Society is built on hard sound money.
And in order to cooperate and collaborate,
you need to have a measuring stick
that you know you can trust.
That's always gonna be the same length, 21 million Bitcoin.
You can measure everything in the world against that.
And that is not going to change.
And so that's like a huge advantage for Bitcoiners
that the rest of the world just has not caught up to.
And the biggest mistake you can possibly make today
is not changing your denominator to Bitcoin.
If you're measuring everything in the US dollar,
the Euro, any other cryptocurrency,
you're doing it wrong because Bitcoin is the signal.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
Bitcoin block height is 828-627.
And the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk,
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is Phil Geiger,
the VP of product marketing at Unchained.
Phil and I went into this conversation
with a pretty open format.
And we decided to go deep into a bunch of topics
that came up from shitcoining to Bitcoin ETFs,
Austrian economics, the upcoming halving,
energy and mining, Texas, the next Bitcoin fud cycle,
and a whole lot more.
As always, you can watch the video version
of this episode on Rumble, YouTube, or X
by searching at Walker America or listen on fountain.fm
or wherever you get your podcast
by searching for the Bitcoin Podcast.
If you do listen to the Bitcoin Podcast on fountain,
consider giving the show a boost
or creating a clip of something you found interesting.
And if you have not checked out fountain yet,
I highly recommend it.
You can send Bitcoin your favorite podcasters
and earn Bitcoin just for listening to this show.
And if you are a Bitcoin only company interested
in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
hit me up on social media or through the website,
BitcoinPodcast.net.
Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin Talk
with Phil Geiger.
How's it going, man?
It's going really well.
How are you doing, Walker?
I'm doing very well.
This is actually, this is my first interview,
a Bitcoin Talk episode, as I'm calling them,
of the new year, I believe.
I don't think I, I think this is the first one.
So you are my entrance back to the interview scene.
So welcome.
Thank you.
I mean, that's quite a bit of pressure.
I'm hoping that we have a great combination.
And it kicks off your 2024 on a positive note.
You know, I'm sure that we will.
And the beauty of, you know, I started this show
as actually a joke, like was, I think it was at a BitBlock
boom a couple of years ago.
And a couple of us were like throwing around the idea
that, you know, there just aren't enough Bitcoin podcasts.
And this was, I think, 2022.
So while we've really grown the Bitcoin podcast games
since then, but I was like, I'm going to start another fucking
Bitcoin podcast.
And that's literally going to be the title.
And then like a year after that, I was like, you know,
maybe I should actually do it, but take it somewhat seriously.
So I still got the domain another fucking bitcoinpodcast.com.
And like, titcoin.org and things like that.
But then I was like, OK, I'll just have them redirect
to Bitcoinpodcast.net.
And it'll be very official and super serious.
But my point being that this is a low pressure environment.
So all bets are off here.
Yeah, I mean, I was a little intimidated also
by just the opportunity to join the Bitcoin podcast.
I mean, there are a lot of Bitcoin podcasts out there,
but there's only one the Bitcoin podcast.
I know, and as soon as you put the in front of something,
it makes it official.
And so I figured, wow, nobody else has taken, you know,
just got to capitalize the word, and it becomes the.
And so, hey, why not just fill that gap?
But yeah, podcasts, not products.
That's what I always say.
Why build products when you can build podcasts?
You know, the real value add in the Bitcoin community.
Bitcoiners talking to each other.
Love it.
But that's how this whole thing started, though.
Bitcoin talk.org, you know,
without Bitcoin talk.org, we wouldn't have any products
or podcasts and Bitcoin would just be a, you know,
a little niche cipherpunk mailing list experiment.
And now, you know, we've got Larry Fink shilling Bitcoin
on on on all the major news.
It is kind of a trip.
I mean, you've been in the space a lot longer than I have,
I think, very obviously.
I'm only my first.
My first like Bitcoin cycle was basically this cycle.
Like I had bought bought Litecoin at, I think,
the 2017 top because I was one of those people who thought,
well, I can't afford a whole Bitcoin.
You know, just I'll just get one of these Litecoins.
And maybe someday it'll be worth what Bitcoin's worth.
Obviously very stupid in retrospect.
But then saw things crash and came back a couple of years later
at like the end of 2019.
And I was like, what's this Bitcoin thing again?
And to be fair, the first time I heard about it was I think
2014 or 2015, it was the Silk Road days
because I had a friend who was doing,
procuring some things that he wanted from an open website,
which should not be a crime either for the person procuring
them or for the person who built that website.
But it's one of those things where it took me a few touchpoints
to get to it.
And then finally it was like 2020.
They shut us all down.
They started printing money.
And I was like, I need to understand what the fuck I'm doing.
And what the fuck money is a little bit better.
And then through that, just started viewing it through the lens
of Bitcoin.
And then you know how it is.
It's like the rabbit hole is a one way street.
And so once you go down it, you're like, well, I'm hooked
and there is literally no going back for me anymore.
That's right.
And I think what you just mentioned really highlights the effectiveness
of a lot of the altcoin marketing strategy where it just is out there.
And they're all out there trying to get people's attention away from
Bitcoin, which is the innovation.
And I myself fell for it when I first got into Bitcoin.
I was doing my research and I decided, hey, I want to get some of this
Bitcoin stuff.
Sounds interesting.
Now I'm a smart guy.
So I'm going to get Bitcoin.
And then what's the other crypto that is a little bit more buttoned up,
a little bit more professional?
Oh.
It's the bankers crypto ripple.
So I ended up buying some Bitcoin.
I bought some ripple ripple essentially went to zero for a few years
and then magically kind of unfortunately revived in 2017.
And that was the end of my shit coin journey.
And I converted all that to Bitcoin.
Yeah, I bought, I don't even know how many different types of shit coins
before then realizing, hold on, this is a, this is a fool's errand.
And I am not a super genius trader.
And even if I was, I don't think that it's worth my time to be
investing my money, but also my time in trying to watch these things, looking
for the next, you know, 100 X gem that you're going to find.
It's like, because realistically, unless you're an insider, you're going to get
burned.
And if you are an insider, I don't know how you really sleep at night very well,
knowing that you're just making these gains on the backs of other people
getting rugged.
It just doesn't quite sit right.
And I think a lot of Bitcoiners have gone through that journey where it's like,
you know, I'm not trying to play the moral high ground, but I just think what
you're doing is, is garbage and how garbage people act.
And I would rather try to build something of value, you know, for myself, for my
family, for society that other people find valuable and will pay me for, rather
than, you know, print up a token, run a slick marketing campaign, pump it to all
high heavens and then rug it out to make a nice profit and rinse and repeat.
I could just, I mean, I guess if it, if you sleep well at night, then good for
you.
But I think for most of us who are far down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, that's,
that's not even something that we can comprehend anymore.
It's so funny when I tell people that I work in Bitcoin, they think that I'm
some sort of crypto trader and I am the worst trader ever.
I tried trading for, you know, a grand total of like a week and I ended up
losing a bunch of money.
I just said, never again.
And since that time, all I've done is essentially just save in Bitcoin and
that's outperformed really anything else.
And so I would still be able to, they're like, Oh my gosh, you're even in Bitcoin
for a long time.
You must, you know, be great at trading and all this stuff.
I was like, no, I just, just like earn money.
And then I park some of that money in Bitcoin for the long term.
It's like this insane concept that you can just work and earn money and then have
a savings vehicle that is reliable over the long term.
And you know, you're not going to touch it.
So you don't care about the day to day fluctuations, but over the long span of years,
Oh, wow, your purchasing power increased dramatically.
But it's like, it's all it is is just back to basics.
Like that's what Bitcoin is, right?
It's just, it's just being able to save.
And I was somebody who was not great at saving prior to Bitcoin.
You know, I was making a good amount of money.
I was working like a, I was working in Accenture for a number of years.
So I made, you know, very good money, but just somehow just always spent so very much
of that money.
And it wasn't until Bitcoin that I realized, Oh, this is just, I use this as my savings
technology.
And it's really simple.
Once you change your outlook to view like Bitcoin is how I save and I want to save as
much as I can.
While still like, I'm not living in a box.
I'm sitting in a chair.
So like, you know, sure, I've got some, some fiat things like this chair that I'm sitting
on, I could be standing right now, sure.
But you know, it's, it's this mindset shift.
And it's like, that's a really nice thing because when you have that simplicity of how
you're actually going to store the value of your time and your energy, then it becomes
much easier to focus on things that do actually create value versus just figuring out how you're
trying to scrape by or looking for the next, you know, 100 X crypto gem that you're going
to make it all back in one trade with, which is never going to happen.
But yeah, it's a, I'm curious what you think, you know, being in this, in this space for
longer than I've been seeing a few cycles, you know, do you think that there's a point
that we reach where, you know, every Bitcoin bull market, it seems there's a new shitcoin
du jour or a new bunch of shitcoins, you know, that are the hot flavor of the day.
