. This one is from Noster and Francis from bull bitcoin. If you don't know Francis, you're missing out. If you don't know bull bitcoin, you are missing out. Just an incredible highly bitcoin focused, like hardened and they, they've built a setup that is really kind of unique among all of the places that you buy like services that you buy bitcoin at in the fact or in the sense that you, you, you have to take custody of your bitcoin. And they've also like been really great about legally taking advantage of like, like you could literally buy bitcoin through the post office with them at one point. Like they have stayed on, they've been great about trying to have privacy options available. They've just been seriously really cool company. And I have a, one of my favorite shirts is actually a bull bitcoin shirt. But Francis wrote a fantastic article on Nostr that almost has like a little bit of like Stone Ridge, you know, investor letter sort of feel to it almost in that it's partially talking about bull bitcoin but really it's talking about making, making hard decisions and why and the thinking and philosophy around building something that's actually going to sustain and building the tools and the solutions to a long and also not just not giving up because we haven't sorted it out yet. As if this was going to be easy and everything was just going to be handed to us and we were just going to, you know, tomorrow morning we're going to wake up and it's like, oh, here's the magic wand that solves all of our scaling problems and all the trade offs of bitcoin have just like magically disappeared. But actually sucking it up and doing the hard work and staying here for the long haul because we actually care about it, because we actually have soul in the game. I don't know, it does a Great job.
[00:02:57] The article got me super riled up and I think you're really going to love it. Shout out to BitKit wallet in the context of if you want a non custodial wallet. If you're like buying from Bull you can have this go straight to your BitKit wallet and BitKit both has on chain and lightning and really cool. They have a literal peer to peer contact list system that is actually slightly related to their pub key stuff, at least in philosophy and things are going there. If you haven't listened to that episode with Carvalho you got to is really freaking cool. But check out BitKit and I'll have my link in the show notes. And then of course if you want a good hardware wallet to use with any wallet that you are using on your mobile so that you can keep your keys safe. The Jade Wallet has always been fantastic and Blockstream just released the Jade plus and mine will literally be here any day now. So stay tuned. I'll keep you up to date on it, probably do some videos and stuff and publish it. So follow me if you want to find out more about it. Links and goodies all in the show notes. But now that you're using BitKit and you have your J ordered, let's get into today's article and it's titled the Hard Path by Francis Puyot from Bull Bitcoin Doing Bitcoin the right way is hard.
[00:04:18] If Bull Bitcoin wanted to take the easy path, we would have done what all the other exchanges are doing and would simply have offered a custodial wallet to our users. But our mission is not to sell numbers on a screen, fake paper, Bitcoin and IOUs.
[00:04:34] Our mission is to create sovereign individuals. If our clients don't take full control over their wealth, we have failed them. If we wanted to take the easy path, we would have offered shitcoin trading, NFTs, ICOs yield and all sorts of nonsense. No doubt we would today be far more wealthy. But we would have failed in our mission to establish a universal Bitcoin standard and fixed the problems created by Easy Money. We would have compromised on our values and sold products that we don't believe in and we don't personally use. If we wanted to take the easy path, we wouldn't have spent years building open source software that lets any business run their own self hosted Bitcoin Wallet API infrastructure connected directly to their own Bitcoin lightning and liquid network nodes. We would have just done a deal with Coinbase or another third party to take care of the Bitcoin engineering on our behalf. But we would have failed in our mission to help keep the Bitcoin network decentralized and resilient to institutional failures. We would have lost our direct and precious connection to the Bitcoin network. The engineering, operational and logistical challenges involved in maintaining a non custodial Bitcoin service like Bull Bitcoin in an environment where Bitcoin network fees are increasingly high, while also maintaining an accessible user experience with minimal compromises on the cypherpunk principles of Bitcoin are impossibly hard to fathom for the vast majority of Bitcoiners. Despite consistently taking the most difficult path at every turn, Bull Bitcoin has nonetheless been crushing it for the past 10 years thanks to our Bitcoiner ethos and mindset, sticking to our core values and creating products with a singular engineering sovereignty. All of this we accomplished without any outside funding. Every SAT invested in Bull Bitcoin was acquired by offering a service valued by our customers. Every network fee we pay, every investment in RD comes straight out of our pockets. If our Bitcoin only non custodial model fails and we become unprofitable, there will be no bailout as a low time preference business. Taking the hard path today means we will have a unique competitive advantage in the future. Nobody uses Bitcoin more than a non custodial