as a risk manager, you have to be constantly reassessing risk.
You can't just pair it what was true 10 years ago.
Right?
And you kind of have to be constantly analyzing the current macroeconomic situation.
And in the current macroeconomic situation, everything is risky.
Stocks are risky.
They're trading like altcoins right now, for the most part.
Debt is piling up.
And the debt servicing payments are reaching a trillion or have reached a trillion dollars.
So like maybe you heard 10 years ago in some mainstream media article, Bitcoin is a risky
asset.
You can't just say that and pair it 10 years later.
You have to look at the current situation and reassess.
If you're not always reassessing, then what kind of a risk manager are you?
But I don't need to say that anymore.
I just say, well, BlackRock has an ETF now.
What's your strategy with Bitcoin?
Oh, you don't have one.
That's a problem.
You know, it's just an easier conversation to have.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow Plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin block height is 829256 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 Samson Moe, aka Excellion, the CEO of Jan 3.
I know you're excited to hear from Samson, so I'm not going to make you wait any longer.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Samson Moe.
Thanks for coming on.
I'm glad we got a chance to do this.
It ends up working out well that we're able to do it kind of post ETF news dropping because
now we're in this interesting limbo period.
ETFs have been approved and now it seems like everybody kind of forgot about the halving
that was always going to be coming up in a couple of months with all the hype around
the ETF.
So I think this is kind of a perfect time to zoom out a little bit on the larger Bitcoin
narrative to talk, of course, about just what you have been focusing so much of your time
and energy on, which is nation state adoption.
And then to talk about whatever else comes up because this is an open format.
But if it's good with you, I want to just kind of dive in with a very simple question
that I like to open these things up with.
And just to set the tone and you can take this any direction you want, but just who
are you, Samson?
And how did you get here today to be a guy who is orange-pilling nation states around
the world?
What was that journey for you?
Good question.
I'm just an ordinary guy that just kind of got plunked down into this Bitcoin space
here.
And I guess my background is game development.
And that's kind of when I first learned about Bitcoin, I was a game developer building online
games and it just kind of progressed from there.
Like reading about Bitcoin and having built online worlds with economies, it kind of makes
you understand and appreciate Bitcoin right away because we have to manage online worlds,
whereas no one manages Bitcoin.
And then that was my first epiphany about Bitcoin, like, wow, there's nobody behind
the curtain driving this thing.
It just kind of works and anybody can participate.
So I guess that's how I got pulled into it.
But I don't think it was my goal to kind of be doing what I'm doing now.
I always just thought I'd make games and I'll make games until I die.
But somehow fate kind of pushes you in different directions.
And I guess now I'm orange-pilling nation states and doing aqua.
So lots of interesting things.
Yeah, all in a day's work, right?
I was looking at the Jan3 website just in preparation for this call again.
I hadn't looked at it for a little while.
And I was looking at it and it said Jan3 is a Bitcoin technology company.
And I liked that because you guys have just deployed aqua now live in production.
It's available.
You can go and download it on the App Store.
And I think when you guys were first kicking up or kickstarting Jan3, at least from the
outside looking in, it seemed like, OK, these guys are going around and talking to nation
states.
And I know I would see various comments on Twitter.
What are they actually doing?
What's the plan after you talk to them?
How does that even work?
And so now it seems like that plan is becoming much clearer, which is a technology, as a
technology company, you're not just consulting them.
You're providing solutions.
You also in December just deployed a financial division, right?
So I think that's a great place to start.
And you give a little bit of the Jan3 story and what it is you guys are doing all over
the world from the press releases I see.
Yeah.
So the higher level mission is to accelerate Bitcoin adoption or accelerate hyperbiccoinization.
So getting more people into Bitcoin, helping countries and individuals transition into
this new Bitcoin standard.
So I agree.
When we first launched Jan3, people are wondering, well, what are you guys doing?
But we were building Aqua in the background and building up our team.
So I guess the way to frame it is we do operate on a number of levels.
At the top level, we're engaging with governments and politicians and regulators, just educating
them and teaching them about why they should start implementing some sort of Bitcoin strategy.
Also maybe mining and Bitcoin bonds and these types of financial instruments.
And at the bottom level, we want to support the grassroots initiatives with a non-custodial
wallet, which is Aqua.
So we want to have a piece of the puzzle to help onboard the next couple billion people
into Bitcoin.
And this is a wallet that we think can be used in a number of ways.
We've launched it, of course, now and anybody can download it.
But we can also white label it too for countries that want to have their own Bitcoin wallet
like El Salvador when they first implemented their Bitcoin strategy, they had their Chiva
wallet.
And I think the launch was not that optimal.
But the other critique that they had was that this is a completely custodial solution and
you can effectively monitor everything and see what everyone's doing and freeze people's
funds if you wanted to.
So I think what we can achieve with Aqua's design is give them a Bitcoin wallet that
has other digital assets too, like USD stablecoin in the form of Tether.
And this kind of allows you to have the best of both worlds.
So you can have this government approved wallet that helps you onboard, give out Bitcoin
to people if they do what El Salvador did.
But then all your funds and all your assets are non-custodial too.
So I think this is a piece of the puzzle.
So everything we do kind of fits holistically into this whole accelerating hyperbiccoinization
framework.
And I think the other piece that you mentioned was Janssen Financial.
So this is a new division.
It's offering financial services.
So we were thinking we're spending all this effort orange filling countries and central
banks and telling them to buy Bitcoin.
Why don't we have a division also helps them get the Bitcoin?
So we have a number of partners and liquidity providers that take care of the back end on
onboarding.
But we're like the front end and we engage and help them to understand why and then we
pass them through and help them to get the Bitcoin and then the rest is history, hopefully.
Now I think that that's a I love how the approach has really kind of become more clear.
Like you have the top down and you have the bottom up as well.
And I guess you want to meet in the middle there so that you're not just saying, hey,
country, country X, go ahead and adopt Bitcoin.
It's going to be good for you.
It's here are actually the tools that you can use both at the top level for acquiring
that Bitcoin.
If you want to put it in a some sort of sovereign treasury or the bottom up here are the tools
that people actually need.
And it's funny you mentioned Chivo because that was one of the things I've only been
to El Salvador twice, both times were in 2022.
And that was one of the big negative things that people mentioned when you talked to them
was for for citizens, it was that, OK, this thing doesn't always exactly work that well,
the swallow it.
And for people who were maybe a little bit more knowledgeable who already knew about
Bitcoin, whether they be citizens or people that were there working on various initiatives,
the biggest drawback was, hey, this is custodial, this is kind of replicating some of the same
problems that we're trying to get away from with Bitcoin.
It's just OK, you can still be rugged by the government, but now they're just rugging your
Bitcoin instead of rugging your fiat.
So it's like it was not ideal.
And I'm kind of I'm interested to know and I know some of this stuff is probably you're
not able to maybe talk about it, but I'm really interested in no kind of let's maybe we can
role play.
I will be the the president or the prime minister of Libertaria, let's say.
I would love to know what is your elevator pitch to these, you know, to these either
heads of state or senators or whoever you're able to get in the room with.
How do you start that conversation knowing that a lot of these people have very, very
tight schedules?
I'm sure it's hard to even get a meeting, get in the door.
How do you deliver that message to these people?
Yeah, that's a good question.
So what was the name of your fictional country again?
Libertaria.
OK, so the question really is, does Libertaria have what problems do you have there?
What's your energy mix?
Do you have untapped energy reserves?
So these are the kind of questions that we need to do our research on before.
And I think that informs our approach on what we will deliver as the elevator pitch.
So people ask all the time, like, well, what is your what is the playbook?
There is no one playbook that fits every country because every country is very unique and also
the political landscape is very unique too.
So while you might have a majority in Congress in Libertaria, maybe another country doesn't.
So it'll be harder for them to pass something like a Bitcoin law than, say, Libertaria,
because you have majority in Congress and you can effectively do as you please.
But it really comes down to what problems they're facing.
So are there any problems or do you have any excess energy in Libertaria?
I hope so.
Yes, actually in Libertaria we have quite a bit of excess hydropower that we really
don't have a use for right now.
And we also were a very fortunate country in that we have some really great geothermal
that we are just looking for reason to tap into, but a lot of it's a little stranded.
And we also happen to have some deep, deep oil reserves.
So our oil is very, very cheap for our citizens, any oil products.
But unfortunately, we're just we're having to flare so much methane as a part of that
process.
It's it's really something if only there was something we could do about that.