This time it was a lot of dogs, maybe this time it's like lizards and cats.
I don't know.
Do you think there's a point that we reach, you know, either sooner or later where that
stops being the case, like where the val value prop of shitcoins just becomes so untenable
and more people become aware of it and stop conflating it with Bitcoin that we stop to
see the like stop seeing those same, you know, follow on hype cycles with crypto, or is it
just something that's going to always be a tag along to Bitcoin?
What do you think on that?
Well, I've been extremely surprised at how long the general crypto garbage has persisted.
I originally thought, you know, it was very clear early to me at least that Bitcoin was
the real innovation, Bitcoin was the one that discovered or solved the problem of digital
scarcity.
And all of these cryptos are just examples of the fact that it is super easy to make
digital copies of things.
You can make infinite digital copies of anything except for Bitcoin.
That's kind of the innovation in my mind of Bitcoin is it's the thing that solved that
problem.
So I thought that people were going to catch on to that a lot quicker, but that I was totally
wrong.
And what I think is really fascinating, and I think I've been through maybe two or three
bull markets, like this is probably my, this will be my third, I think, full cycle, is
the, not that the Chicoins have gone away, but their narrative just keeps changing.
It's all the same garbage, but under a different marketing umbrella.
So now it's, you know, the, well, I think right now it's kind of embarrassing to talk
about NFTs in the broader market.
Like there's still some diehard NFTs out there, but most people have recognized that that
was a total fad, but there are still some persistent altcoins out there that have just
scraped by on these different narratives.
And I think maybe primarily just lots of funding in, in the fact that they have a lot of wealth.
The other thing that's kind of unfortunate about the whole crypto scene that outside
of Bitcoin is that all coins have been one of the most lucrative ways to earn Bitcoin
over the last six years.
So things like the Tron foundation and block one.
So Tron, you know, is a shitcoin block one launched EOS.
They are massive, massive holders of Bitcoin and they probably will be for not forever,
but for the foreseeable future.
So there's a world where, you know, the Tron foundation is helping to establish schools
in, you know, rural Africa or something.
And it's just like, oh, all they did was capture people's value instead of creating something
that was useful for the world.
But I'm hoping to see, you know, in the future that they at least put that Bitcoin to good
use or alternatively maybe just spend it.
What was nice about the last cycle is we saw a lot of large kind of not great Bitcoin holders
lose or spend all of their Bitcoin.
I'm thinking about like the Terra Luna foundation FTX, although in FTX's case that was their
clients Bitcoin that they've taken.
But like it's heartening to see that a lot of these kind of iffy companies and holders
are spending their Bitcoin.
That's just the process of Bitcoin decentralizing and it's a little bit painful, but overall
it's healthy.
Yeah, I always think it's such a clear signal that, you know, you mentioned Tron or EOS.
These whatever you want to call them companies, foundations, whatever label you want to give
them because they're not a decentralized cryptocurrency, certainly there are platforms.
The fact that they are taking their native token and using the proceeds from the sale
of that token to then buy Bitcoin should tell you all you need to know about where the true
value is.
They're not keep trying to buy back as much of their own token as they can.
No, they're selling a token to be able to accumulate Bitcoin, which is the hard money,
which again should be clear as day to most folks.
But you know, I guess I think for a lot of people, I mean, myself included, like it takes
a little bit of pain to realize why Bitcoin is special and why it is different.
But that journey takes different amounts of time for different people, I think, and incentives
matter.
And so if you're on the inside of one of these crypto companies, you know, you may think,
well, maybe you convince yourself like, yeah, we really are the future of finance.
And yeah, we're using the sales of this to buy Bitcoin.
But you know, we're accompanying Bitcoin along on this journey.
But we are where the real innovation is the real use case utility, whatever, you know,
blockchain technology buzzwords you want to throw out there.
But I want to, I want to back up a little bit before we get too deep down the shitcoin
rabbit hole.
Oh, it's deep.
Yeah, it is deep, deep and dark.
It's not go there.
But I want to start out with just doing a little introduction to you.
And I found that the best way to do this is just to ask a question.
And that question is, can you just tell everyone in your own words, who are you and how did
you get here today to where you are doing what you do?
My name is Phil Geiger.
I work at Unchained leading our product marketing initiatives.
And I've been a bit pointer since kind of the end of 2014.
And my journey to discovering Bitcoin was it was a little bit luck.
It was, I mean, it was a lot of luck.
To be honest, I was in the right place at the right time.
I had the right background.
But I also think it was partially how I was raised and the things that influenced me through
my life.
So I studied economics in undergrad.
And even before that, I was introduced to what I didn't realize it, but the Austrian
School of Economics through books written by Ein Rand before college.
And after going to school for a Keynesian economics degree, I was feeling very burnt
out.
I was really interested in economic psychology, trying to understand how people interact with
the world.
And the economics that I learned at the university just really didn't teach me that.
So I left university and started working in health care for a health tech company implementing
software at major hospitals around the country and around the world.
So I was really primed to understand Bitcoin when I first heard about it in like a presentation
format.
I'd heard about it from the news or from articles that I'd read that telling me that
it was evil.
But I was just in the right place at the right time in 2014, listened to a presentation given
by a woman in Madison, Wisconsin.
And it walked through the history of money.
And it talked about the tech technical side of it as well as the economic side of it.
And it just resonated with me.
So immediately after that, I just decided that I had to get some.
Were you working at Epic by chance in Madison?
I was.
I was working at Epic for seven years working at Epic and lived in Wisconsin for five years.
Nice.
I just know that Epic is like one of the largest employers in the Madison area.
So I figured that was a pretty good shot.
Yeah.
You throw a rock in Madison and you'll hit somebody who works at Epic if they're in their
20s.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, I appreciate the background.
And it's interesting, honestly, that you were down, well, the Keynesian path.
Was there a point where or when you were in college, as you were studying that you realized,
like, given that you had a little bit of the Austrian background pre-college, that you
realized, you know what, some of this stuff just doesn't check out.
Like some of this, you know, I can't square this circle of these concepts they're trying
to teach me.
The entire time.
I remember doing homework and it was essentially just running some calculations and drawing
graphs based off the calculations.
And I was just thinking like, what am I doing here?
Why am I drawing these graphs?
What do these, you know, variables represent?
Why am I ignoring like other variables?
I actually found myself a lot more drawn towards psychology as a result because that's what
I was really trying to get at is like how people, trying to understand how people interact
with each other and society and how civilization kind of grows.
And so, yeah, the economics that I learned in school, I just thought was complete waste
of time.
I couldn't focus on it at all.
It just didn't make any sense to me.
But I felt as though I needed to complete the degree because I already had like half
the classes done.
So I did that.
But that's why I left.
I was like, I don't want to be involved with this.
And then, you know, a few years into my career in health tech, I discovered Bitcoin and the
Austrian school.
And I was like, oh, this is what I've been looking for.
And what's nice about the Austrian school is it really does a good job of talking about
individuals and how they act and how they collaborate and cooperate and how from the
individual and entire society functions.
And this is something that in the mainstream media and just all the education that you
get in a normal public school today is completely hidden.
It really tries to hide individual actions and educate people about just like how the
state controls the money.
And this is how it works.
And then everything is good.
And if we don't have that happening, then society is going to collapse.
And as Bitcoiners have come to understand, no way, actually the opposite is totally true.
Like society is built on hard sound money.
And in order to cooperate and collaborate, you need to have a measuring stick that you
know you can trust that's always going to be the same length, 21 million Bitcoin.
You can measure everything in the world against that.
And that is not going to change.
And so that's like a huge advantage for Bitcoiners that the rest of the world just has not caught
up to.
And it's something that you can, we were talking a little bit about the shitcoin rabbit hole.
Like the biggest mistake you can possibly make today is not changing your denominator
to Bitcoin.
If you're measuring everything in the US dollar, the Euro, any other cryptocurrency,
you're doing it wrong because Bitcoin is the signal.
And outperforming Bitcoin is nearly impossible at this point.
I mean, there's a few cases where you can over a short period of time outperform Bitcoin,
but over the long run, it's extremely challenging.
And so one of the biggest competitive advantages you can have is just start measuring your net
worth in Bitcoin and see if that additional rental property is actually worth purchasing
or your fourth jet ski is really going to make you that much happier.
Holding Bitcoin for a little bit longer will allow you to get a fleet of jet skis.
Right.
And you can buy the jet ski factory in a few having cycles.
Manually after jet skis.
Yeah, it is funny because it's such a mentality shift and it's one that I'm so grateful to
have made where you start having that as, again, your measuring stick.
And it is the only measuring stick you can use Bitcoin because the only measuring stick
that's not constantly changing at the whims of some group of old farts behind closed doors.
