If you're watching this video, you're going to learn three big things.
Number one, how to handle a gnarly Bitcoin dip without losing your mind or your conviction.
Ooh.
Number two, why Bitcoin is still a powerful savings tool for you,
even after its price gets chopped in half.
Number three, why self-custody matters if you want to truly own your Bitcoin.
Ooh, self-custody.
Today's guest is Conrad from Bitcoin Well.
He is a longtime Bitcoiner.
helping folks like you and me stack sats straight into self-custody.
So if you're brand new to Bitcoin,
come on inside the world's biggest Bitcoin welcome center for today's show.
Welcome to Sat Chats, the Bitcoin podcast where we chat about sats.
Sats are the smallest part of a Bitcoin the same way pennies are the smallest part of a dweller.
with Sat Chats.
We are building the world's biggest Bitcoin welcome center
to serve as your gateway to generational wealth.
So if you are brand new to Bitcoin,
we want to chat about Sats with you.
Literally you, brand new Bitcoiner.
Head to satchats.com to grab your slot in the studio today.
I'm your host, Stuart.
And I'm your co-host, Anna Bevan.
And with us today, back for his Bitcoin baby update, is number 75, Conrad.
Hey, folks.
How's it going?
Conrad here from Bitcoin Well, community manager here reporting in.
And I'm very happy to be back.
Thanks for hosting me, guys.
Yeah.
I mean, he's a double-digit guest.
Number 75.
Yeah.
That's pretty noise.
Season one.
All right.
Now, a lot has happened since you came on the show.
We taped your show June, early June of last year.
So since then, Bitcoin was like around 106 when we were taping.
Everybody was feeling pretty juicy.
Then we get up to 126 in October.
We're like, dude, let's, I mean, I was like, let's go.
And then we like just recently had a very nasty Thursday where it was like,
still off of a cliff, man. So what was your emotional journey through the new all time high
and now back into the 60s since your appearance on the show, all the emotions, everything?
That's a great question, Stuart. So I've been fortunate to have been around Bitcoin since about
2017. And I think since then, how I feel about price climbs, price falls, short, short, you know,
mini bear markets, mini dips, extended bear markets, all of those things, I feel about them
a little bit differently, because I know Bitcoin is going to stick around. I know Bitcoin is going
to succeed. So these things more seem like minor disruptions or minor delays to mass adoption,
hyper-Bitcoinization, as some folks have called it.
I'm not worried about Bitcoin, even if the price falls.
It fell about 50%.
We're about 50% down from the all-time high of about 126.
We're in the mid-60s right now.
I just see it as my dollar buys me twice as much Bitcoin today
than it did a few months ago.
I think most people are still not understanding Bitcoin,
which is why the price is so low.
And I think how Bitcoin is going to be better understood
will reflect its price later on.
I think right now we're kind of just early,
still early to Bitcoin clearly.
And I'd love to talk about that a little bit more
relative to the macro politics we're seeing,
macroeconomic environment,
and as well as how other assets are performing
relative to Bitcoin.
I think that really speaks to how
we're still all so early to Bitcoin.
So do you feel that way?
Like, ooh, I get twice as much Bitcoin
or as the most brand new Bitcoiner,
are you like, yo, what happened to my Bitcoin?
I definitely think that I see it as I get twice as much Bitcoin.
And I will say that I feel that way strongly because I sit next to you every day.
We talk to seasoned Bitcoiners who are like, talk to me in five years.
Like, this is not a dip.
Like, just chill out.
Just continue to dollar cost average.
Continue to buy your Bitcoin.
You'll thank yourself later.
yeah i think early on like in 2024 when i was starting to stack my first sats it was in the
60s same as it is yeah and i was like i was like i mean i just if something would just
and it would like dip to 15 grand i would just like snatch it up i just like bam like i just
want to go way down like get a bunch have it go way back up and like bam like have that moment
yeah and today i still feel fine like it was crazy that was my first like real
good pullback as a bitcoiner the one that we just had yes like where it's coming down 50 percent
like because it basically was like in the mid 60s it did 60s 70s in 2024 and then in november like
went above 100k i was like oh my god like yeah and then it kept going this is the first like
proper pullback and on a personal level i'm like dude whatever you know i i dollar cost average
every single week no big deal i think as a as a showrunner i know that bitcoin's price ripping up
equals more subscribers for the show and i'm like because more people are interested in it when
and i'm like dude bitcoin could you be so kind as to help a brother build the world's biggest
bitcoin welcome center over here like why you got to be dropping 50 on on a homie that's just
trying to help people stack more sats right right so i've got a mix of feelings there but i like
yours conrad because to anna bevan's point most seasoned bitcoiners like have no real feelings
about this moment it was sort of like whatever stack sats so i also think that they're like
further from like when they purchased bitcoin for the first time like you like one thing that you
say often is you use the analogy of waves. So like the further into the ocean you get,
the less likely you are to feel the wave. And so a lot of brand new Bitcoiners in our audience,
me and you included now, because it's gone back to where you started buying,
like we feel the waves. We're just like trying to tell ourselves like soon we'll be in the ocean.