Yeah, so I guess you're kind of like leading into it.
But you know, I would pitch like President Walker, you have all these resources at your
disposal and with Bitcoin, you can solve a lot of the problems.
You can cap off the flares, monetize that in the form of Bitcoin.
And with your untapped energy reserves, you can just tap into them because with Bitcoin
mining, you can mine anywhere.
You don't need to have a specific spot.
You can go where the energy is and maybe you want to build a new airport.
Well, this is the way to finance that new airport for Libertaria.
So mine Bitcoin, we can help you set up and then you can build your report.
But it's really that simple, like aligning the incentives and their needs with what Bitcoin
can help them and then potentially bringing in the right partners to do so.
But there's also the opportunity to pitch them on a Bitcoin bond.
So this was announced a few years back in El Salvador and I think President Bukele is
still planning to do it.
But this is a way to raise capital, incur sovereign debt, but have a component of it
put into the hardest asset on the planet, which is Bitcoin.
So this model can actually help a lot of countries eliminate their debt problem or having to
pay the IMF indefinitely.
So maybe Libertaria has a debt problem.
You're overextended.
You have a lot of debt problems.
You have to pay the IMF every year, an exorbitant amount of money to service the debt.
Well, then I would say, well, you can mine Bitcoin, take your excess energy or your untapped
energy and raise capital to do that and then eliminate all debt in five to 10 years.
I'll have to take this to the members of my Congress in Libertaria, but it's a very
compelling pitch.
I think that you've been doing this now, giving these pitches, having these conversations,
looking for these pain points now for some time.
And as you've been having these conversations, the Bitcoin landscape has obviously further
developed.
The narrative, I feel, or maybe I should say the overton window around Bitcoin has shifted.
Where you're seeing now firms like KPMG put out reports that say Bitcoin is an ESG asset,
basically.
You're seeing a lot of research come out that's saying, oh, wow, this is peer reviewed.
So now I can pay attention to it, even though it was the truth before.
It's still the truth, but now it's peer reviewed.
So I'll listen to it.
You're seeing these narratives shift.
And is it becoming a little bit easier to have some of these conversations just over
the course of time, or how have you seen that evolve in terms of receptiveness and preconceived
notions?
Yeah, definitely.
I would say the narrative has shifted a lot.
And a friend of mine, Fernando, he launched this website called BTC Perceptions, and he's
tracking media sentiment over time.
It's really interesting to watch, but you can see that the sentiment is getting better
and better about Bitcoin mining.
And it also helps with the ETF.
So a lot of Bitcoiners are like, ETFs are horrible, and it's just a honeypot.
It allows the government to seize your money later.
If it's in there, it's not real Bitcoin, blah, blah.
But from my view, the ETFs are great because it is this massive sentiment shift, where
in the past we would go to a president of Liberia and talk to them and say, well, maybe
you can talk about Bitcoin.
Maybe you can think about Bitcoin, and they'll have feedback about so-and-so problems.
Maybe it's used by criminals, things like that, the old media narrative.
But now we just say, well, BlackRock has an ETF approved.
So there's that.
And that kind of eliminates the going, taking the conversation in a wrong direction about
defending Bitcoin.
You come at it and you say, well, this is a legitimate asset class now that is approved.
And the largest asset manager on the planet is now offering it to their clients.
So you can say it's risky.
You can say you don't like it.
You can say bad people use it.
But here is a very cognizant fact that Bitcoin is this new asset, new reserve currency.
It becomes a lot harder to throw up those obstacles.
We still, of course, see folks like Elizabeth Warren, Bitcoin's favorite critic, throwing
up the same tired tropes.
And it seems that she's transitioned from the Bitcoin is burning the planet narrative.
It's kind of given that up a little bit.
And she's just fully on the Bitcoin is used by criminals narrative.
But at a certain point, she just starts to call the world's largest asset manager a
criminal, you know, which one could make the argument either way.
But it doesn't matter.
It's becoming more mainstream, whether the critics like it or not.
And I do see a lot of the pushback.
I see the argument for, OK, this is a centralizing a lot of Bitcoin.
It's not real Bitcoin.
It's still custody by them.
But by the same token, you have so much money locked up right now in retirement accounts
that people cannot touch until they're in the US at least until they're 65 or 64, 66,
whatever they might be.
And that money now has a path to get into Bitcoin where it did not before.
Yeah.
Sure, you had certain products like unchained.
You could do the conversion and whatnot.
But this is this is extremely easy now.
And there's a larger degree of credibility to it.
And I think that's kind of to your point is it it makes it more credible to those people
who still have not had the time to research Bitcoin really and probably won't.
But they see, oh, BlackRock has a Bitcoin ETF.
OK, well, I'm all right with that.
It just smooths that conversation a little bit.
Exactly.
It's the same in any kind of discourse, whether it is with a government, a president, or an
investment manager for a pension fund, it just changes that whole direction of the narrative.
So that's why I'm really bullish on the ETFs because it's a huge legitimization of Bitcoin
as an asset class.
And I think we will always have these critics like Elizabeth Warren, as you say.
And while I respect her people and her Native American heritage, I think it's a bad look
when she goes and gets community noted all the time for deliberately spreading misinformation
about Bitcoin.
So, you know, I think her elders and her tribe should have a word with her and say, maybe
you shouldn't do that anymore.
But yeah, I mean, we've talked to pension fund managers in the past and this is pre ETF
approval.
And one of their, I guess, pushbacks right away is like Bitcoin is a risk asset.
And I would launch into a trade and kind of lump-ass them and say, as a risk manager,
you have to be constantly reassessing risk.
You can't just pair it what was true 10 years ago.
And you kind of have to be constantly analyzing the current macroeconomic situation.
And in the current macroeconomic situation, everything is risky.
Stocks are risky.
And I'm saying like altcoins right now, for the most part, debt is piling up and the debt
servicing payments are reaching a trillion or have reached a trillion dollars.
So you can't just say, like maybe you heard 10 years ago in some mainstream media article,
Bitcoin is a risky asset.
You can't just say that and pair it 10 years later.
You have to look at the current situation and reassess.
If you're not always reassessing, then what kind of a risk manager are you?
But I don't need to say that anymore.
I just say, well, BlackRock has an ETF now.
What's your strategy with Bitcoin?
Oh, you don't have one.
That's a problem.
It's just an easier conversation to have.
No, it makes a lot of sense.
And also, I really was not sure where you were going with Elizabeth Warren's people
at first, but that well played, sir.
It's funny too.
Now, we're at the point where you start to look really foolish if you are constantly
repeating the same old tropes about Bitcoin, the same old fud, the same old lies, because
whereas before, there were Bitcoin publications and Bitcoiners who were putting out information
to counter these narratives.
But now you're having folks like BlackRock or different consulting firms or whoever it
might be putting out excellent information that counters all these narratives.
So if you're still up there screaming that Bitcoin burns the planet or Bitcoin is only
used by criminals, you just look really stupid.
You just look like either you haven't been completely ignorant of all the information
that's out there or you are somehow a bad actor.
And neither one of those are a very good look.
And I think we're going to see a larger shift.
I mean, we've already seen Bitcoin enter the political discourse in a positive way.
I mean, this past or this current election cycle, you had both RFK and Vivek who started
accepting donations in Bitcoin via the Lightning Network at Bitcoin conference.
That's huge.
Granted, Vivek is no longer in the race, but RFK is an independent with a fairly probably
the best chance an independence had in a long time.
And he's vocally pro Bitcoin.
That's a huge deal whether you like the guy or not.
That's a really important conversation that's being had out in the public.
It's nice to see.
You have to update your meme, by the way.
There's red, there's blue, there's Bobby, and then there's you.
Oh, I like that.
I like that.
It's not red and blue anymore, right?
I know.
It's not a big game, which is really interesting.
And I just find that, I don't know, we constantly seem to be living in the most interesting time
for better or for worse.
But this is the time at which Bitcoin takes center stage and the time at which an independent
actually has a shot at winning.
And at a time which we have seen people come out of left field and win, like Malay and
Argentina.
So these are very interesting times.
Now I actually, I wanted to ask you kind of your take on Malay and Argentina because I
think first of all, it was incredible to see him get invited to Davos and then to give
that speech, which was outstanding.
Like something you never thought that you would hear on the stage at Davos.
Quite refreshing.
But he has really thrown a wrench into the not working gears of Argentina and gotten
them spinning again.
It seems.