And so you actually have a measuring stick that is going to give you accurate measurements
over the long period of time without needing to worry that, well, OK, yeah, I got a whatever
percent raise this year, but oh, well, inflation was, you know, 5% this year, but it was, you
know, 3% last like you can't possibly like it is so hard to to run a business in this
fiat inflationary environment where, you know, honestly, workers are the most disadvantaged
because I think Lynn Alden makes this argument quite often that, you know, OK, inflation's
10% and you go to your boss and you say, I need a 10% raise and they say, well, did
you get 10% more productive?
And no, I got 1% more productive, but you know, an extra 9% for inflation.
So it's so difficult, but it's difficult on the on the business side, on the producer's
side as well, because you're having to deal with constantly changing input costs, constantly
changing employment costs.
And it's so hard when you have to spend so much of your time worrying about just the
fluctuating value of your purchasing power as a business and what that's going to get
you.
And then on an individual level, once you make that mentality shift to say, Bitcoin is my
measuring stick, you know, I may have other assets, but I need to measure them in Bitcoin.
Otherwise, I won't know if they're actually good investments or not.
It kind of opens your eyes and you're like, oh, oh, OK, these things that I thought
maybe, you know, this particular stock in my portfolio that is doing whatever return
a year, but it's paying me a little bit of a dividend.
But you know what?
It's still just just treading water with inflation when it comes down to it.
And in Bitcoin terms, it's dropping maybe not over one year if it happens to be a bearish
year.
But again, as you said, over the long run, and I think just at a larger sense, you know,
you touched on with, let's say, traditional economics, Keynesian economics, what's taught
in school.
This idea that so much of it is this backwards looking analysis, trying to be able to plot
out and create equations for the results and to fit those equations to the results that
they tell the story that you want them to tell.
It's not at all versus the Austrian perspective, which is OK based on human action, that we
all make decisions that are in our best interest in order to try and accumulate capital and
create value.
And it just couldn't be a more diametrically opposed set of ideas.
And it just makes me think of Paul Krugman.
The guy has been running these victory.
I don't know if he's one of those people I have on notifications on Twitter, on X,
excuse me, because I just love to see it.
And I mean, especially these past few weeks, he's just repeatedly been like the war against
inflation is over.
We won.
You know, this we're back to practically 2 percent levels.
If we measure using, you know, cough cough, this basket of CPI goods, and we're going
to use Supercore for this month, we're not going to use core.
Next month, we'll use core inflation.
We'll just take out the food and the energy and the housing and the used cars and things
like that.
And now look at this.
The Fed did it.
We are the smartest guys in the room and we figured it all out.
We figured out how to make the market perfect.
And all you have to do is just change the amount of money you print from year to year.
And this backwards looking justification for policies dutifully puppeted by mouthpieces
like Paul Krugman.
I want to know what he gets out of this.
Like, who is paying a guy like that at this point?
Because it's just so obvious that he's a blatant regime shill.
And he just, it will say whatever he needs to to make it seem like everything is great.
And you know, when the chosen, the anointed are in power, Paul Krugman says, well, look,
everything we figured it out, guys, there's no reason.
Why are you complaining about the economy?
The economy is great.
Everything is back to our target of 2% theft per year.
It's just astounding.
Like, I don't know, he blows my mind on a daily basis.
I started thinking about Krugman and MMTers less as economists because they're not economists
and more as fantasy romance authors.
And it actually makes a lot more sense.
Like in Krugman's fantasy romance novel, the guys in the suits change their numbers.
They update their CPIs and it creates this utopia.
And that is a fantasy.
And it's not, it's not reality.
And I mean, I think like, yeah, it's one of the funniest books that I've read over the
last four years was The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton.
She's an engineer.
I haven't read it yet.
I've been trying to bring myself to read it.
So what's what's your analysis of for those that don't know, Stephanie Kelton is one
of the premier MMT thinkers out there.
So how does that?
Yeah, thinkers is a little bit of a loaded term there.
I would say like anti-thinker.
Like she, yeah, she takes a look at, she tries to describe how the economy functions starting
from the foundation where money is only valuable because the government makes it valuable.
And if you believe that fantasy, then her arguments might be compelling, but it's just
factually incorrect.
It's not, it's not how, you know, starting from this idea where money is only valuable
because the government taxes you in that form of money is like such a provably false assumption
that I don't even know what to say.
Like if you believe that then the MMT, you know, econ astrology might make sense, but
it's just not how the real world works.
And they get really upset when you point out that that's not how the real world works.
Because you know, gold still has value and the government doesn't collect taxes in gold.
It's just like, yeah.
To be a group of literally all of history.
Like it's literally to say like history doesn't matter at all.
The fact that emergent monies have existed and still exist like gold doesn't matter at
all.
We're now saying that the only way money can have value is if it is backed by the threat
of violence and force, because that's implicitly or sometimes explicitly what they're saying.
Right.
If you're saying that the only reason that money has values because government says so
and they collect taxes, that is implicitly saying that the only reason money has value
is because if you don't use it, we will put you in jail because that means you're not
paying your taxes and you will go to jail.
And if you don't believe that the government will put you in jail for not paying taxes,
I don't know what to tell you.
They will.
They will confiscate everything you have and they will put you in jail.
But I know there are some other MMT years who are a little bit more explicit with that
almost gleefully saying like, well, yeah, that's how it works.
You know, the government will use force if they need to.
And that's why this has value because there's force behind it.
The problem with all of it is that Bitcoin can't exist for any of those things to be
true.
And the fact that Bitcoin exists just falsifies all of it.
And they have no response to that other than to say that it's, you know, Bitcoin is just
for speculating or it's just for criminals or it's not backed by anything.
It has no intrinsic value.
You might have heard all of these terms like those aren't real arguments.
They're just kind of like name calling because their entire worldview has been shattered by
the introduction of neutral money that can't be debased.
I mean, it's really quite a like a neo-communist mentality when it comes down to it.
It's basically saying that the only way something can have value is if it is centrally controlled,
if it is issued by the all-knowing and ever-present omniscient state.
And if you don't use it, well, you'll find out what happens and you won't like it.
And I find that to also just be such an inherently like anti-freedom mentality.
And I think that that's also part of the problem is that, you know, oftentimes like, especially,
you know, you're scrolling through X and the algorithm shows you just some absolutely fucking
stupid take from someone.
And you're like, I know this is stupid.
I really shouldn't even engage with it.
Like I shouldn't even waste my time with it, but you're like, I need to.
And then if you start getting into conversations with these people through the limited information
exchange medium of social media, you realize that like, oh, it's not even just that we
disagree about what is money and what properties money has and how money should work.
But we disagree just so fundamentally on like, what are people's, what are their base rights,
what are their base needs, what drives people.
And this idea that you can justify the institutionalized theft of purchasing power from people by
saying that, well, this is just how it works.
And it's the only way that money can work.
And you know what, buddy, you better just like it and go back to being a cog in the
wheel and then stop complaining and just invest more wisely.
You know, then you'll keep your purchasing power, just invest better.
And to claim that that's in any way a capitalistic mentality is just backwards.
And I don't know, I'm curious to see because we've seen a lot of the starts of some narrative
shifts around Bitcoin, right?
Like I think we've seen a little bit of the narrative start to shift actually quite a
lot regarding different piece of Bitcoin foot like the Bitcoin burns the planet.
That is starting to become an untenable argument to make because you just look stupid when
you make it because now there is so much data coming out.
Like before it was basically just everybody republishing did you economist pieces and
from that Dutch central banker Alex DeVries or DeVries or whatever it is and everybody,
you know, putting that as their trusted source in all of their hit pieces.
But now it's like you have more peer reviewed academic studies coming out because that's
the only thing the legacy mind listens to saying that like, no, actually look, Bitcoin
is is helping people in Africa to pay for their renewable energy mini grids and electrify
these villages.
And you have like, oh, look, you can use Bitcoin miners on top of a flared flared gas.
Well, like, wow, that would otherwise just be burned into the atmosphere.
This is actually kind of nice.
It's becoming harder to to have that argument that Bitcoin burns the planet because now
it's just becoming clearer to even more people that you're just lying.
Like you're just making that up.
So I'm curious to where you see the attack vectors coming.
Last year we learned that Bitcoin isn't burning the planet.
It's just using all the water.
That's right.
The swimming pools.
Yes.
Right.
He uses in the course of one month, it will use up enough water to fill all of the swimming
pools in the US.
And you can just tell whenever someone sends a Bitcoin transaction, because all of the
lakes and rivers nearby just go dry.
It is truly astounding what they come up with for this.
Wow.
Every time you send a Bitcoin transaction, you just drain a swimming pool.
Like that's just how it works.
Well, they're not sending their best, which is why Bitcoin has absolutely wiped the floor
with every single global currency since its existence.
