Take_098 - Taking Stock of Our Wins

[00:00:01] It's incredibly easy to complain about what hasn't happened yet or what we haven't achieved. And it's also important not to become complacent, not to lose sight of the work still to be done. But I also think it's foolish not to recognize and count the successes and overwhelming progress that we have had and to take a little bit of humility in recognizing that things might not happen in exactly the path and order of events that we would expect them to to get the future we want. So that's what I think this episode will be for. What are the successes of bitcoin? What leaps have been made over the last few years or even a decade, and which ones are so subtle that they've almost been ignored? I'll be saving my absolute favorite for last. So let's take a break from our technical deep dives, our complaints and the challenges, and get a little bit of perspective and take stock of our wins. It's time for a Guy's Take episode. [00:01:03] The Best in Bitcoin Made Audible I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. [00:01:26] 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. This show is brought to you by the Blockstream Jade Plus. I had always been a fan of the original Jade and the Jade plus just feels like what that device always should have been. It's faster, it's sleek, it looks good. If you don't believe me, you can watch the unboxing video I did on YouTube and the socials and I'll be giving you guys a walkthrough on setting it up and basic features here probably in the next few days. So keep an eye out. Also, don't forget to check out the Bitkit Wallet. This is a non custodial on chain and Lightning wallet that is super easy to use and has a beautiful simple user experience and design. And if for some reason Lightning is not available in your area, do not use a vpn. That would totally make the problem completely disappear. But you should use a standard VPN for privacy anyway, but not to get around this problem. Check out the non custodial easy to use Bitcoin and Lightning Wallet bit kit at the link that you will find oh so conveniently in the description of this show. All right, so I want to take I wanted to take this episode because there's a couple of different reasons. One is the shocking amount of kind of poo pooing that a lot of people are doing. And the complete and utter lack of perspective that I think a lot of people have about the incredible things that we have accomplished without dismissing or ignoring the many things that we still need to do, and of course, what the ultimate goals really are. But also just looking at the path that we have taken, like getting a little bit of perspective, when you look back 10 years and see what has actually been accomplished, the fight is not over. We're not done building. We're far from both of those things. But we also aren't losing. And some people literally just. If every problem in every way and at every layer isn't solved exactly the way they expect it to be solved, not even that it's not solved, but just that it's not happening the way they prescribed that it should happen, there are people who are literally suggesting or implying that we should throw in the towel that somehow we have lost the vision or the hope of Bitcoin. And a shocking number of people who seem to latch onto that narrative or that mental framing seem to suggest that this is entirely a result of the fact that some financial institutions have bought Bitcoin. [00:04:25] Like, that's it. And so have a ton of people in crypto. They've jumped on this same stupid bandwagon. And I don't mean to be insulting to anybody who holds that opinion, but I do believe this is a very stupid bandwagon. And what I have to ask those people is, what about a decentralized, open, permissionless, global money made them think that it was somehow going to exclude the people that they didn't like? [00:04:57] How did you expect that BlackRock was going to be excluded from this? That somehow they were never going to be able to buy Bitcoin, or that Bitcoin was just going to be a revolution that happened and they were just gonna stick their thumbs up their asses and not get involved at all and watch and literally just die? [00:05:17] How did you expect to reach a Bitcoin standard without the financial system adopting Bitcoin? So if your viewpoint, if your mental model suggests that Bitcoin has failed because now there are ETFs, because now BlackRock owns some, because now the United States government might buy some, then your mental model never had a basis in reality and never had a path for Bitcoin to win, because the mental model makes no sense. The whole idea of Bitcoin was always that the worst thing about it is that all of the great sovereignty and freedoms and control and privacy that you get from using Bitcoin will be available to the person that you dislike most in the world, and there is nothing you nor they can do about it. That is what decentralized and permissionless means. The fact that you and your enemy are both using Bitcoin and neither one of you can change what Bitcoin means to the other. The rules or their relationship or their censorship or their access, any of it is exactly what money for enemies means. And it's the entire purpose, it is the raison d'etre of money itself to be an independent medium that even enemies can use and trust independently. To the contrary of it being Bitcoin's failure, it is one of the most potent examples of its success. [00:07:06] So I want to make sure I get that framing out of the way before we dig into this. [00:07:13] And, you know, I'm not even sure, you know, I wonder if it's like this fiat nihilism that just kind of spills over into it. Because, you know, you see, BlackRock owns all of our retirements, and the fine print on every bit of it is that they get the voting rights. So in our desperate attempt to throw all of our money into a bunch of random indexes and give it to a bunch of giant financial corporations, corporations just so that we can make 5% and not even keep up with inflation in the money supply, we literally hand all of that power over to blackrock, to these massive corporations that then literally have the right, they have all of the ownership power to then vote on our behalf. As to what those companies do, it genuinely gives them control over the most pervasive and powerful corporations in the country, arguably in the world. And it's basically done right under our noses. And the only way to opt out of it is to just get demolished by inflation every single year. Until Bitcoin, of course. But I think that same sense of hopelessness and nihilism and that they control everything and they're powerful is then just projected onto bitcoin. It's like, oh, well, BlackRock now owns a big ETF and everybody's doing the exact same thing. So now they have voting rights over Bitcoin. Now they control all the bitcoin and all the bitcoin companies. And the miners will have to do what they say. And running a node doesn't matter anymore because they hold all the keys. And so part of me understands it, but I also just think it's not accurate because BlackRock, quote unquote, controls only the people who hold the overwhelming majority of their value in the etf. And honestly, in no world are those the people that are going to be the ones who matter most in a Bitcoin civil war, or when it comes to the protocol, or when it comes to the permissionlessness of the the software and the network itself. They are by definition the most ignorant and the weakest hands in the entire ecosystem. They have no idea what they own. They necessarily don't have any conviction because they are holding a literal etf. They are just there because numbers seem to go up. And if that ever stops being the case, they will dump and leave. They will not fight a war. Think about the reason protocol wars happen. It's because people are so unbelievably die hard, dedicated and stubborn is that they refuse to budge on some sort of issue and that they are willing to fork and threaten a literal battle and a splitting of the entire ecosystem and the software and the technology and all of it to get what they believe is the right way to do it. You get that because you care, not because you want to get rich. You're risking losing it all in order for you to get what you think is the best route. This is why there were the protocol wars during the early Internet. There were, there were the protocol wars during Linux era. And of course Bitcoin had its own protocol war. But from what I personally know of the history of all of this and in my digging into it, it was only ever. The wars were only ever between groups of people who cared so deeply about this that they were devoting their life to it. That it was the most important thing in the world to them to get the correct outcome. The takeover and the whitewashing and, and dilution of these things is something that happens very, very