The key way to think about this is optionality. If you hold Bitcoin for the long run, you have the
option to bring that portion of your wealth with you anywhere in the world or to make permissionless,
censorship-resistant payments to any internet-connected person in the world if you want to or need to.
Your money can't be unilaterally frozen or debased by any bank or government with the stroke
of a pen. It's not stuck in one jurisdiction within narrow borders. It's global. Those features
might not seem important to many Americans, but it's huge for a lot of people in the world.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin block height is 827-035 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Out Loud, where I read you a Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent piece out loud.
Today, I'm reading Assessing the Health of Bitcoin by Lynn Alding. This is actually my first time
reading this piece since Lynn just published it, but Lynn is one of my favorite thinkers and writers,
so I know I'm going to enjoy it and I figured if I was reading it, I may as well read it out loud for
you. Before we get started, I want to remind you that the Bitcoin halving is just a couple months away,
so now is a very good time to get your Bitcoin off of the exchanges and into your own custody.
Go to bitbox.swiss.walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the Bitcoin only
Bitbox O2 hardware wallet. Again, it is Bitcoin only. It's fully open source. You can go to their
GitHub and verify for yourself. No need to trust me. It's super easy to set up and it's a great
tool for seasoned psychopaths and new Bitcoiners alike. Plus, when you go to bitbox.swiss.walker
and use promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this show, so thank you.
If you want to watch the video version, you can always go to 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. And if you have not checked out fountain yet, I highly recommend it. You can
send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters if you find their work valuable and you can earn Bitcoin
just for listening to this show. Fountain has honestly become my go-to podcasting application
now because honestly, Apple Podcast just sucks and I don't really like Spotify. So check out fountain.
And finally, 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 out loud read from Lynn Alden.
Assessing the Health of Bitcoin by Lynn Alden. When investing in Bitcoin as an asset or companies
that build on top of the Bitcoin network as part of an asset mix, we need some metrics with which
to evaluate the progress of the investment thesis and by extension, the health of the Bitcoin network.
It's more than just a price on a chart. It's an open source network with millions of users,
thousands of developers, hundreds of companies, and several ecosystems built on top of it. Most
Wall Street analysts and retail investors haven't actually used a Bitcoin wallet,
taken self custody of the asset, sent it to others and or used it in various ecosystems.
And yet doing so is very helpful for fundamental research. Bitcoin means a lot of different things
to a lot of different people. It enables portable savings, censorship resistant global payments,
and immutable data storage. If you're an American or a European investor in high-quality stocks and
bonds, and are not thinking about the Bitcoin network from the perspective of a Nigerian,
Vietnamese, Argentinian, Lebanese, Russian, or Turkish middle class saver, for example,
then you've not yet fundamentally analyzed the assets use case. And on top of that,
people assess the health of the network in multiple different ways. If Bitcoin doesn't conform to what
they want it to be, they might conclude that it's not doing well. On the other hand, if Bitcoin fits
exactly with what they want, they might think it's doing great, even if there is plenty of
frictions remaining to be solved. Having spent a lot of time studying monetary history, as well as
spending time in the startup venture space around Bitcoin, and studying the technical details of the
protocol in recent years, I have a handful of key metrics that I personally look at when assessing
the health of the Bitcoin network. This article walks through them and sees how the network is
doing in terms of each one. 1. Market capitalization and liquidity. 2. Number of conversion points.
3. Technical security and decentralization. 4. Quality of user experience. 5. Legal acceptance
and global recognition. 1. Market capitalization and liquidity.
Some people say price doesn't matter. 1BTC equals 1BTC is how they like to put it.
It's not that Bitcoin is volatile, it's that the world is volatile around Bitcoin, man.
And there's indeed some truth to that. Bitcoin has a fully diluted supply of 21 million Bitcoin,
technically 2.1 quadrillion SATs, which are the smallest denomination of on-chain Bitcoin.
Created and distributed in a pre-programmed decreasing pattern,
produces blocks on average every 10 minutes thanks to an automatic difficulty adjustment,
and has operated with remarkable consistency since its inception with a higher uptime rate
than Fedwire. I don't know what the dollar supply will be next year, but I know what the Bitcoin
supply will be and can directly audit its exact supply at any time. But price is an important
signal. It doesn't mean much on a day-to-day, week-to-week, or even year-to-year basis,
but it certainly means something across several years. The Bitcoin network itself might be serving
as a heartbeat of clockwork order in a world of chaos, but price is nonetheless a measure of its
adoption. Bitcoin is competing in the global marketplace of monies now, against more than
160 different fiat currencies, gold, silver, and various other cryptocurrencies, as a store of value.
It's also competing with non-monetary assets, like equities and real estate,
or other things we can own with our limited resources. It's not really that the dollar
is fluctuating in price around Bitcoin, as some proponents like to say. Bitcoin is the younger,
more volatile, less liquid, smaller network compared to the dollar. It's indeed the one
fluctuating more in price. In some years, Bitcoin holders can buy a lot more property,
food, gold, copper, oil, S&P 500 shares, dollars, rupees, or whatever else compared to what they
could buy in the prior year. In other years, they can buy a lot less. Bitcoin's price is mainly
what's fluctuating on any given intermediate term basis, and the fact that it fluctuates
affects the purchasing power of the holders. So far, the fluctuations have aimed sharply up,
meaning that a holder of Bitcoin can buy a lot more than they could several years ago.
If price stagnates for a long time, that's a piece of information. If that were to happen,
we should reasonably ask why Bitcoin is failing to appeal to people. Is it not providing solutions
to their problems? If not, why? Fortunately, as the chart above shows, this has not been the case.
Bitcoin's price keeps making higher highs and higher lows, cycle after cycle. It's one of the
best performing assets in history, and I would say it has held up rather well, given the aggressive
tightening of central bank balance sheets and the sharp rise in positive real rates over the past
couple of years. Looking at on-chain indicators, its historical correlation with global broad
money supply and other factors, Bitcoin continues to enjoy long-term adoption and growth, but it
must be monitored. And then there's liquidity. How much daily trading volume is happening on
exchanges? How much transaction value is being sent around on-chain? Money is the most saleable good.