If you again reframe your mind, if you start measuring everything with Bitcoin as the denominator,
what you realize is that they have been absolutely demolished over the last 15 years.
And the people who don't have Bitcoin, who haven't been saving in it and preserving their
purchasing power and really increasing their purchasing power, their voices are getting
drowned out and less and less effective because the Bitcoiners are comparatively getting so
much wealthier.
Even, I noticed the other day, I think it was some news article about either Malay or
one of the other central banks around the world devaluing their currency to match the
black market rate.
Even that is propaganda.
The black market has figured out what the actual exchange rate of a given currency is.
And the governments have been totally lying about the exchange rates, probably to fleece
tourists and their own population, their own employees.
And now they're just matching the exchange rate with what it actually is.
They're not lying anymore.
But the articles are like, Malay devalues the Argentinian peso.
It's like, what?
No, no, no.
The peso has been screwed by the central banks and the corrupt politicians in Argentina
for a long time.
Malay just reflected what the free market is actually telling you the exchange rate
of that peso is, which is honestly a brilliant move on his part.
Okay, I'll devalue it too to what the real rate is because that's going to cast even
more light on it because you can't just hide behind the government numbers when the government
numbers actually tell the truth for once.
What a shocking concept.
It's interesting.
I'm curious.
We talk about the energy flood narrative and I do think that that one is going to die
down.
I'm sure old Alex DeVries will still be around for a while, still kicking up the same old
tired arguments.
But I have to imagine that the attack vectors are going to shift this cycle.
And it seems that they're shifting towards the, honestly, like the oldest trope of all,
which is Bitcoin is used by criminals.
That's the one that they're really, you know, Elizabeth Warren is really pounding her chest
on.
And I'm curious what you see as like, is that the big attack vector of this cycle?
Is that the big FUD vector?
Is it something else?
Do we reach a point where the attack vector is like, you know what, these Bitcoiners have
too much wealth and we need to special a windfall tax just for Bitcoiners because, you know,
it's unfair and we should redistribute some of that wealth because they were just speculating
and they got lucky and whatever else.
What do you think?
I actually think that this is where the ETFs are going to provide a lot of cover for us
because Elizabeth Warren can write however many angry emails and letters she wants.
But when BlackRock, which has enough, I think BlackRock's AUM is something like 8.3 trillion
dollars, which is something around three times the annual GDP of Germany.
Like BlackRock has so much wealth that they get to make the rules in the fiat system.
Those with the gold make the rules.
That's what's very different about Bitcoin is it doesn't matter how much Bitcoin you
have, you're still not going to change the supply.
You're not going to increase the block size without all of the Bitcoin participants going
along with that.
So having these ETFs is just kind of shoved down Wall Street's throats is actually a really
important development.
And I do think I'm having a hard time putting my finger on what the exact fud of this cycle
is going to be.
Even the Elizabeth Warren terrorist claims were easily debunked publicly multiple times
by different people.
And it's starting to just make those politicians that are making those claims look very ignorant
or just straight up purchased, which is probably both.
They're probably both true.
But yeah, I think I'd be interested.
I'm interested in seeing how 2024 goes in terms of like the US presidential elections,
because I'm almost certain that Bitcoin is going to come up as a primary topic of debate.
And we will get to see which, you know, what both sides are saying.
I would be shocked if they both kind of just agree about it, because I think that there's
going to be deep pockets that are trying to purchase a specific narrative from each
of them.
But that's where I think, you know, we'll really see the the fud come out is is this
year on the political stage in the US.
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It's going to be a wild year in general.
Because I think this 2024 is the year of I think 49% of the world that is of voting
age will be voting in a national election in 2024.
It's like the most elections happening at the same time at any point in history.
So which is just kind of wild when you think about it like basically half the world is
going to be voting for a change in power at the highest levels of whatever their government
is.
And obviously the US is you know the biggest bully at the playground.
But even in I mean you look at Malay in Argentina, that's a seismic shift and a really positive
one for the people of Argentina, I think.
And you know, time will tell.
But so far it seems so.
Judging by the speech, I don't know how they let him give this speech at Davos, but I don't
know if you watched that speech he gave there.
Incredible.
I mean probably the best Davos speech that's ever happened, but the bar is pretty low there
because it's usually just John Kerry telling you, you know, before he gets back in his
private jet that you know you need to stop eating meat.
Or the author of Sapiens talking about the collective hallucination of society and how
it's all just a dream and everything is fake.
Oh my.
Yovale Harari or something like that.
That was another fantasy romance novel by the way.
I don't know if you read that one.
I did.
I read that back before I was orange-pilled and at the time I was like, wow this guy has
some interesting points.
And you know, wow.
And you know he writes in that way that appeals to somebody like myself at the time who had
kind of a Dunning Kruger effect where I thought I knew more than I did.
And he sounds smart.
You know, he sounds like he's saying things that are really intelligent.
But it's really just a lot of bullshit.
He weaves in a lot of truths with some very, very sneaky lies.
And that's why it's such a dangerous book I think because it's like, yeah it's really
readable.
It's great.
It's very fascinating.
And then you'll like say something and you're like, wait, wait what?
He had that speech recently where he was like, you know, nobody has any rights at all.
Like not even to your own.
And it's like rights are a fiction.
Yeah, like I'm pretty sure you could at least say that I have the right to my own body.
And if you don't believe that, like that's pretty much just the justification that's
been used for slavery and genocide by every person throughout history.
So like is that really the side you want to be arguing on?
But I don't know.
It's going to be an interesting year and I hope that we see Bitcoin discussed on the
ballot across a ton of countries and I think we will because it was really cool to see
both RFK and Vivek.
You know, they both announced that they were accepting Bitcoin donations via lightning
at a Bitcoin conference this last year.
Like that was awesome to see and to have them bringing that into the presidential race conversation,
shifting that over to Nwendo.
You know, I don't know what RFK's reasonable chances are.
I think an RFK Vivek ticket just really mix things up.
Like that would be that would be a game changer, but probably Vivek's gunning for that VP
spot for Trump, but we'll see.
But the conversation is shifting and it's shifting very, very palpably.
And sadly, I think with it's probably going to come down to Trump and Biden again and
RFK running as an independent and likely they're just going to have diametrically opposed positions
to each other regarding Bitcoin.
If they talk about Bitcoin at all, they've both Biden hasn't really spoken about it that
much, but I don't think he like his handlers just haven't told him to say anything.
Trump has spoken negatively in the past, maybe his opinions changed.
And then he's also launched multiple NFT collections.
So like take that as you will, I don't know.
I hope they talk about it.
Yeah, I think it would be a massive competitive advantage to pose the question politically.
Like I think whoever poses the question politically is going to do well because it's funny.
Money is supposed to be apolitical.
It's not supposed to be a political issue, but having an apolitical money might be one
of the most political things that we could possibly have right now.
That's just the kind of clown politics world we live in where something that is definitionally
apolitical Bitcoin, nobody can really change it on their own, is turned into like a political
weapon.
But I do think it would be a very powerful one and definitely controversial and attention
grabbing, which for a lot of these politicians is really important.
You want to say things that are going to capture attention.
Yeah, I mean, I have to wonder if half the reason that somebody like Elizabeth Warren
even tweets about Bitcoin or her staff tweets on her behalf about Bitcoin is just because
it's the highest engagement that she gets on any post.
You know, any publicity is good publicity, right?
Like she knows that they get more website hits and more attention and it gets her name
is published in more places.
They're like, well, even if people are saying bad stuff, at least they're talking about
us.
I don't know.
Yeah.
And I'm totally guilty of being completely baited by the nonsense.
But yes, that's 100%.
I mean, it's the the Peter Schiff playbook.
Like he's been dunking on Bitcoin for years, what, seven years or something?
And Bitcoin has gone from hundreds of dollars to $70,000 and now it's, you know, $40 something
dollar thousand dollars after the ETFs.
There are ETFs.
Like the guy is so obviously he's been wrong for so long.
He's essentially built a career off of it.
But he triggers the Bitcoiners so effectively that his social media scores are, you know,
astronomical.
He gets an unbelievable amount of engagement, which is kind of one of the broken incentives
of social media today.
No, say things that are controversial.
It's so true.
And I mean, it's a Peter Schiff.
I have to wonder, maybe he's just playing a long game trying to suppress that press,
suppress that price, excuse me, as much as he can, because really he's trying to fill
his own bags with Bitcoin.
Cause he's like, shit, guys, I get it now, but I can't let anyone know I've get it.
You know, that's going to get all my gold bugs to start buying.
But he's even admitted to losing his Bitcoin key, you know, so you know the guy has Bitcoin.
They all do.
All the shit coiners have Bitcoin.
It's like the number one rule.
And to clarify, we're also calling gold a shit coin here.
Yeah.
