I do think that we are underestimating the power of culture, you know, winning the day when it comes to Bitcoin.
I think we lose all of that if it's just about number go up.
I hope that the U.S. is able to tack back a little bit and, you know, respect, you know, constitutional rights for privacy,
because that's how you know the most about somebody is by figuring out what they spend their money on.
It's going to be really hard. I think that that's the final boss.
These programs are woefully inefficient. The cartels still have big banks banking them. It's ridiculous.
Bitcoin is absolutely ripping and in every bull market there's always a new wave of investors
and with it a flood of new companies, new products and new promises.
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Cheers!
Welcome to PubKey.
Thank you man.
My name's Thomas.
How are you doing?
Your name's Thomas.
Yeah.
The proprietor of this joint.
Yes.
Do you want me to turn this off or do you want the background music on?
We should definitely turn it off.
I'll turn it off.
Yeah, thank you.
I like the really old school radio, though.
It's good.
Yeah.
You've been quoted on this show more than anyone else, I think, at this point.
Really?
At least five times.
It's my favorite quote in Bitcoin, which is,
we're all going to be rich and depressed because the project failed.
Well, you want to be on a boat if that's the case.
Tell me.
It's better than being poor and depressed, I suppose.
That's true.
That's very true.
What do you mean?
Explain the point.
so um it's funny i've gotten i've had a lot of people were talking about that in oslo um during
the uh the freedom forum um that came up when we were having uh just some beers and peter was there
so that was i think you me peter um jamie mcavity and marty bentz yep in austin yeah it was in no
it was in fort worth fort worth yeah um and i forget exactly what we were talking about i think
it was like ordinals, you know, mempools. It was a mining show, I think. But yeah, I kind of threw
like a stink bomb into the conversation and said, do you think that, you know, the price of Bitcoin
continues to just rip with like ETFs and things like that. But the project, the underpinnings of
the project and the promise and the potential fail. What percentage likelihood do you think
that is? I think very high. I agree. This is one of my like biggest concerns about Bitcoin is that
is not really being used as freedom money by many people anymore.
No, there are edge cases.
I think HRF does a really good job highlighting cases
where this does make a lot of sense as freedom money.
And I think the underlying principles are definitely still there.
But particularly around some of the core debate that we're seeing,
and then also just diving into the history of the internet
and what happens with IP
and removing some privacy preserving features very early on.
You see some of that stuff being reflected in, you know,
history sort of rhyming with Bitcoin.
And it's also the use cases, right?
Number go up is great.
That's a marketing thing for the most part.
And you hope that people that benefit from the number go up,
reinvest and really help drive some of the founding principles
that were very important in the early days
when you had like the cypherpunks into the libertarian
cohorts in the early days, focusing on being your own bank and self-sovereignty and privacy
preserving technologies. We're just not there for it right now, it seems like. With a lot of
the Bitcoin treasuries, the public Bitcoin mining companies, the ETFs, number go up is definitely,
I think, getting too much of the airtime. And it makes sense. Everybody likes making money.
Everyone likes being right about it as well with an investment thesis and Bitcoiners that, you know, have poured a lot of time and energy into this thing for, you know, five or 10 years.
There's also fatigue that sets in.
Like it's one catastrophe after another, whether it's a New York Times article or it's a fork war or something like that.
A pretend debate.
Yeah.
I mean, it's rough.
It can be exhausting.
So I think a lot of those people that were some of the real champions of the self-sovereignty side of things for Bitcoin are either burned out or they've moved on to other things.
Each new class comes with pluses and minuses.
I don't know.
You're kind of like the old man on the porch, like yelling at the kids.
Kids don't get it these days.
And that's just going to happen with any new technology.
You have different cultures and different communities.
I half agree with Shinobi that Bitcoin culture doesn't exist.
I think it does exist.
It's just very fractured, and it comes from lots of different perspectives.
There's not one homogeneous Bitcoin culture or community.
But the older generations seem to care about these things a lot more than the new generations.
And you also have state-level attacks.
You have regulatory attacks, AML, KYC, the attack on Samurai, Tornado Cash, which I guess
is Bitcoin adjacent.
And I'm blanking on the other one.
That was a big one.
Wasabi?
Yeah, there's Wasabi.
There was the mixer, BTC Fog.
Roman, I think, is still sort of in trial limbo.
But we'll see how it plays out.
Well, he got convicted, I think.
Yeah, I think so.
And now he's waiting for appeal.
Yes.
It's funny that you say every new class comes with its trade-offs.
So if you go back to, I don't know what you'd call the 2017 class,
because everyone there was the ICO crew who then ended up becoming Bitcoiners.
Yeah, but that was the start of the real Bitcoin toxic maxi crew as well.
True, in response to all the ICO bullshit.
Yeah, that drove a real hardening of the Bitcoin community in a way as well.
They had been in it long enough.
They were paying attention to the block size wars,
which ultimately came down to a social vector
that won that day and an economic vector.
But that was a strong hardening.
And then in 2020, you had the COVID class.
I feel that's almost like the digital gold class.
Yes, I think so.
So I don't know who the first person to really say this was,
but I think VJ Boyer Party did a good,
like he was kind of the big instrumental part
of that sort of narrative with bullish case for Bitcoin.
And I was actually having this conversation with him.
And I feel like I understand why he says that.
And I love Vijay, so I'm not having a go here.
But I feel like that narrative is sometimes misleading
and potentially like undersells what Bitcoin truly is.
It's almost like being like a plane is a flying horse.
Like it does have the properties of gold
and it is better than gold in a lot of ways,
but like it's not all it can do.
And I feel like that has kind of led to this narrative
where Bitcoin's only a store of value.
The reason it's better than gold
is you don't have to chip some off to buy a beer, right?
You don't have to shave it at the bar.
Like, you know, it's cross-border,
it's instantaneous, it has all the properties of modern money with the properties of gold over the
years. So it does leave the second bid out too frequently when people sell it to other people
like gold. And Novogratz has been doing this for a long time. I think Paul Tudor Jones has been
doing this for a long time. We have a lot of gold bugs. I think Trace Mayer started with a gold blog
and then discovered Bitcoin and saw that it was superior technology. But they leave out the
monetary aspects of gold when they're typically talking about it just as a sort of value.
Yeah, I totally agree.
But then, like, what is the new class?
I don't think we really have one.
I think the new class is the microstrategy class.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's the sailor stance.
Yeah.
You know, people that are sort of championing these Bitcoin treasuries.
And, you know, it does make sense, especially given the geopolitical backdrop, inflation,
you know, the macro picture that we're looking at.
I understand why these companies are doing these things, but I haven't seen a lot of
these companies orange pilling people, right? How many people are running a node or even have a
hardware wallet after getting into it through MicroStrategy? It kind of has some like Wall
Street bets vibes to it, you know, like, you know, GameStop and AMC. And this system's wrong. And,
you know, these players are going to be successful in the system because it's wrong.
We'll see how all the treasuries deal with short sellers and things like that. But, you know,
it'll be an interesting battle but they're not really diving into the like core tenants of what
got bitcoin to the point where it's interesting for the companies yeah um you know to sailor's
credit micro strategy strategies credit you know they hosted um op return uh will foxley's conference
with with uh block space okay um so that was a lot of core developers that was a lot of developers
you know a lot of arguments about you know layer two and things like that um which was good
But it wasn't that public-facing, right?
It sort of like was an internal conversation
that had some publicity through BlockSpace,
which I think they did a fantastic job.
But, you know, I haven't seen the same push
from a lot of other interested parties
pursuing these Bitcoin treasuries
and paper Bitcoin or whatever you want to call it.
Yeah, and it's funny because like that has,
since I got into Bitcoin, that's definitely changed.