Yeah, just keep going. Just keep swimming further into the ocean. But we do feel the waves. Like,
I mean like constantly refreshing like I mean I've now gotten it to I think I can go 24 hours
without refreshing uh-huh which is a real big thing for me Conrad like that's a big improvement
I still think I check I think most Bitcoiners still check all the time um it's just like you
know you you subconsciously you open up your phone your thumb the next thing you know you're
checking the price like oh okay it's the same as it was five minutes ago um yeah but i just
stewart to your point about you know subscribers and how the way that you know new folks are to
kind of come in i think that a lot of that stems to the fact that people are using the price and
the media as like their main inputs for whether they believe bitcoin is going to be successful or
not if no one's talking about bitcoin and they don't really see the price a lot of people that
especially not in Bitcoin currently, are not really thinking about it. But when the price is
ripping and you're getting articles talking about, oh, this guy said that Bitcoin is good. This guy
said that Bitcoin is good. This guy said this price is going to happen for Bitcoin. Everyone's
like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're excited. But then when the price goes down, this person says this
bad thing about Bitcoin. This person says this bad thing about Bitcoin. And then people believe
those bad things. And they believe that because the price is falling down, it means that the
success of Bitcoin is going to fail. Granted, if Bitcoin hit $0 and stayed there for an extended
period of time, that would be very bad. But I think the longer you spend on Bitcoin, the more
you realize that that's not going to happen. And if the price falls suddenly and there happens to
be an ill-timed article saying that it's something bad about Bitcoin, you are more comfortable with
Bitcoin as a set of principles rather than a price that moves up and down and that determines your
success that determines Bitcoin's likelihood of success. It's just on the journey. I would
recommend for anyone to just take one of those big price charts, zoom them all the way out,
and then look closely at those big price movements. They seem so small in hindsight and in comparison
to where we are today. And I think the future, where we are now, will look the same five,
10 years from now when we look at the price chart. We will look at Bitcoin's adoption.
another good one to look at I think is hash rate how much that just incredibly increases and like
if you do the math for how big the hash rate how many ASICs there would be today versus if you took
the same amount of hash power basic and they did it something like in 2017 or 2024 or 2022 like
you're going to see this continuous increase and that's where Bitcoin is just constantly growing
um and there's just this large growing of constant adoption um and we don't really have to worry
about the price falling and that means that things aren't going to work out um it's better for people
like us because we can afford more uh we can afford to get more bitcoin like michael michael
straylor and strategy have bought their 720 000 bitcoin recently right like they're still stacking
um and they're not worried about the price because they understand that coins they're buying
every single chance they get, which most people that are in that same kind of knowledge camp
are still understanding Bitcoin are buying every single chance that they get.
They're not worried about what the Wall Street Journal posts or what Bloomberg posts about
Bitcoin because that doesn't affect their perception of it, their understanding of it.
Whereas I would argue that still does for most folks.
They're still kind of driven by what the media says or what the price says.
Hmm. Well, you know, another thing I was wondering, going into your episode, Conrad,
on your first episode with us, number 75, you talked about Bitcoin being a store of value.
You talked about Bitcoin being an extraordinary savings technology, both of which I agree with.
And I think you do too, Hibes.
Same.
But when we think about the brand new Bitcoiner in our audience, or even a pre-coiner who's like,
just a full-on beginner. Since your last time on this episode, how do you explain Bitcoin as a store
of value and a savings technology to a beginner after a big old drawdown like the one that we just
saw? Yeah, I mean, definitely now is probably a more challenging time to make that argument to
someone that is not really familiar with Bitcoin. When Bitcoin's price is up and higher than it was
the day or the week or the month before, it's very easy to tout all of the historical averages.
Oh, you know, Bitcoin averages a category of 40%. I'm not sure what it was at all time high.
Now that average will be a little bit lower, assuming that we don't kind of just continue to
stay low for an extended period of time. But that average always will be higher than other
traditional assets for one. And for two, I think it just comes down to like the core,
the principles of what Bitcoin is. There's only 21 million Bitcoin. We have to chase financial
gains because our currency is designed to lose value on purpose. That inflation is done by
creating more notes of currency. So that's one kind of way where Bitcoin still remains different.
And I think it's, I've heard the argument, it's like, we have this thing in finance called the
efficient market hypothesis. And what this states is that if all the information is known equally
by everybody, then any particular asset will be perfectly priced in.
And so because all information about Bitcoin is transparent, the folks, advocates of the
efficient market hypothesis will say, well, why isn't Bitcoin's price a bajillion dollars,
whatever a Bitcoiner like me says it ought to be?
And I would argue in turn that that is, yes, the information is out there.
It is vastly misunderstood by most people.
Like go and ask people about Bitcoin and they'll probably tell you like, is Bitcoin a stock?
One, Bitcoin is too expensive.
I can't afford it.
Things that they just don't understand about Bitcoin fundaments on a super surface level, they'll be afraid of it being hacked or it's not secure or it's not stable.
All these things which are actually not true.
Bitcoin is incredibly stable.
Its block production is one of the most stable online systems we've ever seen.
The uptime on Bitcoin, the network, is unparalleled to any other centralized system because there's no single source that can go down and stop the network.
So Bitcoin is incredibly resilient.
But I think the main thing that most people are going to be talking about isn't its supply being stable, is its price is going down over the last few months.
And that is bad. And that is bad for a savings tool.
And I would argue, yeah, that's not ideal, especially in the short term.
But like, let's take a look at gold.
Like gold, I think most people would agree, even people that aren't even into finance will be on some level that gold is some sort of stable value thing.
It's always been valuable. It always will be valuable. Gold has had thousands of years to be understood by the whole world.
And gold also, despite being a large asset, doubled in price like within a very short, within a few months recently.
And a lot of people, given the global tensions we've been seeing recently with the war in Iran, are predicting an even higher price for gold.
right? Those same kinds of people would, you know, people in traditional finance would have
criticized Bitcoin for being, you know, a bubble, whatever, or an illegitimate asset. And even if it
managed to grow thus far, because it's gotten larger, it's going to fail to keep growing and
having its like monstrous gains it's had in the past, you know, like hundreds of percent gained
in a single year. But then you look at something like gold, which it was a $16 trillion market cap,
like more than 16 times larger than Bitcoin. And then it doubled within a very short amount of time.
And it still has like 5% gain days. So I think that shows that an asset can be misunderstood
and misappreciated by a lot of people, but it can still be a store of value tool that will be
appropriately repriced. Like I don't think there's a single gold bug out there that is
surprised by gold hitting $5,000. And I bet you that they're not all just selling their gold and
buying a bunch of worthless paper money, because they know that gold is the ultimate real money.
And I think Bitcoin is a lot, I like to think of Bitcoin in a lot of ways as being the same as gold,
just a digital version that allows it to be way, way more efficient, which in the age of the
internet will just eventually allow it to just win It just so much cheaper and easier to store move transfer around um and you don have to trust anybody like if i if you wanted to sell your entire podcast studio for gold coins you could you would struggle because you can validate
that the goal is real. Like you would have to trust me bringing you these gold plate gold coins.