Gold has served its purpose throughout the last 5000 years as the best form of money
available until a perfect form of money was created in the form of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin solves all the problems of gold, its physicality, divisibility, and it also solves
all the problems of the digital dollar, which is that, you know, it can, it can't be inflated.
So you can send Bitcoin around the world just like you can send a digital dollar around
the world and you can't send gold around the world.
And it's not going to be debased.
And also doesn't centralize because it's not physical.
So it really is the best of both worlds.
On that topic, you gave a talk or a short presentation at Bitcoin Commons.
I was just watching the video talking about basically why Bitcoin has that cap of 21 million
and and or more so why that cap will remain and how it remains.
Can you touch on that a little bit?
Because I think that that's I really enjoyed that that talk watching it.
You explained it really well and really simply.
And I think that's something that always especially for people who are just learning
about Bitcoin.
They often say, well, sure, the supply is fixed now, but they don't understand the game theory
of why it will remain so.
And it's a tough kind of a tough nut to crack for a lot of people.
Can you can you dig into that a little bit based on that talk you gave?
I'll do my best and just for background for your audience at the Bitcoin Commons here
in Austin, Texas.
We earlier this month or I guess last month now in January of 2024, we hosted an event
called Bitcoin for Local Businesses where we invited local entrepreneurs into the Commons
and just gave them a few kind of Bitcoin 101 presentations and then followed up with how
businesses are helping other businesses purchase, secure and manage and grow their Bitcoin.
And I was tasked with giving the presentation how Bitcoin enforces its fixed supply in about
15 minutes to a group of people who I was I was assuming just knew absolutely nothing
about Bitcoin or just very surface level.
And so as I even mentioned in the talk, like the subject of how Bitcoin enforces its fixed
supply is extremely difficult to pin down.
And so I was just trying to like get people thinking about it in the right way.
So much of the time is spent on miners or nodes, the technology, the real world energy
expenditure, but my presentation was really about how the individual is what enforces the
fixed supply of 21 million.
So you, Walker, me, I enforce the fixed supply of 21 million of my Bitcoin, right?
And if someone else tries to change that and I don't like it, I can take that copy that
is created and convert it into Bitcoin.
Now I'm not always going to be right, but what I will never personally vote for is for
my Bitcoin to be debased.
And there's ways that I can help to support the network beyond just selling a copy.
You can run a full node, which is running the Bitcoin software, which is very easy to
download.
You can run it on any sort of computer essentially today.
You can also mine Bitcoin, right?
That helps to process transactions and ties Bitcoin to the real world via energy expenditure.
But neither of those things alone are what secure the supply of 21 million.
It's really the Bitcoin participants, people who save in Bitcoin and who don't allow for
a copy of Bitcoin to just exist.
So the example I gave was the 2017 Bitcoin Cash Hardfork, which was a really interesting
example because it really had nothing to do with the supply.
It was about a totally different piece of functionality, the block size.
The Bitcoin cashers wanted a larger block size.
The Bitcoin participants very clearly were not interested in that.
But through the process of creating an entirely new cryptocurrency and giving that copy to
the holders of Bitcoin, what they did in actuality was attempt to create inflation.
So the market deemed their attempt as inflation, which is why it was sold to essentially zero.
I think it crashed like 98%.
And again, their intention was not to try to print money.
It was to change something else that they were really passionate about.
But the market viewed their actions as attempting to print money.
And what I wanted to leave people with with the presentation is that's probably not the
only time that that will ever happen.
In fact, we can just assume that something like that can and will happen in the future
maybe via a bug we didn't expect or another civil war where people want to change another
aspect of Bitcoin.
And people have even proposed just adding some tail inflation to Bitcoin.
Sure, go for it.
That's my perspective because as soon as they attempt to do that, what I will do is sell
that copy.
And I can't predict what everyone else will do, but I feel very confident that the market
will find their solution to be significantly inferior and will send it to close to zero.
Now Bitcoin cash is still alive, so I have to give them some credit.
Barely.
It's hanging in there.
Again, if you're measuring the value of something with Bitcoin as a denominator, it looks like
it's been absolutely slaughtered.
But if you're measuring it in the US dollar, it's still hanging in there.
But it's essentially irrelevant.
Nobody's making Bitcoin cash ETFs.
Nobody's really saving in Bitcoin cash.
It's got some kind of small community, but it's not really making much of an impact on
the world.
Bitcoin continues to grow, and you can just tell by the values of these two networks.
So anyway, it's just to recap, the presentation was essentially trying to get people thinking
about how they themselves in Bitcoin are really governing the monetary policy, and their actions
and decisions are what enforce that supply of $21 million.
And even if you don't even think about opting into Bitcoin because of its fixed supply, maybe
you're just getting some Bitcoin because you think the price is going to rise, which is
how most of us start.
Unknowingly what you're doing is opting into that fixed supply of $21 million and helping
to enforce it.
I think the things that I...
Oh, go ahead.
No, no, no, please.
Yeah, the things that I could have done better with the presentation is talk a little bit
more about miners.
Miners perform an extremely critical function in Bitcoin, but I think of it more as infrastructure
or plumbing.
The world civilization is one plumbing accident away from The Road or some post-apocalyptic
movie.
It is absolutely critical, but plumbing is not what is not alone what is valuable about
civilization.
And the same thing is true with mining.
It is in a critical, critical function that Bitcoin could not exist without, but they're
not in charge of the network.
It's not the miners that are delivering the value.
That's almost like saying, Fiat money is valuable because the government taxes it.
It's like, no, you're performing an extremely valuable function.
You're converting electricity into hashes in order to propose blocks of transactions.
You're processing transactions and Bitcoin doesn't run without that.
But if you don't process transactions according to the rules that I'm following or that you're
following or that consensus is following, you're just booted out of the network.
That was the other really interesting thing about the Bitcoin Cash case study was that
they had a majority of the hash rate.
Maybe not a majority, but a significant portion of the hash rate and a lot of large businesses
that were agreeing with that.
And it just proved that, hey, it's not the hash rate.
It's not the businesses.
It's the users.
The other thing that I'll say, and this is, I think, a little bit of an underexplored aspect
of the Bitcoin Cash fork is that there was a lot of debate about Segwit and how to activate
it at the time.
And an engineer, they went by the name Shaolin Fry, just took a copy of the software, Bitcoin
Core, and released their own version, which had its own activation policy.
And so they even went around the Bitcoin Core engineers and just launched a separate piece
of software that gained enough traction that it kind of pulled people towards that activation
method.
So it's kind of funny.
That was a really, in my opinion, great example of just how much Bitcoin refuses to centralize.
In any way, like miners couldn't do it, businesses couldn't do it.
Even the engineers, the Bitcoin Core engineers, I think were, now we can look back at it and
say, hey, they were trying to do what was right, but what they were doing was actually
stalling and the market said, no, we want this thing activated now.
And they kind of went around that whole process.
It was just really interesting.
I think if I was to do a longer presentation, I would go a little bit more into those details,
but my presentation was really good.
I was going to say, you only had 15 minutes, right?
So that's a group of people who are not seasoned Bitcoin veterans.
But I appreciate the explanation there because I think what it touches on really is that
fundamental game theory of Bitcoin and also just the Austrian principle of human action.
People are going to do what is in their best interest.
And with Bitcoin, if you are a holder of Bitcoin, it is in your best interest to maintain that
fixed supply, to not add tail emissions.
I think a lot of the tail emissions suggestions tend to come from actually like the crypto
side of things, these people that are suggesting, well, Bitcoin is, they're the crypto guys
who say that Bitcoin's a pet rock and that it doesn't do anything and that it's going
to have to have tail emissions or it's just not going to work because there's not going
to be enough revenue generated by fees and miners will stop and hash rate will plummet
by the year 2140.
And Bitcoin will die yet again for the 5,000th time.
But on the fee side, we're seeing that that's just really not going to be an issue.
And I find it a funny discussion to even have because on the fee side, whenever people say
that fees aren't going to be sufficient to support Bitcoin and to maintain that hash
rate, it's kind of funny because talking about measuring sticks, they're using the measuring
stick of the current fiat price of Bitcoin and then looking at how small the fees may
be and saying, well, see, that won't be enough to pay for energy.
But you're measuring again in the wrong way, like you need to think about the fact that
the value of those sats that are going to be generated by fees in the year 2100, in
the year 2140, that's going to be an insane amount of value.
And that's, you know, again, going to be used to pay for electricity, which will still
continue to seek out the cheapest possible sources and the, you know, most because they're
the most profitable sources.
And I think this, the overall scarcity discussion, it's a perfect segue into just the very obvious
elephant in the room that everybody knows about and is entirely predictable, which is
the Bitcoin having, which is coming up in a couple of months, which I feel like with
all of the ETF hype, it's like, people have kind of put that in the back of their mind
a little bit.