slowly over a very, very long period of time. While it seems like the die hards kind of move on to the next layer because the foundation's strong enough that the dilution doesn't matter a whole lot. Like the dilution of Linux and kind of operating systems doesn't super matter a whole lot. When there's Bitcoin to build and there's Noster to build and there's Tor to build and there's BitTorrent to build. That's what the cypherpunks and the people who built the Internet, that's where that culture went to solve a problem on top of it. Because Linux is just Linux and it's been Linux for a very, very long time. I kind of get the sense or just intuitively from what I know about it, it seems like that's probably likely to happen in Bitcoin is that we're just going to continue to build up and produce better layers and better technology for layers on top of it. And of course bitcoin will kind of be diluted into the financial system. And the financial system will have a bunch of instruments that they'll trade and hold to and ETFs and all of this other crap. And they'll be subject to all the same controls and surveillance and stupid shit that they've been putting up with for a really long time because I don't know, they don't care. But you will have the opportunity to opt out. That will be an option because it will remain open and permissionless and global. And especially as political institutions, as governments of the world, state actors, get into bitcoin, they will mine for themselves, they will mine defensively. And I think the competition between states is what will set in its censorship resistance on top of just commoditizing the mining industry and mining hardware so that, you know, right now there's a miner in my basement that is keeping it warm downstairs. And I don't really care what it costs because it's to keep the basement warm. And all of that is basically to say that I do not believe the people who are buying the Bitcoin ETF are our problem, nor the financial company that's making the ETF. This is not anywhere in my top 10 for concerns of anything that actually meaningfully affects bitcoin. It is the simple fact of the temporary situation of who owns what coins at some given time, which is always has been and constantly changes. The short to medium term institutionalization of mining is a bigger concern. And I believe this is a technical concern that has technical solutions. Which is why I am so interested in what mechanic and Luke and everybody over at Ocean Mining are doing. Because I think this is the fundamental solution to that problem, is make it more profitable and make it easy to just mine yourself or not. Not to mine yourself, but to mine in a decentralized pool where the miners themselves are creating the blocks, they are creating the templates and make and lower that barrier as much as possible and you can fundamentally change the game. And you don't have to fight something that you can't control. You can just make the right avenue easier. And in that same thinking, if you are worried about the etf, which again is a massive win for us and for Bitcoin, which we will get into in a moment, but if that is your concern, well then the solution is not to bitch and whine about BlackRock. It's to make self Custody easier and more intuitive. But anyway, I digress. I just kind of find it super ironic that people had been fighting for an ETF as if it was this. Because it is, it does. It signifies a legitimization of the asset in the eyes of traditional finance or of the more it places it inside of the Overton window of the mainstream investment perspective. And this was fought for for a really long time. And I just find it really ironic that the fudge that it means that BlackRock controls everything and then it's a disaster started almost immediately. There is this super persistent kind of defeatism attitude that and you know, this might even be more of a libertarian thing because I notice this in different factions of the libertarian community, is that some people just only want to see the negative and they can't possibly take anything as a win or see anything with any sort of nuance that there is good and bad to every single thing that happens. But there is this framing that seems to persist that if things don't exactly happen as some imaginary prediction of some libertarian future occurs, well then it's a total and overwhelming failure. I see this sort of same thing happen with a subsection of bitcoiners that like without an etf, bitcoin can't succeed. And then as soon as we get an ETF, BlackRock controls it and they run everything. And that was it. The game, the gig's up, you know. But in breaking down the incredible wins that we have had in Bitcoin's history, the ETFs people do not realize how massive of a win this is. And it's not because number go up, which is great and everything. It's not because oh, a bunch more people will buy bitcoin. That's not really the point of it. Like, yes, there is a piece of that that is true. There will be more people exposed to bitcoin. It, it is, it's definitely good for number go up because traditional finance will be able to invest in it. Even though they don't technically own bitcoin, it is still a massive win and plays a very important role for a couple of different reasons. The first one is just that it is the ultimate capitulation of tradfi. We have crossed the Rubicon on whether or not bitcoin will be banned. That entire argument is behind us now. All everybody, you know, oh, we're gonna, it's gonna be taken over and is slowly going to be financialized and they're going to control it all and they're just going to slowly regulate It. They were never going to ban it anyway. Well, you didn't know that now, only now is it that that's the concern, because it used to literally be that bitcoin was going to be made explicitly and outright illegal, and there was no guarantee at all that that was not going to happen. And I think this disconnect is largely just failing to recognize the amount or just the perspective on the amount of time that someone has been in this space. You know, if you got in at 20, 21, 2020, then you just never felt the concern that bitcoin was going to be banned or that literally conducting a transaction would be seen as an illegal act, as a felony that landed you in prison. Because I promise you, had you been five years earlier, you would have felt that fear. And that is gone now. It has entirely left the realm of politically feasible. And I think it's only those who have not been here long enough to feel just how present and possible that danger was, to not then be able to appreciate the fact that that is just not a realistic proposition anymore. And what an unbelievable win that is for Bitcoin. The ETFs are simply a representation of reaching that point. They are kind of the nail in the coffin that makes it clear we have crossed that bridge. And importantly, this happened under an antagonistic regime. This was while chokepoint 2.0 was happening. This is when Biden and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders basically had the political and extralegal power to cause as much friction and put up as much resistance as possible. So there was no, oh, Trump is going to win, therefore, we have to throw in the towel. It was just, the fight was won even under a relatively adversarial political environment. [00:19:57] And it was going on for 10 years. I think it was all the way back in 2013 when discussions and attempts of making an ETF really started to roll and the political and social momentum was so clearly on bitcoin's side that it wasn't even like a gradual capitulation. It was just a. It was a literal throw in the towel, like, give up. They won the court case, multiple court cases. I think in respect to this, the push to, to get approval and to go around, essentially the powers that be in Gensler and everyone trying to push back against this. And Elizabeth Warren was becoming too great, and it was coming from too many different angles to the point that just a dozen or so ETFs, major ETFs, got approved all at once. And continue, more continue to come onto the table and more are still projected to come in over the next year. And even crazier. Essentially a proof of the amount of momentum and social pressure behind finally getting these approved is the fact that it is the most successful launch of an ETF ever. Like the entire thing was totally oversubscribed. It succeeded well beyond even what BlackRock expected it to. This wasn't just a successful ETF launch. It was one of the most successful ETFs in the history of ETFs. If that doesn't demonstrate that Bitcoin is here to stay and there's nothing they can do about it, then I don't know what does. And another way that this shifts the Overton window, why this shifts the mentality for the average person, is that it's going to be vastly more visible and apparent of Bitcoin's success during bull markets. Because no one