Like what if they're gold plated? What if they're tungsten coins with like wrapped in gold? Like
you won't know until you do a lot of work to verify that. Whereas if I offered you say, I don't know,
a hundred Bitcoin or whatever, whatever the studio would be worth. Um, you'd be like, okay, cool.
like 100 Bitcoin or whatever it is, like I can verify that on my node, I receive it, boom, instantly good to go.
So the way that Bitcoin can be used is still better than gold.
Gold is more understood than Bitcoin, but I would argue that Bitcoin will continue to be more and more understood.
And then its value and price will start to reflect the value that it offers people.
so what i'm hearing from you is that bitcoin is still a good savings technology because it is what
it is quite frankly and the more you understand about it the greater your conviction the more you
kind of push through the waves to get out into the ocean the more you kind of see that what you're
doing is right and you just got to hang in there you know you mentioned war just a minute ago
that's something that's going on currently i mean think things haven't gotten more peaceful over the
past nine months um things haven't gotten less inflated over the past nine months like these
nation states don't have less debt uh over the past nine months and you know attempts to kind
to regulate or pass legislation there was like a crypto week i think here in america a month after
your show yeah but now they're still hemming and hawing trying to figure out whether to pass the
whatever clarity act or smart act or whatever it's called i mean do you the smart act do you feel like
in a world where things seem to be getting messier and messier since your last episode
bitcoin is still the best shield against all that if you just get yourself some bitcoin
and mine your own business, still the best thing you can do?
I have a few different analogies on how I like to think about Bitcoin
and how I'd like to think of it relative to other assets.
You often hear me comparing it to gold.
But I think of Bitcoin also as being a life raft.
I wrote an article about this recently,
how I think there are certain types of people that need Bitcoin more than others.
I wrote about how Michael Saylor is,
I think he's an incredible influencer for Bitcoin. He's taught so many people about Bitcoin.
And he created a few different things. One, this different lens of Bitcoin relative to inflation
as a pristine capital. Everything is a melting ice cube, but Bitcoin is the one thing that doesn't
melt. I think it's a great analogy on the value preservation of Bitcoin. Then he talked about how
companies can buy Bitcoin to have a stable treasury for the future. And he did that.
And he did that so much. He bought so much Bitcoin that his company kind of like this is probably normal for most people now, but his company kind of became an ETF, which kind of paved the way for all the other ETFs to exist because it was hard to reject all these Bitcoin ETFs.
if MicroStrategy was buying and basically being a proxy for a Bitcoin ETF, because the amount of
Bitcoin that they held relative to their total company value, the Bitcoin dwarfed their company
value very quickly. And they were basically just buying a Bitcoin ETF with a company attached,
like company revenue, et cetera. So then that kind of paid the way for all the ETFs. And then
really, that's when we started to see two things, two mass moves, Wall Street piling in onto ETFs,
and a lot of people buying ETFs to get exposure to Bitcoin,
and then a lot of companies buying Bitcoin for their treasury balance sheet.
Now, I would argue that this is good.
More people buying Bitcoin is good.
But like I said in the beginning of this little spiel,
was that I think certain people need Bitcoin more.
And I don't think that the billionaires, the really rich people,
need Bitcoin because they don't need the metaphorical life raft.
They already have metaphorical and literal yachts.
So these people don't need the life raft to stop them from the Titanic sinking,
which is when fiat kind of the fiat system starts to crumble. The everyday people are who really need Bitcoin.
So my kind of joke was I'm like, we don't need another Michael Saylor. We need a Mitchell Mailer, right?
An equivalent to Michael Saylor, but one that will be able to get the youth, get the younger generations,
get the people that aren't super sophisticated financially, that don't have these massive, massive financial portfolios,
where even if they get like a 95% drawdown, they're still richer than most people.
those aren't like people that need Bitcoin and this seems like a huge challenge but I would argue
that this is very possible because in the last five six years we saw a bunch of people that had
previously rejected Bitcoin embrace things like NFTs and DeFi and then get taught to do stock
option trading for Wall Street Bets through uh for GameSelf through Wall Street Bets um and a lot
of the Wall Street Bets movement I feel like mirrored some of the principles or some of the
philosophy of Bitcoin of like, you know, if like there's a corrupt system out there, there's like
elitists in charge that are disproportionately benefiting from leveraging the system. But if we
as a group unify and use our knowledge of the system, we can outweigh their elitist position
and actually gain ourselves the way that they're expecting the game. And we saw this happen with
GameStop creating the short squeeze. A lot of young people I see getting rich, you know,
are making a decent amount of chunk of money along the way. And I would argue that those
things show that a mitchell mailer is possible a bitcoin influencer to help the young people
understand about bitcoin and that it's a good tool for them to kind of overthrow the elitist system
that we were seeing in banking and in the fiat system just the inherent characteristics of a
fiat system bitcoin allows them to kind of flip that power control over and actually have a life
raft that they're fully in control of they can exit the system and also be fully independent
because in the end of the day,
that's why this life raft is so,
Bitcoin as a life raft is so compelling to me
is because we're all stuck in this Titanic
and we can't leave the Titanic.
And the Titanic hits an iceberg,
we're all going down with it
because of our money is all tied to the same system.
But if we have a quote unquote life raft
being Bitcoin independent of the system,
then we can so-called jump ship
and then still stay afloat,
still not drown, stay dry, all that good stuff.
And I think Bitcoin is just still
the ultimate tool for that.