And I think almost everyone who buys Bitcoin
for the first time will like leave it on exchange
for a period of time.
but like it was
when I was getting to Bitcoin
Trace Mayer had his thing on Jan 3rd
I can't remember what it was called
where you like
everyone got the keys off an exchange
and like he was doing that
from a trader's perspective
but still like that message
was constantly there
and then the step was literally
take Bitcoin from an exchange
onto a hardware wallet
and then maybe run a node
but like now
are you really going to
sell MicroStrategy
have a tax hit
buy Bitcoin
then buy a hardware wallet
put Bitcoin in a hardware wallet
like the steps have been
so much removed
that like I don't know
if people who are buying MicroStrategy today are really Bitcoiners,
and maybe they'll never be Bitcoiners?
It looks like the GBTC trade, right, with the premium and the discount.
It's a good trade for a lot of folks with the MNAP premium.
So I think that that makes sense.
I also think that a lot of these trades are the product of financial friction,
and you can exploit that dislocation for a certain period of time.
Trades like this do collapse over a long enough period of time.
I don't know if that's 10 years or 10 months.
But, you know, I think that that trade does collapse at a certain point.
And you're not left with the Bitcoin.
You could almost make the case that there's a linear path for an ETF redemption in kind
that could be more beneficial to Bitcoiners, you know, than these plays, you know,
continuing to gobble up lots and lots of Bitcoin.
We have a Bitcoin ETF in Australia that's in kind redemption.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, that's great.
I think it was the first one in the world.
Have you used it?
No, I'm not an ETF guy.
Yeah.
But for a tax advantage reason, if I had one, I would use it.
So when I was at Fidelity, one of the things that I, they were very proud of an internal, I guess, like program or product that they offered where they, you could get physical delivery of gold.
So I wanted to look into that to see if it was something that like the Bitcoin incubator could draft off of and like model, you know, it was just a buy and hold wallet in the early days when I was there.
But trying to figure out if we could, you know, mirror the product that they had for gold delivery.
So I ended up researching that for a while, and it was so insanely complicated.
You still needed a receiver bank, and you had to pick it up,
and armored cars, and all these things.
But you don't need any of that with Bitcoin.
Do you think they will do this with Bitcoin?
I think it's possible.
I think that Lummis has been talking about this.
There are other folks as well.
I think Hester Peirce, she was here a couple of weeks ago.
It came up during that talk.
We haven't released that yet, but that was with Ross Stevens.
Oh, nice.
That was a great talk.
So that came up as like one of the next big things that they want to discuss.
It makes sense.
I mean, it's a bearer asset, right?
It's a commodity asset.
It sits in the ETF.
You should be able to take it in kind.
It's pretty easy to do.
You can even have certain mechanisms, right, where it has to go to an exchange first.
And then from the exchange, you can withdraw it.
That gets a bit cumbersome and clunky.
Why would you need that for like KYC reasons?
Yeah, I think that that's how BlackRock would get comfortable with it, right?
They don't want I don't think that BlackRock would want to be, you know, redeeming people in kind like that.
But like if you had a partner exchange, I could see Coinbase anyway.
It's at Coinbase anyway. Yeah, precisely.
So if there was a partner exchange that was facilitating that in the KYC AML, the legal risk, regulatory compliance lawyers are never getting out of this unless we're successful in taking down the BSA.
And right now there's not a single politician in the U.S. talking about going after the BSA.
There's only a handful going after the Patriot Act.
We might be able to get, what is it, Tom Massey, the guy who's like...
Yeah, maybe.
I don't know if you get him on board.
And this also came up when Hester Peirce was here.
It is kind of curious.
The two big ones in the US that are the main structure regulations for AML and KYC
are the Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fuck them both.
For different reasons, but both of them are awful.
There are some politicians, and they're French right now.
It's not like a widely accepted, you know, use of time in Washington to go after the Patriot Act.
But nobody touches the BSA.
It's just, it's too difficult.
It's the same narratives with Bitcoin.
It doesn't matter.
Like, a bad guy might use it.
And that's, you know, enough for everybody to just give all their personal information to Coinbase or Ledger and have them get hacked.
And, you know, I still get these stupid phone calls every night.
Would there be any appetite within the government here to get rid of the Patriot Act?
Because it's so glaringly obviously evil.
There's a little bit.
The TSA came out of it.
I think it's pretty unpopular.
And it doesn't fit for the internet age.
It doesn't fit with Bitcoin.
It doesn't fit with AI and everything that's in the pipeline.
I hope that the US is able to tack back a little bit and respect constitutional rights
for privacy, particularly around, you know, anybody's finances, because that's how you know
the most about somebody is by figuring out what they spend their money on. It's going to be really
hard. I think that that's the final boss is the BSA. The Patriot Act has some fringe politicians.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't really have that much traction. But, you know, I would love to see
like Bitcoin Policy Institute or some of the other folks in D.C. that are writing about this
zero in on that issue because it leads to direct harm, right?
Like when you have your personal information tied,
especially to Bitcoin or to, you know,
other cryptocurrencies or whatever,
they're putting more people in harm's way
than they're preventing.
These programs are woefully inefficient.
The cartels still have big banks banking them.
It's ridiculous.
Well, Peter van Valkenburg wrote a huge piece,
I don't know, a year ago or something like that
on the Bank Secrecy Act.
I don't know if they ever like took that any further,
But that has, I guess, kind of started amongst these organizations.
Yeah, yeah, I hope so.
I hope they get traction.
There's a lot to do, right?
You know, we'd like some tax reform, some tax clarity, accounting principles for these
corporations.
I think we're going to see that get pushed through just because these corporations are
getting so large that they're going to be able to throw more weight around those items.
The problem with the BSA and the Patriot Act is, you know, large scale financial institutions
really like this stuff because they can spend on compliance departments. They can collect all this
information. That information is valuable and it prevents challengers. They get this regulatory
moat. So there are lots of reasons why they secretly love this stuff. What's your take on
the Genius Act that just passed? It's mostly stable coins. There's some stuff relevant to
exchanges. I didn't follow it too closely. I followed it more from the political lens. And
at what point are the Democrats going to, you know, drop the bullshit and realize that this is
a new technology. It's a tool. And from my view, the Democrats are pushing this into a partisan
issue more than the Republicans are because they won't touch it because, you know, the bad guy
likes it. And, you know, the Republicans are kind of involved. So, you know, they want to look at
Bitcoin like, you know, it's like calling a hammer Republican. And this is going to persist as long
as the Democrats allow it to.
So I looked at the,
I paid attention to the Genius Act
and its passage
more out of more interest
for how the DNC
was going to vote on this.
And they got in the way for a while.
And there's all these little negotiations
about what they want.
But, you know,
I think that they pulled it
into the partisan battle
a little bit more
than I would have liked to see them.
One of the interesting things from that was,
do you ever listen to All In?
Yeah, a little bit.
I mean, I kind of hate it,
but I listen every week.
It's like Sex and the City for guys.
Yeah, exactly.
But I was listening to it this week,
and David Sachs came out and said like someone asked him why they can share the interest that they get from the T and stuff Yeah And David Sachs came out and like explicitly said basically bankers said no which is super interesting
Because like they're obviously seeing this as a threat to the banking system, which it kind of is.
But like where do you think stable coins fit on this like freedom money aspect?
I think that's a really, like it's quite a tricky question because I get why you want to push Bitcoin to the people in like the global south,
but also Tether is super fucking useful for them.
Yeah. I mean, it's freedom money for people that are not in America, I suppose. It's a,
I don't know, it has to be on like a comparative scale. So I think it's really beneficial for
people in the global South to have access to dollars. They don't have the volatility. Dollars
are a much bigger brand than Bitcoin. Bitcoin's a big brand, but it's the dollar. So the proliferation
of that is extremely beneficial to the US on like a geopolitical stage. And it's useful,
useful to individuals more useful than Bitcoin for individuals that are just trying to hold on to it.