will stop, will refuse to talk about it. Everybody who is talking about anything in investing and in markets and all the news outlets will be forced to talk about Bitcoin as it succeeds in an ETF that you can allocate your retirement, your savings and anything that you have invested in the stock market into it. In addition, BlackRock, which has spent years openly attacking and demeaning bitcoin, is now literally singing its praises and shilling their ETF directly to normies as something to purchase. Tradfi isn't simply not attacking Bitcoin anymore. They will now turn into bitcoin promoters. And that's even if they try to weasel their way out of promoting bitcoin and promoting instead, just like their ETF and their instantiation of it because it's safer, or they have a futures contract that's less volatile or whatever it is, doesn't matter. They have capitulated and they are forced to normalize it because they now have products to sell. And no matter how badly they wish they didn't have to, the success of the ETFs and the market, the fact that the buyers are there and they want it, leaves them no option. [00:23:23] Another major win. [00:23:26] You know, I think it was probably what's the year? 2025. So maybe six years ago, seven years ago, 2018, 19 era, there was maybe like most of the idea of methane mining was just that, an idea. And there were, if there were any, there were just a handful of people who had realized what a, what an incredible potential it was and actually utilizing the fact that they had flared methane at an oil mine that could be used to mine bitcoin. It was literally free energy. And yet today this is being completely legitimized and the energy sector is beginning to truly realize its potential. All sorts of quote unquote, alternative and disparate energy sources are becoming recognized and normalized for their potential in bitcoin mining. And that is simply a really big win. Because as the energy sector, as everyone, as all entrepreneurs and the industrial sectors realize that waste energy is bitcoin's best friend. There is an astronomical amount of waste that can be utilized. You know, we talked back. We've done a couple of different episodes talking about this and I've referenced it. It was referenced in a couple of reads. I think that we've done as well. But the lnll, I love this chart because I think, and as I understand it, it's still one of the most accurate and largest attempts to map out the entire world energy production. The LNL broke down the amount, the rough amount of energy that is used that is lost in transition and or transmission. Excuse me, and. Or that is lost in being produced at the wrong time. Because you are always having to utilize a buffer. Because energy used right now has to be produced right now. It has to be delivered right now. There is no delay. So electricity essentially has to be ready and waiting so that when I turn on my stove, the power for the entire grid doesn't go out. And their numbers showed that it was actually pretty, pretty shockingly close to a third for each. That a third of energy, a third of all of the electricity we produce is lost simply because it is produced when not enough people need it. And understand when we get into a world with more renewables that have been so heavily subsidized, that problem is worse. That portion of wasted energy grows. It does not shrink. And this is a global statistic. Global. [00:26:28] One third of all energy production around the world, and getting worse is produced when there is not a buyer and it essentially goes in the trash. [00:26:40] Another third is lost in inefficient transmission is in the distance. The friction, the resistance in the line in the transmission medium itself, the heat that is created from this transmission, the re amplifying and balancing and making frequency consistent and all of these different things in order to keep the electricity quote, unquote homogeneous both across the network and through any transmission lines, because all of it basically degrades the further and further it gets away from the source of the energy. Another third of it is lost just through that mechanism. And then the last third is what gets properly and actually used. [00:27:26] So I want to restate that because again, this is a global statistic. I Think it's important to understand what this means. [00:27:36] Bitcoin has been shifting the perspective in the energy sector and having done so in the financial sector and investment sector, this will continue to be. This will only accelerate when it comes to the energy industry, but it is becoming normalized and recognized as a way to monetize waste energy. And according to one of the best studies we have on the topic, the exact same amount of energy that the entire world actually uses is matched in energy that is thrown away for nothing. And as the hardware and chips get commoditized and cheaper and cheaper and easier to use, mark my words, Bitcoin will be the best thing to happen to lower energy waste as any technology in a hundred years. Because literally, what else can profitably use flared methane whenever they need it to. Whenever flared methane is just available as if everything that needs energy doesn't just need it randomly, it needs it at a specific time. I can't just wait for someone to need to flare methane or wait for the wind to blow to cut on my stove. I need my stove when I need to cook and eat food. This is why an energy buyer of last resort is such an unbelievable improvement and could be a fundamental, a foundational piece to the world energy industry. And the fact that this is being normalized in the financial and investing world and recognized in the energy sector is a hugely significant development in my opinion. And we'll see how this unfolds in the next few years because I think things will move relatively fast. It will move quietly for a year or two as infrastructure and decisions and partnerships are being made and tooling and hash power is being built out. And I think that time is right now. It'll be happening, happening quietly. Most people won't see or hear about it. And then in two years we'll start. It'll be kind of like what happens in bull and bear markets. Bull markets is lots of people, you know, just hype and adoption and interest and kind of the social sphere getting just like set on fire with excitement about some stupid thing just because number go up in green candles. But it is also when 100,000 people start 100,000 different projects because of all of the excitement around it, and they start building and designing and then the bear market comes and 90,000 of those projects get abandoned and 10,000 of those projects are being run by people who get it and deepen their conviction and then also realize what and how they need to build their project to mitigate for the fact that there is volatility, that there are adversaries that there will be down days, quote unquote. And it can't just be something that only works when green candle go up. So the overwhelming majority of the trash and the convictionless morons get thrown out in the 90,000 that get abandoned. Then 10,000 projects push forward. And after a year or two of development or building or trying to fight through the problems, 9,000 of those get abandoned or turn out to be the wrong idea or at the wrong time and they just kind of stutter and fail. Which leaves a thousand projects that actually start getting released during the bear market. And 900 of those projects still just kind of suck, even though they made it to the the quote unquote endgame or they did in fact do what they set out to do. But a hundred of them, 100 of them are important, significant and really, really interesting. And start momentum and excitement of other people and other entrepreneurs. Then building on top of those during the next hype cycle, the feedback loop that will come with the legitimization of this and foundational pieces or instruments in the traditional finance world and in the energy sector in the next cycle will pay compounding dividends. And I don't mean that in the case of like literal dividends. Well, it could be the case, but I mean it in the sense of the compounding effects and returns of genuine infrastructure being built out and what each layer means to the next cycle of maturation. [00:32:27] Another big win, the China FUD about China having too much mining power and China controlling bitcoin has died and has been replaced with the United States and North America has too much mining power. And I think it goes to show two things. One, how obviously transient this layer of problem is and thus how solvable it is. Ocean mining being such a great example of a technical solution that I think has a slow but consistent push toward fixing it. Or datum, more specifically datum, the tool that they built for ocean mining. But then also how little real long term risk this sort of problem, this type of problem seems