So one of the things I would like to see kind of in the next few years is a Mitchell mailer, or it could be like a Spartacus where everyone is kind of collectively being the Mitchell mailer. But I think having this type of greater influence and greater education of what Bitcoin is, I think will help the people understand it. Because these folks are buying tons of Bitcoin, these, these treasury balance folks, you know, over a million Bitcoin has been bought for Bitcoin treasuries. Yet the price has gone down in the last few years.
um i think that comes down the last thing that touches down on is how these um sophisticated
investors buy bitcoin is they're not buying it the way bitcoin was being bought in 2017
or in 2020 um they're not buying it on exchanges they're buying it on over the counter which means
they're not affecting the price which means the price can actually go down while lots of bitcoin
is being purchased um and if you if regular folks are buying bitcoin on exchanges that actually
drives the price up a lot more, which can kind of help the snowball effect of what we know that
price is a great marketing tool for Bitcoin. So I think there's an education problem happening
right now in Bitcoin and shows like sat shots that are educated and folks that are educating
no coiners or people that don't have Bitcoin. I think that's a huge role to play in helping the
Bitcoin adoption from this current time point. What is over the counter? Over the counter is
Kind of like, so when you're buying and selling any stock, we'll just use Bitcoin for this example.
If you go to something like Coinbase or Coinbase Pro or something like that, you'll see whatever the current price is.
And you'll see the kind of pyramid shape.
And the pyramid shape, they call it an order book.
And it is pending trades to buy and sell Bitcoin at various prices.
So if you see like a bunch of prices to buy, what's the price of Bitcoin right now?
It's basically $69K.
Nice.
um so if the price of bitcoin is 69 000 and i want to buy 100 bitcoin i'm not going to buy 100
bitcoin on this order book at 69k i'm going to buy all the bitcoin that are for sale at 69k
they'll buy all the bitcoin for sale at 61 69.1k 69.2k until i hit whatever high number and i
clear out all those pending buy purchases uh that like will literally raise the price that moment
now granted a bunch of people could then come and sell very quickly lower the price back down
But if enough people are doing this, it actually raises the price. And over the counter allows you. So instead of using that an exchange and an order book over the counter, be like, hey, Anna, I want to buy 100 Bitcoin. And then Anna will say, OK, I know someone that's selling 100 Bitcoin. I'll Stuart, Stuart, give me 100. Give me 100 Bitcoin. I'll give you the cash. You don't have to worry because when you the process where I bought Bitcoin, the price goes up. That same process could happen when you sell Bitcoin. The price can go down.
So this is actually one of the services we offer at Bitcoin Well Infinite.
We enable you to buy any amount of Bitcoin at basically whatever the current price is without any price slippage.
So if Anna was working for Bitcoin Well Infinite, I would call her up.
She would source this Bitcoin for me, and then I would make my purchase through her.
It doesn't affect the order books.
So interesting.
Yeah, it's almost like Bitcoin well would just kind of help take a big buyer and get them some Bitcoin straight through where you're not really kind of sending any price information to the marketplace that would be like, oh my gosh, like they're driving the price up.
You just kind of, it's almost like peer to peer, but there's like a little dude in the middle who kind of helps make it happen.
Basically an alleyway buy.
Yeah, but like a tiny, with a little person in between.
yeah like with with like lots of like safety rails sure sure sure in place to make sure that
it's all good to go okay yeah okay so um you know you so did that answer your question first it did
yeah that's helpful because i i couldn't i didn't really know that you could do that i mean i mean
i'm like dollar cost averaging like a small amount of bitcoin yeah on an exchange right yeah we're
We're just normal people.
We're normies out here just trying to save a buck.
But I mean, that's what's nice about Bitcoin
is that we can save and build up almost like an asset
without it needing to be a second home
that we somehow find a tenant for
or managing some kind of stock portfolio.
I'm not really an investor.
I'm not really a spender.
I am a saver and Bitcoin allows me to save.
Now, Conrad, his point there too earlier in the conversation was, hey, I'm not so sure if everyone needs Bitcoin equally.
You know, if you're very rich and you can take all of your government tokens and use it to buy assets that you can then borrow money against and never really have to sell because you've got stock in Amazon or you got some nice land maybe.
you know not to hit too close to home maybe this nice land is you know it's in one of the
neighboring states or it's not i don't know but it's very real you know those folks can kind of
take advantage of the current system and conrad called them elites and it's kind of interesting
because bitcoiners those of us who need bitcoin maybe more than others you know if we were to kind
of like rise up we would be asking for a fairer world like a lot of times in like revolutionary
moments you have an unbalanced system where a couple of people are rich maybe for good reasons
maybe for bad reasons but a lot of people are just like dude we're we're farming land and we're
starving like you know what there's more of us and more of you like get out of here and they kind of
ultimately end up making a system that tries to prefer them over these guys. I feel like when
Bitcoiners are trying to talk about change, we're literally attempting to make it more fair for
everyone. Like we're not really trying to create an advantage for ourselves. So do you agree with
Conrad that some people may need Bitcoin more than others or is Bitcoin for everyone?
I mean, I think Bitcoin is for everyone, but I think I think I understand what you're saying,
Conrad is that it can, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, it impacts people differently.
Like if you, if you are the Mitchell Mailer's example, if you are Mitchell Mailer and you are,
it's easier for you to save in smaller chunks or to buy smaller chunks of, of Bitcoin. Like
you don't have to buy a full Bitcoin to, to start saving in an ice cube that's not melting.
or like have a potential future for you for decisions that you don't even know you have to make.
But I think the gap that I see in your, in your like Mitchell Mailer explanation is
the people who get Bitcoin and the people who don't get Bitcoin, whether it's people who get
assets and don't get assets, like what's their entrance point to like close that education gap
or that knowledge gap?
Because I mean, is it the fact that the system is rigged?
Is it that like our money's not doing what we think it's doing?
Because I'm sitting here and if I have a savings account,
my dollar value is still staying the same.
But if I'm saving in Bitcoin, it's dropped like 46% since I had that savings.