exchange. Every trade and every revenue generating activity is derived directly from a Bitcoin payment. We are keenly aware of every possible problem that Bitcoin users may be facing. Because we are ourselves a power user. We know what kinds of problems the users will face, what solutions we need to build, and how we must adapt. We always skate where the puck is going. But there is another, more noble purpose to choosing the hard path. I'm also heavily involved in a community circular economy project in Costa Rica called Bitcoin Jungle. We spend countless hours to educate locals, set merchants up with Bitcoin point of sales, and build the infrastructure necessary for Bitcoin to thrive as a medium of exchange in even the most rural areas. All of this we do for free and in fact we pay for it out of pocket. I discovered recently that a few people were skeptical of our efforts. I met one of them and he asked us, but why are you doing this if you don't make any money from it? We do it because we love Bitcoin. We believe in the ideology of Bitcoin, its underlying cypherpunk and free market principles. We do it because we as sovereign individuals cannot live in isolation and we all benefit from the success of our communities. We do it because we want our kids to grow up in a world that is free from the evils of fiat currency. May our children never suffer the corruption of participating in a socialist economic system that steals their time and their wealth by the simple fact of interacting with fiat currency. We do it because doing it is a moral imperative. In a world of systematic injustice, doing nothing is to be complicit. You cannot live a virtuous life with the knowledge that you had the capacity to act heroically but chose to capitulate. Bitcoin is at the center of a spiritual war between forces of corruption and forces of liberation. There is a higher power that calls us to become the resistance. Bitcoin is hope. Bitcoin is salvation. If Bitcoin fails, everyone on earth is truly and utterly f ed. We are on the cusp of a fundamental civilizational change. The global debt fueled fiat Ponzi is imploding right before our eyes. What comes next is up to us to determine we are the right place and the right time. We have a unique window of opportunity that may not come again within our lifetimes and that of our children.
[00:10:06] The choices we make today will shape what the world looks hundreds of years from now. Whether our descendants live in totalitarian dystopias or we'll be ushering in a new era of prosperity and freedom depends on our willingness to choose the hard path today.
[00:10:24] And if you think the hard part is over and that Bitcoin has already won, think again. During our decade of operational experience, there were few serious attacks on the Bitcoin network. Bitcoin had relatively low levels of adoption, and apart from a few periods of intense fee spikes and the fork wars of 2017, it was smooth sailing. Bitcoin was mostly flying under the radar, left to develop organically in the hands of its cypherpunk caretakers. This era of complacency is over. From now on, everything is about to get much, much harder. This is what we live for. Nothing easy is worth pursuing. Bull. Bitcoin hasn't given up on Bitcoin's mission to free humanity from the shackles of fiat, slavery and centralized systems. We are reinvigorated by the challenges that Bitcoin is facing and that will continue to intensify. We will not give up on Bitcoin's use case as a medium of exchange, and we will continue to build tools that make it easy for anyone to opt out of the traditional banking system to conduct peer to peer transactions securely. As was originally Intended by Satoshi when he launched the Bitcoin project, this new epoch bull Bitcoin is leveling up to an entirely new standard for consumer facing Bitcoin apps higher than anyone has ever seen. We have been thinking about how to make our unique non custodial model work sustainably long term for years. This is the hill that we choose to die on. But as we entered into a new Bitcoin epoch, I've witnessed many in the Bitcoin community become cynical, fatalistic and even depressed. It's hard to blame them. Privacy preserving tools are being shut down. The lightning network is suffering scalability issues. The Bitcoin blockchain is being spammed by degenerate NFT gamblers driving up transaction fees for everyone else. Bankers and Wall street insiders are accumulating Bitcoin fortunes and promoting exchange traded funds as an alternative to self custody. Bitcoin mining is being heavily centralized among a small group of American based public companies. It sometimes feels like Bitcoin is under attack by very nefarious interests that want to control it and corrupt it. Even from within our own community. We are suffering from prophets of doom spewing fear, uncertainty and doubt. Many sneer that lightning is broken, that Bitcoin has been co opted by Wall Street. Some say we should give up and switch to altcoins. Some pundits blame laser eyed maxis for blocking protocol changes and claim that being conservative about modifying the rules of Bitcoin means ossification and that's the reason why Bitcoin has high fees. Others are pushing the idea that Bitcoin was never meant for payments anyway and that being a store of value was always the main goal of Bitcoin. Who cares about the poor? The plebs can always keep their funds on an exchange. At bull Bitcoin we see it very differently. We have a realistic and optimistic approach towards building a bright future for Bitcoin. I have never been so bullish on the future of Bitcoin as I am today.