Liquidity is very important. Bitcoin has been ranking very well in this metric, too,
with billions or tens of billions of dollars worth of daily trading volume against other
currencies and assets, which puts it on par with Apple stock in terms of daily exchange liquidity.
And unlike Apple, where the vast majority of volume is on the Nasdaq exchange,
Bitcoin's trade in many exchanges and currencies around the world, including some peer-to-peer
marketplaces, there are also billions of dollars worth of on-chain transfer volume in a given day.
A way to think about liquidity, and it'll likely make you more bullish when you realize it,
is that liquidity begets more liquidity. For money, that's a big piece of what the network effect is.
When Bitcoin had thousands of dollars worth of trading volume per day, someone couldn't put
a million dollars into it, even spread out over weeks, without drastically moving the price.
It wasn't a big and liquid enough market for them yet. And then when Bitcoin had millions
of dollars worth of trading volume per day, someone couldn't put a billion dollars into it,
even spread out over weeks. And now that Bitcoin has billions of dollars of trading volume,
there are trillion-dollar pools of capital that can't put meaningful percentages into it.
It's still too small and too illiquid for them. If they start putting a few hundred million dollars
or a couple billion dollars per day into it, that's enough to tilt the supply demand toward the buy
side and seriously inflect the price upward. Since inception, the Bitcoin ecosystem has had to
achieve certain levels of liquidity before it even gets on the radar of bigger pools of capital.
It's like leveling up. So, who would buy Bitcoin when it's over 100K or 200K per coin?
Entities that can't really buy it until it's that big is who. And at $100,000 per Bitcoin,
each sat is worth a tenth of a cent. Kind of like how the price of a 400-ounce gold
good delivery bar doesn't really matter for most people, the price of each full Bitcoin,
an arbitrary large unit, doesn't really matter. What matters is overall network size,
and liquidity and functionality. And what matters is whether their share of the network
is preserving or growing its purchasing power over the long run or not. Like any asset,
Bitcoin price is a function of supply and demand. Supply is fixed, but portions of it can be in
weak hands or strong hands at any given time. During bull markets, a lot of new people excitedly buy in,
and some longer-term holders trim their exposure and sell to those new buyers. During bear markets,
a lot of recent buyers sell out at a loss, and the more steadfast people keep dollar cost averaging
into it, rarely if ever selling. Supply rotates from fast money weak hands to vaulted money strong
hands that won't easily part with it. This chart shows the percentage of Bitcoin
that hasn't moved on chain in over a year, along with the price of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin supply is
tight like that, it only takes a small spark of new demand and fresh capital inflows to raise the
price significantly, since there won't be a big supply response function from existing holders.
In other words, even a sharp price increase won't encourage much selling from those 70% of coins
that have been held for over a year. But where does that demand come from? Generally speaking,
the biggest correlation I have found to Bitcoin demand is global broad money supply,
denominated in dollars. The first part, global money supply, is a measure of global credit growth
and or central bank money printing. For the second part, the reason dollar denomination is
important here is because the dollar is the global reserve currency and thus the primary unit of
account for global trade, global contracts, and global debts. When the dollar strengthens,
it hardens the debts of various countries. When the dollar weakens, it softens the debt of various
countries. Global dollar denominated broad money is like a big liquidity metric for the world.
How quickly are fiat currency units being created? And how strong is the dollar relative to the rest
of the global currency market? Look into Bitcoin, has a macro suite, and as part of that, they show
the rate of change of Bitcoin price relative to the rate of change of global broad money. And I've
made a custom chart set out of it. Basically, we're comparing the exchange rate between two
different currencies here. Bitcoin is smaller, but is getting harder over time thanks to its
ongoing supply havings and its supply cap of 21 million coins. The dollar is way bigger and goes
through periods of softening and hardening, but mostly it is softening and ever increasing in
supply with briefer periods of cyclical hardening. Both the fundamentals of Bitcoin and the
fundamentals of the dollar, global liquidity, affect the exchange rate between the two over time.
So when I am assessing the market capitalization and liquidity of the Bitcoin network, I am doing it
in relation to global broad money and other major assets over time. It's fine for it to have major
ups and downs. After all, it is bootstrapping from zero to who knows what. And that comes with
volatility. Price appreciation attracts leverage, which eventually causes crashes. Bitcoin has to
keep going through cycles and shaking off leverage and rehypothecation if it's going to become widely
adopted. Bitcoin's notorious volatility is unlikely to diminish much until it's more liquid and more
widely held than it is now. There's no fix for Bitcoin's volatility other than more time, more
adoption, more liquidity, more understanding, and better user experience with the wallets, exchanges,
and other applications. The asset itself is only changing slowly. It's the world's perception of
it and the leverage built on top of it or ripped away from it that goes through manic and oppressive
cycles. What would make me concerned? If the Bitcoin price were to stagnate despite a prolonged
period of rising global liquidity, or if Bitcoin were to fail to keep making higher highs and lower
lows over a multi-year time frame, despite global liquidity doing so, we would then have to ask
difficult questions about why the Bitcoin network is failing to take market share for a prolonged
period of time. So far, it's quite healthy by this metric. Two, number of conversion points.
Bitcoin has gone through a number of narrative transitions over its 15-year life cycle. Although
the funny thing is that virtually all of them were discussed by Satoshi Nakamoto,
Hal Finney, and many others back in 2009 and 2010 on the original Bitcoin Talk forums. But since then,
the market has bounced around to emphasize different use cases of the network over time.
It's like the parable of the blind men and an elephant. In the parable, three blind men are
all touching an elephant. One touches the tail, one touches the side, and one touches a tusk.
They all aggressively argue with each other over what they are touching, when in reality,
they are all touching different parts of the same thing.
A big narrative that bounces back and forth in the Bitcoin ecosystem is whether it's a payment
method or a savings method. The answer, of course, is both, but the emphasis tends to change sometimes.
Nakamoto's original white paper was about peer-to-peer electronic cash. Although in his
early posts, he also talked about central bank monetary debasement and how Bitcoin is
resistant to that due to its fixed supply, i.e. useful as savings. Money does serve multiple
roles after all. Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large,
I contain multitudes. Walt Whitman. Both payments and savings are important,
and both aspects strengthen each other. And because Bitcoin is mainly designed as a low
throughput network, which maximizes for decentralization, it primarily serves as a settlement network.