to actually present. [00:33:17] Not to say that it is not a risk, it obviously is a risk. But when China controls it all, FUDD turns into North America controls it all fud in just a few years, it suggests that in just a few years it could very well and very easily be a completely different group, a completely different demographic, a completely different jurisdiction that now presents the problem indicating that it is not systemic, but simply an outcome of transient market success or failure. [00:33:51] Another huge win and one that I think people dismiss or they get too lost in the weeds. About specifics or who tweeted what or whatever. [00:34:03] But a company known for taking every bit of their profit, even borrowing against their own equity simply to buy bitcoin, and who has done this for years, all the way through both a bull and an entire bear market cycle, has been so unbelievably successful at doing this that they have drawn a massive amount of attention. They have outperformed practically every other thing in the market. And its CEO is an unapologetic bitcoin maxi. And this company is extremely likely to now be listed very soon in the S&P 500 index such that every person in the US who buys the index will be getting exposure to bitcoin through this company throughout every other thing that you think you know about it or what you think about Saylor or micro or strategy that used to be microstrategy. All of what I just said is entirely true. And it is important for us to recognize that if you look at this, go back seven, eight years in this, this is such an unbelievable win. I remember in, I GUESS it was 2013, there was the St. Petersburg bowl that just had like bitcoin on the field and that this was such a huge deal because it was just being put, like Normie Land was just aware of it. And now a company that through the bear market and a bull market through an entire cycle has been doing nothing but incredibly loudly buying bitcoin and borrowing against their equity to buy more bitcoin to just get as much as they possibly can, has essentially outperformed every everything else to the dumbfounded disbelief of so many other companies and financial managers and people who are so angry and just know for sure that this is an unbelievable scam and MicroStrategy is just a joke. None of them can ignore it. And this has literally happened. And as I've talked about before on this show, what he is doing is essentially a speculative attack. It's an arbitrage opportunity on the fact that we have false interest rates, that interest rates in the fiat world are nonsense. And what I believe will be the ultimate interest rate will be the opportunity cost of simply not holding, of not just holding Bitcoin. And that's ultimately how bitcoin fixes, fixes the money and fixes the world is. It becomes the ultimate pricing mechanism. So holding money, holding bitcoin, if the economy is going to naturally grow 5% or 7% over the year, well, then Bitcoin would naturally grow 5 to 7% in purchasing power. And thus if you are not paying 5 to 7% interest on the capital that you are using, borrowing and using up today, then you aren't even the lender is not even breaking even. This is something that Alan Farrington and Sasha Meyers and the crew over at 21st Century Capital and we've read Orange is the New Green and a couple of Alan Farrington's pieces around that on the show. But I think it's, I think it's Orange is the New Green. But I might be wrong as I can't remember the names of the other two, but one of them is specifically about the fact that the point of this, that the, the critical thing that Bitcoin needs to do is literally reprice the world's asset and capital allocation such that the cost, the opportunity cost of the use of capital is the fact that it is not being held in Bitcoin and making whatever the bitcoin return will be. So the real interest rate is the return that Bitcoin should Bitcoin would be giving you. And Saylor is arbitraging that interest rate, the difference between the bitcoin return and the fake suppressed interest rates of the fiat printing economy. And he is succeeding massively at doing this. And this will get harder and harder and harder to ignore, especially if they get added to the S&P 500, which a few things I read suggest that this might actually be very soon. We will see. But Saylor's mere existence and the strategy, the unbelievably successful strategy of microstrategy or strategy B, is a massive win for the Bitcoin ecosystem, for the legitimacy of Bitcoin and for the mainstream capitulation to Bitcoin's existence. Okay, another massive win. [00:38:52] The President of the United States freed Ross Ulbricht on his second day in office. Now we have a crypto czar whose entire purpose is to assess the regulatory environment and make it favorable for crypto companies. And has been explicit and open about the discussion and proposal for the United States to have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Now, I don't care what you think about it, and I completely agree, like, the idea of a crypto czar sounds stupid. I have very little interest in the United States government having a bitcoin strategic reserve. I have talked about this in multiple episodes. I have given at length my opinion about this topic. I am much more interested in protections for Bitcoin users. I am much more interested in no capital gains on Bitcoin so that it can actually be used as a currency, a payment vehicle and a medium of exchange. I am Much more interested in protections for basic privacy and the fact that privacy is explicitly detailed as a right, as something that is default, your choice and your option, and available to you, and that to take it away is a Fourth Amendment issue. Those are the things that are my concerns. Those are the things that would be my focus. I would actually be kind of pleased if the US Government took a little bit longer to figure out and find Bitcoin. But my personally not being super interested in it does not make me blind to the reality of just how important it is and what a big deal it is. And Ross Ulbricht is free. He went to the beach the other day for the people who have been here the whole time, who saw him get arrested, who watched the case unfold, who knew of or saw the Silk Road and talked to people who used it, who used it themselves, who read the lengthy explanations for the kind of libertarian ideal of solving violence in the drug, an experiment in solving violence in the drug market, and the crazy, crazy idea that maybe this could work, and then watched him get put in prison for contesting or doing something different, for trying something different than the government that only knows how to put a gun to something and kill it if it doesn't like it. And when you can't kill an inanimate object because it's just a plant, well, then they just end up killing and destroying the lives of a whole bunch of people. And the plant seems to persist. And none of the quote, unquote problem ever gets better. In fact, it gets way, way worse. But they still just can't help themselves. They have to shoot people and they have to put people in cages for the rest of their lives for the audacity of trying something different. They gave him two life sentences plus 40 years. [00:41:51] There were a ton of discussions about how one day we'd have a bitcoin president. One day bitcoin would be important enough and relevant enough that his story would be news, that it would catch someone's attention, and it may very well force a shift in the thinking around the topic. And then maybe the bitcoiners who were there would be wealthy enough or important enough that either they themselves or they could catch someone's ear who was important enough in the social sphere, in the traditional markets that Ross Ulbricht could be free. And then when case after case, when appeal after appeal just kept getting shut down, we got to the end of the line and it was literally only a presidential pardon and nothing else that was ever going to have him see the light of day. Again that he would ever walk free out of that block of cement. [00:42:51] Ross Ulbricht is free. It's not just a win for Ross. It's not just a win for his mom. It is a win for Bitcoin in a huge, huge way. And I think that can't be discounted either. And I'm very happy to see Ross get a second chance. Another huge win. [00:43:10] Operation Chokepoint 2.0 failed. [00:43:15] It failed. [00:43:17] After years of extralegal attacks, financial boycotting, shutting down bank accounts, the overwhelming regulatory and poisonous backdoor political frictions that have been artificially pushed onto the industry and the tools, they have utterly failed. They have failed to stop the importance and the growth of, of the industry and the asset. They could not have failed any harder. In fact, and this is one of the reasons why I do not understand the whole nihilistic, oh everybody, this is all