[00:13:47] Make no mistake, the core principles of Bitcoin self custody, censorship, resistance and privacy are under attack. But the Bitcoin community possesses a unique advantage that will ultimately allow us to prevail. Not only do we have skin in the game, we have soul in the game. Our tribe of a few thousand cypherpunk bitcoin maximalist fanatics stand against an empire of fiat clones, millions of faceless cogs in a soulless machine. I like our odds. While I agree that we should never take Bitcoin's success for granted, the bleak picture that some want to paint regarding the state of Bitcoin is detached from reality. We've already achieved incredible technological miracles. The fact that it is possible for a user to run a lightning network node on a mobile device and make fully trustless payments is a monumental achievement. Despite what they claim, I can guarantee that no other shitcoin or fiat payment system has anywhere near the level of sophistication of Bitcoin. It is an incredibly bullish sign for the Bitcoin ecosystem that we have achieved a level where users can remain fully sovereign if they have the means. Scaling Bitcoin so that it can enable hundreds of millions of people to become sovereign individuals is the most pressing challenge of our times. Our community must accept inevitable realities not everybody will be able to afford on chain transactions. The success of Bitcoin means that one day during our lifetimes, a single Bitcoin transaction will cost hundreds of dollars. Upgrading the Bitcoin protocol may allow us to create tools that enable a more secure, censorship resistant and private payment mechanism. But no soft fork can fix the fundamental trade offs of the Bitcoin protocol. But this doesn't mean that we should either give up on Bitcoin's value proposition as a medium of exchange, or that we must fork Bitcoin according to the whims of whoever is trending on Twitter. Nor should we capitulate to traditional exchanges acting as banks for the vast majority of users to fix the inconvenient and expensive user experience that most people are suffering in times of high fees while making the minimum amount of compromises. You need vision and execution. There is an army of shadowy supercoders that like us, have dedicated their lives to ensure that Bitcoin becomes the universal medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. We come from different walks of life and we have different strategies. Some of us work on self sovereign consumer applications, others focus on privacy protocols, mining decentralization, second layer payment networks, e cash protocols. And finally, as a last resort, some are working to add changes to the Bitcoin protocol which can enable tools that we currently cannot build. At Bull Bitcoin, our vision of the future Bitcoin experience is crystal clear. It is a vision of success and integrity where the path of least resistance for the user is also the path of least compromise. We the Bitcoin builders will make it real.
[00:17:17] All right, so that wraps up the piece by Francis and Bull Bitcoin and I want to talk a little bit about pessimism and optimism because he brings up a few really good points in this one thing I do not understand, and maybe it's based on when and how someone got into Bitcoin. Maybe that makes a big difference because of perspective and the time that someone was here and what they see is like the shift. But I honestly cannot fathom looking at the state of Bitcoin today, looking at the environment, the ecosystem, the tools available, the overwhelming success in its price, and the fact that it is clearly not dead, like it has survived. It has not only survived, it has become normalized. People are accepting that it is here to stay. People are capitulating on the concept of. On the constant reiteration that it's going to die and it's going to zero. I do not understand being pessimistic. I do not understand being pessimistic. And I want to clarify what I mean by pessimism and optimism, because optimism for the sake of optimism is stupid. Like, I'm not talking about. I mean rational optimism. A rational optimist is someone who can openly talk about all of the problems to solve, but simply accepts and understands that they can be solved and that they will be solved because we have the tools, the environment, the people, and the funds necessary to actually solve them. That's one thing I didn't even bring up in the whole pessimism, optimism thing, is that how could you be pessimistic when you see the whole world waking up to all of the problems that the libertarian community and the cypherpunk community have been telling people forever, since the 90s, and nobody listened to them? The idea of decentralization is becoming normalized. The idea of censorship, resistance is becoming something that you talk to everyday people about and they understand, they relate to it, regardless of which side of the political aisle they are on. You can give them some sort of a story, some sort of a perspective that will align with them and they will get it. And of course, there's lunatics, there's communists, there's people who think we should censor the Internet and everything, that everything should go through some ministry of truth. But what's funny is that the existence and the blatant boldness of those people making the claims that they are are exactly why all of those other things have been normalized.