And so like I can't really access it readily.
but like i'm telling myself that this is like five years in the future me um is going to be
so grateful that i just like stuck it out yeah 10 years in the future me will be like dang
yo dang yeah girl was it like she was it but we can't go that far i can't go to 10 near me
well i mean to conrad's point though at one point he said hey you know if you look at past dips
all the way zoomed out it's like nothing it's nothing and i i i always like in 2024 i was like
man it would have been so cool to have enough conviction for like bitcoin to run up to 31 bucks
and back down to like two bucks and if you're like nah dude i'm hanging on to my bitcoin at two
you would be the freaking man right now I feel like when you don have commas involved in your numbers it a little bit easier to have conviction Uh uh Well and yeah like I started off like fantasizing about the maximum amount of richness occurring in my life
thanks to like conviction early in Bitcoin.
But my next point is, as you track out those dips, you know, the next dip where maybe it went up to a couple hundred bucks
and then down to like a hundred bucks and was there for a while, you know, but I guess the one
that I'm really familiar with is in 2017, where maybe it ran all the way up to 20 or $21,000.
And then it got all the way back down to like 3000. And if in that moment, you're like, dude,
I'm not only am I hanging on at 3000, I'm going to get more. You'd be the man today. The next one,
if it, when it went up to like almost 70 and back down to whatever 20 there, you would be the man as
well so it must be true that if we hang on to our bitcoin in the high 60s as it's come down from 125
plus five years from now 10 years from now 15 years they'll be like wow did you really hang on
and buy more when it was when it dipped into the 60s i'm like i sure did i i wrote this one tweet
uh a few years ago and i was like breaking news from the future bitcoin crashes down 400k everyone
questions whether Bitcoin is dead. And I'm like, that's how it feels every dip. Like if you guys
like throw yourselves in time in 2018, when Bitcoin's price was around $3,000 and you're like,
Bitcoin's dipped to 70K and you're like, what? That's like way higher than we've ever seen.
So I think, yeah, I think there's definitely the more kind of time exposure you have to Bitcoin,
less sensitive you are to price fluctuations. To touch down on the previous comments I was making,
um yeah i mean i think on some level i know that this might be a bit controversial but like
bitcoin was invented because the banks were fraudulent the government was billing them out
like the people that benefit most in that situation are already kind of leveraging a
like a uh an unfair system to their advantage um which is fine like you know like do the best
everyone should do the best they can but those people have done so well that like when what my
argument is that when everything falls they're not going to struggle to feed their kids but when
the people that don't want any assets when when ai if ai replaces their jobs if everyone's stuck
on universal basic income from some cbdc that's like losing value in same rates which could happen
the future like those are the people that need bitcoin the most um if you ever read the book
like how money dies it's like the middle class upper middle class people thought they were
totally fine with all these financial assets and then they're like on the streets like begging for
bread. You don't want that. I don't want that for anybody. And I think Bitcoin will genuinely help
protect people from that kind of situation, the same way that the US dollar did in the 30s in
Germany and Austria, or the 20s in Germany, Austria, and any kind of hard gold backed money
at that time. Basically, why I think gold backed money in like 1920s, Germany or Austria did for
preserving value, I think Bitcoin will do in the West. And I think the reason for that is,
is because we're in this fiat system where there's war again.
And war is like good for the fiat system
because it forces you to keep spending.
It keeps forcing you to grind up your GDP
through any kind of spending.
And also, if you don't have a limit on missiles,
then you could spend more missiles
to further control the economy
to further kind of perpetuate your fiat system,
which is obviously what's been happening.
You know, I don't need to get too into, you know,
motives for a mass armed conflict. But there are a lot of patterns that indicate that this is likely
to kind of perpetuate the fiat system rather than any other claimed goals. And I think that's
evidenced by the fact that the United States moved away from the gold system to make more war.
Like this happened towards the end of the Vietnam era when Vietnam was bankrupting the United States.
Nixon moved off the gold standard completely. And the United States has basically been at war ever
since. Not that they weren't at work before that, but they were depleting a lot of their gold
reserves and it moved just to full fiat since. The WTF happened in 1971. A lot of these charts,
you can start to see take off from there. As we move to full fiat, it changes the incentives for
the entire economy. It's one of the reasons why wealth has become stagnant. Incomes have not
rised with asset prices. The people that own all the assets, the people that own hundreds of homes,
or like, you know, like hunt, they have like eight, nine figure portfolios.
They're, they're, they're, they're pretty insulated from a massive fiat crash.
Like they'll still get hit hard, but they're not going to struggle to put food at the table.
And that was kind of more what I was talking about.
Like Bitcoin is for some people, it's for the people that have been kind of messed over
by the banks and the banking system.
And there are some people that can't afford a home because it's just too expensive.
So like if a home is like one of the historically best tools against inflation, like what's
the next best thing a home or gold both those things are very difficult and expensive to store
let alone move around um and if you have to flee you know good luck fleeing with a home or good
luck fleeing with your whole stack of gold you might be able to flee with some of the gold both
bitcoin you could flee with all the bitcoin in your head you can't have a 19 sale um an executive
order 6102 where they confiscate all the gold you know they did that about 90 years ago they can't
do that with your bitcoin if it's in self-custody they can take your real estate you know red zoning
We've had real estate seized for any kind of grand government project.
It'll be seized.
The government can do that.
But they can't take your Bitcoin.
And so that's why I say it's like it's the best life preserver, the best lifeboat for the lower classes, because it's one of the few assets that you can buy $10 worth or $20 worth at a time, go directly into self-cust.
You can't like self-custody $10 worth of stock at a time.
You can't even self-custody your stocks or a lot of financial assets.
So Bitcoin really is unique in that sense.
And so that's why I want to kind of just clarify why I would argue some people need it more.
It's kind of like a little bit of a philosophical usage of the word need.
Like everyone needs Bitcoin.
Everyone's getting screwed over by money that's designed to lose value on purpose.
That's not fair.
But there are people that are more sensitive to a strong economic contraction than others.
I think Bitcoin would benefit those folks the most, even if its price kind of does fall a little bit short term.
Yeah, it's sort of like they, it is a break for some people who just can't catch a break.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I think about like somebody in Africa who lives on like a one US dollar a day.
Yeah.
If they could somehow get one US dollar into Bitcoin, not only could they control themselves,
but as Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does, like what if that dollar turns into $2?