Like they don't really have the means to invest in something like Bitcoin, take the volatility and
hold it for long periods of time. So it makes sense. I wouldn't say that it's free to money for
Americans. I think it's more of a tool to propagate the value of the dollar globally,
particularly in high inflationary periods.
That's a pretty good sinkhole to have.
Yeah.
So that'll continue, I think, at a pretty rapid clip.
I really like Paolo's thoughts on the matter.
He doesn't think Tether's going to be around forever.
Like, you know, he thinks it's sort of-
Has he said that?
I think so.
I think that it was him or it might have been somebody else.
But, you know, I think that it collapses to Bitcoin eventually.
Yeah.
Maybe it was somebody else.
I'm pretty sure it was Powell.
I could believe it was him.
I know people can have their criticisms about him,
but I think he's a Bitcoiner.
Yeah, for sure.
It's a Bitcoin company.
I mean, they're moving aggressively.
They have a lot of Bitcoin.
It's the Bifinex team, right?
I-Finex.
I think that they were here so early
in such a really, really big way
that they certainly understand it.
Oh, for sure.
But the utility, it's the most profitable company
in human history on a per employee basis.
So things are working,
and I think that you do that trade until it collapses.
Do you think they totally stumbled into that as a business model?
No, I think they're really smart guys.
I think that it got much bigger than they were expecting, a lot faster.
But I think that they understood the utility.
When did Tether start?
Was it like 2016, 2017?
It was 15 or 16.
When I first got into Bitcoin, the narrative of that was always like inter-exchange settlement.
Because it's when Bitcoin fees were crazy high.
and people were like moving Bitcoin to shit coins
to another exchange to put it back in,
like whatever.
I think what it had to do with
was a lot of the jurisdictional arbitrage.
So if Bitcoin exchanges were showing,
you know, massively dislocated rates,
you had, I don't think it was Sam
and the Kim Cheap Premium,
but I think it was attacking stuff like that.
Yeah, right.
Because I do also remember,
I think it was like some Korean exchange
had a crazy Bitcoin exchange rate at the time.
Yeah, always way more expensive.
And the problem with that,
you couldn't exploit that arbitrage
efficiently using traditional banking rails.
Because you have to wait for a wire.
Yeah.
That's why there was that massive dislocation.
It actually had to do with the correspondent banking network.
But now it's to the point where I forget the number.
Jack said it when we were at BPI last time,
but the number of people that are onboarding is wild.
Like Tether.
Tether.
I'm not surprised.
I'm pretty sure he said it was like,
I might have this wrong.
I'll check before I put the show out.
But like 250,000 people a week or something ridiculous like that.
That's insane.
It's insane.
Yeah, we got to check that math.
I don't know.
there might be more humans. I'm pretty sure that was right. More customers than humans on the
planet. Otherwise, this is all getting cut out. I want to go back to like the very start of this
conversation. You said you were in Oslo while we were all in Vegas. Like, I think those two
conferences couldn't be more different. Yeah. What was it like? Because that's like a real
freedom money conference. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what Alex and the HRF team have put together here
is incredible. For a really long time, Bitcoin didn't have that much to do with HRF. It was
the activists. And then Bitcoin starts to slowly creep in as a tool that helps them, you know,
do their work, prioritizing safety and efficiency and privacy and all these things and authoritarian
governments. It's just a really elegant fit with the work that a lot of the activists are doing.
So the evolution of that over the years to the point where, you know, Alex and his team are
getting some of the top core developers, top NOSTER developers in the world together with
activists so that they can build their products with them in mind is really fascinating. So they
did a NOSTER event and everybody was really hyped up about NOSTER at the time. And an activist
kicks off with a brief talk about it's not ready for game time, right? Like for prime time.
there are security holes in NOSTER that need to be addressed if we're going to tell somebody that
this tool can be trusted in a very high stakes situation. Are these things like privacy and
stuff like that? Yeah, privacy, you know, account access, losing your private key. NOSTER is super
cool, but it's way too early. It's too clunky, particularly when the stakes are as high as they
are for a lot of these activists. That is a sobering talk. And it was amazing that it gets
delivered to the activists and to the developers at the same time, because that's what they ended
up talking about. Like, how do I like, what are the bugs here? What are the features that you need
to see to actually put it to a point where this is safer to use than signal safer to use than,
you know, X or Twitter or whatever? Yeah. So that's real progress. So I love what HRF is doing.
We saw a lot of that. The Bitcoin cohort for the Oslo Freedom Forum is bigger every single year.
You know, there was a beefsteak this year. There wasn't one in Vegas. There wasn't one in Vegas.
First time ever.
Damn.
I know.
I'm sorry.
It was a really good one too.
Was it?
Yeah.
He got a whole cow.
Oh shit.
Yeah.
It was awesome.
Did he finish it?
I don't know.
It was a cow.
It was a little cow.
It wasn't like a baby cow.
It wasn't veal.
But I don't think it was like a full blown adult cow.
So with Noster, are you pretty bearish on it for now then?
I'm not bearish on it for now.
It's going to take some time for it to hopefully realize its potential.
I think it's great.
But it's like what we were talking about before.
One of the biggest barriers for people adopting Bitcoin was private key management
and actually interacting with the protocol itself.
Nostar feels a lot like early Bitcoin.
So if we're going to get something like that to the point where it's our digital identity
and our digital representation of your voice and yourself online,
that's pretty fucking valuable, right?
The stakes are almost higher than it is with Bitcoin
because you can have multiple wallets and you can spread them out
and there's hardware wallets and, you know, the attack surface is much smaller.
But it still comes down to that private key.
Splitting it up in a way that you would split up, let's say, a Bitcoin wallet.
If I have like, you know, 20 Bitcoin wallets and 20 private keys,
then the attack surface is much more complicated for the whole thing.
But if you have one private key for your digital identity,
that gets a little scary.
So I think that it's in the early phases,
and people have been talking about this
and working on issues like this and many more for a while.
Some of the other stuff are just features, right?
The Nostro ecosystem is still quite small.
They're mostly Bitcoiners.
We're kind of talking to each other.
Even X can feel that way.
Oh, 100%.
So like on X, you have lots of people that know absolutely nothing about Bitcoin, but
they don't engage in that conversation because that's Bitcoin Twitter.
That's what Nostra feels like right now.
So growing that tent and making it much more attractive to folks, it's really difficult.
It's a tech scaling issue.
Yeah.
It's powerful.
It's very cool.
There are some functions that work really well.
but um you know i think it's going to take you know a couple of years to to sort out if some of
the the the critical um solves can be delivered and if people give a shit i mean there's a lot
of competition i've never really been on blue sky that looks like a shit show on that i've been on
threads i checked in one time just to see like when it leaked what that pub key was going to dc
i checked in there and it was like it was like the grandpa simpson meme when he walks into the
bar and sees Bart and then walks straight back out. Did you hear the conversation I had with
Paul Stort and Gladstein recently? I have not. I want to see that one. I've seen clippies.
It was hard work. Yeah. Paul makes everything difficult. He does. I find it hard because
he's a nice guy. He is a nice guy. And I don't think he's doing it purposely. As in, I don't
think he's just attacking Bitcoin for the sake of attacking Bitcoin. I think he's got a huge chip
on his shoulder about drive chains.
Well, yeah.
He also has a company,
a VC-backed company.
Totally.
So I think there's a number of reasons he does it.
But like one of the things
that Alex was bringing up a lot
was like e-cash.
Yeah.
I really, I've used e-cash a bit,
not loads.
I really like it.
And I basically would never get bet
against anything Cali's doing
because he's a fucking badass.
I agree.
But like, how do you think
that kind of fits into the
like freedom money aspect of Bitcoin?
I think the functionality is insane.
Like, you know, Kashi, Fedimance, eCash.
I'll be honest, this is a world that I haven't dabbled with that much.
Maybe the same or a little bit less than you have.
I've played with it a bunch.
I believe that there's been some transactions,
some test transactions here at PubKey using it as well.