Actual day-to-day coffee scale transactions need to be done on higher layers of the network.
Bitcoin's ability to be sent from any internet user to any other internet user in the world
is an essential part of what makes it useful. It provides the one holding it with the capability
to make permissionless, censorship-resistant payments through points of friction.
In fact, one of the first ever use cases for it was well over a decade ago, when WikiLeaks was
deep-platformed by major payments platforms. WikiLeaks then turned to Bitcoin to continue
receiving donations. Democracy advocates and human rights advocates in authoritarian regimes
have made use of it by bypassing bank freezes and so forth. People have used it to evade
unjust capital controls that tried to keep them permanently locked into a rapidly debasing,
developing country currency. Similarly, Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap and its decentralized
immutability that keeps its ruleset credible, including that supply cap, is what makes it
attractive to hold. Most monies increase in supply over time with no limit, and even refined gold
increases in supply by an average of about 1.5% per year. But Bitcoin eventually does not,
if people didn't want to hold it, and instead just converted back and forth from fiat currency
to Bitcoin to briefly make settlements and payments, then that would add all sorts of frictions,
costs, and external points of censorship for the network. Paying with Bitcoin or receiving
payment in Bitcoin works best when you actually want to hold Bitcoin for the long term as well.
So, it's that blend of both payments and savings that is important.
The key way to think about this is optionality. If you hold Bitcoin for the long run,
you have the option to bring that portion of your wealth with you anywhere in the world,
or to make permissionless, censorship-resistant payments to any internet-connected person in
the world if you want to or need to. Your money can't be unilaterally frozen or debased by any
bank or government with the stroke of a pen. It's not stuck in one jurisdiction within narrow
borders. It's global. Those features might not seem important to many Americans, but it's huge
for a lot of people in the world. Many countries place capital gains taxes on Bitcoin and most
other assets, meaning if people sell or spend it, they have to pay taxes relative to their cost basis,
and they have to keep track of the accounting for that. That's a big piece of how countries maintain
their currency monopolies. Over time, that might go away for Bitcoin as it becomes highly adopted
and as some countries make it legal tender, but that taxation is the reality for most places now,
and that makes it less attractive to spend compared to fiat currency in many contexts.
That contributes to me not particularly wanting to spend mine much yet, but then again, I'm in a
jurisdiction and line of work where I rarely run into domestic payment frictions with my fiat systems.
Gresham's law states that given a fixed exchange rate, or I would argue some other friction as
well like a capital gains tax, people will spend the weaker money first and hoard the stronger money.
In Egypt, for example, if someone has US dollars and Egyptian pounds, they'll spend the Egyptian
pounds and keep the US dollars tucked away as savings, or if each of my Bitcoin transactions
has a tax on it and my dollar transactions do not. I'll usually spend the dollars and keep my Bitcoin.
The Egyptian could spend the dollars and I could spend my Bitcoin in many cases,
but we're choosing not to. Thier's law states that when a money gets extremely weak beyond a
certain point, merchants won't accept it anymore, and they'll instead demand payment in the stronger
money. That's when Gresham's law gets overridden and people have to spend their stronger money.
When a currency utterly fails, those people who have been saving in dollars in those countries
tend to begin spending them, with the dollar and other monies taking over the weaker currency,
even in the medium of exchange role. And in most economic environments, it's not just
merchants selling goods and services that matter. It's also currency brokers. In Egypt,
or many developing countries, a random merchant like a restaurant might not accept dollars,
even though dollars are treasured things that go for a premium within the country. Sometimes you
need to convert to the local currency first in order to spend at an official merchant.
Less official merchants are often more readily accepting of premium forms of payment. Suppose
I bring a wad of physical US dollars, a couple South African Krugerrand gold coins, or some Bitcoin
with me to a random country, and I don't bring my Visa cards. How could I acquire local goods and
services? I can either find a merchant to accept one of these monies directly, or I can find a broker
that will convert these harder monies to local currency for me at the fair local price. For that
latter method, it's like I'm entering an arcade or casino. I might need to convert my real globally
saleable money to this place's centralized monopoly play money while I'm here, and then convert
back out to real globally saleable money when I leave. It sounds harsh, but that's how it is.
In other words, what we need to know is how saleable or convertible a type of money is,
not just how many merchants directly accept it, or how much merchant volume is being done in a
given currency. For a clear example, the amount of people paying for things directly in gold
throughout the world is extremely low, and yet the liquidity and convertibility of gold is high.
You can pretty easily find a buyer for a recognizable gold coin at fair prices almost
anywhere. Therefore, gold gives the holder quite a bit of optionality. Bitcoin is similar in that
regard, but way more globally portable. Most fiat currencies are extremely liquid and saleable in
their own countries, accepted by virtually all merchants. But all fiat currencies, except for
the top handful, quickly lose saleability and convertibility outside of their borders, outside
of their enforced monopolies. In this sense, they are like arcade tokens or casino chips.
My physical Egyptian pounds and Norwegian kroner are nearly useless in New Jersey, for example,
even in terms of finding a place to easily convert them, to roughly quantify things.
The physical US dollar has 10 out of 10 saleability in the United States,
7 out of 10 saleability in some countries, and maybe 5 out of 10 saleability in other countries.
There's a range, but overall it's generally the most saleable money in the world currently.
Sometimes you can directly spend it, other times you have to convert it first,
but either way, there tends to be plenty of liquidity. Most physical currencies also have
10 out of 10 saleability in their own countries, but they have either 1 out of 10 or 2 out of 10
saleability everywhere else. It'll take quite a while and potentially a steep discount rate
to find someone who will exchange value for them when they are outside of their host jurisdiction,
like an arcade token. Gold has probably like 6 out of 10 saleability almost everywhere,
which makes it one of the more saleable bearer assets around, up there with the dollar.