Yeah.
And now they can live for two days.
like by setting aside one day, they can live for two days later. Or that two days flips to four
days, eight, 16, 32. And like, hey, five years ago, I set aside one day for myself. And now I can
live for a month on that, you know, and that kind of ties into, you know, another question that I
think you've kind of answered a little bit, but it is around adoption and the price of Bitcoin.
We got a lot of wealthy people in America and Canada, the United Kingdom, maybe in Australia,
as well, some in Japan and China. But most people are not rolling in dough. I mean, I know I'm not.
And I know that some individuals in like Latin America, South America, Africa are definitely not.
Bitcoin is ridiculously useful in terms of protecting yourself against all of the
messiness that goes out there in the world. Only 3% of the whole world or so has any Bitcoin.
I mean, we saw recently that the Lightning Network hit a milestone in November where over a billion
dollars in transactions were carried out on that network. Adoption continues to grow. People are
putting more miners online to try to get themselves some Bitcoin.
Like everything about Bitcoin is growing.
The use case for Bitcoin literally includes the whole world,
but we are down 50%.
What is going on?
What is going on, dude?
Is it simply because people don't know what they're looking at
or something else going on?
Well, I think it's got to be simple.
Yeah.
to what you said people don't know what they're looking at and i like one of the things i was
talking about recently as well was um the ratio of bitcoin to gold um like literally like the
like the actual price ratio of one asset to the other just kind of show how they move and if you
like if you look at this uh chart which you know i i have it up on my other monitor right now
but basically what we see is it pretty much looks like kind of like the bitcoin price because
bitcoin did a lot more volatile than gold has been um but we've kind of been in this rare situation
where gold has really been pumping in the last few months
and Bitcoin has really gone down in the last few months.
I think this shows that gold is still,
its macroeconomic play is very clear.
It's like a hedge against inflation risks,
government uncertainty, currency risk.
But Bitcoin still is just not.
Bitcoin is still seen as the new tech stock.
um but i think it just like once again it just goes down to the bitcoin just just being misunderstood
um and its usefulness that you touched down on it's pretty unparalleled like you know the folks
that are living off of you know a dollar a day in africa or any country those folks can't access
a banking system so even if they have like money they don't have an ability to store it
in a bank the bank just want no banks will service them which means their ability to participate in
the global economy is constrained, which allows, which prevents them from being able to potentially
earn more money than they could and be able to do things a little bit differently than they could.
I remember when I came to Bitcoin, that was still like one of the early promises of Bitcoin,
was that it would allow the bank to become, the unbanked to gain access to banking services.
With the Lightning Network, you can send fractions of a dollar around anywhere in the world.
So now these folks will literally have an ability to buy and store and hold Bitcoin when they previously would have to use something like livestock as their savings mechanism, which is labor intensive and has a lot of risk involved.
So like, yeah, like Bitcoin can fall down 50 percent, but like you could lose just a bunch of your chickens and then they're just gone.
And it takes you a while to recuperate that or some of your other livestock.
you can lose more than 50% of your livestock
and like a wolf gets in
or there's an adverse weather event
or something like that happens.
So it's a very labor intensive savings mechanism
that basically becomes a full-time job.
And I think especially when you're doing something
like stacking Bitcoin regularly,
you completely turn off that whole portion of labor
that you would normally be doing in investing,
researching all these stocks,
driving your financial advisor,
have him tell you what to do,
pay him lots of money so he can drive a fancy car,
just that you can maybe get 5% and like barely escape inflation or just lose to inflation over
time. Whereas Bitcoin, you can actually fully be in control, which like is a novelty in terms of
any financial asset. Like there's no other asset you can actually control and be fully in control
of it and like not just have it taken away from you. Like gold, any other asset can be easily
seized with a stroke of a pen or the wave of a gun. But like with Bitcoin, like you cannot do that.
like you can have Bitcoin in multi-set, you can store Bitcoin in your head, you can have Bitcoin
stored in your head on an untraceable manner. So you can go across jurisdictions, transfer this
money globally. It gives the holder of the asset unprecedented power. And I think this is one of
the disconnects that we've seen in the political discourse around Bitcoin. I think the right-wing
political system has embraced Bitcoin a little bit more, which I think kind of makes sense.
Bitcoin is this pristine form of private property that can be controlled by an individual, which the political right typically values political property and individuality and individual freedom.
So those kind of things make sense to be embraced by the right.
But the left also embraces a lot of things that are pro-Bitcoin.
They appreciate inclusivity and equitable financial opportunity.
And both those things are achieved through a free banking system.
like bitcoin is a free there are no account fees for bitcoin there are no um financial oversight
they'll say oh you know we don't like what you said politically so you can't do this like that's
what the banking system does currently and we've seen the banking system censor various groups over
the past recently and in all throughout history so bitcoin is kind of like i think bitcoin should
be very much embraced by the left and i think if that happened the political conversation on bitcoin
wouldn't be you know this side says it's good this side says it's bad it would more be like a um a
bipartisan kind of agreement on this is a good tool, which I think will still take time because,
like I said earlier, we are in a fiat system where everything's incentivized to perpetuate
the fiat system. So a lot of people aren't quick to say Bitcoin is good because that means
either literally they believe that or inversely it could be perceived this way that the US dollar
is bad. And if you work for the US government, you're basically working for the US dollar.
So you don't want to overly support Bitcoin unless you really think that the tide is going to shift
and you want to kind of stand on the side of new system.
But that being said, the left should embrace Bitcoin.
The principles of Bitcoin align with the left's principles
around financial inclusion and equitable financial opportunity for everybody.
And that is what Bitcoin offers.
Bitcoin is for people on the left.
Bitcoin is for people on the right.
Bitcoin is for people.
They are up top.
People is for people down low.
Bitcoin is for people that are around the side
How many prepositional phrases are you going to do?