controlled and the cabah runs everything and there's nothing we can do. [00:43:54] Chokepoint 2.0 failed. The political regime literally folded and they are having to regroup and play a new hand. I don't understand how you could possibly take that as bad news or just take the presence of someone that, that you don't like as, as failure. Like before anything has even really happened or any contest has even presented itself, or while things are in the middle of unfolding. Like, I'm not saying don't be aware of it or, or be complacent or something, quite the opposite. But I think it's also important to recognize your strengths and your weaknesses and importantly play to your strengths. And to kind of reiterate what we talked about earlier. If you thought winning was going to mean everything would look exactly the way you expected it to look, then I'd argue we have forgotten that society, what society is, and that it includes other people as well as our own imaginations. If we imagined that there wasn't going to be trade offs that people we don't agree with weren't going to make any returns, that the US Government or some totalitarian regime somewhere was never going to profit or benefit from Bitcoin at all, or BlackRock was never going to make a killing off of it, or just that someone, anywhere that we didn't like was just not ever going to be a part of Bitcoin or ever own any, then I would argue we don't have anything resembling reality guiding our vision of what the future is going to look like and necessarily means we don't understand what Bitcoin is. Numerous people have said something along these lines in A couple of different ways, but it's really worth repeating. And it's. It's something that I really love. It's a perspective that I've always loved. Is that the worst thing about Bitcoin is that because of its radical neutrality, all of the extraordinary benefits that it offers you, the freedom, the sovereignty, the growth, those things will be granted to the person you hate and most disagree with in this world and there is nothing you can do about it. And that doesn't apply to just normies. It doesn't just work when we're talking to normies. It also applies to you and me. The people we dislike will buy and benefit from Bitcoin. And the only way to avoid that is if we created some centralized Internet money that was that we just wanted to be controlled by cypherpunks and libertarians. Okay, but if you want that, then you didn't want a decentralized, permissionless global monetary network, because that's not what that means. If what we have is the former, then ETFs, the US government, Blackrock, Russia, China, whoever, were always going to be a part of this and there's nothing you and I can do about it. The beauty of Bitcoin was always that it aligned the incentives of enemies. And whether we're excited about the addition of the US government or the Chinese government or BlackRock or whoever the hell it is at any particular time is irrelevant to the fact that it is a huge win for bitcoin and the aligning of disparate or even adversarial entities. That is what good money does. [00:47:26] Okay, another big win. [00:47:30] There is a rather. [00:47:32] There's a rather significant like I dare say large decentralized social network and new key based protocol arguably more successful than any of its predecessors when it comes to a global an open stream of data and connections and information where you can easily and quickly plug in a lightning address enabled wallet and send and receive zaps with ease. [00:48:00] People really discount whether or not they are using it for social media. The unbelievable power of NOSTR and what that protocol represents. I use it every single day and it's not because of social media. I use it every single day because Nostr wallet connects connect is what allows me to connect my mobile wallet Albigo to my start 9 with direct authentication dumb like easy setup and it works responsive over clearnet encrypted without the risk of a middleman. We have not even begun to realize what the potential of a global payment directory contact list an authentication and key tool that is natively Distributed across a decentralized network of relays. The potential of that is unbelievable. And I think people don't. A lot of people are constantly like, oh, we need to solve privacy at the base layer. Or they're prescriptive about where and how some solution should be implemented or how it must be implemented to actually get it. And I think it's important to recognize that the whole, you know, Lightning doesn't work because you have to have your device always online. Okay, well, we need to invent a new version of Lightning that has ecache. That's great. And that potential still exists. But how many people in the modern world today go without at least one device online all the time? Or that don't have a handful of friends who could run an encrypted blob that they don't even know that they could host that is online basically at all times? What if that problem could actually be solved with the direct communication and easy authentication of friends and peers in a layer on top of it through a literal social layer? What if the marketplace and authentication, the distribution of funds or the distribution of files or the distribution of an application can be done with a web of trust built on top of a simple tool that people can adopt without even realizing all of the things that they are getting out of it. They don't have to be sold as a distributed DNS. They don't have to have it be sold as a distributed payment directory. They can just be sold on the fact that they can log into this thing and receive zaps from people. And even though they only have a thousand followers on their Nostr network or their nostr YouTube version and they have a hundred thousand followers on YouTube, they get $200 in zaps and they get $100 in YouTube ads and of course they get a couple of their videos banned. Just for fun, I've onboarded numerous people onto Nostr and given them, gotten them set up to receive zaps over lightning. And I can tell you right now there is no onboarding avenue to Bitcoin. [00:50:58] Not Nostr. There's been no onboarding avenue to bitcoin that has been easier and more rewarding than using Nostr. My sister in law who has, who only does Instagram and doesn't care about any of this stuff from a technical sense and doesn't quite get it. She just, it's interesting to her and she likes Bitcoin and she saves in bitcoin, but it's just not her thing. Even she grasped how crazy Nostr was, right when she Got on and she made like 12 bucks in zaps just for being like, hey Nostr, what's up? For like two weeks she was like, this place is crazy. These people, they just sent, they're just sending me money. Why? And this network, in the grand scheme of things is still very, very small, but its potential is utterly massive. And at the exact same time, we are seeing a rebirth in a whole other set, a whole other stacks of decentralized and peer to peer technologies like the Pear stack, like Pub Key, and a handful of other tools that in combination could begin to solve the entire Internet, the entire stack of the Internet's problem. And they are all catching momentum. And I think the missing piece to all of this infrastructure that people had been trying to build before that, that made it unsustainable, that made it not able to get to realize what its true potential was, was always the authentication problem, the web of trust problem, and the payments problem, which in some sense are all kind of derivative of the same problem. But without Bitcoin, there was no path to actually making these sustainable marketplaces because you always had to have trusted third parties, whether you offloaded it to a different layer or the app store or the social network, and the identity of the parties involved or the payments to the parties involved, it didn't matter. There was always a trusted third party layer in order to mitigate one of the problems of decentralization that disallowed it to scale to what the Internet really was, to the, to the true potential of the Internet. And thus we ended up getting layers and variations of different centralized services and different centralized platforms that all wrapped up, that together ended up being a broad solution to all of the various problems. But they're all disparate, they're all siloed, they all have their own problems and they're all controlled and surveilled. And today, finally, people are waking up to the cost and the problem of that. And at the exact same time, we have the tools in order to build those solutions and build alternatives to them with the web of trust, with the decentralized versions that do actually solve those problems. And at a time in technology where AI is going to make it so easy to fake, to replicate and to produce any and all software that without a decentralized trust model, the centralized