[00:20:17] But I cannot fathom looking at that, seeing that people are waking up to this and looking at the tools that we have today, the systems that we have, the networks that we have, the technology that we have today, and the unbelievable amount of work and the things that have been built with all of these in this new ecosystem, and looking back 15 years to compare and not see the literal quantum leap that we have taken.
[00:20:57] It is night and day for what is available to us to build with, to build on and to accomplish. There are seemingly minor things that dozens of people are just hacking away at in their free time trying to build ecash systems and new multisig and miniscript systems, new standards for zaps and lightning payments and key management on NOSTR and PUB key and hole punch. Things that are literally being casually built by people that can plug into something like the Breeze SDK and just have lightning turned on.
[00:21:37] If you told someone, if you tried to explain this to someone 15 or 16 years ago, they would have just said that's not possible.
[00:21:46] There's absolutely nothing that exists that could allow you to build those things that you're casually talking about. And if you're a pessimist now when we have all of these tools available to us and what you know, you're complaining about mining centralization, that's a temporary problem that is 1000% solvable. Yes, we should talk about mining centralization. Yes, we should talk about the potential trade offs and the consequences of the United States actually being supportive and actually trying to invite Bitcoin, Bitcoin commerce and Bitcoin miners into their regulatory frame. There are side effects, of course, there are consequences, duh. But this isn't even a systemic issue. This is a totally temporary based on the situation, based on the government, based on the jurisdiction, based on the period in which we're advancing in the technology and the chips and what the companies are doing, it could not be more surface level of a problem. There's no systemic problem at all. Mining has been centralized multiple times and then be been re decentralized and shifted. It was completely concentrated in China and in six months they banned it and everybody picked up and moved all the way around the world. Now it's America's got the problem. That's not a fundamental problem, that's not a systemic problem. It's just a temporary shift that it has caused concentration again. And there's so many different things that we can do to solve it. I mean seriously, if you're bitching about this and you don't mine on ocean, honestly shut your mouth. Like shut up. Mine on ocean or and build your own block templates. It's not that hard. Run it up on your start 9 or quit complaining if you're not even going to try to do anything about it or you don't even care enough to turn on a bitaxe. And you might as well be a shitcoiner saying, oh, it's centralized by my shitcoin. Because just saying, bitcoin mining is centralized without any understanding or any concept of a comparison. According to what? In comparison to what? What? How would we want it to look? How do we want it to look? And how can we get there? But honestly, you better be building something, mining something, or trying to come up with a good idea and not just whining about it.
[00:24:11] Understand, there is plenty to fix about bitcoin. There is plenty of building to do. There is plenty of work to do. As Francis talks about in this piece, we, we are far from, from our goal. But holy crap, we are closer than we have ever been to the very idea we are reaching toward by miles. And none of bitcoin's problems are unsolvable. None of them are existential.
[00:24:44] You know, another one that gets focused on a lot that is a type of pessimism that doesn't, that doesn't make sense to me. Like, I understand getting like, everybody can get down in the dumps. I got down in the dumps yesterday. Yesterday was crap. Everything sucked. Paradise sucked. The show sucked. Everything was terrible. Yesterday was just one of those days. But you know what? I pull my panties up and I get back to work and I go and try to fix some of the damn things that are annoying me. But one of the things, and this is the whole. And I don't want to say that I do not find this valuable. Like, and you know, going right back to what I just said about like, don't complain, shut up, don't say anything. If you're not mining like a useful. A useful complaint. A useful criticism is the better word for it, I think one that can pinpoint something useful about the problem, that can help make the problem more solvable, help make it clear exactly what the problem is in order to fix it.