I will use it tonight if we get some beers.
Yeah, absolutely. That sounds great.
I'd love to see that because I haven't had enough hands-on experience with it.
I think it's fantastic.
I think Paul's dead wrong about this.
You know, Kesha's been around for…
Two years.
Two and a half years, maybe.
But even still, it was literally coded by Kali over a weekend.
This isn't a huge VC-backed company.
He's kind of done this on his own.
And it's got to an insane point very quickly.
I think he has a bunch of developers now.
I'm sure he does now.
I think the team is pretty robust.
Yeah, I'm sure that's true now.
but I know when he started, it was literally him.
I remember you're wearing your cheat code thing.
He wasn't here this year at cheat code,
but he was the year before.
And I remember on the second day,
which is meant to be like the day we just go
and have fun at the football and drink beers,
Cali was sat inside in the clubhouse on his laptop,
like tapping away.
It's like, you don't bet against something like that.
I remember that.
That's back when he was still wearing
the full like face covering.
He's still doing that though, right?
Sometimes.
I think at big conferences.
Some conferences, he'll let it all hang out.
Fair enough.
It's easier to raise money
if they can see your face.
Yeah, that's true.
He's not me.
No, he's not.
I'm kidding.
Sorry, Cali.
But like, I really like Kashir.
I like what he's doing,
but I kind of find it a hard,
and I think he would also be the first to admit this.
It's kind of a hard thing to square away
in the sense that it's like,
it is custodial.
Yeah.
Like it might be really private,
really good.
It works,
but it is like a custodial trade-off.
And like,
are we sacrificing something
to have like a freedom money future with this?
Yeah.
I think so.
Is that trade-off worthwhile?
Potentially.
I mean, some of the privacy solutions,
there were varying degrees of custodial aspects
to Wasabi and Samurai as well.
Wasabi would take fees out of your wallet
to pay for the mixing services and things like that.
That's a sliding scale of custody.
It's like a partially custodial solution in a way.
Yeah, because you were still self-custody on Wasabi.
Just when you sent it to Mix, they would take it.
Yeah, they just take some.
Yeah.
But they weren't taking it out of your wallet.
It was when you sent a transaction to Mix for Bitcoin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not like they had the ability to step in and take it.
Early on, though, some of the mix—
because I think there was volatility in the mixing fees,
depending on how much uses there was.
So it could drain wallets in the early days.
And they fixed a lot of that stuff.
It's a good product.
There's no shade at Wasabi.
But I think that the trade-offs are pretty clear.
and you still have to go through, in most cases,
most of the Bitcoin is bought through KYC, AML,
you know, compliant exchanges.
The tracking software is good enough.
You have to be pretty skilled, right?
You're talking about like a Mr. Hoddle
or somebody like that, that, you know,
has the confidence and capability
to obfuscate sort of that chain of funds.
Yeah, because it's not just doing the mixing,
it's what happens after.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And then if they're all tainted coins and they just decide that all these coins that came out of this mixer are now like tainted and commingled with, you know, XYZ bad guy that they don't like for the day.
Yeah, exactly.
So the attack vectors are things that we like, you know, poured over for years.
I think that they're still there.
I think that there's a lot less people that view that fight as something, you know, worth fighting for.
And I think a big offset of that are, you know, it's what we were talking about before.
I think that there's fatigue. And I think the number go up is like, you know, when people get tired and the numbers going up, like, you know, how incentivized are you to keep fighting for like the ideals?
And there's great people, Eric Carson, like lots of folks that are still talking about these things.
I do a little bit. But the reality is that, you know, life is hard enough.
And I think a lot of people are going to opt out and, you know, sort of simp for sailor.
Yeah, I think that's true. And like we were talking before we did this show about the orange pilling problem.
Like why do you think that exists? Because I feel like it's a new thing.
So let me just give some context. So like if we did this show and this was all about like Bitcoin treasury companies, it would do really fucking well.
And then because we're not talking about that and we're talking about like privacy and freedom money, it won't do so well.
I'll come on later and we can talk about Bitcoin treasury companies another day.
But these are the reasons that I got into Bitcoin was like,
obviously, it's really nice to get rich from something.
But like, I genuinely care about like the freedom money aspects of Bitcoin.
Why do you think we're struggling to make more people care about that?
Does it just not scale as an idea?
It's a really good question.
The intellectual curiosity has to persist for a really long time
because you can come from the marketing side.
The number go up is the best marketing department that Bitcoin has.
It's extremely effective.
To stick around for the freedom money, for the self-sovereignty, the privacy-preserving elements that could be there if you dive in requires you to dive into the technical, economic, social underpinnings of how this stuff works.
Most people just don't have the capabilities, even for one of those, to do a deep dive, right?
Like, let's say somebody really is interested in the social mechanics or the political philosophy of how Bitcoin works.
They can dive into that and not really understand the tech or the economic side and get pretty far.
But they're missing a tremendous amount of why it works and why they should care and why they should dive in.
To get somebody to, you know, really buy into something that is sort of like a lifelong, you know, exercise in being a student, like getting super heady academics with topics that you're uncomfortable with.
I was a lawyer and a history major.
when I first started looking into Bitcoin,
I spent a really long time with no background whatsoever
trying to understand as much of the technical side as possible
because that's the bedrock.
And then the economic principles that Satoshi overlaid
and the evolution of some of those principles
as it pertains to, let's say, like Bitcoin mining
and mining pools and transaction fees,
that's a really big commitment.
So it's twofold.
Do we have the right Sherpas,
the right old guard that is making that a requirement?
And do you have a receptive audience that wants to go down that path?
For every flush out of every cycle,
and we talked about this a little bit earlier with the ICO craze,
a lot of people dabbled aggressively in altcoins and ICOs.
And let's say 100 got washed out and they said,
fuck this, I'm never going back to that.
Maybe 10 of them became Bitcoiners and decided to double down.
Yeah.
And literally, I remember getting to the end of 2017.
Like, to be fair, so I first got into it in like 2016.
And then through 2017, I was just doing pure shit coining.
Yeah.
What was your favorite?
I had...
What was the worst dick kicking you sustained?
The worst dick kicking was one called Modem.
Modem?
I don't know if you remember it.
I don't even remember that one.
It was like logistics on a blockchain, bro.
I love it.
Where can I invest?
You can't anymore.
It went to zero.
It was one of you that actually went to zero.
But like the whole time I was getting more and more interested in Bitcoin.
And at least I was denominating what I was doing in Bitcoin.
I had that part at least right.
But I remember at the end of it being like,
I've told everyone I could possibly talk to over the last year about,
at the time, sorry, Ethereum, as well as like Bitcoin.
And at the end of the year, I was like, fuck, I was so wrong.
I was like, who was right?
Who was right the whole time?
Like, where's the signal?
And it was Pierre Richard.
And I remember just going back and like reading the entire Nakamoto Institute.
And that was my change.
Pierre was incredible in that era.
Yeah, he was incredible.
It was like-
Still is.
Yeah, for sure.
But it's like, who- I don't know who the people who are doing the orange pilling are now.
Like, I'm trying, but you have to show a decent amount of interest to sit down and listen to
an hour-long podcast.
How do you get that touch point with normal people?
I think, look, PubKey's trying, right?
We try to focus on maybe 60, 70% entertainment.
That's why it's in a pub.
We try to make it as comfortable and fun
and entertaining as possible And then you can kind of hide the orange pill in peanut butter like you giving a dog medicine or something Yeah You know I think Peter doing a really good job with Real Bedford as well For sure And you know both of the projects kind of bury the Bitcoin
stuff, at least on first glance. I actually think he like just sorry to interrupt, but like, I think
it's more than just Real Bedford. I think everything he's doing in Bedford is changing.