platforms are very likely to collapse under their own weight, because the management of this will become an impossible task. As I've talked about for a couple of years now, and I think we've very much seen, there will be worse kyc, there will be worse frictions. There will be more. [00:54:23] All of the different networks and platforms will close off more and more. You won't be able to use a vpn, you won't be able to do it without an account, you won't be able to do it without giving your credit card, they'll start charging. And you'll have the difference between a premium account where you finally it's the insidification of the Internet, right? Everything that you were expected to get for free pretty much forever will now be hidden behind a paywall. And the free version will just increasingly suck worse and worse and worse. And you'll still have to jump through all of these hoops and fill out a bank form just to do something simple on the Internet. And understand, as we realize these decentralized tools and the new protocols, the user experience of our version will be infinitely better. And I am already seeing and experiencing that. Albigo is a fantastic tool. [00:55:12] My NOSTR login extension is beautiful and so simple. I just click login and it says do you want to log in? And I hit sign and I am good to go. My profile is there, my contacts are there. All of these different apps have the exact same social ecosystem embedded and sitting behind it that I can utilize. I can take it wherever I want. No app can ban me. If they did, it doesn't even matter. And I don't have to fill out forms anywhere or even keep a bunch of crappy username and passwords and have to constantly change my password and confirm with an email. All that stupid shit is just tradfi Internet, whatever you want to call it. It's only when I go back to Normie Land that all of those pains and frictions come back to me. And I go through this chain of confirming my Gmail and confirming my backup G Gmail and then confirming my Proton mail with a code and then punching it in and then picking out all the stoplights just to log in and check something. It's not sustainable in a world with AI. If you want to know my opinion and the trend and trajectory that I think I see, I think that model kills itself. And it just so happens that I think bitcoiners are the only ones with the tools necessary to fix it. To actually have something that is sustainable in the new environment. [00:56:39] That is a huge win for Bitcoin to frame it simpler. [00:56:44] Traditional centralized platforms and traditional financial tools are fighting the trend of technology in order to stay viable. While bitcoiners have the tools, have built the tools and the systems that will be able to ride this technological wave. And when we are talking about massive technological shifts, alignment is orders of magnitude more important than anything else. Do not be confused by the fact that Facebook and Google are massive corporations and Nostr and even Bitcoin is still relatively small. Nobody fights a technological shift. The question is which model is swimming against the current and which one is surfing the wave. And speaking of AI, there has been an explosion in the progress, efficiency and accuracy of AI language models. And this is already leading to an explosion in new software. This will accelerate. There will be a tipping point with the accessibility and skill of the model, combined with what will likely be a completely new way to teach and learn coding that will send us into the hockey stick phase. We will literally. Software will literally eat the world. Because everyday builders and designers and entrepreneurs will have the capacity to create any software and any computing environment solution that they seek. And this will likely accelerate the need and the value of of open protocols, open ecosystems and open source tools. Because modularity, secure modularity will be the most important thing. Because a million people building tiny things on an open source platform is way more valuable than a thousand senior engineers doing what some particular department in Apple decides they ought to be doing. Because those millions of people will be solving their own problems directly, whereas those thousand senior engineers will be told by Apple and management what they suspect other people's problems will be. And they will spend an order of magnitude more resources in order to try to find something that is successful. And of course, those groups and types of developers and builders and companies will still be wildly successful, but they will not outpace the evolution of millions upon millions upon millions, maybe even billions of people trying to solve their own problems with advanced language models. And this again goes back to the web of trust problem. And how do you authenticate and how do you know who you're getting your tools from and the application that you're getting it from? And how the hell does an App Store survive when they have to vet and kyc for a million new applications in three days? Because it may very well get to that point. And when it does, your social circle on Nostr may give you a trusted app from someone that is one step removed in your web of trust from someone that you know and trust, who trusts them very well. You will get their application immediately and it may take four months for it to show up on the App Store. Right now the biggest thing standing in the way is the network effect. [01:00:09] But I just think that there will be a point where it turns from a barrier into A tailwind. So I think we have made massive leaps forward on that front and I think AI is pushing us. Oh, also, actually, there's another really fascinating thing, and I can't remember who posted this. I probably saved it somewhere. I'll try to find it and put it in the show notes. But I can't remember which model it was. But somebody just achieved 4.9 million tokens worth worth of context in an LLM. Now, why is that significant? [01:00:42] Because the entire Bitcoin code base is 5 million. We are about to reach the point in which you can take the entirety of the Bitcoin code and put it into the context of a large language model and ask it questions, develop with it, look for bugs, review it, learn from it, explain it step by step and show examples of what does what. [01:01:11] And I do not think that is a small deal, especially in an era where development on Bitcoin itself, I feel like, is stagnating. The ability to freely and independently learn Bitcoin through LLMs with the entirety of the code base in the context window is wild. [01:01:31] All right, another big win. Lightning is been. Has been normalized in the bitcoin space. It is basically available with any and all of the tools that I use to the point that now everybody just complains about how lightning won't scale all by. It won't scale bitcoin to the whole world all by itself. So it's like we got a 52 or 100X and now everybody's just mad that it doesn't go to 8 billion. It's like, yeah, well, if you read the white paper back in 2015, you would have known that already because it was literally in the white paper. Yet again, people who miss the forest for the trees. You know, it was really, really funny. I had a couple people mention it actually in the Audionauts shout out to you guys. By the way, love the Audionauts. Thank you guys for hanging out with me in the Keat and Telegram rooms. But somebody brought up the fact that they were just laughing when I did the recent episode we did with Clinton on Liberty Lockdown with me and Steve Patterson. Steve went into this bit of a diatribe about how lightning doesn't work and it's all custodial and all this stuff. And I had my Albigo wallet connected to my nostr and so I could zap non custodially, custodially from my start 9 from my lightning node and just. I just could zap people all day on nostr and I Did it all day. I. I do it all the time. And so while he was doing this, I literally just kind of like held up my phone. I was like, I can zap people right now. Is this the thing that you said don't work? And I just was going down and I was just like zapping every post. I wasn't even reading them. But it's a perfect example, I think, of people just from the outside just not aware of the things that actually exist. And you know, their only exposure to it is some crypto dude who, you know, some ethereum bag holder who just looks at every single thing that goes wrong. Or, you know, there's another report of a bug or something in some sort of a client. And so they post that and then they retweet it and say, I can't believe lightning has so unbelievably failed. And meanwhile there's not a single person on Nostr who cares or even knows about the bug. And we're just retarded zapping everybody all day. I'm getting sats streamed to me on Fountain. Like lightning works. I use it all the time. There are a ton of different services and