[00:25:50] That doesn't have to be pessimist. I think any good optimist is going to. Has to have a rational view, has to have a serious critical look at what the problem is and how to fix it. If you don't understand the problem, you can't fix it. But some of the Whitney Webb kind of Mark Goodwin cohort, while I find there a lot of the analysis really useful in understanding or trying to get a picture of what the relationships might be and what motivations may be for a lot of people, I also don't see how anyone was supposed to stop someone from buying something. And I'm also not. This is kind of a broad category of people who complain or say that it's all, it's all taken over and you know, we're doomed and all this crap because the Rothschild still control everything. And I'm mostly just kind of picking on Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin just because they have the most popular content that I think goes down this path often. Not like always, but it does when I read it, it does irk me in that way. But in a broader sense, there are people who literally complain about the ETFs. There are shitcoiners who constantly tell me that Bitcoin is captured because ETFs exist.
[00:27:21] Like there's, there's nothing else to it, it's just ETFs exist. Look, a lot of people are buying them. Bitcoin is captured. Oh, this company owns this and would probably think it's probably for a bad reason. Oh, this, this particular bank is really successful. This Stablecoin is widely used.
[00:27:46] Very rarely do those types of complaints come with an actual second logical step as to why it's a problem. And I mean a coherent one that actually follows that someone will be able to actually control something in a meaningful sense. And when I mean control, I mean that Kali on Nostr will not like somehow they, he won't be able to build ecash tools anymore, that I won't be able to run my lightning node anymore, that it will get shut off the network or it will be stopped, or software won't be able to be distributed anymore. My big concern would be some sort of a problem or a centralization or a level of control that disallowed other solutions from ever even existing. That would be a very significant issue. But when and where did anybody get the idea that you were going to stop like, that we were just going to like not allow Wall street to buy Bitcoin, or that we weren't going to let the United States government be interested in it, that we could stop Tether from being successful because somehow we could convince the billions of people who live persistently under double digit inflation and have their entire economic lives eviscerated from them, that we could somehow convince them not to use the best fiat currency that they dream about in the sense that it's profoundly stable in value in a digital wallet, that they could just boot up and send transactions directly between each other and they don't really have to care what the rules of their jurisdiction is. It's still just usable. Then of course we never really get the explanation as to how this means that Bitcoin is controlled or screwed. And even the shitcoiners and the tether derangement syndrome people, their complaint is always that the price.
[00:29:57] The price, it's some crap that tethers fractional reserve. But they've managed to survive two market collapses and drawdowns of 70 and 80% in the price. But no, they're definitely fractional reserve. Okay, I find that a little hard to believe if you could survive a 70 to 80% drawdown when multiple other stablecoins did die for being fractional reserve reserve. But let's say you're right. Your big oh, they're going to destroy everything. Is that the price crashes.
[00:30:27] Jesus, man, how long have you been here? If there is one thing that I could not be less worried about in the context of whether or not it will kill bitcoin is that the price crashes. The price has done nothing but crash over and over. Good God. It's the one thing that we're actually so fucking immune to that people who've been here for a cycle don't give a shit anymore. Like, all I can ever think when people use that as like a this will kill bitcoin or this is going to control bitcoin, is all I see is that there's a. It's a reflection of the fact that they actually care that they can't handle it if bitcoin goes down 15 or 20%. It's really hard for me not to see that as just cowardice on their part that they're not going to buy into it because, oh, the price could crash. Or possibly that they're just. They kind of have that I'm a victim, somebody else is always in control and there's nothing I can do sort of mentality. And they don't realize that if they could just suck it up and make it through a price crash, if they actually just have slightly bigger balls than the people who they. Who they think control them, it's actually a great buying opportunity. Like quit. Quit begging. Quit expecting the easy path.
[00:31:45] As Francis says, the only thing that's going to matter is the hard path. And it's one of those things that kind of makes me happy that bitcoin is so freaking volatile. It keeps weak people out that if they ever get it, they have to make a change to themselves. They have to realize that it is weakness in order for them to get why it is valuable and have enough conviction to actually look at the price fall and think, this is an opportunity. And part of me wants to save everybody. Part of me wants everybody to buy bitcoin. But then another part of me just knows that that's not how you just don't create a strong civilization by cutting corners, by letting everybody get the easy way out. Like, I'm not doing a service, I'm not doing a favor to Rad. And for the next five years I just opened every boat bottle of water I ever gave him rather than letting him struggle with it now to do it himself and actually letting him not taking away the opportunity to see him actually work like really hard at something and then feel the reward and the excitement when he figures it out. You can't shortcut that stuff.