For sure. But you have to look under the hood with him, right? It's not there. There are some
Easter eggs. PubKey and Bedford are very similar in this regard. They're like Easter eggs where
Bitcoiners identify this. Bitcoiners know that that's a Bitcoin company. But if people are just
going to a football match at the park or, you know, coming in for a burger and a beer here,
and they don't have that frame of reference, it's just a nice day out, right? Like the bar's
comfortable, the games are good, and that's fantastic. But if you get into it and you look
under the hood, and it's just like, you know, what are these Easter eggs about? Like, what are
they talking about in that back room um how why why did people raise all this money from those
those those gorgeous twins uh like you know then then that's the element where curiosity is a much
better start to the conversation yeah when when a no coiner asked the first or pre-coiner asked
the first question that is a far higher quality conversation than if you know we just go out and
say like you really ought to buy some bitcoin totally like the world's going to a shit going
to shit and this is the only salvation that's an off-putting weird conversation yes right and it
in my experience it's really rare to have that conversation uh get traction but if they ask the
first question um if somebody pays with bitcoin at the bar uh you know and there's a group of
people and they're like what was that was that a bitcoin transaction and like you know then there's
there's the um has that happened all the time all the time yeah that's very cool if the room is
packed in the back and we're talking about, you know, nerd shit back there. Like, you know,
every single time we host an event, there'll be a couple of people at the bar. Maybe, you know,
it's just guys catching up or, you know, a date or, you know, somebody by themselves. They'll
pick up the beer and they'll go into the back and sit down just to see what they're talking about.
Yeah. Some of it might sound like, you know, an alien language and they don't stick around and
pay attention to it. Maybe it's interesting to them, maybe not. But like, you know, just having
that element potentially introduced somebody to something and you're in the position to maybe
strike a chord with that individual, that really helps. I don't know how many people are becoming
Bitcoiners because of the treasuries or because of what they see on CNBC or certainly not New York
Times or Wall Street Journal. They're still out there terrifying people that this is like, you
drug dealer money. We've been, I think, ineffective in advancing that element of the conversation.
I mean, you've been on Fox News.
I have.
A couple of times, right?
A couple of times.
I watched one of those-
They just wanted to talk about Trump, though.
Yeah, of course. Well, maybe Trump is the guy.
A little bit of Bitcoin, actually. That's not true. A couple of the hits, they were interested,
but one guy knew what he was talking about and was really curious.
The other guy was a little bit older.
That was my favorite one. He was the old English guy, right?
Yeah.
And he was like, you can't pay with Bitcoin, can you?
It was incredible.
Yeah.
And I fucked up the math.
I think he's like, how much is like a burger and a beer?
And I just was like, I don't know, like 10,000 sats.
And it was like a thousand dollars or something.
I don't know.
Oh, well.
I mean, no one's going to pull you up on that.
Definitely not him.
He was doing math on live television is not my forte.
It's not easy.
I refuse to do math on the podcast because I've done it before and done the exact same thing.
Yeah.
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I do want to talk about PubKey, but
we're going to bring Jerk on in a minute to talk about that.
Get him on. But before we
do, let's talk just a little bit about
New York. I mean, Jerk, you can come in for this if you want.
New York.
He looks so sad to be coming on the podcast.
I know. I make him do it all the time.
Get a beer, Jerk. He's so good at it.
Get yourself a coaster.
The first time I came to
PubKey, this table was still being made.
That was wild. That's when Peter hit Michael Sonnenstein with a two by four.
Yeah, that was a fucking great interview.
This table was like, I swear, about a foot thicker when we first used it.
Yeah, because it was still unfinished.
No, this was all jagged edges, and it still had the barrier around it.
Oh, man. They made that table up here.
You promised me it'd be finished before we got here.
We were sprinting.
I promised Thomas it'd be finished.
It was insane. We were sprinting.
But when they sanded this thing down, they put plastic wrap around the table.
Yeah.
The amount of sawdust that this threw.
So when they finally finished it and polished it down, we got up here and we're like, great.
This is an uninhabitable space now.
This is like completely fucked.
It's all right.
Many such stories.
It's a little big.
It is big.
It's a big table.
Always worried that the legs are going to collapse.
No, it's a great table.
It's not too big.
I mean, it's like half the size of the room, but it's not too big.
It's good for Beirut.
Cheers.
Who are you, Jerk?
Why are you here?
I like a little cold beverage on a hot, sticky day.
It's nice not wearing headphones.
I find it distracting.
I lock in.
My ADHD benefits from the headphones.
It feels like I'm on an airplane or something.
What, wearing the headphones does?
Yeah.
I can just have like a-
You can zone in.
I can zone in easier.
Yeah.
I'm distracted.
Yeah, but they don't look good on a bald head, so.
My podcast, no headphones.
and then you get this thing on the top of the head yeah i really do it's uh you know about that
what wearing headphones for you know you get like the podcast or divot yeah the gamers that's real
no it's definitely real is it yeah 100 what that's your little fontanelle your fontanelle
yeah your fontanelle keep your damn hands off my fontanelle what do you it's like the soft spot
for like little babies introduce stuff jack yeah uh i'm one of the pub key bros i'm one of the
Pubkey Idiots, Thomas's partner.
He came to me with this brilliant idea.
I said, no.
I said, that sounds terrible.
How did you guys know each other?
Through a mutual friend.
Okay.
And I used to have a cafe wine bar that he used to come into.
And he would come in with his little collared shirt.
It was very cute.
He had hair like Ellen DeGeneres.
But he's a nigh dick.
And he was about 50 pounds heavier than he is now.
And he was like, guys, guys, can I talk to you about Bitcoin?
lord and savior bitcoin you really should get a bitcoin atm in here and i was like dude
get your fat little friend out of here i don't want to hear anything
uh such a sweet guy i always i always think of thomas like so fondly he was such like a
such a sweet guy big smile on his face um bitcoiners are like that they're like uh what's that um
who are the guys who go like knocking around on doors jehovah's witnesses they're like jehovah's
witness, like very sweet, like Mormons kind of thing. You're like that.
It is true. Yeah. We are kind of like the Jehovah's witnesses. Yeah.
I've stopped that though. It doesn't work. It doesn't work.
Like we did the, we tried to do comedy at the hot style takeover in Vegas.
That was fucking great. I just saw just blank stares.
The only people laughing were people who work at pub.
Wait, did you do comedy as well? I was the fat guy in the beginning.
No, I know you're the fat guy, but I didn't, I didn't get,
I didn't get that to like the,
you didn't get it.
I did do like a little opening like segment.
I came out on stage.
I was like, hey, how we doing?
I guess it wasn't comedy.
There was a couple of like, you know, singers,
but they did not land.
I was just looking out at the crowd.
Like people were like, just crickets.
Yeah, that's brutal.
That was a great event though.
I've said a few times.
I think the Bitcoiners don't really know
like what to laugh at maybe.
You were there at the first one too, right?
In Nashville.
I am not funny, but this has happened many times.
What people haven't laughed at you?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the one in Nashville,
we had David Lucas from Kill Tony.
Yeah, that was rough.
I thought it was good.
I don't think people told him the right vibe.
They don't like inappropriate.
They're family people.
They're like, but these events are held at night,
you know, at bars, like at eight o'clock, you know?
Not the one in Nashville, that was in the afternoon.
And like the first thing he came out,
like there were a lot of kids sat in the front row
and he was like, you should all have been a boy.
I was like-
In Vegas too, there was a front row.
There was a kid, you know.
But I think that-
It's a family thing, Bitcoins.
The first one was good for sure, the one in Nashville.
But I think the event you guys did in Vegas
might be the best Bitcoin side event I've ever been to.
Oh, thank you.
I think it's really cool that it's like,
it's kind of getting a bit weird again.
And I'm all here for the weirdness.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah, it was like a Bitcoin talent show.
Yeah, or lack of talent show.
Just like anyone, you know,
you got a thing you want to do
if you want to read some poetry?
like, get on up here.
You got to kill time somehow.