as we've covered numerous reports just show the unbelievable growth in the volume of payments. The one, the, I think it was the 2023 report had a 1200% growth in the amount of payments that go through a bunch of different nodes. So that is a huge win. And I kind of find it funny that people think that it's actually a dud. And just for fun, right at this very moment, I just zapped somebody. El Salvador, Venezuela. I just zapped Igno says. I just realized that it's not don't trust verify, it's verify who you trust. That's a pretty cool. That's a pretty cool Nostra node. I like that. And so I just zapped that 420sats using failed lightning from my, my own personal node. That's a win, you know. And in that same vein, there's another really big win is living on a bitcoin standard is so easy now. I mean, at least in relation to what it was four years ago. And the difficulty I had in doing only bitcoin. Holy crap. The number of bitcoin and lightning enabled services now that have debit cards, you know, fold is now launching a credit card as well, which means that I actually won't need. I have had my pnc, my traditional bank account and card still for a while because there's like three services whose subscriptions I have to put on that card because they won't take a prepaid debit card and I can't pay for them any other, any other way. And when I get the Fold credit card, that, that will no longer be the case. The only thing I will need a traditional bank account for, I can basically close everything except for my business account. And I still barely even use that as well. The only thing is that Fold has a maximum for how much money that you can keep in it. And when you're doing housing construction and you know, large purchases and stuff, you need some place to keep a large amount of money. But any and all of my day to day living on Bitcoin and paying for stuff in bitcoin, if I'm not wiring $50,000, which is basically almost never, I can do it entirely within the bitcoin ecosystem with bitcoin tools. And using bitcoin wallets like that's such a leap, like such a massive leap from where we were just a few years ago. In fact, it is cheaper for me to live on a bitcoin standard now that like with Fold Premium specifically, and there's actually a number of other services that do this as well. I can convert between Bitcoin and Fiat. I can go from Bitcoin to Fiat cheaply and quickly within those platforms for all, for virtually no fee. I think the spread is typically I calculate it every once in a while just to see and it's usually like between 0.3% and 0.5%. But I get 0.5% back on my debit card just when I use it in sats. And then I'm constantly buying gift cards with my balance that get me 2%, 3%, 5%, even 10% back. Which means that something that was a hassle for me and cost me a premium of 1 to 2% in fees just to just to transfer it to dollars and then shift it to another account, which cost me another 1% or something like that. Something that was eating me alive in fees for a long time because I was on a bitcoin standard is now actually a tailwind, is now actually something that benefits me because I get more sats back and I get regular discounts on things because of the way I do them in Bitcoin. That is a huge shift. And I know that, you know, it probably doesn't affect that many people because there aren't that many people living on a bitcoin standard. I'm one of very, very few who do. But it's less about the fact that the tools are available to me, which I am excited about and more about the fact that the liquidity and infrastructure of the ecosystem is such that those tools are now possible. That is what is crazy about it. It is a huge indication of the maturity of the infrastructure and the market around Bitcoin that I can now do that. Now there's another one really big that I think is being discounted and or is just kind of quietly happening in the background. [01:08:09] Bitcoin backed loans, I believe, are becoming a big industry. And I increasingly think that this will be the backbone of the next era of Bitcoin monetization. Bitcoin backed credit instruments will be the key to full reserve, fully transparent payment networks, fully private payment networks, decentralized payment networks. And Bitcoin will become the ultimate collateral to so many different tools and systems in the traditional finance world. As the volatility and risk of default and the imbalance of the fiat world continues to get worse, they will be looking for an out. They will be looking for a hedge that allows them to balance out the other side of their balance sheet. And I think of Bitcoin as a reserve to other instruments and the multisig and the separation of keys through institutions and through users. I think these will be incredibly valuable things that are being slept on by the Bitcoin ecosystem. Because so many Bitcoiners just want the perfect solution, rather than realizing that we have half the perfect solution sitting right in front of us. And we could actually make a financial system that is fully and transparently reserved by every single piece of it, just as Bitcoin is designed today. And that gives us a window in time, not only for Bitcoin to be so unbelievably liquid that it becomes obvious that it's going to be a medium of exchange, but also to build out, to test out what the limitations of that infrastructure and that method is, and continue to build out and iterate and innovate when it comes to more and more decentralized networks and more and more decentralized and private payment systems. I think it buys us another 10 years of things getting massively better and massively more toward the Bitcoin vision. And it allows us to either get the opcodes that we need in order to reach the next level, or to just figure out the innovation or the trick that that solves that problem we hadn't intended, or maybe even another layer that solves the problem in a way that no one had even expected. As I've said before, the solution to Bitcoins, Bitcoin is the monetary base. It is the consensus network for the monetary truth of the world. And the solution to the payments problem and to the peer to peer digital cash problem may look as different on top of Bitcoin as Bitcoin looks on top of the Internet. So I believe it is important not to discount that we still do not know how it is going to be solved simply because this problem is still not solved. A hundred million shitcoins have tried it a hundred million different ways and none of them have fixed this. None of them can scale to 8 billion people in a decentralized and trust minimized, radically neutral fashion. The complaint that Bitcoin hasn't solved it either is meaningless. And the prescription that the solution is definitely going to look like this particular shitcoin or blockchain or whatever is also bullshit because you haven't solved it. So you have no idea what it's going to look like or where it's actually going, going to exist when it finally does. So the question is, how can we make the financial system, the credit system and the pricing system of the world an order of magnitude more important right now with the tools that we have? And I believe that it's distributed jurisdictionally and financially and institutionally distributed, multisig and fully reserved and openly transparently backed credit instruments that trade Bitcoin that can be redeemed to the chain, it will begin to balance a multi trillion dollar asset misallocation problem in the fiat world. It will begin to position Bitcoin as the ultimate opportunity cost by which interest and debt should be charged against or priced against. And importantly, it will lower the volatility of Bitcoin and put it on a stable and consistent growth pattern. Because when Bitcoin shoots up from 60 to 90,000 and somebody takes out a loan against their Bitcoin, Bitcoin in order to pay it back and hold on to their Bitcoin for another, you know, year. And then it goes to $200,000. Well, what it does is it dampens the selling pressure at 90,000 to keep it stable at 90 to 100,000 and then allows it to stably and consistently grow through that period. But then also when it hits 200,000, rather than having a giant pop off to 500, you have a whole bunch of people that are now closing out their loan at a 50 to 70% profit who are able to hold onto that Bitcoin rather than having to sell it at the price that they did not want to because of a liquid Bitcoin backed loan market. It is a futures contract that is fully backed and fully reserved and fully transparent where you can even hold one of the keys. That is a huge deal. People go back 10 years, 20 years and explain to somebody that that's going to be possible and they will laugh at you. It literally cannot even exist in the fiat world. There is no such thing. Bitcoin is the only asset on planet earth that is both sound and has native multi signature technology. That is it. It's the only one. And the only things that even