And he has been, you know, Bitcoin was not a center part of his campaign by any means,
but it was something that he talked about multiple times in the context of sound money
and Austrian economics and libertarianism kind of at large.
Do you see or maybe you're hearing rumblings of any sorts of moves by Argentina?
Do you think that they move toward dollarization and then there's the potential for a move
towards Bitcoin legal tender status?
Do you think that doesn't even necessarily make sense for them?
And there's an alternate path they can follow to incorporate Bitcoin.
Maybe it's the bonds.
Argentina is also a country that is rich in natural resources.
What do you see playing out in Argentina and kind of I assume you're pretty bullish on
Argentina given the recent developments?
Yeah, it's great.
It's just great.
His address at the World Economic Forum was just perfect, but I think there's some commonality
too to what he's doing, right?
And what we're doing is Jan 3.
So we also get some blowback about our work with governments.
People say, well, why are you doing that?
You're helping the state get Bitcoin.
That's not a good thing.
We need to separate money in states, et cetera, et cetera.
But you have to kind of work with the systems we've got because we do have governments now.
We do have politicians.
We do have people making laws about this stuff.
So either you go and engage with them or you just say, no, I'm just going to do my own
thing and then you get the Orwellian stuff coming out as law because they don't know
any better or they're fearful of new technology, new things.
And then they try to ban self-gustity or say register all your miners with this agency.
There's all these bad things that can come of not engaging.
But if you do engage, I think there's no downside to it, only upside.
The worst is they don't listen to you or they dismiss you.
But the rest of it is maybe they'll listen, maybe somebody in there listens or maybe it
kicks off a spark in some guy's mind about Bitcoin and he starts going down the rabbit
hole.
But I only see benefits of it.
And it's the same with Millet.
When Millet said he was going to Davos, a lot of Bitcoin is like, oh, he's just another
puppet.
But he's not.
He is a libertarian and he is speaking his mind.
But now he's doing it in a much broader platform.
And it is very powerful because if you look at the views, I think he's reached millions
of views on his speech and no one cares what Macron is saying or Lagarde is saying because
no one believes them anymore.
No one cares what they have to say.
The message that people care about is the one of freedom and doing things that make sense.
And I think bringing that back to center stage is very important for this new renaissance
that Bitcoin is spearheading.
And it's the same case for RFK, for Bobby.
He's also spreading that same message.
And you can look at it and be negative about it and say, well, he's just a politician.
He's just saying this to get votes.
But the reality is it's probably more detrimental to Bobby to talk about Bitcoin than to not
talk about Bitcoin, right?
Because we're not a huge audience.
Yes, we have some economic power and some influence and we could be noisy, but we're
not the masses.
So he does run the risk of turning off a lot of people.
But I believe he is doing so because he actually believes that Bitcoin is critical to freedom.
And I'm just getting off topic here, but going back to Argentina, I don't believe Argentina
has to follow the same path as say El Salvador and go Bitcoin law and launch a Chivo and
etc.
They're following their own path, which is deregulation.
So Malay has said, you can use whatever money you want to use in trade.
And we've seen people sign apartment lease agreements denominated in Bitcoin.
There's a massive amount of tether adoption in Argentina as well.
And I expect people are going to ramp up on that and just use the money that they want
to use rather than a mandated money.
And I think I haven't had time to dig into it, but I think there is discussions or approval
already of removing tax on Bitcoin.
So you can achieve the same effects as El Salvador doing things your own way.
I believe this is what's going to play out over the next few years.
Different countries just doing something unique to adopt Bitcoin, not necessarily following
and copying that strategy, but coming up with their own and in accordance with local laws
too.
So I said in the past, I'm bullish on Panama and I'm bullish on Guatemala.
So Costa Rica has a loophole too, but they have these loopholes to make Bitcoin legal
tender without making Bitcoin legal tender.
They just have to say, we want Bitcoin now and it's a done deal.
So there are easy ways to get Bitcoin adoption.
We just have to nudge it and push it along.
I think that's such an interesting point too.
No country is identical to another.
So their paths need not be the same when it comes to Bitcoin.
I'm very interested to see kind of the geopolitical game theory play out over the coming years.
As you see, I mean El Salvador was undeniably the first mover by a long shot here.
But as we start to see more countries look at El Salvador and say, wow, their tourism
numbers and the revenue they brought in just from that alone, just from a ton of people
going there who were not going there before and bringing their money and spending their
money in that country.
That's a remarkable, remarkable achievement.
And obviously a huge part of it was also making that country safe, that people want to go
to places where they're going to feel safe.
But a lot of it was also, you know, was Bitcoin related specifically.
And it'll be interesting at a larger scale to see other countries like Argentina, for
example, they start deregulating, which he's already begun.
If they remove any sort of tax on Bitcoin so that you can just freely use it.
Well, that makes a lot of people say, hmm, maybe I'd like to move to Argentina or at
least to establish a residence there and be able to go somewhere where I can spend my
Bitcoin without the government taking a cut of anything that I'm spending on.
That becomes and as other countries see that when money starts moving out of countries,
then governments I feel start paying a little bit more attention.
Once their tax base starts eroding and they realize that, you know, we still do want to
collect taxes, even though we can just print the difference.
We want to get as many taxes as we can.
That's when they start to perk up a little bit and say, huh, maybe we need to rethink
our strategy on this.
But those first movers, I think, have just a massive advantage and will probably reap
the greatest, you know, proportional rewards for this.
Yeah, but I'd love to know if you have whatever you can talk about again.
But is there a lot of covert either Bitcoin mining, maybe in, let's say, oil rich nations
in the Middle East or Bitcoin stacking by any sort of sovereign wealth fund that you
think is happening behind the scenes right now?
And they're just trying to keep it quiet for as long as they can because they've already
seen like they already get it and they want to get as far ahead as they can before everyone
else catches on.
Yeah.
I mean, I was just talking on a spaces with a couple guys, Alessandro, Adam Back and others
about the ETFs and also we segwayed into mining.
But the massive spike in hash rate over the last year or so, I think, is largely due to
sovereign mining.
And we know about Bhutan now.
And the only reason we know about Bhutan was they were outed in some bankruptcy filing.
I believe it was Celsius.
So they had something there and we just know that they have mining.
So they came on, they owned it.
So there are others I've heard of.
I don't want to name them because they're not confirmed, but they're very credible murmurings
of these countries mining.
So there is that.
We know El Salvador is mining and there is a large public private partnership.
We know Costa Rica has a public private partnership too with a small hydro insulation.
And we know Oman is mining with Marathon.
So this is really what's driving the hash rate.
So a lot of people are concerned like post having what's going to happen.
Is it going to crash?
Maybe they'll dig up the old mining death spiral again.
But I think all the sophisticated miners have hedging tools at their disposal.
So they don't need to just flash sale, flash sell Bitcoin and dump it on market to meet
bills, meet bill payments.
And then you have all the sovereign mining that is effectively behind the meter.
So they don't have to pay for electricity.
It's just, you know, it's their power so they can just use it as they want.
So I don't think there's going to be an issue there.
But I guess my point is there are, and to answer your question, there are a lot of countries
that are mining that have not become public about it yet.
And if we are successful in what we're doing with Jan 3, we'll have Columbia as well and
Surinam mining.
So this is the trend that the mining and the hash rate is just price insensitive.
They don't care anymore.
And you know, Bitcoin could go to a dollar and they'd still be mining because they already
have the infrastructure.
They have free power and they can use it to balance their grid.
So it's just the new norm.
It's just going to be this blending of mining and energy company, where it's just energy
companies are miners and miners are energy companies.
I mean, it's a natural symbiotic relationship, right?
I mean, Gladstein had a great piece lately in Bitcoin mag stranded and it was talking
more about smaller scale mining made possible by Gridless in Africa and in Malawi specifically.
They were looking at some cases, but his point was basically, if you are not mining Bitcoin,
you are wasting energy because in any sort of energy production environment, there is
wasted energy right now under the current paradigm.
Here we're talking about solar or wind or hydrothermal, whatever it might or geothermal,
whatever it might be, especially with, you know, if you're drilling for oil, inventing
methane as well, like, wow, you're literally burning money.
But now you have this tool, this technology that allows you to say, okay, we're going
to capture that waste and turn it into the hardest form of money that humanity has ever
discovered.
It's hard to see how as an energy producing nation or as an energy company, you are not
falling over yourself to ramp that up as fast as you can.
I know one, I mean, to name a big name, Exxon, I think started a pilot, it was maybe 2021,
if I'm remembering correctly, where they were mining with flared gas.