[00:33:04] And the hard path is the only path that teaches those things. And you know, mad, mad shout out to bull Bitcoin for what they have built and how they have, how they have set their system up, set their software and everything up so that people have to take custody. Like I generally have respect for any company that is bitcoin only. Like I've always like I think that is the first step to the hard path. But then there are companies that also go above and beyond and shun any third parties at all. Basically building their own setup from scratch and or who commit to something and just keep doing it for a really like just. They just stick to it and they never budge. Shout out to bull bitcoin and river on that for places to buy bitcoin. They have both been and also coin floor. I haven't heard or seen much about coin floor again in a long time, but they're still to this day. As far as I last checked, the one of the only exchanges that like every single month publishes a proof of reserves. You know, there's some companies and businesses and exchanges and things like that out there that just keep pushing forward and keep chugging away and they don't go away and they don't put themselves in ridiculous situations that cause additional risk or attach themselves to someone else or to a company or some sort of a third party that causes them a problem. And granted there is some degree of inevitability. Like not everybody is going to make the right decision the first time I Good God, the number of bad decisions I've made in my little business and trying to do pear drive and all of this crap. I'm learning a lot and there's a lot of times where I just want something else taken care of or I want somebody else to do it or I just can't fathom the degree of cost that I would have to deal with to A, B or C. And I get burned for trying to take the easy path. But mad kudos to those who start on the hard path and just stick to it the whole time. But to the people who are pessimists now, like of all the times to be pessimistic to think that we can't solve our problems. I cannot imagine being handed more that can solve those problems. Having more tools and networks and a huge community and funds at our disposal in order to do this. Like if somebody feels like giving up now, then give up. Because it's definitely gonna get harder. Like it's definitely gonna get harder. In fact, it will probably be a lot more difficult just because there will be a lot of quote unquote people on our side that we don't want on our side. In other words, the US will be friendly to it, but the US will be friendly to it in a way that we do that is not good for it. That's where I think the whole strategic bitcoin reserve instead of like hard and fast clearly defined rules about privacy, about self custody, about any and all basic rights of a bitcoin user to use Bitcoin to get rid of capital gains tax on normal ass daily transactions, I mean honestly get rid of it for good on everything. But a huge limitation to using it as a money, as a medium of exchange in day to day business is the tax problem. So I honestly think the whole strategic bitcoin reserve thing is the wrong thing to be focused on. I mean granted I do think it lowers barriers and it will obviously it'll be great for just the price and the mentality really the mind shift of bitcoin around the globe as to what this thing is and who is talking about holding it. But in that same vein, I feel like if we do not do the explicit rights and like laying out defensive, legal, defensive measures for the users and for privacy and for the right to distribute software and all of these things. And yes, I know the Constitution defends these things, but like a fresh piece of legislation that says no, there are no gray areas for bitcoin. No, this is not different. This is freedom of speech. Because then that just saves us from having to have a Supreme Court case and going through the fight and potentially losing it because everybody already has. The Constitution might as. You might as well wipe your ass with that thing. It's held up very, very poorly. The amount of interpretation of the government can do whatever the hell it wants that people have gotten out of that document is quite wild.