And it's all been focused on the ETF side and saying, oh, well, you know, the ETF is
definitely not priced in right now.
We're going to, it's going to run like crazy after the ETFs go live.
Well, it turns out the issuers were accumulating some Bitcoin leading up to the announcement.
And then with, with graced scales starting to basically get up to almost even almost
where it should be, and still having that whatever it is, 1.5 management fee, people
said, I'm getting out of this as fast as I can.
And so that's a ton of sell pressure, right?
We see that evaporating now.
We see a lot of inflows happening.
I think the ETF stuff overall is, you know, like everything's good for Bitcoin.
And I think it's great that people have the ability to get exposure through alternate
ways.
And that being said, I think that the every four year, every 210,000 blocks, I should say,
almost about every four years, the having is really going to be still the story of the
year like it is whenever there is a having.
And I think that it's going to be a very great case study as it usually is, but probably
taken to a higher degree this year.
It's the unstoppable force, which is ever increasing demand made even more intense by
ETFs eating up more Bitcoin for their, their inflows, meeting that unstoppable force meeting
the immovable object and that immovable object is that enforced by us, by the participants,
hard cap of 21 million Bitcoin.
And I don't think the as much the ETF or excuse me, the having is predictable entirely.
But in your experience is the having ever entirely priced in because can you ever price
in an exponential decrease in, in new supply?
It is cutting it in half and for people that aren't or haven't been around for a while,
maybe they saw the last having or maybe they got in when Bitcoin was already running up
to 69 K.
Maybe they've been buying since the top and DCA in like psychopaths and are now actually
in the black.
But what what are your thoughts going into this having with the additional buy pressure
of the ETFs like there's a lot of talk about God candles.
I don't like to talk about price too much.
But NGU is what draws the majority of people to Bitcoin, especially in the Western world
where we're not yet escaping a despotic regime that is shutting off our bank accounts unless
you're in Canada.
But so far we don't experience too much of that in the US.
But what are your thoughts leading into the having?
How are you approaching it?
How are you preparing for it?
Well, I'm, I'm preparing for it the same way that I've prepared for the last few havings
that I've experienced.
And that is figuring out first of all, which party I'm going to go to.
So I think that the havings more than anything else Satoshi really disrupted the party planning
industry by baking in a party to the network.
No, but on a serious note, like I actually, Bitcoin's never priced in Bitcoin for the
last 15 years has not been priced in.
It's my perspective that Bitcoin is the new global reserve currency and it will over time
eclipse and collapse all of the other currencies because it is a single neutral global currency
that everyone in the world can use.
Now that's going to take a lot of time.
So Bitcoin has never been priced in the knowledge distribution of the disruption is starting
to like get a little bit wider in the US, for example, but there's still a very, very,
very long ways to go.
Most people who have some exposure to Bitcoin have, I don't know, it's kind of like safe
right now for people to say like, oh yeah, you should have one to 5% of your net worth
in Bitcoin.
Now the most diehard Bitcoiners might have 80, 90 plus percent of their wealth in Bitcoin.
And it's my perspective that most of the world is going to get to that point at some point.
So Bitcoin is never priced in.
The Havings are a great marketing event for Bitcoin because it is just showing the world
consistently every four years.
This thing gets cut in half.
Now what the price is going to do, I have no clue, but I view the Havings as just like
a fun kind of more marketing event than like a truly important economic event because the
Bitcoin nodes in the software, it has already dictated the exact monetary policy.
So it's my perspective that all 21 million Bitcoin already exist.
Like they existed as soon as 2009 and they're just being issued, released on a schedule,
according to the plan.
So yeah, I think that's, it's always a great event and I'm very excited about the Havings
and I celebrate it personally.
But I think after another Havings or two, it won't cause so much economic difference
because people are just going to understand that that's how Bitcoin works.
There's 21 million Bitcoin, they're released on a schedule every four years.
The number that gets issued is cut in half.
I think that's the other, one of the biggest problems too of people who think like, oh,
well, you know, what about when the last Bitcoin is issued?
What's going to be the incentive to mine Bitcoin?
We were kind of talking about that a little bit earlier.
They're thinking about Bitcoin mining as its own industry.
When it's my perspective that Bitcoin mining is actually a tool of the energy production
industry.
And humans are never going to be 100% efficient at producing the exact right amount of energy
at a given moment in time to be demanded by people.
And having this network where regardless of what time it is, where you are in the world,
if you've produced too much energy, you can just monetize it.
That is incredibly valuable because right now, if you're an energy producer, if you produce
too much energy and you don't have any Bitcoin miners, you have to turn off production.
So you're losing money.
And essentially any amount of value above zero or even breaking even at zero is better
than losing money.
So that Bitcoin mining in my view is just more of a tool of energy production.
And it's one of the most important tools of energy production.
I think that's another narrative shift that I've really noticed is over the last maybe
year and a half or two years, that conversation has really shifted.
Most energy companies are starting to think about what their Bitcoin strategy is or Bitcoin
miners are getting closer to these large energy companies and trying to work with them.
I think ultimately the industry just becomes vertically integrated.
It's just again, another tool that energy producers will start to leverage.
But today, the Bitcoin miners are out there doing a lot of great work educating energy
producers and acting as demand response here in Texas, for example, when it gets too cold
or too hot.
I think that it's so funny because Bitcoin is one of those things that in retrospect,
it's obvious.
Like it's so obvious.
You're like, OK, wait, there's 21 million coins every four years.
I'm of the same opinion as you that all the Bitcoins already exist.
They're just being issued according to the schedule.
And every four years, we get closer and closer, asymptotically approaching 21 million.
Never going to quite get there because we're still cutting in half.
That for our purposes is 21 million.
And and you're like, oh, once you get that, it's like, well, yeah, that's that's really
it's really obvious what's happening next.
And then you factor in the Bitcoin mining side of the equation, like you said, and I
agree we're going to see just trends towards vertical integration.
I mean, I think Exxon was the first major energy company to start mining Bitcoin with
flared gas.
They started a pilot program in maybe 2020, 2021.
I don't know the status of that pilot program right now if it's turned into more of a full
fledged operation.
But like you said, in Texas with ERCOT and the demand response, this is an incredible
tool.
And Alex Gladstein had a fantastic piece for Bitcoin magazine last week, I think called
Stranded.
And it's all about Africa and Africa's Bitcoin adoption.
But the first part of the piece focuses on Bitcoin mining in Malawi.
And one of his key points is it's just becoming so clear that if you are not mining Bitcoin
as part of your energy generation, you are forced to waste energy.
And so much of our energy is is wasted.
A staggering, staggering amount.
And it's really sad to see so much energy go to waste.
And now you have this tool that you can plug in these computers and be able to take that
wasted energy, otherwise wasted energy, and turn it into sound money with an absolutely
fixed supply that you can send to anyone anywhere in the world without needing to ask for permission.
And that is a paradigm shift that I don't even think we can fully grasp even those of
us in the space grasp what the implications of that are down the road.
I think they're they're very net positive.
It's going to be really interesting to see what countries start realizing this before
others.
Some El Salvador is has obviously led that charge at the nation state level.
Texas although not a country, perhaps soon its own country.
I'm not sure.
Don't know who you ask.
Yeah.
But I mean, Texas, I was just looking at the this EIA study that it's a partial study that
came out today, the Energy Information Association or agency, one of these other many government
agencies in the US, and they're requesting emergency data collection on the Bitcoin mining
industry for forward looking.
They have some of the backwards facing data.
But one of the things that they talked about in this initial kind of overview of the industry,
they talked about very, you know, Bitcoin or talking points, they had actually had some
decent research in there.
They talked about proof of work versus proof of stake and look how much more efficient proof
of stake is.
OK, but then they they pointed out that Bitcoin miners seek out the cheapest forms of electricity.
That electricity is often coming from stranded power sources that are not utilized from renewable
sources that are way underutilized from direct connections to power producers that are enabling
them to not need to go through the grid, but to just go direct from the source.
And they talked about load balancing.
They talked about ERCOT.
And it's pretty cool.
Again, it's one of those things where you see that Overton window shifting where, you
know, not everyone in government is is stupid, right?
A lot of them are parasitic bureaucrats, but there are people in there, I think many who
genuinely at different levels and probably especially the state and local level more
so want what's best for themselves and also what's best for the people they represent.
And it's going to be very interesting to see how these government based narrative shift
towards saying, you know what, look at all of this energy we're wasting as a state, as
a country, as a company.
Why are we not turning this wasted energy into money?
Why are we not doing that?
And as long as you have access to halfway decent information, those questions should come pretty
easily and the answer should come pretty easily as well, which is, well, there's no reason
not to.
We are literally burning money and leaving it on the table and we could be turning it
into absolutely scarce sound money.
So let's get on it.