Yeah, and Jamal is a good host.
Yeah, for sure.
He's a great host.
For sure.
He's very Vegas.
He fits in perfectly in Vegas.
For sure.
He was in his element.
I'm sad that I missed it.
He doesn't really gamble, though.
It's about the-
That's not strange.
It's about the-
It was a work event.
It's about the culture.
I lost my family.
I think culture always wins.
And I disagree with Shinobi.
And Mr. Hoddle, I think,
understands my side
and Shinobi's side on this.
But I do think that
we are underestimating
the power of culture, you know, winning the day when it comes to Bitcoin.
Yeah.
I think we lose all of that if it's just about number go up.
But highlighting, you know, there are little things.
I think if you look at Bitcoin as an industry and you did something like a fertility rate
within Bitcoin, I think that Bitcoin is probably stacked up against lawyers and like bankers.
Like, you know, there's more and more kids at every single conference I go to.
you know just there's a there's a value set and that changes internationally but like within the
u.s bitcoin uh community or whatever you want to call it there is a certain value set there
and that changes when you go to europe or asia or south america africa um but they have their
own unique value or their set of values or things that they prioritize why they why they uh you know
are into something like bitcoin in the first place and what they hope to achieve for themselves and
their family. I think Germany is like the perfect example of that. Like German Bitcoiners are
fucking great, but they're really different to American Bitcoin. Very. They're like real cypher
punk Bitcoiners. Yes. Whereas like, I think America has become like super financialized Bitcoiners.
Yeah, I think so. But it's even different everywhere. It's, huh? They're not the same
everywhere. There are, there are, there are threads that are the same. We're all really weird.
The Germans still want to like homestead. These are still like homesteaders and want to like have
farm. I mean, probably. There's definitely like an underlying shared autism between all Bitcoiners.
Yeah, for sure. But even within the US, like, you know, the New York scene is very different
from the Houston scene. Yeah. Right. Like, you know, you get to like oil and gas and like the
energy touch points with mining. Here in New York is going to be much more financialized. San Francisco
is going to be very different as well. That's going to be more about like startup culture and,
you know, chasing VCs, begging for 10 minutes of their time in an elevator and stuff like that.
for sure um let's talk new york yeah what's going on you guys have got a election going on at the
moment right oh yeah yeah so who is this is what is this for mayor of new york so what's happening
right now is the primary okay and uh i actually posted about it this morning because we can learn
together you're a new yorker you should know this shit i'm like where do you vote i've never voted
for mayor so early voting's happening now what's what's today i think that today is voting no
No, tomorrow, the 24th is the voting day.
But voting day is now early voting plus voting day.
So you have like a week to vote.
Right now, they're doing the primaries.
But in New York, it's a near certainty that the Democrat nominee is going to win mayor and governor.
Is that Adams?
So Adams was a Democrat.
He's an independent now.
Okay.
And he's still running.
The Republican nominee, I think, is Curtis Siwa, who is the Guardian Angels, right?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I always forget.
It's like the Red Berets.
They like, you know, went in kind of like a biker gang and cleaned up the subways in like the 80s and 90s and stuff.
Is this like, is it true that New York is just run by the mob essentially?
Not really anymore.
No.
Is this what that was though?
Yeah.
Well, sort of.
Like back in like the 60s, 70s and 80s, it was pretty rough.
Guardian Angels were, they were like a ragtag group of guys.
They were more like vigilantes.
Yeah.
And they wore a uniform and they patrolled the subway cars.
So the mob in uniform.
They were not the mob.
They were guys who did karate.
More like a biker gang.
Okay, yeah.
So the reason that's like relevant to Bitcoin is
there's been a lot of stuff promised by Adams on the Bitcoin side, right?
Yeah, he hasn't really done any of it though.
In terms of like, but what about the Bitcoin thing?
He's never been here.
Was that not?
He's never been here to my knowledge.
The Bitcoin thing was, he wanted to implement that for New York though, right?
I don't believe the mayor has the authority to do that.
They can-
Did he talk about it though?
He did talk about it at Gracie Mansion a couple of weeks ago or a month ago
when he had the like crypto summit thing.
It was like a luncheon or something.
That's where he introduced that concept.
But I think that the mayor has to just make a recommendation to the comptroller,
and then the comptroller would have more of a say in pushing that through.
Oh, so it's a bit of like a nothing promise.
Yeah, kind of.
Oh, so in terms of Bitcoin, this like mayoral election doesn't really matter?
No.
Oh, okay.
I thought there was actually more at stake with that.
And what about like all the shitty laws New York has around Bitcoin?
That's more on a state level than a city level.
Okay.
So the governor's race would be much more impactful if a Bitcoiner were in the governor's chair.
The governor has direct oversight of the New York Department of Financial Services.
They might not be able to completely repeal the BitLicense, but they can make really strong recommendations.
They can replace the commissioner of the NYDFS and install somebody that would effectively do that.
The governor's race is much more important than New York City.
And is there any chance of that actually happening?
Yeah, absolutely.
Soon?
So that primary, I think, happens later this year.
OK.
So I believe Hochul is going to run again.
She's the incumbent.
So, you know, this goes back to what I was just saying.
Like, the primary is basically the general.
So if you have a challenger from the Democratic Party able to unseat Hochul from that position,
then that individual has probably got a through line to the governor's office.
And we'll see what happens there.
Does the BitLicense have any impact on PubKey?
Not so much.
There's a carve-out for merchants to accept Bitcoin for goods and services.
We're not doing any exchanging.
It's more along the lines of a money service business.
and then also with Lightning transactions
there's an open-ended question as to whether
or not running a Lightning node triggers
some of these MSP money transmission laws
in the first place
we designed with Evan Kaloudis and Zeus' help
he's fantastic
he helped us set up the entire system here at PubKey
shout out to Zeus and Evan for sure
but we have basically a cul-de-sac
where the outbound transactions have an extremely high limit
It's something like hundreds of Bitcoins to send a routing transaction.
We're not the best network participants because of that,
but we have to do that to stay on the right side of the BitLicense.
Yeah, damn.
Okay, so let's talk about PubKey.
You guys are expanding.
This is now all public, right?
Yeah.
So tell everyone what you're doing.
We're going to DC next.
We are actively scouting the next three locations.
Oh, I didn't know that.
At the moment, one of the three will be in the US.
The other two will be international.
Very cool.
And we have a couple of other pop-ups.
So there's PubKey pop-ups.
There's PubKey residencies.
There are no franchises yet where somebody else can basically license the brand and, you know, we'll help them get stood up.
But they handled the operations.
That coming probably next year and then there basically just wholly owned like corporate pub keys DC is a big one for us It going to be massive as compared to pub key NYC
NYC is about 2,200 square feet.
DC is 12,000.
It's going to have a proper-
Across two floors.
It's two floors.
It's going to have a proper restaurant,
two bars, event space.
It's going to have two bars.
Two bars.
It has three bars.
Damn.
That's a little hidden bar.
Oh.
Oh, members only.
And like, what's the plan with DC then?
What's the restaurant going to be?
Aren't you tired?
I'm exhausted.
Jeez.
Why are you not doing any of your work, Jack?
No, I pick out the drapes and the bar stools and stuff.
I'm the creative.
No, that's not true.
He's doing a ton of work.
It's a lot.
We're a small team.
Like, it kind of hit me when we did Oslo, Vegas,
kept New York running and, you know,
continued to make progress in building out DC.
It's pretty incredible for a small team
to pull that off that week.
You say it's a small team,
but it's definitely growing.
I've met like four people this trip
that I've never met before.
We're hiring, we're expanding,
you know, thanks to, you know,
our supporters and our backers.
We're in a good spot.
So DC, the target in DC are really staffers,
interns, lobbyists, policymakers,
the Bitcoin community, DC residents.
We want to do the same thing
on a bigger scale in DC
that we accomplished here.