It gets, at a think at a certain point, it's like you will not be able to be competitive
in the market unless you are mining Bitcoin.
And maybe even, you know, regular in some cases, regulation helps drive this even faster.
I know Biden had proposed something recently about needing to deal with methane emissions
and okay, what are you going to do there?
If not mine Bitcoin, there is no second best option, right?
Yeah, there is not.
I mean, Jay Powell had that 60 minute interview recently and he was saying, yeah, well, we're
borrowing from future generations and things are not looking good, this is unsustainable,
etc, etc.
Sometimes the problem is just staring you in the face and the answer is like right here,
either by Bitcoin or just mine Bitcoin, but it seems to be a challenge for them to understand
it.
Maybe it's just too simple, like I can solve all of society's ills by just buying Bitcoin
or mining Bitcoin.
Maybe it's too simple.
Maybe they want that, you know, Rube Goldberg machine with a lot of complexity.
I don't know, I don't know the answer to that, but we see this too when we're engaged with
the governments too.
And we're like, well, how about just mine with the methane from the dump?
And there's always a will like, oh, that's a great idea.
But then how do you get from that's a great idea to execution?
And it's really the same with dealing with any complex piece of machinery is just you
have to keep pushing it along and persisting and persevering.
It's not easy to get them to do what they need to do, but it's sometimes is flabbergassing
for us as Bitcoiners to look at this and say, well, Jay Powell just buy Bitcoin or, you know,
a country with methane, just mine Bitcoin.
It's such an easy thing to do.
It is funny.
It's actually something I've been thinking a lot about lately is I think a lot of times
resistance to Bitcoin comes from this denial that the solution could be so simple because
we live in this society where there are gatekeepers and middlemen everywhere and there are the
so-called experts who we turn to for these complex solutions that us normal mortals,
us unanointed could not possibly conceive of.
And the solution has to be complex.
And there's all these factors going into it and so many moving parts and you can't just
simplify it down, but you can.
You actually can.
And I think that that's maybe one of the things that's annoying to some folks or is actually
a thorn in their side is like, well, I've spent my whole life trying to perfectly orchestrate,
you know, Jay Powell, like he's he's trying to get the economy just right to get the perfect
balance of, you know, get back to that arbitrary 2% inflation number.
And you know, with the smartest people in the room on the case when they're not inside
or trading and resigning from their Federal Reserve President positions, that's a different
point.
But the answer, as you said, is just it's sitting right there.
You just have to be, I think, maybe humble enough to accept that you are over complicating
things and that there is, I mean, especially when you're the U.S. and you have the World
Reserve currency.
Do you think that this is something I wanted to ask you about as well?
Bitcoin is seemingly an opportunity for a lot of countries in the so called underdeveloped
world to leapfrog ahead to, you know, much like, you know, Africa went basically straight
to feature phones and cell phone smartphones.
You know, they didn't install a ton of landlines everywhere.
They have an opportunity to leapfrog their monetary technology, the same in many other
places in Asia and South America.
And it seems that a lot of the resistance to Bitcoin actually comes from the so called
developed world from the big established powers.
How do you see that playing out in this evolving multipolar world?
How do you see the power dynamics shifting?
And do you think there is a, you know, a good chance that in the next 10, 20, 30 years,
the world just looks vastly different because some people got Bitcoin and said, I get it.
We're going to use this to our advantage as a nation state.
And others said, we need to regulate this.
It's a threat to national security.
It's used by criminals, et cetera, et cetera.
The Bitcoin having is just a couple months away and it's going to be here before we know
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With that, the fiat price of Bitcoin is probably going to do some wild things.
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Yeah, I mean, there is this opportunity and my fear is that they won't get the opportunity
if Bitcoin makes a sudden hyperbolic move up.
So this is my Max Payne theory.
So the ideal case is we plot slowly up gradually to, you know, 1 million over a number of years.
Everyone gets to learn about Bitcoin and not get Bitcoin at the price they deserve, but
on this nice, even time schedule.
But we all know that's not going to happen.
You always get Bitcoin at the price you deserve.
So the question is, do they deserve it?
I would hope so, but it seems not likely.
It seems more likely that Bitcoin is going to shoot up very rapidly and all these developing
countries will stay developing countries and the big dominant players will stay the big
dominant players.
That's the worst outcome.
The best outcome is that we can get some of them at least, maybe Argentina, Al Salvador,
Columbia, et cetera, onto a Bitcoin standard and they become the new first world countries
under this new Bitcoin standard, but they need to move.
It's not like something they can wait around for and see because the first mover advantage
is massive here, especially if Bitcoin makes this hyperbolic move or a step change, because
then you first eliminate your debt, but then you also become extremely wealthy.
And if you look at J-PAL's critique about the debt spiral and the, I guess not, it's
a critique, it's his analysis on it.
He knows it's unsustainable.
You can't not keep spending so much more than you're producing.
And the debt is just going to go to insane levels because it's just compounding all the
time.
So we like compound interest when we're earning it, but when you're servicing a debt and it's
compounding, it just becomes unsustainable.
It just goes infinite at some point and the money breaks and you have to reissue it.
So you have to get in at the ground level.
I would say even 40K, even 50, 60, 70K, that's all ground level Bitcoin.
Everything under one million is probably going to be a rounding error in the future.
So if you can get in at this point, you can be the next superpower of the world.
And while it's great that Al Salvador was the first mover, they are still very small.
But if you get a country like Argentina, which is massive, their economy is massive and they
end up adopting Bitcoin as a standard and they have it in their treasury and they're
mining it with all their excess energy, that's going to be the next superpower of the world.
So yeah, I guess the best case scenario is that we do see an upset because the powers
that be the Western powers, they are motivated to keep the South impoverished.
If you look at France's example, they're using the CFA Frank to pay African countries for
their resources and they can devalue that when they want.
Again, I had to Alex Gladstein for writing all this great stuff and that's how I learned
about it.
But the incentive is to keep them poor because when they are poor, you can just extract value
from them.
So I would love for Africa to upset things and adopt Bitcoin.
So we'll try our best in Africa, but I just see Latin America as far more ripe.
It's more politically stable, has better infrastructure, better energy, etc.
So I just see this charge being led from Latin.
And also you have the proximity to Malay and Bokele.
So that's just like a ripe region for disrupting the global financial system.
It's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out.
I do want to touch on that hyperbolic move in a second here because you've certainly
caused quite a stir with some of these predictions.
But before we get into that, just want to double back on what you said about the extraction
of resources from, again, the so-called underdeveloped world.
Because I think it's something that especially if you're an American, if you're someone who's
from Western Europe, if you're from one of the world leader countries at this point,
you, well to quote Gladstein again, you need to check your financial privilege.
I think that it's really hard for a lot of people.
I mean, even if I'm just thinking of friends that I talked to who work in traditional finance
and they are great guys, finance bros, though.
Some of them have come around to Bitcoin, but a lot of them haven't because they just
they don't really get why the heck you would possibly need it.
And some of them, you know, it's, well, Bitcoin's kind of interesting, but really I'm more interested
in the blockchain technology.
You know, you get some of those too.
But it becomes really, you start to feel really, at least for me, guilty as an American when
you start to go deeper down the rabbit hole of figuring out how your country has completely
put these other nations.
I mean, it's monetary imperialism, basically, where you are exporting your inflation.
I would go as far to say that inflation is America's number one export, right?
We import all of the cheap things we need from around the world and we pay for it with
dollars we print out of thin air.
And you know, we manage to keep inflation relatively low in the US because of that wonderful
relationship that we have, that extractive relationship.
But I have to imagine that around the world, people are people and governments are pretty sick and tired of it.
And especially if you're, let's say, a dollarized economy somewhere in the world, and you are
using the dollar, which is relatively stable, but you don't have the benefit of the printing
press in your basement.
That probably gets pretty darn frustrating.
And if you're these countries in Africa that are under the boot of France, it's genuinely
sickening to see that they are purposefully being kept that way.
It's not because they are somehow less.
It's not because they don't have the willpower.
It's because the system is literally designed for them never to be able to get out from
underneath that boot of monetary imperialism.
And that's it's just such a sad thing to realize, honestly.
Like it's depressing.
Yeah, but yeah, I think it's difficult for people with financial privilege to understand
that privilege.
If you have a bank account and a debit card or a credit card, the likelihood that you
could understand what it's like to be unbanked is probably like 5%.
You have to really be able to think and put yourself in someone else's position to understand
what it's like because you've grown up your whole life with all of this stuff around you.