You can't spend it as easily as a country's local fiat currency, and very little spending
volume happens with it overall. But in just about any country, you can exchange it for liquid
value easily. Gold is a globally recognized liquid and fungible form of value. Bitcoin has
something like 6 out of 10 saleability in many urban centers of the world, similar to gold in
that sense, but it drops down to 2 out of 10 or so in many rural areas, similar to fiat currencies
outside of their monopoly borders. But it's on the strong uptrend, and it has come that far
from nothing in just 15 years. Plus, it can also be converted online in most countries
to mobile phone data top ups, digital gift cards that are spendable locally, and other forms of
value. So the overall number of offline and online conversion points for those that bring
their Bitcoin around with them is substantial. The right question to ask in my opinion is,
if I bring Bitcoin with me, could I spend or convert it for value without much hassle?
In urban centers of many countries, like South Africa or Costa Rica or Argentina or Nigeria as
developing country examples, or basically any developed country, that's a pretty resounding yes.
In other countries like Egypt, it's not really there yet. So what we need to monitor is the
general direction. So far, Bitcoin is definitely becoming more saleable and convertible over time
in any given multi-year time period. The rise of Bitcoin hubs.
In my view, the most promising trend is the growth of many small Bitcoin communities around the world.
Elzonte and El Salvador was among the first, and it triggered the president of the country
to take notice and make it legal tender across the whole country. But it also sparked other
communities like Bitcoin Jungle in Costa Rica, Bitcoin Lake in Guatemala, Bitcoin Acasi in South
Africa, Lugano in Switzerland, Free Madeira, and many others that have become dense areas of Bitcoin
usage and acceptance. The salability and convertibility in those places and others are both
rather high. These hubs just keep popping up. In addition, Ghana has hosted the Africa Bitcoin
conference run by a woman named Farida Naborema for two years in a row. She is an exiled democracy
advocate from Togo, who is deeply familiar with financial repression as a tool for authoritarianism,
and is also a critic of France's neocolonialist ongoing monetary arrangement in over a dozen
African countries. In addition, Indonesia now has a recurring Bitcoin conference run by a woman
named Dea Raskitha. There are conferences in countries all around the world, and there are
small organizations like Bitcoin Commons in Austin, Texas, Bitcoin Park in Nashville,
Pubkey in New York, and Real Bedford in the United Kingdom that serve as local Bitcoin hubs.
It's becoming increasingly common that in a given city, there is a dedicated Bitcoin community
or recurring meetup there. Bitcoinerevents.com and other sites help you find them, and they can
serve as a means of convertibility and salability as well. There are also apps that let you find
Bitcoin merchants in your area. BTCmap.org, for example, lets you find merchants around the
world that accept Bitcoin. The 2023 BTC Prague conference and the 2023 Africa Bitcoin conference
had FETI event apps. In addition to serving as a Bitcoin wallet, this app provided schedules for
all major events at the conference, includes this interactive map that showed locations of
merchants in that area that accept Bitcoin as payment, and provided other services like AI
assistance paid with Bitcoin microtransactions over the Lightning network. As a disclosure,
I'm an investor in FETI via EgoDeath Capital. Here were some of the questions I asked it,
without using a chat GPT subscription, but rather just within the Bitcoin wallet app
that reached out to chat GPT via an API, and paid for by the end user, me in this case,
using Bitcoin. Which developing countries have the highest level of Bitcoin adoption?
As of my knowledge cut off date, in early 2023, Bitcoin adoption has been notably higher in several
developing countries where people face unstable economies, currency devaluation, difficulties
with remittance flows, or lack of access to traditional banking services. Here are a few
of the developing countries with a substantial level of Bitcoin adoption. Nigeria. Nigeria has
one of the highest rates of cryptocurrency adoption in the world. Many Nigerians use Bitcoin in other
cryptocurrencies for payments, remittances, and as a hedge against inflation and currency devaluation.
Venezuela. Due to hyperinflation, political instability, and economic sanctions,
Venezuelans have turned to Bitcoin as a means to preserve their savings and conduct transactions.
El Salvador. As the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021,
El Salvador aims to foster financial inclusion and reduce reliance on remittances.
Bitcoin adoption has been encouraged by the government through various initiatives.
The Philippines. The Philippines has a large remittance market, and many Filipino workers
abroad use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to send money home due to lower fees compared to
traditional remittance services. Argentina. High inflation and capital controls have led
many Argentinians to turn to Bitcoin as a store of value and a way to transfer funds.
Turkey. Economic uncertainty, inflation, and the depreciation of the Turkish lira have driven Turkish
citizens to invest in cryptocurrencies as an alternative to preserve their wealth.
Kenya. Kenyans are increasingly using Bitcoin for payments and as an investment. The country has a
high level of mobile payment penetration, which facilitates the adoption of digital currencies.
Vietnam. Among countries in Southeast Asia, Vietnam has seen a substantial rise in
cryptocurrency usage for remittances and as a form of investment. South Africa. With relatively
high penetration of internet and mobile phones, South Africans use Bitcoin in cryptocurrencies
for transactions and as an investment vehicle. It's important to note that data on Bitcoin
adoption can be difficult to obtain precisely, and it can change rapidly. Usage patterns are
influenced by various economic, legal, and social factors unique to each country. Therefore,
the countries listed above may experience shifts in Bitcoin adoption levels as their
circumstances evolve. Always check the most recent data and reports for the latest information on
Bitcoin adoption trends around the world. What are the benefits of Bitcoin for people in developing
countries? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can offer several benefits to people in developing
countries, particularly in regions where the traditional finance systems are either under
developed or inaccessible to a large portion of the population. Here are some potential benefits.
Financial Inclusion Many individuals in developing countries lack access to banking services due
to a range of issues, such as lack of documentation, trust in financial institutions, or the absence
of necessary infrastructure. Bitcoin can serve as an alternative form of money that doesn't
require permission from a bank or government to use. Remittances. Sending money across borders
using traditional banking systems can be costly and slow. Bitcoin can facilitate remittances more
efficiently and at a lower cost, as it does not rely on the existing banking infrastructure or
exchange rates. Protection Against Inflation In some developing countries, hyperinflation can
erode the value of the local currency, leading to a loss of purchasing power for the residents.
Bitcoin can act as a store of value that is not subject to the monetary policy of any single
country, potentially offering a hedge against inflation. Currency Stability In countries with
unstable currencies, Bitcoin can provide an alternative means to transact and store value,
which can be particularly useful for businesses that engage in international trade.