And I'm hoping I'm curious a little bit of your take on, you know, Texas is basically
winning the hash wars in America at this point.
You've got massive facilities with multiple companies.
It's the state at seems has been extremely pro Bitcoin.
You've got the whole Ercott relationship, which is fantastic.
Do you see this start to become a battle between states to a certain extent?
And I'm not talking about full civil war here, you know, from a hash war perspective.
It seems like it's in states best interest, right?
I really hope so.
I mean, I think Ercott gets a lot of negative press for a few times a year, you know, if
it's like freezing or extra hot and the prices change a lot.
But if you look past the headlines, maybe do a little bit of research, Texas energy
is like 25 to 30% cheaper than any other state.
So yeah, there's like a couple days where maybe they don't get the demand quite right
and the price goes nuts.
But over an entire year, you're spending a lot less, a lot less and Bitcoin mining is
going to drive that cost even lower.
And when energy is abundant, that's where prosperity happens.
If we can harness energy at the lowest cost and just have an excess of energy and Bitcoin
mining helps us get there, like that drives a lot more prosperity.
So yes, I'm really hoping that other states look into Bitcoin mining just because they
have to, right?
I think one of the funniest things about Bitcoin mining is it's literally monetizing
landfills, right?
Landfills emit methane gas, which can be burned and turned into money.
And like there's no downside other than just sheer ignorance or malice not to turn vented
methane from a landfill into additional wealth.
You want that?
It's insane.
Like it sounds like magic.
It sounds too good to be true.
And the reality is that like when it comes to vented landfill methane, which I think
is one of the most just beautiful examples of Bitcoin miners getting creative and also
solving real problems, which is tons of landfills, emitting tons of methane.
Like, there is no one else who is going to pay to take care of that problem.
Nobody else.
The best thing that might happen is they've got to vent that methane somehow.
So maybe somebody pays through some sort of a grant or subsidy to vent it and burn it
and to just burn that methane in the atmosphere.
That's the best case scenario because those landfills aren't hooked up to the grid.
You're not going to be able to power the grid with that.
Nobody's going to pay for that.
But Bitcoin miners will because they're generating revenue from day one.
And it's one of these things.
And it's like you look at it and you're like in retrospect, you're like, well, that's a
that's a no brainer.
But for a lot of people that is still a bridge too far for them apparently.
Well, I don't know.
There's still that narrative that Bitcoin is bad for the environment because it uses
energy.
But if you look closely into really any facet of Bitcoin, I legitimately don't believe that
there's anything anything better for the environment than moving the entire world onto sound money
because it incentivizes saving and it incentivizes capturing all the wasted energy that we already
waste.
Right.
It's monetizing it.
Once you have Bitcoin, you make smarter decisions about your purchases.
You're not going to go out and buy frivolously spend frivolously.
Every purchase is painful, which is a blessing and a curse to be honest.
Sometimes I'm like, I got to just buy something.
I'm going to have to use some Bitcoin, but I have to really work myself, get myself into
a mindset where I can say goodbye to precious sats.
And that that alone is probably the most transformative environmental environmentally
positive thing that we could do for the world.
It's like just put up a little extra friction on just frivolously spending over consumption
and just see what will happen there.
For one thing, the landfills would be a lot less full of useless shit if we decrease some
of that consumption.
So I guess that would actually lead to less methane produced by the landfills.
But I think we can live with that.
The Bitcoin miners mining vented methane will still have plenty of landfills to tap.
And that's another thing about Bitcoin miners.
You could just move them.
Hey, this landfill has stopped venting methane.
Let's go bring our miners somewhere else and plug them in over there to the new wind farm
or the new hydro dam that we've just purchased.
It's this beautiful cheat code across so many layers of society and also across one's personal
life, I think, where answers become much more obvious and clear and simple thanks to the
incentives of Bitcoin.
And then you start to realize that the broken money that we have to steal Lin Alden's book
name, which is a great, great read.
But this broken money has really has led to a broken incentive structure.
And because we have that broken incentive structure, it trickles down to every aspect
of our societies, of our economies, of our governments.
And you see all of these these problems that one faction or another likes to pick at and
say, this is the biggest problem that we face today.
And in reality, all of these problems, while they may be issues, they're actually just
symptoms of a deeper disease, right?
They're symptoms of the broken money, which has broken our incentives.
And you can try to fix those problems.
You can it's like treating the symptoms versus curing the disease.
Treating the symptoms usually involves government subsidies and shoveling money into one department
or another to try and appease a group of voters to get you reelected under the guise of, hey,
we're fixing this problem.
But you're never fixing the problem.
You're putting a bandaid on it and curing the disease is fixing the money.
And it's that, you know, the often repeated cliche of fix the money, fix the world.
But it's it's really not a cliche because it's fixing the money involves fixing the incentives
and incentives are everything.
Again, it's why do people do what they do?
Why?
Because the incentives are aligned in such a way that that decision makes the most personal
sense for them.
So you're not going to change their behavior unless you change the incentives.
And Bitcoin is the best way to change incentives in a positive way that I have personally seen
in my short years on this earth.
And I think that's true for just about every bit coiner.
And that's what also makes it why it's always exciting to be at Bitcoin events, to be in
person with Bitcoiners, because there's so much doom and gloom in so much of the world.
But when you're on Bitcoiners, you feel so much hope because people are actually building
things and trying to make the world better and yes, also trying to make a profit off
of that, which is great because that means they're going to deliver the best possible
product, service, experience, because that's what the market demands.
And it's cool to see that parallel society, that parallel system evolving.
That's a you mentioned something that was really interesting there.
And I think another thing that I've I've been thinking about in another way that I've seen
the industry moving is now Bitcoin companies are going to need to figure out ways to create
products that Bitcoiners will pay Bitcoin for.
We've gone from, you know, I think we're moving, we're starting to move beyond just the exchange,
the Bitcoin accumulation phase into, okay, now we have some wealthy Bitcoiners.
What are the products and services that they demand that they will spend Bitcoin on?
And if your company doesn't have a product that you personally would pay Bitcoin for
or that, you know, makes sense to spend Bitcoin on, I think that's a huge problem.
And it's something that companies are going to have to figure out.
It's something that we are that I personally think about a lot had unchained and tried
to find different ways to deliver value and think of of products that I would spend Bitcoin
on.
I do actually want to ask you about unchained now you guys are not a sponsor of another
fucking Bitcoin podcast.
But I think that the service that you offer is really fantastic.
And the reason that I like what you guys do is because one of the biggest hurdles that
I've seen people come up against when they first are getting into Bitcoin or if I'm talking
about Bitcoin, especially honestly, folks that maybe have a little bit more capital
are a little bit older are looking at putting a sizable chunk of their wealth into Bitcoin
is you start explaining things to them and maybe they're they're coming along.
They're like, okay, yeah, I'm down with this.
This sounds great.
And then you get to the point where the conversation gets to, okay, and this is your private key
and you've got to make sure you keep this really safe because if you lose this, you
know, you can't you're screwed.
And it's that reaction of you mean that there's no customer service I can talk to there's
no there's no, you know, 1 800 number that I can ring up and and be able to get my Bitcoin
sent back to me, you know, the bank will will reverse the transaction for me.
And you're like, well, that's actually kind of the point is that there's no middle and
then you get into all that.
But that that's a big roadblock for people is that fear of I'm going to screw something
up.
And so, you know, maybe you have probably personally on boarded, I'm guessing like hundreds, thousands
of folks onto Bitcoin like had those conversations time and time again.
What are your big takeaways from that?
And how does that kind of influence the way you guys think about your product offerings
that unchained and and also how you view, I guess your place in the ecosystem as driving
forward that Bitcoin adoption?
Yeah, we think we think a lot about those things so that we have an entire team at unchained
the concierge team, which their number one goal their their entire purpose is to get
people set up and comfortable controlling keys.
And the one of the biggest hesitations that we've seen is just that fear of making mistakes.
And at a deeper level, it's a problem of single signature, the coin wallets have a single
point of failure, which in my view is the most important thing about multi sig is that
there are now no longer single points of failure.
So we really help folks achieve that peace of mind where they're actually controlling
keys to Bitcoin, but they know that if they make a mistake, they're not going to lose
Bitcoin.
And that that is the kind of fear that people have about taking self custody.
And then from there, so we get people on boarded onto the most secure form of Bitcoin custody,
which is multi sig where keys are distributed, collaborative custody unchained controls one
key, clients control to they have a majority of the keys.
From that foundation, we can then offer financial products and services that make sense.
So retirement products, Bitcoin IRA, so you can have a tax advantage Bitcoin account where
you control keys inheritance.
So for people who are thinking about Bitcoin generationally, we help you to basically package
up the required information in a way that somebody who has no clue about Bitcoin can
follow and basically hop on the phone, give us a call and then we can walk them through.