It's just second nature in some ways.
Like, yeah, why do they need Bitcoin?
Because it's so easy.
I just go and pay with my card or I get my Venmo account and I send you 10 bucks or it's
just part of your life.
So it's really hard to understand that, I think.
And then it permeates through society because you grew up in this environment of easy money,
easy access to money, and then you become part of the government and you also forget
that proof of work exists and things are hard and things are expensive and you actually
need to make good decisions.
So then you get this, I guess, this attitude of protectionism where you have to protect
what you've got and then you try to implement these controls against things that are outside
of the system like Bitcoin.
But ultimately, you can't keep protecting the system.
You can't say, well, we don't want anything outside from coming into our system because
that system will die.
The entire world is built on interconnectivity and international trade and movement of funds.
So if all your focus is on preventing Bitcoin from getting into the system, then the system
will just die because it can't sustain itself.
And I think this is one of the lost arts of governance.
How does the economy work?
Because you just see the unchecked spending and spending on crazy things too.
And it's the general absence of basic economic theory and that hurts in the end and that
generally results in failure in the end.
So we're starting to see the resurgence of basic economic thinking to come into government
like Malay, right?
It also goes hand in hand with what we talked about before about simple solutions.
So if you're drowning in debt and you need to stop spending so much, maybe cut some government
agencies and that's what he did.
But it's so easy.
Like, well, we're spending too much.
Our budget is too big.
Well, just cut a few things, right?
Maybe if you're America, you can, God forbid, reduce military spending.
I don't know.
I don't want to advise you on things like that.
But it could work, maybe.
It is just truly absurd that I feel like we're living in this time where the question of
actually cutting spending isn't even on the table.
It's not even part of the discourse.
At least speaking from my American-centric perspective, when you see it doesn't matter
if they're Republicans or Democrats, Republicans are talking about cutting social programs,
Democrats are talking about cutting the military, but none of them are ever really talking about
widespread reduction.
It's just all, what is going to score political points with my particular constituency because
they like when I say this and that gets me a lot of views and clicks and more donations
to my next campaign.
But they're always band-aid solutions.
They're never actually treating the disease.
They're just curing the disease.
They're treating the symptoms.
It's this refusal to acknowledge that the problem, the disease is so much deeper than
their political one-liner talking points.
It's the base layer of everything, which is that our money is just broken.
That's not a left wing or a right wing issue.
That is just an issue.
It's superseded, it should be apolitical, but sadly it hasn't permeated its way into
the conversation enough, not in a real way.
I mean, you look in the US, Jerome Powell was appointed by Trump, reappointed by Biden.
The president changes.
Different group of, one, reds are mad or the blues are mad, but the Federal Reserve just
keeps on humming, just keeps the printers up and nobody's any the wiser because they're
too busy focusing on the political talking heads versus the people who are actually
really dictating the direction that we go at a much more macro level.
Yeah, fundamentally, I think what it is is an addiction to free stuff.
All of this is free stuff.
It's not really free, right?
To be honest, the government can't give you anything that it didn't first take from you.
But in the minds of people with less critical thinking, it is free stuff.
Whether they acknowledge it or not, and they want the free stuff.
So how do you break out of that cycle?
It's very hard to break out of that cycle of getting quote unquote free stuff, especially
when the government has the money printer at their disposal.
So there's all this talk about election interference and like, you know, foreign parties interfering
with the election, but the reality is, democracy is a flawed mechanic because it's always under
this 51% attack.
And you have a lot of interference already internally about the incentives of various
interests and what they want the government to spend money on in the future.
So it is already under attack.
It's already corrupted from within.
So I don't know how to break out of that.
But to look at Argentina as a beacon of hope, I would say Malae's cutting of government
ministries is incredibly significant, more so than a lot of people are giving him credit
for.
Maybe it's even more important than Bitcoin Law in El Salvador as an unpopular opinion,
because this is actually something that has very material change and sets a strong precedent
that you can cut the government down if it becomes too big.
And this also solves a lot of problems too, because you get less bureaucracy.
Things actually can function again.
And I had critiqued in general governments because you always have lawmakers and you
don't have law removers or law optimizers to make sure things make sense.
But what he's doing is actually trying to accomplish that, like removing laws.
Some of the first things he did when he came to power was remove laws.
And I think this is a step in the right direction of where we need to go as a society to learn
to not just make new rules, but go back and do the hard work of reading what you've got
and figuring out, does this make sense?
And does it all work together?
Yeah, it is funny that it's become almost inconceivable.
And Malae is viewed as so radical for taking his chainsaw to these ministries and trying
to deregulate.
Not to remove all regulations.
It's not like it's this free for all there.
He's just cutting down on burdensome bits of legal structure that don't actually do
anyone any good.
And I cannot wait to see what the future has in store for Argentina, because I don't have
a crystal ball.
But I have to imagine that that's going to have some incredibly positive results.
And very quickly, and you've seen some of this already, like housing prices starting
to normalize a little bit more, he brought the peso actually, he brought it to the black
market rate, right?
He devalued it, but he actually just was honest about it and said, look, this is, we all know
it's worth this much.
Let's make that the official rate, which is kind of brilliant, actually.
Just to see him basically take the tools of the prior regime and just say, look, this
is the honest truth.
We're talking about simple answers, right?
Mining Bitcoin is a simple answer.
And then reducing the size of the government is also a simple answer.
And these very simple answers can have very profound effects on society.
It's one of the things as much despair and darkness as there may be in this world.
I am so very hopeful because you start, first of all, because Bitcoin exists.
That makes me incredibly hopeful.
But also because you see these bright spots start to pop up, these lights start to turn
on in the darkness and more people start to turn on their lights around them.
And I think success is contagious in a certain way, where if you see a country or a person,
a company that is doing really well, your natural inclination is to wonder, okay, how
are they doing that?
How did they go from point A to point B?
And point B is a heck of a lot better than point A. And you start to get curious.
You start to ask questions.
And citizens of countries start to say, hold on.
These guys were where we are a few years ago, but now they have gone far ahead of us and
they have a much better standard of living.
They have just a much better society.
How did they do that?
And why aren't we doing that here?
And then you start to see the pressure build, I think.
I hope.
Yeah, but there's also a risk there too, which is that they don't want their citizens to
leave, right?
They stop you from moving.
They stop your mobility.
They impose exit taxation, all these things, and try to keep you within.
But I mean, it's good and bad.
The good is that it removes the veil.
It just shows the collectivism and totalitarianism for what it is.
But the bad is that some people are going to have to suffer, but under all of this pomp
and rhetoric and trying to look good, it's hiding a lot of very totalitarian stuff there.
There's the case of the baseball player.
I forgot his name, but he's in California.
He signed a contract for $700 million, and he was taking payments of $2 million a year
and the bulk of it, like $68 million after he leaves California, and he's doing everything
by the book.
But then the Democrats in California are like, well, you can't do that.
That's our tax money.
So now they're thinking about ways to change it so that he can't get out of paying his
cut to the state.
So all of these things just unveil that collectivism under the hood, hidden just below the surface,
which is good, I think, at the end of the day.
You have to show people what they're dealing with, show them the monster.
Yeah, and it's such a good point that to see what's happening in California is like, just
when you think they can't do anything that is dumber than they're doing, they go and
do something like these, the new taxes that they're implementing.
I don't know if all of them have passed yet, but they're certainly in the process.
But the idea that to go from, we are the United States, and that the idea that one state is
going to try to continue being this leech on you, even if you move elsewhere and you are
no longer getting paid in that state, but we're laying our claim to your future, unrealized
earnings, because when you sign the contract, you were here, so we deserve our piece of
the pie.
That is insane.
It is.
That's worse than an exit tax leaving the country.
That's an exit tax going from state to state.
It's called slavery.
Yeah, you may as well be.
It's an interesting thought experiment that is actually quite real.
It's like, okay, if slavery is 100% non-ownership of the only private property that any of us
truly have, which is our own bodies.
So it's 100% ownership of that, and through that, the confiscation of your work products,
anything that you produce is taken by somebody else.
What is 50% of that being taken then?
Does that make you half a slave?
Where do you draw the line?
Is there a 51% attack on being a slave, where if the taxes are over 51%, you're actually
rounding up to a full slave?
It's kind of sad that we're at that point.
But one thing I want to ask you is, as we, and this may feed into the Omega candle discussion,
but as we go these next few years, I think whatever people think about the fiat price
of Bitcoin, we can all agree that four years from now, five years from now, it will be
higher than it is today.