come close are just copies of bitcoin. You cannot multisig a house because I can always kick your door in and that house is stuck right on that ground. No matter where you go. You cannot multisig a gold bar. Someone is going to be holding it. You cannot multisig any sort of fiat instrument because all of it is just an authority. It's just a hierarchy of authority where the next person up the ladder can always just say, screw your keys, this is mine. If you believe otherwise, I will point you to hundreds of billions of bonds held by the nation state of Russia that were confiscated like that. And that's actually something that comes back to a really important point about the ETF is that people post about the BlackRock ETF address and they show when BlackRock has moved coins or when somebody has added coins. And a whole bunch of people when they talked about like moving coins that have been through a privacy through a mixer or coinjoin when they suggested that this was going to be made illegal. Remember when a whole bunch of people sent the coins to the BlackRock ETF that had been coin joined as an FU that ha ha ha, you're now going to commit a crime when you pull out these UTXOs. Consider that nobody else has any clue how much gold or silver or wheat is behind whatever other ETF out there. Literally bitcoin is the only one where you can point at it and be like, oh yeah, well there it is. And now consider that you could create a time locked multi sig reserve with derived e cash tokens that actually prove they are part of the the ladder of the tree of hashes that go back to this balance such that your bitcoin balance is definitely inside of that balance. It is fully and completely reserved and that it expires when the time code, the timeout of that UTXO expires. And you can use an ecash token that you know has not inflated the supply of bitcoin with what other instrument on earth can you do that with? You Can't. And I think a lot of people are sleeping on the fact that Bitcoin is the greatest collateral in the world and that this is just the beginning of what it looks like to move into the medium of exchange phase. And I think it's another great example of the it's not doing exactly what you imagined it would do. Therefore you could fail to recognize that this is a massive leap forward for the disaster and shit show of a financial system and complete and utter lack of reserve system that we have been using for a really long time. Rather than being all poo poo and nihilistic about the fact that we don't have the perfect utopian end all be all direct Bitcoin payments for everybody on planet earth. Yet the stay humble of stay humble stack sats part of the equation is that you should step back and observe that maybe it doesn't happen the way you expect it to. Because maybe we don't know how this happens because we don't really have the best example. We've never really seen really, we clearly have never seen a digital, a new digital money global and decentralized in the modern world monetize from zero and transition to a full global standard. We should be looking at Bitcoin expecting that it will be a medium of exchange and a unit of account and watching it to understand how it is doing that rather than prescribing that it should happen this way and then getting mad when it doesn't happen this way. Because the whole point of stay humble is to recognize that nobody has a clue what this is supposed to look like. So when Bitcoin doesn't take exactly the path you think it might take, it may actually be far more aligned with reality to stop and go, oh, so maybe this is what the path to a global medium of exchange and unit of account looks like, rather than the one that I had imagined. Rather than saying despite Bitcoin's incredible failure, it's just because it's a Ponzi scheme and everybody wants number go up. And because the path of my expectation didn't occur exactly as I had imagined it, then that means it has utterly failed as a medium of exchange and unit of account. And that is something that it now will not and cannot ever be. Maybe, just maybe it's the former. [01:18:00] Now there's a whole lot of other, there's a quite a bullet list here of other things that I could get into, but I think these are the important ones. And then there's one that I think is really subtle for A lot of people and harder to see, but I think is the most important one by far for bitcoin's wins. And that's why I was saving it for last. And this is it. [01:18:26] The haters have hedged. [01:18:29] There is a historical chart of bitcoin obituaries and how many were published by year and it grows from 2011, 2012. I mean 2012 was like a dip because 2012 was a huge spike. But then 2013-2014-2015-2016 is a little bit of a fall and then it spikes in 2017, it goes down a little bit in 2018, then it falls quite a bit in 2019 and 2020 and then grows again in 2021. But it is creating this curve. It is literally a mountain that grew into 2017 and 2018 and is now falling down 2021. There were far fewer claims of its death in 2021 and 2022, despite being the onset of bear markets like 2017 and 2018 were. Then in 2023 and 2024, it's almost non existent. 2024 I think has like one or two. [01:19:25] Even Peter Schiff, he tweeted this and I saved it somewhere. But even Peter Schiff said not too long ago that bitcoin was a scam, it was going to die. And somebody said, short it. And he said, I don't even know how long this scam can go on. The US government could buy this. I am not going to short it. Or something along those lines. That's not a direct quote because I don't have the quote right in front of me. But I remember reading it because the back of my mind screamed at me and it said what he just typed is that he doesn't even know if this is ever going to die. Now from a shallow perspective, somebody might go, oh, he still thinks it's a scam and he still thinks it's stupid. That's not the point. He was confident and certain in the last couple of bear markets that this was it, it was dead this time and you're all screwed in this big stupid Ponzi scheme. But now in pure cope, he says, I hate it, it's stupid, it's a scam. And I don't know, it could last forever. [01:20:27] This is the Lindy effect. This is what capitulation looks like. The great capitulation is not that everybody loves it and everybody becomes a bitcoiner. It's that everybody who hates it begrudgingly and painfully admits that it's not going away. And we may have Just reached that point and that is a huge win. [01:20:54] All right. With that I think we'll close this one out. Shout out to Blockstream and the Jade plus Wallet Hardware wallet. I've got my second video coming by the way. I set it up with Bluetooth and man, I just love how seamless this thing is. When you set it up with Bluetooth, with the Blockstream green wallet, which I really like doing Bluetooth because I know it's like, oh, it's not quite as secure. It's like, well you're using it. With mobile, the big attack vector that you got to worry about is that you're separating your keys from the device and that you have a screen to confirm what you were signing. I think kind of the goal there is the best of convenience and security and Bluetooth and just having it connect and communicate and you just sit, hit sign on your Jade. It's just such a nice experience that I don't know, I think that's kind of the optimum for the Jade Plus I have a 10% discount code. If you haven't gotten one or if you have been looking to get one, do not forget the discount code Guygui 10% off. And if you were looking for lightning, if you haven't gone down the lightning rabbit hole or you're just looking for a really good on chain and lightning wallet that is self custodial on mobile, you've got to check out bitkit. And congrats to all the winners by the way. We did a bit of a giveaway to five people and five people won 50,000 sats and that's like one of the really cool things about slash tags about how they do like contacts and paying people in BitKit is I didn't have to ask anybody for an address. I literally just added them as a contact and then I could pay them directly and that is just a really, really cool thing. And the magic that they are doing behind the scenes and the tools that they are building for that is just super cool. So check out BitKit if you haven't yet. And don't forget to subscribe, don't forget to share out this show to everybody that you know who is interested in bitcoin or everybody who thinks bitcoin has failed. Maybe this will be an episode that will enlighten them a little bit. And I love you all. Again, shout out to the audionauts and everybody who zaps on Nostr and streamsats on Fountain. You guys are my homies. I love you and I will catch you on the next episode Episode of Bitcoin Audible and until then, everybody take it easy. Guys. [01:23:14] Whatever it is you are seeking won't come. Come in the form you are expecting. [01:23:21] Haruki Murakami.