You know, Bitcoin is for people that are, you know, up underneath
And it's not that Bitcoin isn't for people at the top
Like, I would argue, like, maybe it's more for the people kind of lower at the bottom
But it's the people at the top that are utilizing Bitcoin right now the most
The most, like, so much Bitcoin is being bought by, you know, in the ETFs
in these treasury companies, which is good. Those companies will have some sort of insurance to be
able to operate in the future. But individuals need the insurance to be able to operate in the
future too. And I think the individuals, there's a disconnect lately between individuals and the
corporate, I just call them the financial power dogs, right? The big companies, the rich
individuals those companies are I feel like disproportionately using and benefiting from Bitcoin currently than the everyday joe schmose which i think are a little bit behind on bitcoin in the last few years and i think even the nfts that we saw kind of going through recently i
mentioned that that kind of penetrated the social consciousness of the the younger generations you
know like i had people that tried to pitch on bitcoin texting me about what nfts to buy and i'm
like don't buy any nfts buy bitcoin but they were they were persuaded to buying nfts and they got
burned by it and they lumped Bitcoin into the NFT conversation. But the TriedFi people that are
buying Bitcoin on their Bitcoin treasuries or they're buying Bitcoin ETFs, they don't have that
association. So that's one of the things I would like to see fixed is having the middle classes
and the left better understand Bitcoin because then everyone is at the same table about, hey,
this is a good money for everybody. This is going to be good for our future. We don't need to waste
money on on bombs and whatnot we can invest in our future through bitcoin and through investing
in ourselves yeah i the word that comes to mind is opportunity i think that bitcoin increases the
opportunity for everyone specifically those who have not really had the opportunity or the system
is set up in a way that it makes opportunity harder to find um and we've maybe had um rules
regulations and laws that have held back people from being able to like define themselves before
the government does it for them. Um, and I mean, you can go down the road of occupational licensing,
you can go, and I think Bitcoin really speaks to the opportunity for people to, to get out ahead
or to have, to, to try to succeed. And I think that's really all anybody wants is an opportunity
to try um and so i i like i i see what you're saying and i agree completely i just don't know
what what's going to be the thing that like sparks it in their heads of like oh so maybe
it's like if we're on this titanic and we're going to hit an iceberg i think you first have
to realize you're on the titanic and then you have to realize you're heading toward an iceberg
before you even look think about a life raft like i think they're totally there are so many people
who don't even know that we're on the titanic i mean i worked in policy for 12 years and i
i was like there's something that's not clicking i don't know what it is i can't figure it out but
i think i didn't really fully understand i was on the titanic uh-huh uh-huh yeah so well said um
I think that might be why some folks in like the more financial elite circles are understanding Bitcoin better because they know that there's a Titanic.
They might not know exactly the mechanism of it.
And I would argue that there was a narrow window where I think most folks knew that they were on a Titanic.
And I would say this was around COVID, during COVID 2020.
Yes, absolutely.
When everyone was in between everyone getting laid off from work forcefully and the sports being turned on, like back home.
When their sports were off, you know, they had, what was it?
We had no bread.
We had no circuses.
So we started to question what the Kings were doing.
And then everyone was starting to get a little, you know, like, I think that, why is there,
why is, why, why is, why are we getting mailed money?
Where does money come from?
I didn't work for it.
And people were asking these questions.
I don't think anybody really questioned that one.
I think we were all like, we're like, stemmy chicks.
I mean, I love me some free money, but the, I think the impact of the free money, we were
not really told what it was. Um, and that's also 2020 was a huge election for millennials.
It's when millennials actually decided to engage in the political process in a way that they hadn't
before. And I mean, it showed up in a whole bunch of protests. It showed up in, um, a lot of like
questioning. We also had to, like, it was just, that was a big, that was a big year for a lot of
like clicking and coming online of realizing, Hey, um, one, the whole deciding or being told
what is essential and non-essential work. That was a whole trippy thing of like, okay, so you can
tell me I can't go to work and I can't even work. So how am I supposed to do anything about it?
And it was just a lot of all these things of government, like putting the thumb on people in a lot of ways.
Yeah. And I think, you know, my background, my educational background is I did economics and history.
And what I always talk about was that the two curriculums, especially when you get to the historical aspect of economics, is that no one in economics is talking about history.
No one in history is talking about economics.
And I find that they're actually like they cause one another to occur.
Like you can't insulate the economics policies and situations from what's happening in history and vice versa.
So I think these questions that you're asking, everything kind of seemed overwhelming to you.
And maybe I was a little bit too close to the pie and then see that, you know, maybe I'm myself and the people I'm talking to are questioning money a little bit more.
but stewart kind of touched on this at the beginning of the show where he said um you know
we we uh i think you're gonna be maybe referencing the french revolution where you know everyone was
poor everyone was starving and then they kind of overthrew their kings and try to create a better
system that was more equitable for everybody um i would argue that didn't just happen at a random
point in time i think it was because they were starving and that's when they started to really
ask these questions there wasn't enough bread and circuses so to say and i think when that shut down
in 2020, I would argue, and this could be my own biases as an economist, but I think the protests
that we saw were because there wasn't enough bread, because people weren't working, because
people weren't distracted. I think it was a Black Lives Matter protest, but then there were a lot
of retaliatory protests as well. And while I think there's a lot of arguments to be made about racial
inequality in policy and enforcement, I think what it really came down to was anything that
we're just waiting for the straw to break the camel's back.
And then everyone's going to get onto the streets because people were,
people were PO'd and people were upset.
They knew something was wrong and everyone had these different,
this is wrong with the system. This is wrong with the system.
They didn't know what it was. And as a big corner,
I would say this is just, they were mad at the fiat system crumbling.
The fiat system is really,
really fragile when you can't keep having people working because there's so
much debt. It's a massive debt driven economy.
And if everyone isn't working, like the debt still needs to be paid.