Bypassing Currency Controls Some countries impose strict currency
controls, making it difficult for people to exchange the local currency for foreign currencies or to
move money out of the country. Bitcoin can be used to circumvent these controls, allowing
individuals to freely move their funds across borders. Lower Transaction Costs
Bitcoin transactions often have lower fees compared to traditional banking systems,
especially for international transactions. Enhanced Security
Bitcoin transactions are secured by cryptography and the decentralized nature of blockchain
technology. This can reduce the risk of fraud, corruption, and interference from third parties.
Empowerment Bitcoin can empower individuals by giving
them direct control over their financial assets. With Bitcoin, users don't have to
rely on traditional banks to manage their money. Transparent Transactions
Bitcoin's underlying technology, the blockchain, provides a transparent ledger of all transactions.
This can reduce corruption and increase trust in environments where financial systems lack
transparency. It's important to note that while Bitcoin does offer these benefits,
there are also significant challenges, such as price volatility, technological barriers,
regulatory uncertainty, and lack of infrastructure that supports cryptocurrency transactions.
Therefore, the adoption of Bitcoin in developing countries can be a complex process that requires
addressing these challenges. Technical Security and Decentralization
My friend and colleague Jeff Booth often uses the phrase,
as long as Bitcoin remains secure and decentralized, before describing his future outlook on the asset
and its macroeconomic implications. In other words, it's an if-else view that rests on the caveat
that the network continues to operate roughly as it has for the past 15 years,
and that the traits that make the Bitcoin network valuable continue to persist into the future.
Bitcoin isn't magic. It's a distributed network protocol. For it to continue to be valuable,
it has to function through opposition and attacks, and it has to be the best and most liquid way to
do it. The concept of Bitcoin is insufficient to really matter for anything. It's the reality of
Bitcoin that is important. If Bitcoin suffers from catastrophic hacks, or gets captured and
centralized and permissions or censored, then it would cease to offer the use case that it does now,
and its value would be partially or entirely degraded. In addition to network effects and
associated liquidity, the focus on security and decentralization is largely what makes Bitcoin
different from other cryptocurrency networks. It sacrifices performance in almost every other
category, speed, throughput, and programmability, in order to be as simple, streamlined, secure,
robust, and decentralized as possible. Its design maximizes for those traits above all else.
All additional complexity must be built on layers on top of it, rather than embedded into the base
layer, because embedding those traits into the base layer would sacrifice performance in those
key attributes of security and decentralization. Therefore, monitoring Bitcoin's level of security
and decentralization is important when building or maintaining a long-term thesis on the network's
value and utility. Security Analysis Bitcoin has had a very robust security track record
for an emerging open-source technology, but not a faultless one. As I wrote about in my book,
Broken Money, here is a list of some of the more notable technical issues it has faced so far.
In 2010, when it was still brand new and barely had a market price, the Bitcoin node client had an
inflation bug, which Satoshi fixed with a soft fork. In 2013, a Bitcoin node client update was
accidentally not backward compatible with the prior, and widely used, node client due to an oversight,
resulting in an unintended chain split. Within hours, developers analyzed the problem and told
node operators to fall back to the prior node client, which resolved the chain split. Since
that time over a decade ago, the Bitcoin network has enjoyed 100% perfect uptime.
Even Fedwire has encountered outages and failed to achieve 100% uptime during that period,
and doesn't even attempt to run 24-7-365 to begin with like Bitcoin does.
In 2018, another inflation bug was accidentally added to the Bitcoin node client. However,
this one was identified and discreetly fixed by developers before it was exploited,
and so it never caused an issue in practice. In 2023, people began making use of the Segwit and
Taproot soft fork upgrades in ways that were not intended by the developers of those upgrades,
including inserting large images into the signature portion of the Bitcoin blockchain.
While this is not a bug per se, it shows the risks of how certain aspects of the code can be used
in ways that were not intended, and therefore shows the ongoing need for conservatism when
performing upgrades in the future. Bitcoin suffers from the year 2038 problem that many
computer systems have. During the year 2038, the 32-bit integer used for Unix time stamping
will run out of seconds for many computer systems, resulting in an error. However,
because Bitcoin uses an unsigned integer for this, it won't run out until the year 2106.
This can be fixed by updating the time to a 64-bit integer, or by taking the block height into account
when interpreting the wrapped around 32-bit integer. But as far as I understand it, this may
require a hard fork, which means an upgrade that is backward incompatible. This shouldn't be hard
in practice because it's obviously necessary, and can be done well in advance of the problem,
years or decades even. But it may open a window of vulnerability. One potential way to do it would be
to release an update that is backward compatible first, but that activates when the integer runs out
and thus solves the problem. Broken Money, Chapter 26. Bitcoin can indeed rebound from technical
problems. The basic solution is for node operators on the decentralized network to roll back to a
prior update before the bug existed and reject the new updates that are causing the problem. However,
we must imagine a worst case scenario. If a technical issue goes unnoticed for years and becomes
entrenched as part of the broad node network and then gets found out and exploited, then that is a
more catastrophic problem. It's still not unrecoverable, but it would be a serious blow. As Bitcoin's
codebase exists over years and decades, it hardens and benefits from the Lindy effect. The Lindy
effect, also known as Lindy's Law, is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy
of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age.
Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in
the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy. Longevity implies a resistance to
change, obsolescence, or competition in greater odds of continued existence into the future,
where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. Mathematically, the Lindy
effect corresponds to lifetimes following a Pareto probability distribution. The concept is
named after Lindy's delicatessen in New York City, where the concept was informally theorized by
comedians. The Lindy effect has subsequently been theorized by mathematicians and statisticians.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has expressed the Lindy effect in terms of distance from an absorbing
barrier. The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, those that do not have an unavoidable
expiration date. For example, human beings are perishable. The life expectancy at birth in
developed countries is about 80 years. So the Lindy effect does not apply to individual
human lifespan, all else being equal. It is less likely for a 10-year-old human to die
within the next year than for a 100-year-old, while the Lindy effect will be less likely
for a 10-year-old, while the Lindy effect would predict the opposite. Overall, the rate of major
bugs has decreased over time, and the fact that the network has had 100% uptime since 2013
is remarkable. Decentralization Analysis
For decentralization, we can measure node distribution and mining distribution as key variables.