And another four or five years, it will be higher than it was five years from now.
With that, in various jurisdictions, I think we're going to see some even more totalitarian
laws that are tried to pass, like a windfall tax on Bitcoiners, for example, like, oh, well,
you lucky Bitcoin speculators and criminals and shadowy supercoders, you've made so many
fiat, unrealized fiat gains that you deserve.
It's only fair that you pay some of that back to the state so we can redistribute it more
intelligently for you.
And do you think that that's something that we're going to start to deal with at a large
scale?
And is that almost also the, can that be a sign of like the beginning of the end for
the states that are the nation states that are doing that?
Like, is that the death knell where they kind of admit like, oh, shit, we've lost?
Yeah, I mean, this is a very interesting thought experiment.
And I don't really know where it's going to go, but we have all of these interconnected
forces kind of vying for dominance.
You have that control, that totalitarianism goal, and that is fighting against that free
market competition between all these other countries that are implementing, you know,
more open policies and whatnot.
And then you have the fact that Bitcoin is getting dominance and it is self sovereign
and you can keep it in your head.
So how do all of these factors play out?
That's anyone's guess, but I can tell you for sure that anybody under that influence
of control is not going to have good time until this, until one of the other forces
wins out.
Either these countries fail or they capitulate, but that's the only way it can go because
people start to realize that they are slaves at some point, right?
Right now it's just this thing that goes out on podcasts and people talk about, am I a
50% slave?
I don't know.
But people can feel it, just like inflation.
You can say inflation doesn't exist and inflation is great, but yeah, sorry, my eggs cost triple
what they used to cost.
You can say what you want.
You can say you're not taxed to oblivion, but yeah, the reality is you're taxed to oblivion.
So it's going to be an interesting battle to play out for sure, but the funny thing
here is, do you watch The Walking Dead?
Have you watched The Walking Dead?
I've seen, I think, the first five seasons.
Okay, have you seen The Saviors?
Uh, no.
Okay, maybe I'm spoiling it for you.
The Saviors, the one, is that the one run by the guy with the baseball bat with the barbed
wire rather than yes, I have.
That was a dark entrance.
Yeah, so it would actually be better to be governed by the Saviors because their rule
is give us half your shit, right?
Right now, I think if you're at the highest tax bracket in some places like in Canada,
you're over half your shit, right?
It's like 53% in Canada now and I'm pretty sure in some states it's probably over 50.
So you'd be better off living in The Walking Dead world and having that guy, forgot his
name, Negan, be the president and he just takes half your shit because it's cheaper.
And at least he's honest about it.
You know, the rules are, the rules are clear and the same for everyone, right?
Yeah.
It is interesting too.
I mean, as soon as you start to factor in property tax and everything too, it gets to
be pretty like almost comically, like it'd be comically absurd if they weren't just
stealing from you.
And then you have to ask the natural question, which is, if I have to pay the government
every year just to be able to keep living on this piece of land in this house that I allegedly
own, then do I actually own it?
Because you can, well, and the answer to that is very easily, you can discover it very quickly.
You just have to stop paying your taxes on your house and see how quickly the IRS shows
up there.
They will show up.
A friend of ours had a neighbor who was a very quiet guy, kept to himself.
And nice enough, you know, good neighbor kept his lawn mowed and all that.
And this is suburban Chicago.
One day our friend looks outside his window and sees that there's multiple SWAT trucks
that have pulled up to his house with full, you know, at least eight, 10 people rolling
up full SWAT gear, full automatic weapons, staking out this guy's house and then taking
a battering ram blowing down his door when nobody came out for the loudspeaker.
And then, you know, he's like, what the hell is going on?
A couple hours later, after they had completely searched and trashed the house, one of the,
you know, the police officers or whatever they exactly were came over and talked to
our friend and said, you know, did you know this guy that had asked him some questions?
And our friend asked, what did he do?
Well, he hasn't paid his taxes in several years.
Apparently it was like five or seven years and he had a lot of taxes that he owed on
his house, but he refused to pay property taxes.
He didn't believe in them.
And that is like literally what they will do.
They will come to your house and take everything you own because you don't actually own it.
And I don't think people realize that it's, it really is the threat of violence for non-compliance.
Like that's not just a, not just a meme that we Bitcoiners say, like that is a real thing
that they will do.
But it's important for society, right?
So, right, for the greater good, for the greater good.
But you're American, right?
So didn't you guys rebel over like a 3% T tax?
Yeah.
I think that was, I might have been 2% at the time.
Wow.
It's ridiculous.
Yeah.
How far the mighty have fallen, right?
Yeah.
The land of the free.
Right.
You can't leave.
You can't leave unless you pay us.
And also you need to keep paying us even if you live somebody else if you want to be
able to keep your citizenship here.
Otherwise, you can renounce it and, you know, we probably won't ever let you back, but hey,
it's up to you, you know?
You have the freedom to choose.
It's a, it's, it's well, but okay, enough of depressing IRS knocking down your door,
taking everything you own.
At least you can own Bitcoin.
At least you can keep that Bitcoin in your head.
And that's a powerful thing.
And another powerful thing is the beautiful meme of number go up.
And, you know, I, I, I don't always like to talk about fiat price.
However, price is a signal, right?
It's the market telling us something.
And it is a very powerful signal when it comes to new Bitcoin adoption, because let's be
honest, a lot of people get in for better or worse when that price is rocketing up and
Bitcoins all over the news again, and they're thinking, Oh, wow, maybe I should get some
of this just in case you have made recently some, some predictions that depending on what
time frame one is viewing those predictions through are either very wild to some or completely
reasonable.
Like for example, I think the $1 million Bitcoin price prediction is completely reasonable
and it will go far past that.
It just depends on what time frame you're looking at.
But can you talk to us a little bit about the idea of the Omega candle?
You had another tweet the other day about, you know, a kind of power law versus chaos
theory, which I enjoyed.
And kind of what your thesis is for that, maybe as much of a time frame as you're comfortable
giving for it and kind of how you arrived at that, given everything you see from the
kind of higher level of nation states on down to the bottom up just regular average people
buying Bitcoin.
Yeah.
So the Omega candle is a hundred K green candle on the daily.
And this is what happened after a God candle, which is 10 K.
So the God candle has been talked about in trading circles for some time, but I figure
with the advent of the ETFs and this massive change in the macroeconomic landscape, it's
time for a bigger candle to measure.
And I like the term Omega because you can quantify it like a two Omega day would be
a 200 K candle or a three Omega kind of like you measure earthquakes on the Richter scale.
That's like a magnitude six, right?
So I think we both agree that one million is an inevitability for Bitcoin, just simply
because we're printing and have printed so much money, debt is through the roof.
So we're going to hit some point in which either they lower the rates or the money dies.
But I mean, both are going to mean because going to go up.
So it doesn't really matter.
It's an eventuality because the Bitcoin price, the Bitcoin free price is a factor of Fiat
clown world.
And there is no max for Fiat clown world.
There's just burr.
So a million, 10 million, we see it all the time.
If you look at the Turkish lira charts, Turkish lira, TRY, USDT, they already almost have
Omega candles there.
So you have days where it goes up 80,000 Turkish lira or 90,000 Turkish lira.
So it's not really impossible because the money is broken so anything can happen.
Now my thesis is that we're going to see it before the halving, which is in the next two
months or so.
I did, I talked to someone on Twitter and they said put a date.
So I said, okay, I said days to weeks, it'll happen.
So this means we'll shoot up over the course of weeks, at least 10 omegas to reach 1 million.
So I just said, okay, let's just say ETF approval date.
So that would mean seven weeks after that.
So sometime late February.
But I think that's not going to hit now because of all the grayscale selling.
But I still think when it starts, it's just going to ramp up really quickly and just go
vertical.
And this is because of a number of effects at play.
You have a multiplier effect.
Bank of America had it in a previous report that was 118 times.
Every dollar that goes into Bitcoin boosts the market cap by 118 dollars.
And then you have the Veblen effect, which is as something becomes more valuable, people
want more of it.
And we see this from time and time again when Bitcoin is at all time high or close to all
time highs, people start calling you and say, hey, Walker, tell me about this Bitcoin thing
and how do I get some?
But they never will call you up when Bitcoin is at 15k.
Like, Walker, it just tanked to 15k.
How do I get some?
Not possible, right?
So yeah, when we start going up to like 100k, that's when people start going crazy.
At 200k, they go even crazier.