But they're different cities, right?
So to have it be hyperlocal and fit DC, it's not going to be the same like New York dive bar that like, you know, private equity folks and New Yorkers love, know and love.
It's going to fit DC, which is a little bit more event driven, definitely more in the policy and regulatory realm.
um you know we we hope we hope that we're going to be able to facilitate curated conversations
around bitcoin because those staffers and interns and lobbyists are the ones that are writing this
stuff for the policymakers not everybody's going to be like ted cruz and cynthia lummis and like
actually get into the weeds and understand bitcoin i think those two are probably the
best example of politicians policymakers that like actually understand a fair amount of the
underpinning technology seems to understand it quite well gillibrand as well richie torridia
as well. There are many, there are many, but like, I was really impressed. Ted Cruz does
understand mining and Lummis is in like a class of her own. Yeah. She knows what's going on.
But, but that is true. Gillibrand has been here. You know, Lummis has been here. Torres has been
here. Those three like definitely have a much deeper level of understanding. I think it's
unrealistic to get like Pelosi and Schumer to that level or, you know, Mitch McConnell,
who's no longer there, but like whatever.
It's the staffers and the interns that get the project.
It's like, hey, young kid, come over here.
I need you to write something about Bitcoin.
I want it to be positive or negative.
Well, where do they go, right?
They go to some of the policy institutes.
They do their online research
and they see the FT in the Wall Street Journal
and the New York Times.
They go on Twitter and it's a fucking shit show.
Like, you know, we want to be able to facilitate a place
where we're hosting events.
We're helping curate the conversation
with the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Coin Center,
and other folks.
Because you're going to co-locate
with Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Bitcoin Policy Institute's headquarters
is going to be in PubKey.
We're not announcing that until tomorrow,
but I think-
Perfect, this won't be out before tomorrow.
There we go.
That's very cool.
Yeah.
And so obviously, they're the reasons why DC.
I always thought it was going to be Philly next.
You always talked about Philly.
It was for a while.
The capabilities that we had-
The people who live there are just the fucking worst.
Shout out to all the Philly listeners.
There's a really good crew in Philly,
the Bitcoin John and Matt Keita and Andrew Hans.
Has Matt Keita got his drink here yet with Joe Squaw?
No, not yet.
That's coming.
Is it happening?
Yeah, I think that they're in touch.
I saw him reply to one of his tweets,
but I didn't know if it was actually happening.
Yeah.
No, I believe it's in motion.
God, he's been working on that for almost a year at this point.
So, you know, it was Philly for a little bit in terms of our organic growth, just what we were accomplishing here.
And I would say the financial realities of Philadelphia, that was a better fit for us.
We had supporters come in and say the conversations in D.C., you know, Bitcoin is becoming a really impactful topic.
And we saw that this happened before the elections.
But, you know, with the elections at the presidential level, Senator in Ohio, you know, Bernie Moreno unseats Sherrod Brown, who was one of the longest, I'd say, like, lieutenants of Elizabeth Warren in her war against Bitcoin.
The impact is real. So both sides are paying attention. And there's a lot of, I would say,
dark money from broader crypto and Ripple swirling around, and it's getting really confusing.
So if we can help elevate the great work that Bitcoin Policy Institute and other folks are
doing there, give it a home and invite people in to have some beers and some good food to
help facilitate that, then, you know, I'd consider it a success.
Totally. It's important stuff to do. Is the Ripple money still flowing like it was? Are
they still like attacking Bitcoin in the same way?
They got a lot of money.
I know they got a lot of money.
They make their own.
They do. They do. That is a little cheat code.
It's a great one.
But are they still attacking Bitcoin?
You know, there have been some positive overtures. I've heard conflicting reports. I think the
The administration and David Sachs put some distance.
I think they were plowing a lot of money in,
and then they put some distance because they were like,
no, we really like Bitcoin.
So, you know, there's been some public statements
from Garlinghouse that are a little bit more olive branchy,
but like, come on, they, you know,
funded the Greenpeace attack.
They funded-
My favorite part about that attack is that
that statue thing they built, the head,
is now like the coolest piece of Bitcoin art in the world.
I know.
We're the most annoying kids on the playground.
We're impossible to make fun of.
Yeah.
We will just take-
Because they do this thing.
We're like, that's fucking cool.
We're like, we love it.
Yeah.
We are.
Do more.
That's who we are.
Do more.
It's so good.
So anyhow, from where the next one's going to be,
or can you not say yet?
Not yet.
Where are you looking?
So population dense cities across the US and internationally.
So close.
With Bitcoin communities.
Well, when you do the franchise, I'll open one in Australia.
I would love that.
It's very far.
It is very far, but it doesn't matter if it's a franchise.
It'd be awesome.
I think it would work.
Look, there's Bitcoiners everywhere.
And the idea is to be hyper-local and focus on what that community and what that city needs and how they approach Bitcoin, right?
The same tactic of sort of burying it and making a good place.
It's what makes PubKey really hard, but it also what I think is working.
Hospitality is a soul-crushing business.
Yeah, as soon as I started a franchise, I was like, I don't want to work in hospitality.
It's very difficult to get it right.
But if you get it right,
then people treat it like, you know, another home
and they're comfortable and they come back
and they become regulars,
whether it's for the food or the drinks
or the vibe and atmosphere, it doesn't matter.
You're able to do a lot with that
in terms of where you want to steer the conversation.
Jerk, are you going to be able to keep the DC branch weird?
Well, do you like the smell of smoked salami?
Because...
That's a tricky question to answer.
I don't know if I do.
Well, the answer is yes, you do.
Okay.
Because that's what PubKey DC smells like.
And we're going to keep it, and it's going to be part of the brand.
How are you going to keep the smell of smoked salami?
It was a barbecue restaurant for like 17 years.
Okay, nice.
So we don't have a choice.
So salami t-shirts.
It's in the walls.
No, it does not.
It smells like brisket.
That'll dissipate.
Yeah.
With time.
We burn a little sage in there.
it's going to go a long way.
We're going to exercise some demons.
So are you going to get smoked salami t-shirts?
Yeah, I think so.
I think we just have to embrace it.
Yeah, I think you should.
I'm excited.
I'm excited to see it.
Are we going to go see it tomorrow?
Yeah, we can do a little private tour for you, anything.
There you go.
We are in the process of interviewing chefs.
You'd be shocked, the quality of resumes
and people that are excited about this coming to DC.
Interesting.
Like bonafide, like pre-coin chefs, right?
Like bonafide chefs are-
Why do they even know about PubKey?
They saw it in the news.
They saw our reputation online.
These Fox News appearances are working.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, we have good reviews.
You know, people rave about the burger and the atmosphere.
Some of them come and check it out, and they're like,
I don't know exactly what's going on here, but it's fucking cool.
And it's special to see that, like, other people are picking up on it
and appreciating, you know, the soul-crushingly hard work that it's been.
Are you going to work in London?
Huh?
Are you going to open in London?
I would love to.
You know, so many pubs, like historic pubs are closing.
How many pubs are closing in the UK?
It's like two a week.
It's wild.
Why is that?
I really don't know.
It's a bunch of things.
It's the rent.
It's drinking habits.
You know, they're losing.
They have that problem too.
Yeah, young people don't drink.
I thought that was just us.
No, we need to.
I thought that was just NYU.
We need to fix the youth.
Like they just don't drink the same way.
Yeah.
And I don't know if that's good.
One good war.
Yeah.
One war.
Well, we might be on the brink of it.
No, the UK, I think those problems are a little bit more like macro, like lots of millionaires, like a lot of money's leaving the UK.
So I think that that's a symptom of like a much more complicated disease there.
But yeah, that would be a dream.
I'd love to go in.
And that's how PubKey started.