The widely distributed node network makes changing the network's rules very hard to do,
because each node enforces the rules for its user. Similarly, a widely distributed mining network
makes transaction censorship harder to pull off. Bitcoin Core developer Luke Dasher estimates
that there are over 60,000 nodes when taking into account ones that are running privately.
In contrast, Ether nodes identify about 6,000 Ethereum nodes, of which about half are hosted
by cloud operators, rather than run residentially. And because Ethereum nodes use too much bandwidth
to run privately via Tor, that's probably close to the actual number. So Bitcoin is rather strong
in terms of node distribution. Bitcoin miners cannot change the core rules of the protocol,
but they can determine what transactions make it into the network or not, so miner centralization
can increase the odds of transaction censorship. The largest publicly traded miner, Marathon
Digital Holdings, Mara, has less than 5% of the network hash rate. There are a couple other
private miners roughly on that scale, and then there are various public and private miners
with 1-2% of the network, and many with less. In other words, mining is indeed quite decentralized.
Even the largest players have tiny allocations of the network. Ever since China banned Bitcoin
mining in 2021, the United States has been the largest mining jurisdiction, but it is estimated
to have less than half of mining hash rate. China is ironically still the number two mining
jurisdiction, because mining is really hard to stamp out, even with their level of authoritarianism.
Other energy-rich countries, like Canada and Russia, have sizable mining infrastructure,
and dozens of countries have small operations. Mining companies usually direct their hashing
power to mining pools. Mining pools are currently rather centralized, with two pools collectively
controlling about half of transaction processing, and the top ten pools controlling virtually all
of the transaction processing. I think this is an area for improvement. There are, however,
some important caveats. Firstly, mining pools do not custody the mining machines, which is a
critical distinction. If a pool misbehaves, miners can easily switch to another pool. So while a few
pools could work together to do a brief 51% attack on the network, their ability to sustain such an
attack is likely very weak. Secondly, Stratum V2 has been rolling out recently, which allows miners
to have more control of the block construction process than just letting the pools do all of the
work. The physical mining supply chain is also rather centralized. Taiwan semiconductor, TSM,
and a few other foundries in the world serve as the key bottlenecks for most types of chip production,
including the application-specific chips that Bitcoin miners use. In fact, I would go so far as
to say that I think pool centralization is an overrated risk, and that semiconductor foundry
centralization is an underrated risk. Overall, ownership of active mining machines is very
decentralized, but the fact that some countries have a large percentage of miners, that certain pools
have a lot of mining power directed at them, and the mining supply chain has some centralized aspects,
chips away at that mining decentralization to a moderate degree. I think mining is an area that
could benefit from more development and attention, even though the most important mining variable,
the ownership and physical distribution of electrified mining machines, is fortunately very
decentralized. 4. Quality of user experience. If Bitcoin is hard to use technically, then it mainly
gets restricted to programmers, engineers, ideologues, and power users that are willing to put in time
to learn it. On the other hand, if it's nearly effortless to use, it can spread to people more
easily. When I looked at cryptocurrency exchanges back in 2013-2015, they were very sketchy looking.
Nowadays, it's generally easier to buy Bitcoin on reputable exchanges and brokers,
and with simple interfaces. And back in the early days, there were no dedicated Bitcoin hardware
wallets. People had to figure out how to manage their keys on their own computers typically.
Most of the lost Bitcoins you hear about in the media were from that early era,
when Bitcoin was not valuable enough for people to pay close attention, and when the keys were harder
to manage. Over the past decade, hardware wallets have become more widespread and easier to use.
Software wallets and interfaces have also improved a lot as well.
One of my favorite recent combinations is the Nunchuk plus TapSigner combo, which works well
for modest amounts of Bitcoin. The TapSigner is a $30 NFC card wallet that can hold private keys
offline inexpensively. While Nunchuk is a mobile or desktop wallet that can work with many hardware
wallet types, including TapSigners, for moderate amounts of Bitcoin or full-feature hardware wallets
for larger amounts of Bitcoin. Decades ago, learning to use a checkbook was an important skill.
Nowadays, many people get Bitcoin or crypto wallets before they get bank accounts.
Managing public-private key pairs is likely to become a more routine part of life,
both for managing money and for signing things to differentiate real social content from fake
content. It's easy to learn, and many people will grow up with the technology around them.
The number of Bitcoin ATMs in the world, according to Statista, also increased by a factor of more
than 100x from 2015 to 2022. And alongside ATMs, there has been a rise in voucher purchase methods,
which I think is one of the reasons why the ATM numbers started to flatline recently.
As Teco was founded in 2019, and in 2023, they raised $6 million in seed capital in a funding
round led by Jack Dorsey. As Teco vouchers can be purchased for cash at hundreds of thousands of
retail points and online platforms, particularly across developing countries, and then redeemed
for Bitcoin, the Lightning Network ramped up over the past six years and reached very usable levels
of liquidity by late 2020. Websites like Stacker News and Communication Protocols like Noster also
integrated the Lightning Network, and this ultimately blends value transfer with information transfer.
Browser plugins like Albi are fairly new and have made it easy to use Lightning on multiple websites
from one wallet, and can be used as a sign-on method for many of them, instead of a username,
password combination. Overall, the Bitcoin network has become easier and more intuitive to use over
time, and from what I see in the development pipeline as a venture investor in the space,
that will continue to be the case in the years ahead.
5. Legal Acceptance and Global Recognition
But what if the government bans it? Has been a common objection to Bitcoin since inception.
Governments do enjoy their state-issued currency monopolies and capital controls after all.
However, when answering that question, we need to ask, which government? There are about 200 of them,
and game theory is such that if one country bans it, another country can gain business by
inviting people to come and build with them instead. One country, El Salvador, even recognizes
Bitcoin as a legal tender now. Some other countries are using capital from their sovereign wealth
funds for Bitcoin mining. Also, some things are just really hard to stop. Back in the early 1990s,
Phil Zimmerman created Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, which was an open-source encryption program.