And then somewhere between 250 to 500 is the Veblen threshold where we kind of cross into
gold AUM.
And at that point, it's just, you don't even need to think about it anymore.
You just need Bitcoin because it's the global reserve asset.
It's the new gold.
And I think that will demonetize gold and gold will go down, but it'll keep going up.
And as it keeps going up, you have price insensitive buyers because the shrimps, the plebs, whatever,
they're always stacking, always DCAing.
Then you have big anchoring entities like MicroStrategy and Tether that will also keep
buying because they've already decided that we're going to allocate a portion of our profits
to buy Bitcoin.
And then you have nation states also.
So it just probably won't come down once it hits that threshold and it'll just keep
going up.
So 1 million will happen very quickly.
And the Max Payne theory or the chaos theory is that the most painful outcome for the most
number of people and the most chaotic outcome is probably what's going to happen.
So that means it's going to shoot up and to hit that 1 million mark.
And a lot of people will miss that boat.
Like we talked about earlier, it won't be transformative for a lot of these countries
anymore because you're already, when you're accumulating for your reserves, you're taking
what little fiat you have or gold you have and converting it to Bitcoin at $1 million
per BTC.
It's not going to change much.
So that's the most painful outcome, I think, for that group.
But yeah, all of these effects, you have the ETF demand, which is thousands of coins a
day and then the halving coming up in less than three months, like what, eight weeks
now?
That's going to have the supply produced to $450 a day.
So you're already multiples of times over the production.
And yes, people like to say some will sell, but those that sell will probably end up buying
in higher because it just keeps going up.
So all of this put together means, in my view, 1 million candle in a very short time frame
once it starts picking up on the upward trajectory.
I appreciate the context and the explanation there.
When I first saw you make that prediction, I was like, honestly, that seems pretty reasonable
because I think that one of the things that people miss even a lot of Bitcoiners is even
though they are far down the rabbit hole and maybe they've changed their personal unit
of account to Bitcoin, they still have a tendency, which is natural to think in terms of the
current paradigm to measure things in terms of the current system.
And the Turkish lira example is a great one.
Like Bitcoin's already hit all time highs again in TRI terms.
Like that already happened months ago.
When you're measuring stick is fiat, it is going to be a flawed measurement.
So if you're trying to think, oh, you know, you think $100,000, $1 million per Bitcoin
sounds outlandish, you are really just measuring with the wrong stick.
It's something that Jeff Booth says often is it's not Bitcoin being repriced.
It's Bitcoin doing the repricing.
Everything else is trending to zero in terms of Bitcoin.
And when you flip that equation to start looking at it that way, $1 million a Bitcoin doesn't
sound all that unreasonable when you consider all of these the confluence of factors that
you mentioned, not only do you have all the new ETF inflows that'll be coming and are
coming, not only do you have the having coming, which is a massive supply shock, but you have
the nation states, you have the psychopathic holders of last resort who are just DCAing
every single day.
A little and maybe it's a few bucks, maybe it's $100, maybe it's $1,000, but they're
just taking that away, putting it in cold storage, and that's out of circulation for
many years.
And I like to think of it in terms of the paradox of that old question, what happens
when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object and framing it as the idea of the unstoppable
force is demand ever increasing and more voracious demand for Bitcoin.
And the immovable object is Bitcoin's absolutely finite supply of $21 million.
That's not moving.
It is truly an immovable object floating around in cyberspace, but demand is only becoming
stronger.
So what happens when that unstoppable force hits that immovable object?
Well, Omega, I guess, or multiple Omegas.
It'll be really interesting to see this plan.
I think you're right about the Max Payne theory.
I think it's unfortunately, because it would be nice for Bitcoin to kind of crab along
and upward slowly and steadily and give us many people, and especially in the developing
world, more chance to at least accumulate a little.
But sadly, I don't know if that's going to be the case.
There's an interesting psychological thing here at play.
So when the Omega candles didn't come right after the ETFs were launched, a lot of people
pushed out their predictions and said, well, maybe in five years or maybe 10 years.
And this is a failing of human psychology.
So we don't really deal with step changes very well, which is like a change that's very
rapid like this.
And then you have a new plateau.
So when the step change doesn't come, you don't have that vertical line like that, then
cognitively you push it out and say, well, it'll happen here.
But it probably is still in the same place as it's going to happen, and you're just getting
closer to it.
And then you suddenly move up that step.
So someone tweeted about it, and I was going to comment, but I lost it in my feed.
But I wanted to talk about that later on on Twitter.
But I think it's still coming very rapidly.
If not at the having very shortly after the having, I don't think this grayscale selling
has pushed us out five years.
And people are doing that.
They're doing that same mistake that people do when something has changed, but it didn't
happen when they thought it was going to happen.
But I think you're just a little bit closer to that step, not that the step has moved
over here into 2026 or something like that.
It's like that one very simple graph.
I think it's used to talk about success where it's like, right when you're thinking about
giving up is just before you are personally about to go parabolic in whatever your domain
of expertise is.
And I think that that is the case here too.
People's memories are oddly short, I think.
And they're very quick, as you said, to backtrack and change and say, well, okay, yeah, this
didn't happen.
So let's let's shove that out way into the future into something that feels more comfortable
since my initial prediction doesn't seem to be right.
But it's just that maybe you need a little bit more patience.
And again, I don't see a scenario.
I mean, perhaps, perhaps all of the inflows into the ETFs stop.
Perhaps no nation states adopt Bitcoin at all.
Perhaps all those ETFs sell off all of their Bitcoin holdings.
Those could I don't know, maybe those could happen.
But you know what's not going to happen is that psychopathic army of daily DCA or weekly
DCA or monthly DCA plebs is not going to stop buying Bitcoin.
They're just going to keep going.
And I don't think that people fully grasp the the power and importance of just that one
river of fiat that flows into Bitcoin.
Now, once you start to incorporate the confluence of again, the ETFs and nation states and just
a hyper inflationary fiat world in different places at different times, it starts to get
very hard to make an argument against a really violent and rapid ascent.
Like, that's a I think that's a harder case to make than to say, look, it's going to be
a step change and you're not prepared for it.
Like, I don't know.
But perhaps that's just perhaps that's just my over over bullishness talking.
Who knows?
You can never be too bullish on Bitcoin.
But yeah, I've seen some critiques saying to like, well, Bitcoin might go to a million,
but then the money's worthless.
I don't think that's the case either.
Because what we've seen in recent years is you could shut off the entire world economy
and it doesn't change anything.
You'd think that that would have some massive, massive implications, but you know, everything
just kept on humming.
And yeah, we have inflation, but more or less kept going.
So I think even with the one MBTC, we're still going to have that same purchasing power for
a while because it takes time for the world to adjust to that shock to the system.
The sad fact is the world just does not adjust really well to shocks.
And the case in point was the COVID quote unquote pandemic, right?
Yeah, like we shut everything down and that was really stupid.
But it took years for that to play out.
Even the inflation was not instant.
So I think Bitcoin will have that same effect.
Like Bitcoin will reprice very rapidly because it is traded and moved across markets and
borders 24 seven.
Everything else is not.
And also this is why Bitcoin is the truest measurement of value you can get because it
doesn't stop for anything.
If you buy a house, you get repriced once a year when you get your property assessment,
right?
Things on grocery stores, they need to check their suppliers and see if the price went up
and then they'll get around to it weeks later to update the labels.
But the funny thing is I see some stores now having electronic signs so they can update
faster.
But it takes a long time for these shocks to the system to permeate.
So I think you'll still have $1 million of Bitcoin, $1 million per Bitcoin, and cars
will largely cost the same for a few years.
And then the shock will hit and then you'll start to see that change reverberate through
that system.
It's also interesting to think and people perhaps have forgotten that at least in the
US and in other Europe as well to a lesser extent, but this was the most historically
rapid tightening of fiat monetary policy in history, basically.
I mean, you can look at the money supply and it actually went down a little bit.
They sucked some of the money back out of the system.
And now, if you zoom out, it didn't go down very much.
But it did go down.
We have tightened.
The printers are idling right now.
Meanwhile, as you mentioned earlier, the interest expense on at least the US federal
debt is at a trillion dollars.
The only graph that looks like the interest expense in the debt is maybe the Bitcoin hash
rate, which also has a similarly beautifully parabolic arc to it, signifying something
very different and much more hopeful.
But people, when you have the chairman of the Federal Reserve, who controls the dollar,
which is the world's reserve currency saying things like we are on an unsustainable path
and we know that the only answer for them to deal with this debt is to inflate that
debt away.