My wife and I lived nearby here, and we've been coming to the predecessor bars since like 2006.
from 2000 and well when we started coming here had been there since like the 90s but it closed
in 2010 and it was the most iconic new york dive bar it was just a what was it called before it's
called the stone crow and it was great people still come in and they're like this used to be
the crow and it's like yeah um then it reopened as like a really nice neighborhood tavern just
like no frills just a a a classic fastball tavern and that was great that closed in covid
And the idea was, like, if we lose all these things in COVID and we're just jammed onto remote work and Zoom, like, we're going to become, like, Bugman.
And that was sort of, like, a scary thing in, you know, 2021 and 2022.
too. So, you know, if PubKey can play a role where we're rehabilitating the way things were,
tapping into nostalgia and the importance of this place, and then recultivating how these places
were used for, you know, real discourse and disagreement and fomenting of revolutions,
that would be awesome. So an English pub is very, very top of mind.
Nice. I think it's really cool what you guys have done for the Bitcoin space in New York as well.
Like it feels like you're definitely the hub in New York,
but it feels like that's also bringing people in.
And like during COVID or just after COVID,
like everyone seemed to be moving to like Austin and Nashville.
And now when I go to those places, everyone's looking, yeah, in Miami,
everyone's like, how's New York?
And if you say you've had a really good time there,
like the city's good, they're like, fuck.
Like I have this conversation with Harry all the time.
Whenever I tell him I really like New York, he's like, ah.
Sold the bottom.
I totally sold the bottom. I'm sorry, Harry.
It is getting better.
Like, you know, New York is not completely back.
It's not completely saved.
But, you know, New York has an ability to move way faster and change itself than, you know, just about any other city on the planet.
And New Yorkers don't really tolerate shitty experiences for that long.
I think it's on an uptrend.
But, you know, we're one communist mayor away from the downtrend.
So we'll see what happens.
True.
Scary stuff.
And I love New York apart from when it's this hot.
Like, I am dying.
It's brutal.
It's the best.
DC is going to be worse.
Is it?
Much.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
I've got to wear a suit there as well.
I'm not wearing a suit.
Really?
You're not wearing a suit?
I am not wearing a suit.
I'm going to do like jeans and a blazer probably.
No.
I'm not doing a suit.
You've got to wear a suit.
You've got no fucking respect.
Yeah.
It's not a respect thing.
That is business attire for me.
Yeah, but not for everyone else who's there.
It's going to be too hot.
Damn.
What else is going on publicly?
Damn.
Anything we've not talked about that you want to shill?
god we got a lot of stuff coming up um you know dc is you know a couple months out um we continue
the the bitcoin programming here we have uh leopoldo lopez here on friday and this will come
probably after that yeah it will um but we'll post um those and we're we're um very grateful
and fortunate to get these awesome guests from hrf um yeah we got a lot of really great things
coming up the summer is always a little bit slow right like people get out of the city because of
the oppressive heat and humidity.
So it comes at a good time.
July and August is a bit of a reset
that we can focus on
and then hit the ground running again
when it starts to cool off in September.
Very cool.
I'll be at Honey Badger probably.
Oh, me too.
Excellent.
I've never been.
It's probably my favorite conference.
Interesting.
Aside from T-Code.
I've never been to Eastern Europe at all,
so I'm quite looking forward to that.
Riga is a very special place.
It's a really awesome city.
It's like a medieval Baltic city.
People are super, super friendly.
And it's small.
So Honey Badger kind of takes over.
It's kind of like cheat code where you're running around Bedford
and you just see Bitcoiners sort of everywhere.
That's what Honey Badger's been for a pretty long time.
I'm excited.
We've got big plans for Bedford next year.
Are you coming back?
Of course.
We didn't do the pub key pop-up this year.
We've got to do it again.
Well, I don't know if we're ready to announce anything yet,
but we'll be there.
Oh, I don't even know.
Should I know this?
You've been speaking to Peter.
I'm excited.
He couldn't come this time, jerk.
You didn't come the first year, did you?
I am, yeah.
Did you come the first year?
No, no, no.
Cheat code?
Yeah.
Yeah, I will be there.
Yeah, good.
It was fun.
Apart from like you got kicked out of your own pop-up.
No?
No, they didn't let us back in the next night.
Yeah, so the first year we hosted a pop-up
at like a local pub.
And then they were happy.
We tipped well.
We packed the place out.
It will have been their busiest night of the year, probably.
They got kind of run over.
This was in Bedford.
They got kind of run over that night.
We got in a fight in Oslo.
We went back.
He's like another man on these European...
Who did you get in a fight with, Thomas?
We got in a fight with...
At the bar, we got in a fight.
No, no, that was PK.
I don't want you to tell the story.
I want Joe to tell the story.
We did get in a fight.
It'll be way more entertaining if Joe tells the story.
We got in a fight.
We threw the glass at the cab, and then there was a whole hubbub.
This was his friend from kindergarten.
Tell me the story.
nothing to do with this.
There was a fight at the pub that we went to every single night.
You threw a glass at a car.
No, no, there was no.
Someone did.
So, so there was a fight between two guys.
One of them was a friend of ours and a glass hit a cab and the cab got involved.
The cabbie got involved.
And then the three of them were going at it.
And Thomas came out of the bar and this is, I'm his protector.
I just took him and I just ushered him back inside.
I'm like, don't, you don't need to see this.
Come back inside.
He's like, what's going on?
I was like, Tom's back.
Back in.
Come on, I want to show you something.
Yeah.
The only thing I miss about the Miami conference
is the pub key pop-up at Mac Club Deuce's.
We went back.
We were scouting a location in Miami.
And just a couple months ago,
we went back to Mac Club Deuce.
And it was so great.
Just walking in.
It's one of my favorite bars in the world.
Just walking in.
It is so great.
It's one of the best bars in the world.
It's horrible, but amazing.
It's perfect in every way.
It is gross and terrible, and you can smoke inside,
and it is the fucking happiest place on earth.
Is that one of the ones you're scouting?
Mac Club Deuce?
God, we'll need a lot of Bitcoin to take that one over.
That's an icon.
Does that pub do well, though?
That bar do well?
Yeah, they crush.
Oh, okay.
They crush.
There must be a lot of theft.
It's all cash.
It's probably the most famous bar.
It probably ranks in America as one of the most famous dive bars.
Oh, really?
It was like, I think, Bourdain went there, didn't it?
Yeah, he did.
Yeah.
He did.
That would be a cool note.
That is a pub key bar.
I mean, I completely agree.
That land is very expensive.
Yeah.
One day.
A lot of the ideas downstairs are stolen from the Deuce.
Yeah.
A lot.
Not a lot, but the neons.
It's our sister bar.
Okay.
The neons are stolen from the, proudly stolen from the Deuce.
Yeah, but pub key is so much nicer.
It's so much nicer.
Yeah.
Just like little motifs.
That was a requirement of my wife.
We could have a dive bar, but the bathrooms have to be clean.
It's just like, but that's not a dive bar.
There's no smoking side.
I went to a good one in Chicago with Dylan and his girlfriend.
I am from Chicago.
What's the like really famous one?
It's a green door.
Don't think that was it.
You could smoke inside there.
The winner's circle.
Nope.
Is that the milkshake one?
Give me one more.
Is it called Richards?
Huh?
Richards?
Yeah.
I don't know.
I could be getting it wrong, but it was, that's, that's another one that should be on your list.
So Dylan, Dylan, Jack and Jerk are from the same like town.
Oh, so you know those guys.
You're like friends with those guys.
No, I don't.
We just figured it out.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
And I tried my best.
I was like, dudes, high school.
And they're, you know, they don't care.
Wait, did you go to the same high school?
We did go to the same high school, yeah.
I'm a bit older, but yeah.
Yeah, you look older.
Yeah.
More tired.
Yeah.
Well, this has been fun.
Thank you.
Thank you, guys.
Should we go and drink a beer and have a smash burger?
Yeah, whatever you like.
Let's do it.
Awesome.
Thanks.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.