It allowed people to send private information to each other over the internet,
which is not something that most governments liked. After his open-source code found its way
outside of the United States, the U.S. federal government launched a criminal investigation
against Zimmerman for munitions export without a license. In response, Zimmerman published his
full open-source code in a book, which gave it protection under the First Amendment. It was,
after all, just a collection of words and numbers that he chose to express to others,
or speech, in other words. Some people, including Adam Back, the creator of Hash Cash,
which eventually was used within Bitcoin as its proof of work mechanism, even began putting various
encryption code on t-shirts, with the warning on the t-shirt that the shirt was classified as
munitions and thus illegal to export or show to a foreign national. The U.S. federal government
indeed dropped their criminal investigation of Zimmerman, and encryption regulations were reformed.
Encryption became a key part of e-commerce, since paying online requires secure encryption,
and thus a lot of economic value could have been delayed or pushed elsewhere if the U.S.
federal government had tried to persist beyond what was feasible. These types of protests were
successful, in other words, and used the rule of law against government overreach, and also pointed
to the absurdity and infeasibility of trying to restrict such concise and easily spreadable
information. Open source code is just information, and information is hard to suppress. Similarly,
Bitcoin is free open source code, which makes it hard to stamp out. Even restricting the hardware
side is tough. China banned Bitcoin mining in 2021, but China is still the second largest
mining jurisdiction. When China has trouble banning something, it's clearly not easy to ban.
The software side is even stickier than that. A lot of countries have flip-flopped on banning
Bitcoin, or ran into their own rule of law or division of power. In relatively free countries,
government is not a monolith. Some government officials or representatives like Bitcoin,
whereas others do not, and they are accountable to the people and to the rule of law. In 2018,
India's central bank banned banks from interacting with cryptocurrencies and lobbied the government
to prohibit cryptocurrency use entirely. But in 2020, India's Supreme Court ruled against them,
which restored rights of the private sector to innovate with this technology. In early 2021,
amid a decade of persistent double-digit inflation of their own currency, Nigeria's central bank
prohibited banks from interacting with cryptocurrencies, although they didn't try to
illegalize it among the public because it's really hard to enforce. Instead, they launched the
E-Nira central bank digital currency and clamped down on physical cash with much stricter withdrawal
ATM limits to try to corral people into their centralized digital payment system. During the
ban, Chainalysis assessed that Nigeria had the second highest cryptocurrency adoption in the world,
mostly stablecoins and Bitcoin, and specifically had the highest peer-to-peer trading in the world.
Which is how they got around the bank blockage. In late 2023, after nearly three years of an
ineffective ban being in place, Nigeria's central bank reversed their decision and opened banks up
to interacting with cryptocurrencies with regulations. Back in 2022, amid heavy demand for
cryptocurrencies by the public to defend against triple-digit inflation, some of Argentina's major
banks were stepping up efforts to offer them to customers, but Argentina's government banned banks
from offering them to customers. They cited the typical headline reasons of volatility,
cybersecurity, and money laundering, but really it was about trying to slow the flight out of
their failing currency. And then in 2023, they went to step further by also banning FinTech
payment apps from offering digital assets to customers. But this started to be reversed
after the election of Javier Malay, who is pro-Bitcoin and in favor of the market determining
what it wants to use as money. During Malay's campaign, economist Diana Mondino, now Argentina's
Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote that, Argentina will soon be a Bitcoin haven for years. The
United States Security and Exchange Commission blocked spot Bitcoin ETFs. Other countries
had spot Bitcoin ETFs with no issue, and the Commodities Futures Trading Commission allowed
Bitcoin futures trading, and the SEC allowed futures-based ETFs, both long and short. The
SEC even allowed a leveraged futures Bitcoin ETF, but they repeatedly blocked all spot ETFs.
Which is the simplest type, and which is what the market wanted. In 2023, the DC Circuit
Court of Appeals found that the SEC's allowance of Bitcoin futures ETFs, but not spot ETFs,
was arbitrary and capricious, rather than based on reasonable and coherent arguments.
By early 2024, several spot Bitcoin ETFs began trading. They also allowed the SEC to
make the ETFs trading. There are about 160 currencies in the world, and they have a sort
of financial blood-brain barrier around them. They can control how much physical money,
e.g. cash and gold, comes through ports of entry with tight restrictions, and they can
control what currencies banks are allowed to operate in, what domestic and foreign bank
wires they can make, and what denomination of currency accounts they can provide to their customers.
Even if a developing market jurisdiction does allow broad access to dollar accounts,
they can be dangerous for the holders. They are fractionally reserved, and do not have FDIC
insurance backed by the US government and US central bank. In other words, dollar deposits
in developing country foreign banks are basically junk-rated and uninsured leveraged bond funds.
During times of currency shortage, the dollar accounts can be forcibly converted to local
currency at a fake exchange rate, or blocked from withdrawal. If someone holds dollars in a domestic
bank account in a country where hyperinflation occurs, they are unlikely to be getting most or
any of their dollars back. These 160 different fiat currencies can be a real problem for a lot of
people. Latin America has over 30 currencies, Africa has over 40 currencies. All of those
financial borders are frictions for trade, and all of those financial borders keep people partially
locked in to rapidly devaluing currency units. In other words, if I want to pay a graphic designer
from a developing country using various traditional payment methods, and they want to receive dollars
rather than their local rapidly devaluing currency, their government and banking system can block the
transfer and make them receive it in local currency in any number of ways. And they can set an
artificial exchange rate as well. It's tightly controlled. But if that graphic designer elects
to be paid in bitcoin or dollar stablecoins, I could send it to them with a QR code on a video call,
or over a DM or email, and it goes around their banking system. For legal reasons,
I wouldn't send it to a country with sanctions. It would be too risky for me to do. But I'm happy
to do it if they're in a country that is legally acceptable for Americans to send money to, and
where the primary friction is on their side, which represents the vast majority of countries.
Additionally, someone can bring unlimited amounts of bitcoin and stablecoins with them globally,
just by having a private key. They could write it down in their luggage, store it on a device,
memorize 12 words that represent the key, or stick it in a password protected encrypted
cloud file temporarily, and thus bring unlimited value density through any port of entry. I see
signs at airports that say, no cash over $10,000, and chuckle to myself, because they have no way
of knowing who in the line has $10 million or any other arbitrary value of bitcoin or stablecoins
accessible to them in some way. With this technology, those 160 financial borders that
separate us all are increasingly porous. Trying to stamp out bitcoin or stablecoins,
or similar stuff, is like trying to build sand walls to hold back the ocean tide.