[00:38:11] But all that said and going back to the Whole, oh, it's just ETFs and everybody's just holding it. And it's supposed to be peer to peer cash and nobody's using it for that. I also want to note that as a payment system, Bitcoin makes a staggering set of trade offs. To get a reliable, trustless monetary system, which means much has to be built. Because a global, decentralized, peer to peer payment system for every single person in the world doesn't exist, A lot still has to be built for the medium of exchange phase. And importantly, medium of exchange isn't. I accept Bitcoin and convert it directly to dollars. That's not the medium of exchange world I want. I want a world where people take Bitcoin. That necessarily means it is a broadly and widely desirable store of value. As I have said many times and as we have covered in numerous pieces about the history of money, about monetary economics is there is a clear path that is dependent on the liquidity and the desirability of the monetary good. That starts at. People want to buy it and hold it because it's valuable. People want to then use it and start using it as a money and currency as a medium of exchange. And then the liquidity of both of those stages becomes so great that it becomes the dominant unit of account in whatever economy is saturated by it. There is an order of operations and the most important. Well, the foundational order of operation, the first piece of the puzzle is that everybody desires to have and own this thing so much that they are willing to accept it directly for payment. Sure. Payment services that convert that accept lightning or liquid or Bitcoin on chain or whatever and convert it to dollars. Fantastic. It's great. It's not a bad thing. But it is also not the fundamental thing that we desire and want for Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. We want an actual economy, not the. The other half of the exchanges. We're not just trying to fill up all the asks on the order books. That's what we're doing. When somebody like Amazon accepts Bitcoin for payment, they're not holding the damn Bitcoin. And this is also why bitcoiners have to use it as a medium of exchange. Like we need to be using it. Like, I love that everybody that I work with accepts Bitcoin. I literally pay everybody in bitcoin and I know they sometimes have to convert it to pay for bills, but. But we literally pay each other. I get sponsorships, I pay my accountant, the producer, every, everybody that I. Wyatt, everybody that I Work with. We do business in Bitcoin. We are a tiny little bitcoin circular economy. And if we as bitcoiners are not using it directly and are not learning the tools to use it directly, then how on earth could we possibly expect or think it's on someone else to do it or that someone else should solve the problem? Like, could there be a more obvious. Like, this is our responsibility to figure this out because we're the ones who care enough to try to push. We're crazy lunatics who actually think we're going to make the dominant currency in the whole freaking world, a digital money called Bitcoin. Yes, it's up to us to learn the tools, to give feedback, to criticize, to find the bugs, to help people build it, to fund, to zap people who are building it, to come up with new ideas, to support the companies that are doing the hard path and staying on that. Yes, that is our responsibility. If there is any responsibility, that is ours. But there is no, I see no possible path in which we get to Bitcoin as a medium of exchange in which it didn't first become a $20 trillion plus market where everybody just wanted to have Bitcoin.
[00:42:31] Amazon is going to put it on their balance sheet. Apple is going to put it on their balance sheet first before they start accepting it for payment. Because that's exactly the benefit you get when you accept it for payment. If you just buy it and hold it, it's actually easy. It's pretty low friction because you can just get it and it will go up in value. You have to be next level dedicated to be like, well, I am going to implement a new system of technology, a new payment, a new part of payment tech in my platform that will then pay it directly to me and we will allocate X amount to our treasury. We will, will keep it there because we have already decided to just do the simple part of buying it and holding it well. Now here is a way that we can, quote, unquote, buy it easier. And we can try to entice those people who have lots of Bitcoin by making products that they want and giving them discounts or whatever it is that we can do. Because we don't want fiat anymore. We want to be holding as much Bitcoin as possible. It almost necessarily has to come at buying and holding a lot of it first. Like way before everybody is accepting it as a medium of exchange. Not even from a technological standpoint, but from a simple. Do they want to hold this thing standpoint especially something that's volatile because it's still nascent, it's still not nearly doesn't even come close to the liquidity of most major currencies. And specifically, it's in an open environment. Nobody's being forced to use it. There's no country that says you have to do business in Bitcoin that's giving it some level of liquidity. And it's totally out of the paradigm of what people think as giving something stability, giving a currency stability, which is that some government guarantees it or some government says this is a currency, therefore you just know that, okay, well, these 50 million people in this country country are always going to use it, therefore I can expect it to just kind of be stable in value, roughly. This is not only something that nobody understands, not only something that no country or population is forced to use, not only something that still has tons of technological mountain in front of it to climb, but is also just totally freely floating.