And so those are the types of things that we're trying to flesh out is just the financial
services beyond custody, but it's built on that foundation of collaborative custody where
keys are distributed.
So there isn't a single company or individual that could possibly lose Bitcoin because keys
are distributed.
And I think it's it's just such a it's a remarkable thing that we have the ability to do multi
sig.
Like that's that is so genuinely huge.
And whether it's, you know, however many keys you want, you know, total with it, if
it's a two or three or three or five or whatever, that's, I think, a lot more peace of mind.
And you know, again, it's I I firmly believe that like a lot of orange pilling happens,
you know, person to person from a conversation from, you know, finally, you told them about
Bitcoin again for the 50 50th or the 69th time.
And they finally said, okay, yeah, I'll get a little bit of Bitcoin on Coinbase or whatever.
But I honestly think that what helps drive adoption, a huge part of adoption is companies
that offer services that address the pain points of people trying to use Bitcoin like
that.
And companies in the Bitcoin space who are created by and run by Bitcoiners know those
problems all too well, and they are best positioned to be able to offer solutions for that.
And again, to compete to provide the best product to provide the best service to provide
the best experience.
And ultimately, all that competition is for the benefit of the users.
Like that is that is great.
We we need more Bitcoin companies as many as possible coming up with problem or solutions
to problems that Bitcoiners face.
And it's it's really cool to see that Bitcoin company ecosystem evolve.
You know, I was talking, I was talking to Mike, Mike Yarmaz, the Muslim man back in
December.
And you know, I asked him, you know, what do you say to the people that say that there's
you know, there's nothing happening on Bitcoin, you know, the again, kind of a crypto side
of the aisle trope, you know, all all all the innovations happening in the blockchain
Web three space.
And he's like, you know, what do you mean nothing's happening on Bitcoin?
Like that is where you actually see real companies building real products, building real services
to address real needs.
And to see that ecosystem evolve.
And I think with this with the ETFs, as we see more and more institutional capital starting
to focus on Bitcoin, we'll also see more and more institutional capital focus on Bitcoin
companies.
And you know, because that's again, potential maybe the company isn't going to outperform
Bitcoin, but maybe they do over a certain timeframe, and you're willing to take that
bet.
Like that's what it's that's what it's all about, right?
Yeah.
And what I've really noticed is that if you're solving problems for Bitcoiners, a single
Bitcoiner, what you're you're actually solving problems that massive companies that eventually
adopt Bitcoin are going to face.
So even with these ETFs, for example, something like 11 out of 13 of them are relying on Coinbase.
That is a massive single point of failure.
If one company runs into an issue, 11 ETFs are going to have problems simultaneously.
That's not sustainable.
It's the same problem as an individual who's like, I have my life savings and I'm securing
it with one ledger key.
It's just not sustainable.
You really need redundancy and you need to eliminate the possibility of a single mistake
from causing you to lose money.
I wanted to actually was that I wanted to ask you about the ETF specifically, because
I think you had a tweet.
Was it was it bitwise who posted they were the first ones to post their address?
And it's it's a, well, you can speak to this more intelligently than I can, but it's a
it's an old format first fall and it's single sig.
And can you can you talk about that a little bit?
I think you had multiple tweets about this because it was cool that they were like, here,
look, you can see our address and people are sending you 69 69 sats to it and whatnot.
And yay, they're, you know, they've got over capitalized now, but talk about what the potential
pitfalls of that are for, I think it was bitwise, right?
Yeah.
I do want to give them a ton of credit out of all of the ETFs.
I think they are the one that appears to me, like they are trying to be Bitcoin focused
and engage with the Bitcoin ethos and community.
So they're donating to Brink.
They publish their address.
What I think a lot of Bitcoiners were looking at is the type of address they use is a paid
to pub key hash address.
And that was a very, very early address, you know, single signature, very secure.
But now there's there's kind of multiple new address types that have that have been invented
since then, such as multi say paid to script hash or segwit or taproot.
Those are all different address types that have been invented since the pay to pub key
hash.
The reason that they're using that is because that's what their custodian uses coinbase.
And I'm sure I'm certain coinbase has extreme security around the single key that secures
that address.
They probably split up that key and some sort of MPC or Shamir sharing method.
So it's kind of like multi-sig.
But the problem with it is that at the end of the day, it's one key.
And when you sign transactions or when you create those little kind of shards of that
key, there's a moment in time where it is a single key protecting all that Bitcoin.
So I want to give them a lot of credit.
They're being very transparent.
They're going out there and they're publishing their address.
I just as a joke, I looked up the largest Bitcoin address and published that address
as well and said, this is my address.
The problem with publishing an address is all of the addresses are public and you can
go and look them up on the blockchain on mempool.space or blockchain.info.
You can look up every single address and that's what I did.
I went and found the biggest address.
In order to really prove that an address is your address, what you actually need to do
is use a key to sign a message from that address.
So it's almost exactly what's happening with Craig Wright right now.
Craig Wright says, I'm Satoshi.
Those are my addresses.
Look, I've shown you the addresses.
They're mine.
And an extremely simple way to just prove that you actually have those addresses to
use your hardware wallet to sign a message.
It's like trivially easy.
It takes 15 seconds with Trezor Suite, for example.
So one of the things that I said to the BitWaySpeed was, how can I verify that that's your address?
Can you sign a message?
So of course, BitQuinters are always going to try to find the most esoteric ways to prove
their kind of knowledge.
And on one hand, it's like, welcome to the show.
You're here.
We're glad.
I think personally, I'm glad that they're here.
I'm glad that they have been a prominent voice for open sats and brink.
And of course, we're going to do a little dunking.
Welcome to the show.
So yeah, there's essentially, with that address type, there's a ceiling that you hit, which
is ultimately at the end of the day, it's a single key.
And if you move to a different type of address, there's just another ceiling that you can
get to.
And even if you hack that one key, you still need more keys before you can spend the Bitcoin.
I appreciate the explanation.
And I definitely agree.
Like, I think what BitWaySpeed is doing, they're donating what, like 10% of net profits, open
source development.
That's awesome.
I would love to see all of the ETFs doing it.
And I'll happily dunk on the other ETFs as well.
Yes.
Let's see what BlackRock does.
The rest will follow.
But for now, I mean, good on BitWaySpeed for doing that, because that's an actual predictable
or relatively predictable revenue inflow for open source development, which could become
quite substantial.
So that's really cool.
I'm glad to see it.
And I think it's one thing to just say that you're going to donate 10%, but it's also
cool to see that I think they're right now the third largest ETF, maybe after GBTC.
So it's like BlackRock, Fidelity, and then them.
So if you have an active 401K or something like that, and you want exposure to Bitcoin,
there's a few good options out there now.
But if you have an IRA, that's when you should hold your keys.
And it's optionality is a beautiful thing, isn't it?
And I hope that with the ETFs in a larger sense, like, I think we're going to see a
lot of people who end up buying a Bitcoin ETF, maybe just for the hack of it, because
they heard Bitcoin is going to go up.
And then maybe that encourages them to go down that rabbit hole a little bit.
And we see a little bit more of that.
But time will tell.
But I do want to be conscious, like Bitcoin, your time is scarce.
So want to be conscious of that.
And I appreciate you coming on today.
The last thing I would ask you is that are you reading anything right now that you'd
recommend?
I just finished reading the three body problem trilogy, which is a sci-fi trilogy.
There's a Netflix show that's coming out.
And it really, the first two books, the three body problem and the Dark Forest were, I thought,
incredible.
They're slow burns.
So it takes about 150 pages for each of them to start getting really good.
But I thought those books were absolutely incredible.
It got me thinking about our place in the universe just a little bit differently.
Nice.
I did see that pop up on Netflix.
So I'll have to check out the book as well.
The third book, I would say, kind of jumps the shark a little bit.
But it's also pretty good.
The first two, though, I think are incredible.
OK.
Well, and then the last thing is I'll include your social links anywhere else you would
like to send people who are listening to the show.
Yeah, you can find me on x at Phil underscore Geiger.
My email is Phil at unchained.com.
You're welcome to shoot me an email.
And yeah, follow me on X or connect with me via email.
All right.
Well, man, thank you so much for coming on again.
You know, Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are also abundant.
So thank you for sharing your scarce time on another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
I had a great time.
I had a great time, too.
Let's do it again sometime.
Absolutely.
Thanks, Walker.
All right.
Thanks, man.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast.
If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast,
head to Bitcoin podcast.net or hit me up on social media on noster.
Head to primal.net slash Walker and on Twitter search for at Walker America or at Bitcoin
podcast.
You can also watch the video version of this show on X or on YouTube by going to YouTube.com
slash Walker America or rumble by searching for at Walker America.
Bitcoin is scarce.
There will only ever be 21 million, but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
Until next time, stay free.