The ability to transfer money around banks, between any internet-connected parties,
opens up global competition between monies. This is good for most people. It's only bad for people
who rent-seek off the top, constantly dilute people's savings and wages, and channel that value
toward themselves and their cronies, and that rely on obfuscation rather than transparency to finance
themselves. Capital naturally flows to places with good legal protections and the rule of law,
and technology makes that process quicker and smoother, and makes it accessible to the working
class and middle class rather than just the wealthy. The mere holding and using of bitcoin puts
governments in an awkward place if they try to ban it, especially governments that have any semblance
of rule of law. They have to argue that it's a bad thing for there to exist money that can't be
debased and that people can hold themselves and send to others, or another way of putting it.
They have to make the case that a decentralized spreadsheet is a threat to national security,
and that such a dangerous thing as that must be banned under threat of imprisonment.
Instead, the biggest legal challenges for the bitcoin network ahead are likely in the area of
privacy, and by major governments like the United States. Governments really don't want people to
have any sort of financial privacy, especially at scale. Financial privacy was the default for most
of history, but in recent decades it's increasingly not. The premise from their perspective is that
in order to prevent the 1% of bad people from doing terrorist financing or human trafficking or other
bad things, 100% of people have to give up their rights to financial privacy and allow the government
to surveil all transactions between all parties. In addition, governments have shifted much of their
revenue toward income taxes, which rely on ubiquitous surveillance of all payment flows to enforce,
but of course, such a thing can lead to massive overreach and with grave consequences.
In addition, we live in an age of surveillance capitalism. We are offered myriad free services
by corporations if we sign away our digital soul, meaning all of our data. What we look at,
and what we spend on, is very valuable commercial information, and governments enhance this and
help make it the norm because they plug into the back end and collect that data too.
Sometimes it could be for the national security reasons, and other times it could be to try and
control the whole population, e.g. China's social credit scores. However, the ability for people
to self-custody their own money and send money to others and do it in such a way that corporations
can't surveil it and governments can't surveil or debase it is an important check on power.
For corporations, there are plenty of reasons to not want them to surveil us, not least being that
they are often hacked and spill that data onto the dark web. And for governments, rather than being
able to surveil and freeze funds without probable cause in sweeping manner in ways that benefit them,
these sorts of technologies force them to have probable cause before using targeted enforcement,
which comes with cost and legal procedure. In the 19th century and before, financial privacy was
the norm because most exchange occurred via cash and coins, and there wasn't any significant
technology to monitor that. The idea of monitoring everyone's transactions was a type of science
fiction. Starting in the late 19th century and especially throughout the 20th century,
people increasingly used banks for their savings and payments, and those banks were
increasingly centralized and surveilled by governments. The telecommunication age and the age
of modern banking that it contributed to enabled ubiquitous financial surveillance to become normal.
Governments mostly didn't have to enforce privacy controls in individuals,
they mainly just had to enforce them on banks, which is easy and happens behind the scenes.
The rise of factories and corporations brought people off of farms and into cities, earning
paychecks that they receive in their bank accounts, with taxes automatically withdrawn, and with all
their financial activities easily surveilled. However, as computer processing, encryption,
and telecommunications kept improving, eventually Bitcoin was created and allowed for peer-to-peer
pseudonymous value transfer. The more widespread Bitcoin and adjacent technologies become,
and particularly private layers and methods on top of them, the more untenable it becomes for
governments to maintain that existing centralized surveillance apparatus. People can begin opting
out, but governments won't make it easy. They are now trying to impose bank type surveillance and
reporting requirements on individuals, which is orders of magnitude more difficult to enforce
than on institutions. I suspect there will be more Zimmerman-like conflicts in the years ahead,
but this time for financial privacy. Governments will increasingly tighten these
frictions around people using various privacy-preserving methods up to and including trying
to criminalize them, and the defense to such overreach is that many of them are open source.
They're just information to restrict their creation and usage by people who are not otherwise
committing crimes, requires criminalizing the usage of words and numbers in a certain order.
It's both hard to legally justify in jurisdictions that have free speech, and hard to enforce in
practice, because open source code spreads rather easily, and in the United States and
certain other jurisdictions, well-funded lawsuits can push back on these laws as being unconstitutional.
So, I expect that period to be messy. Final Grade A-
Grading the network is kind of a joke since it's not really quantifiable, but basically most aspects
of the network are either getting better or staying roughly the same. The areas where we can
subtract points and thus bring it down to an A- rather than an A or an A+, is that minor
decentralization could be better, particularly with regard to pools and ASIC production,
and overall user experience and second-layer application ecosystem development could be
further along than it is now. For that second item, I'd like to see more and better wallets,
more seamless usage of higher layers on the network, more adoption of built-in privacy features,
and so forth. If Bitcoin enters a sustained period of higher fees, as it has been in lately,
then I think those second-layer developments will accelerate. When fees are low, people are more
likely to use the base layer and have less reasons to use higher-layer solutions. When fees are high,
various existing use cases get stress-tested, and users and capital gravitate toward what is
working or what is being demanded. Additionally, governments have generally been pulled, sometimes
willingly and sometimes with protest, toward accepting it to some degree. However, the battle
ahead is likely around privacy, and in my view, that's nowhere near being finished yet. If anything,
it's just heating up. Overall, I continue to view the Bitcoin network as being highly investable,
both in Bitcoin directly as an asset and in the equity of companies building on top of the network.
There are still areas of risk, but they represent areas of potential improvement and contribution.
Part of what makes the Bitcoin network powerful is that its open-source aspect makes it so that
anyone can audit the code and propose refinements to it, anyone can build layers on top of it that
attach to it, and anyone can build applications that interact with it and enhance it for users.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Out Loud episode of The Bitcoin Podcast. If you are a
Bitcoin-only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, head to
BitcoinPodcast.net. You can find me on Noster by going to Primal.net slash Walker. And if you want
to follow The Bitcoin Podcast on Twitter, go to At Walker America or at TITCoin Podcast. You can
also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com slash At Walker America or At Walker
America on Rumble. 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.