So then you have this huge burden that everyone is all of a sudden really
aware of um maybe less so that they're aware of when they're tuning into sports at 7 p.m every
night and they're you know their paycheck is steadily rolling in um so and they're gambling
on the sports they're like now look if this guy gets the ball next and comes across and shoots
the three plus it bounces off and this other guy catches it and then he goes up and dunks it i'm
gonna get 20x on my bed i'm like dude but those people will have money for bitcoin yeah it's so
distracting. It's so distracting. Well, what I like about today's conversation, Conrad, is that
Bitcoin is still the best option for every single individual out there, whether they know it or not.
Yeah. We should continue stacking Satoshis, continue increasing our conviction and, you know,
wake up every day and say, you know what, I'm getting some Satoshis for half off right now.
So let's take a pause there for a moment and have some Ithaca hummus.
Our Buy the Dip Moment sponsor, Ithaca hummus, reminding us to buy.
Buy the dip.
Buy that dip.
Just do it.
Buy it.
Buy the hummus dip.
Buy the Bitcoin dip.
So Conrad, today we are going to be tasting the lemon garlic flavor of hummus.
Yum.
I'm going to come in here for this fact.
We are going to act as your taste buds in the studio for today's bite.
Cheers.
The crunches sound like a TV commercial.
Sounds so good.
Yum.
We've changed a lot of things in our show, but the ASMR crunch will last forever.
We're going to start a separate channel where we just ASMR, eat hummus.
We'll probably get a million subscribers like that, dude.
Some people do that.
Some people's social media niche and success is to me shocking.
I know.
Dude, we've been putting out the greatest Bitcoin content for 15 months now.
I found a lady online.
All she does is pretend to be asleep.
is just 300,000 subscribers, dude.
Anyways, now, Conrad,
we did this last time with you.
We know that when we start talking about Bitcoin,
there's so much to it,
we'll never fit it into a single chat about that.
So we do ask each of our guests
if they'd be willing to come back on in nine months
to give us an update on their Bitcoin baby.
This would be your Bitcoin toddler.
And by the way, I put your transcript into Chappie
to get her thoughts on it.
She's like, we should see what it's like
for him now that he's a new dad like what are you talking about chappy it's like he's he's you know
you said you know come back on for your bitcoin baby update i'm like chappy that's like just a
playful way to say see you in nine months he doesn't literally have a baby chaps what are you
anyways would you be willing to come back on in another nine for us yes i would i would and one
message i'd love to leave with your audience as well is you we talk about buying bitcoin we talk
about how is this life raft and it's like this money that nobody can take from you and i think
the caveat that like you have to be in self-custody of your bitcoin what self-custody means that you
keep your bitcoin on a wall that only you control this could look like and like something like this
is a wall that only you control and then that way you're actually fully in control your bitcoin
you're not leaving it on a bank you're not leaving on an exchange where it could get lost and get
stolen it gets seized any of these three things have happened in the past and could happen again
but if you buy your bitcoin through a place like bitcoin well where we automatically deliver your
Bitcoin to self-custody, you can ensure that your Bitcoin is going to be waiting for you there in
the future when you need it most. Let's go. Now, we're going to hit you with a new little segment
here called Give Us Your Two Sats. I'll let A.B. let you know what's going on here.
Yeah. So since you are a Bitcoiner and an experienced Bitcoiner, we would like you to
share your two sats with our brand new Bitcoiners in the audience of what you think is going to
happen in the next nine months? Gosh, nine months. What a stable macro and political
environment we have to predict in. I think it's going to be a time where, again, people are going
to start questioning how the system works. I think we're going to start to see maybe oil prices get
more expensive, which could put some more pressure on people. And I think that pressure will cause
people to look inwards, look into the system, try to understand why are things happening the way that
they are happening. And I think ultimately, that will lead to people questioning the fiat standard,
the fiat system that we live in. And I think we'll see a couple of things happen. Gold will probably
continue to increase. Bitcoin, I hope and expect will become more understood, and we'll start to
have higher, higher prices. I wrote about recently how every Bitcoin bear market gets shorter than
the previous bear market and assuming that we are in a bear market which given our drawdown time
frame it looks like we are and gosh i don't remember the exact days that i had approximated
but it was from the high i predicted that bitcoin was going to be about 440 days until a new all-time
high approximately if we keep shortening our bear length of the previous cycle so that kind of
actually lines with my bitcoin baby because i thought by year end we could be looking at a new
all-time high. Yeah.
Year-end is when we'll be coming in from a Bitcoin baby.
So it'll be interesting to see where that toddler, you know,
nine months from now where Bitcoin will be. But yeah,
I would stand by my previous assessment of the bear markets keep getting
shorter. If this one gets shorter again,
we could be at an all-time high by the end of the year. And if, you know,
I think that's very possible because, you know,
the fiat system cannot afford for asset prices to fall.
They have to continuously rise to make up for the fact we have continuous
inflation and to help pay for the growing debt system. The assets just have to keep rising. So
Bitcoin, I think we'll get lumped into that. And I think we'll become better understood,
which will help it lead that race. Let's go. Yeah, that's awesome.
So Bitcoinwell.com slash sat chats. If you want to stack some sats directly into self-custody in
Canada and here in America, where can we spend more time with you, Conrad online?
So a great place to hear more from me is if you're a Bitcoin Wall customer, I create weekly newsletters on Bitcoin, kind of like talking about the market that we've been talking today.
Every Thursday morning, you're going to get an email from me, from Conrad, talking about what I'm seeing in the market.
I talk about updates in the market.
And then one thing that I'm thinking about, it's kind of like my unique observation for the week.
Last week, it was the shortening time length of the bear cycles.
the previous week it was the gold and bitcoin ratio it kind of suggests that gold is gonna i mean
bitcoin's gonna be kind of bouncing back hard relative to gold and tried by assets so um yeah
stay tuned for me there um if you sign up with um the bitcoinwell.com slash sat chats link you
automatically subscribe to those emails and you can hear more from me uh another place to hear more
is at bitcoinwell on x or twitter it's another great place to get more updates from me and
everything great happening at Bitcoin. Well, yeah, boy. Awesome. All right. All right. So
billionaires, if you have enjoyed today's show, click the subscribe button at your chance to win
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until next time
Could be yours.