They have to make the debt worthless and then worthless.
That's the only they're not going to pay it off.
That's just not going to happen.
So we are going to use our printers.
We're going to fire them back up at levels probably never before seen.
And if that's happening with the world's reserve currency, it's happening at a much larger
like I've shuttered to think what the Turkish leader is going to do when the US starts easing
and printing again.
It's not going to look good.
The US is still the prettiest horse at the glue factory, but they're still at the Fiat
glue factory.
Well, it doesn't really matter because the world is more than just the US, right?
Other countries will start printing too.
Like China, it looks like they're about to start printing and they also have their ETFs
going through in Hong Kong, right?
So I think everyone has to print because everything is failing and the only way out is to print
and that printed money has to go somewhere.
So it's this hastening that transition to the Bitcoin standard that money will go into
Bitcoin from the smart people.
The dumb people will hang on to the Fiat until the very end.
But it is this transition period that we're seeing and it's going to happen very quickly.
I want to be conscious of your scarce time here, but I do want to ask you one more general
question than one more just mini question to finish this off.
But I wanted to actually ask you your thoughts on China because there I know that they throw,
I mean, their equities markets have been falling off a cliff, but of course, Bitcoin is still
too volatile.
But China is also one of the largest sovereign holders of confiscated Bitcoin.
There's still a good amount of hash rate in China, despite their best efforts to ban it
many times, Bitcoin persists.
And given their current economic malaise that they appear to be experiencing, do you think
there's any possibility that China does a bit of an about face or reversal on their Bitcoin
stance at a nation state level?
Do you think there's any point where they say, you know what, actually, we are going
to start mining Bitcoin as a sovereign, you know, as a nation.
And you know, by the way, private enterprise, feel free to come back to China and mine your
Bitcoin here.
Do you foresee that happening or any chance of that happening?
I think it is starting to look more likely.
So I like to view Hong Kong as a proxy for sentiment in mainland China.
So the fact that Hong Kong has been opening up and speaking more about Bitcoin and unfortunately
crypto, I think it is a signal that they are starting to warm up to the idea that this
could be something.
And a lot of countries, whether they admit it or not, look towards the US for guidance.
So I know in Australia, the regulator there is on the verge of approving an ETF, a proper
ETF, but they were waiting for that signal from the US to do so.
I think that's moving forward now.
And I believe that might be the same case for Hong Kong because I know some groups
that were filing for an ETF there and they were very close, but it was just waiting on
that signal from the US that, you know, this is the new gold.
And then they'll move ahead with it.
But again, Hong Kong is a proxy for sentiment in Beijing.
So if Hong Kong is opening up and Hong Kong has fallen on hard times too, I was back there
last year and I felt like the city was largely abandoned.
And I know too because a lot of friends have moved to Singapore actually.
So it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation that you have to
be open.
Like right now, China is largely economically closed off.
It's kind of its own enclosed ecosystem and it's not working.
They need an influx of capital.
And this is what I think is interesting with Latam because all of these leaders in these
countries are starting to open their doors to money.
They want investment to come in.
They want the tourists to come in, right?
Instead of closing off and isolating yourself, they want to be connected to the world.
And they can do that through Bitcoin as this interconnector between economies and between
people.
So that's got to change, I believe.
China will move closer to Bitcoin and they'll do an about face.
It's just a question of when.
But if they do choose to do so, I mean, it's going to be substantial on everything because
they're very close to the ASIC manufacturers.
The vast, vast majority of ASIC manufacturing is done in China and that's going to mean
that they can get hashrate up very fast.
And there is a large amount of energy infrastructure in China, also nuclear.
So while Western nations were giving up on nuclear or closing down nuclear plants, China
was building more nuclear plants.
Plus they have the hydro and everything else too.
So if they decide to go into Bitcoin in a big way, it's going to have massive repercussions
for the market as a whole.
It'll be fascinating to see how that does play out.
And I think the nuclear is such an important point too, because as you said, you know,
as countries like Germany were spearheading the movement to get rid of all nuclear and
switch back to coal because they somehow determined that that's cleaner for them.
China not only was building out nuclear, but I think people underestimate the importance
of having specialists, having a workforce, having the experience in building these plants
to be able to actually do it at a competitive price at a large scale.
You know, whereas other countries have just sort of let those skills fall by the wayside,
you know, it's a, if you don't practice something, you tend to get a little rusty at it.
And especially if you decide to make it some sort of a, you know, climate pariah for literally
no logical reason, well, then you really lose expertise in that.
So it would be interesting to see as well how that sort of a shift towards positive
stance on Bitcoin might just, you know, affect China at a larger, in a larger way, because
I think wherever you are in the world, Bitcoin is going to, you know, you don't change Bitcoin,
Bitcoin changes you.
And I think that's true at a personal level.
I think that's also likely true at a nation state level.
It's going to change priorities.
It's giving you an honest ledger as your base layer.
It's going to make things better in ways that are difficult to comprehend now and that are
going to be different across the world because everyone, as you said, every country has their
own pain points that you need to look at.
But I'm hopeful and I hope that the, you know, the global mining hash war, which will be a
peaceful one, I think we're going to see it ramping up very quickly as, you know, we're
going to see Omega candles for, for price.
We're going to see some really interesting, all that hash rates just going to keep climbing.
But luckily we have the difficulty adjustment, right?
Every two weeks we can, we can come back to a baseline that we're supposed to be at.
But Samson, I want to, I want to thank you for your sharing your scarce time with me.
This has been really fascinating.
The last thing I would ask you, which is not at all Bitcoin related, or maybe it is depending
on your answer, but are you reading anything right now that you would recommend that other
people check out?
I have a bunch of books on my to read list.
I'm just trying to think what's the latest one I opened up.
I haven't had time.
I've been too busy with Aqua Launch.
But generally the books I'm reading are not really anything to do with Bitcoin.
So I haven't actually read most people's books in this space.
I'm sure they're all good.
But I find other things are interesting too, like sci-fi stories.
I think one of the ones I picked up recently was how to rebuild civilization after some
cataclysmic event, like what things you need to know and what technologies you need as
a base.
I just find it interesting, not foreshadowing anything here.
Sure, sure.
Yeah.
Hopefully not anyway.
Yeah.
Things like that are interesting.
I would recommend it's a book that I'm, if you're a sci-fi fan, Devin Erickson, Theft
of Fire.
I'm actually having him on the show next week to talk about it because it's not a book about
Bitcoin.
He does talk about Bitcoin tangentially in the book in this future that he envisions.
But I'm maybe about a third of the way through it right now.
It's a great piece of sci-fi thus far.
So I would recommend checking out.
He's the one who had that amazing thread with the interim CEO of OpenAI where he just
works to the guy.
I remember this now.
Yeah.
I remember he ratioed somebody, some author ratioed somebody.
Emmett Shearer, I think, was the OpenAI.
He's like the founder of Twitch and was the interim OpenAI CEO.
But Devin Erickson just absolutely just roasted him for suggesting a 100% inheritance tax.
And then it went on for a while.
It was a really wonderful thread.
But yeah, the book is solid.
And if you're a sci-fi fan, want something not Bitcoin related, that's a good one.
All right.
I'll take it under consideration.
Please do.
Take it under advisement.
And then last thing is where should folks go if they want to find out more about the
work you're doing at Gen 3?
If they want to download Aqua, they can go search.
I just checked it again today because I needed to update the app.
But Aqua Bitcoin on the app store, it'll pop up top of the list.
But anywhere else, they should go to find out what you guys are doing.
Yeah.
We're on Twitter slash X.
My handle's Excelion, E-X-C-E-L-L-I-O-N.
And then Jan3's at Jan3com.
Aqua's at Aqua Bitcoin.
And we're also on Nostra, less so these days, but trying to get back into it, just too busy.
But yeah, that's it.
I'll link it all on the show notes, Nostra and Pub's included.
But Samson, thank you so much because I know Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts are
abundant.
So I appreciate you sharing your scarce time on this one.
Thanks so much.
And I can't wait to see what you guys do next.
Thanks Walker.
Always a pleasure.
And I'll see you at a conference somewhere.
Hopefully very soon.
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 BitcoinPodcast.net or hit me up on social media.
On Nostra, head to primal.net slash Walker.
And on Twitter, search for at Walker America or at TITCOIN Podcast.
You can also watch the video version of this show on X or on YouTube by going to youtube.com
slash at 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.