[00:44:59] There's no central bank trying to balance out the price. There's no debt issuance. There's no market regulators or artificial price buffers or any of that kind of crap. It is a open, floating global market that is that still does not have an astronomical amount of liquidity. When we are talking about a monetary good not associated with any government that nobody understands, that everybody is still utterly confused about. And most think it is nonsense. A lot of people who buy it and think they're going to make money off of it still think it's nonsense and still have no idea what the hell they're holding. If you think that's not going to be volatile, and if you think that volatility is not going to affect people's decision to use it as a medium of exchange, then we have a very fundamental problem, a very simple and fundamental problem of ignorance about what it is that makes people use something as a currency directly peer to peer. Because I think it seems pretty damn intuitive to me that the former has to come first, that store of value that being widely, broadly accepted and purchased and desirable by most people in the marketplace has to come before everybody can use it widely and easily as a medium of exchange. And I think in a general sense we're seeing it become a medium of exchange. We're watching it happen. Nostr is a perfect example. It is literally the medium of exchange. On nostr, it is my medium of exchange. Three years ago, it was incredibly difficult to be on a bitcoin standard. Today it's pretty damn easy. I have a lot of great people to work with. There's a solid number of great companies that will pay you in Bitcoin. There are companies that you can get paid in fiat and they'll turn it directly into Bitcoin for, for you. I can deposit my Bitcoin straight to fold and just push it right to my bank account, right to my debit card and use it. Bitcoin is my money. It is my medium of exchange. And all I've seen is the technology and the services and the infrastructure and the people get better and closer to that being a reality. Like we are still in the very slow uptick of the medium of exchange phase. Like very, like we're still in the flat part that's starting to curve up. We are well into the curve of the store of value phase. But I also don't know, I have no idea what it's going to look like when we're talking about governments and central banks and states in general just holding Bitcoin as a part of the global reserve. I still think it's hard to.
[00:47:52] It's hard to estimate what kind of an impact that will be because that is well and truly into a different era.
[00:48:00] But anyway, I've rambled enough. Actually wanted to hit a quote from this piece.
[00:48:06] We are on the cusp of a fundamental civilizational change. The global debt fueled Fiat Ponzi is imploding right before our eyes. What comes next is up to us to determine we are the right place and the right time. We have a unique window of opportunity that may not come again within our lifetimes and that of our children. The choices we make today will shape what the world looks hundreds of years from now. Whether our descendants live in totalitarian dystopias or will be ushering in a new era of prosperity and freedom depends on our willingness to choose the hard path today.
[00:48:51] Amen. If you just want to whine about what's not working or what isn't good enough, rather than give honest and useful criticism, which is perfectly fair and it is a very different thing and. Or you think somebody else already runs everything and the Rothschilds are already in charge and you should just give up, then you do that. But I hope for your children's sake and your children's children's sake somebody else doesn't and picks up your slack.
[00:49:22] We got shit to do.
[00:49:25] Let's get to it. All right, we'll end it here. You know, in that, that quote section actually says we are the right place in the right time, there are a couple of little like fudged typos or whatever in this and I can't. I can't tell if that is a typo like we are in the right place in the right time but I don't know why I really like it as we are the right place and the right time doesn't really make sense but something about me likes it. But anyway I hope you guys enjoyed that episode. Shout out to Francis for an amazing read and for Like I said, kudos again for the incredible work they've done and the company they've built and the dedication they have had to the mission of Bitcoin. Don't forget to check out the Blockstream Jade plus they have released an awesome new hardware wallet. I thought I was going to get mine today. It is not. It has not arrived yet but I'm really stoked about it and I have an affiliate link I went over and signed up for that so if you want that and I don't know it didn't give me like a discount thing but I swear I think there is I'm going to keep investigating that but I'll have the link in the show notes regardless and when I figured that out I'll update what those details are. I'm like almost certain but I could be wrong. Maybe I'm stupid but if you want a really awesome hardware wallet that will keep your corn safe I've always been like a big fan of Jade anyway. I've given a couple I've purchased a number of Jades and given them away to people that I have onboarded to bitcoin. It's a really good one and especially in combination with Green wallet it just like I really their their setup has been slick. I've been using green since way before it was it looked a whole lot different but I'm super stoked for the Jade plus and don't forget to use my link if you do grab yourself one. Also for a non custodial Bitcoin and Lightning wallet, Bitkit is amazing and they are also supporting my work. Synonym has been building some fantastic stuff and I think what they are building is going to be a huge part of our peer to peer decentralized bitcoin future. And I've been a big fan of Bitkit and I think you should check it out and add me as a contact. I will have my key right down in the show notes. All right guys, thank you so much for listening. I will catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible and until then everybody take it easy guys, where the head goes the body follows. Perception precedes action.
[00:52:10] Right action follows the right perspective.
[00:52:15] Ryan Holiday from the Obstacle Is the Way.
