Hey, hey! Welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix. I'm your host, Cedric Youngelman.
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for the holidays. In this episode, I chat with Parker Lewis, author of Gradually Then Suddenly
and head of business development at ZapRate. We dive deep into Parker's Bitcoin journey
from questioning the sustainability of the Federal Reserve's monetary policy
to discovering the economic truths behind gold and Bitcoin. Parker lays out the logic behind
Bitcoin as not just a hedge, but a permanent solution to inflation and why viewing Bitcoin
as volatile but not risky is key to understanding its long-term value. We also dig into the
transition from fiat to a Bitcoin-based economy, why Bitcoin must become a medium of exchange to
succeed, and how ZapRite is helping pave that way, helping pave that path by enabling businesses
to accept Bitcoin along fiat. If you're looking to understand Bitcoin on a deeper economic level,
not just as an asset, but as the future of money, this conversation is for you. If you want to get
in touch with me or buy some really cool Bitcoin Matrix merch, head over to thebitcoinmatrix.com.
Also, please consider supporting the show directly by subscribing on the Fountain app to the Bitcoin Matrix.
And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with Parker Lewis.
Parker Lewis, welcome to the Bitcoin Matrix.
How are you?
Cedric, good to be here.
As I was just mentioning to you, I'm sorry it's taken this long, but I look forward to
the discussion.
Yeah, me too.
You know, your works are seminal and they've been part of my journey.
But also, I got to see you live at BitBlockBoom probably more than once.
But once in particular, I don't know if you remember your Mike Tyson knockout punch out.
Yeah, yeah.
Body blows, not knockout punches.
Yeah.
So I hope we get to that in a little bit.
But first, I'd love to hear your rabbit hole story, how you came to Bitcoin, how Bitcoin
maybe found you or what happened there.
Sure.
Yeah, Bitcoin found me in 2016.
Yeah, 2016.
I was working for a hedge fund in Dallas, Texas.
And I was on one hand doing research as to what would happen when the Federal Reserve
began to unwind post-great financial crisis quantitative easing.
The $3.6 trillion that it introduced into the financial system from 2009 to 2014,
in the 2016 timeframe, it had signaled plans in the near future
that it would begin to take that money out of the system.
and I was doing research and trying to develop my own view of what would happen to a broad range of
financial markets. At the same time that I was going down that rabbit hole and ultimately when
I did that I came to the conclusion that the Federal Reserve was never going to be able to
permanently take the money back out of the system, that they were always going to have to print more
money and that it was a function of leverage, the amount of dollar debt that existed in the world
relative to the actual number of dollars that could service that debt,
and that the only way that quantitative easing or the introduction of money is designed to work
is to actually expand the credit system, so it always functionally needs more money to support it.
At the same time that I was going down that research path,
I was asked to go do diligence on a gold company.
That serendipitously led a good friend of mine to introduce me to Safety in a Moose.
It was before Safe Dean had written the Bitcoin standard, but formed a friendship with Safe.
Safe helped me understand why gold was money as part of the diligence process.
And it was around the same time that he was becoming interested in Bitcoin.
And I'd like to think that I went from zero to gold to Bitcoin very quickly, but it took me a little while to get to gold first.
But as soon as gold started to click, then I started to understand why Bitcoin existed, why it had a fundamental value.
that I'm solving the same problem, but in a perfected form.
And that my two paths of research really converged.
It was like, okay, they're always going to have to print dollars.
And now I have some anchoring as to why Bitcoin was created to solve that problem,
not just the printing of dollars, but the printing of euros and yen
and fiat money all over the world.
So that was mid-2016, mid to late 2016.
So, yeah, then, you know, everything fit into place and continue to go deeper down the rabbit hole.
Sure. When you mentioned like gold is money, what kind of maybe do you remember maybe your own reaction to this journey of like almost like maybe I'm a fish in water?
I've never really thought about what money is, what that question is.
And here I am. I think gold is money now.
Do you remember sort of that journey and that journey?
me sure yeah i remember well i remember thinking before figuring out why gold was money that i had
this express thought that you know gold is a shiny rock it's a relic if you know i ever wanted needed
gold i'd rather have guns and ammo and and cattle you know like be be out on a on a ranch sovereign
but but i hadn't really ever questioned that root principle of what money is and i think that that
is the principal question that someone has to be interested in to want to go down the Bitcoin
rabbit hole, but also to be interested in order to understand Bitcoin. And so, you know, I have an
economics degree from college, but one of the things I also recognized was that economics as a
field of study, it assumes money exists and then it builds assumptions on top of it, but it never
questions the foundation. And it's one of the reasons why I think Bitcoin is so hard to
understand. And so that is one aspect of Bitcoin that requires humility. And it's perfectly natural
because it's just very few people, you know, not like certain people have, you know, like,
but not everyone, but very few people have, you know, questioned, you know, why the dollar has
value in the first place, whether it's a collective hallucination. And if you just accept that reality
that no one has had to evaluate actual money, like one money versus another, what makes something
money, that it's easier to have humility and to be like, okay, yeah, let's go down the rabbit hole.
Yeah, I remember taking Economics 350 in college and it's money and banking. You talk a lot about
money supply m2 m3 but really nothing about what is money or right yeah like my courses that i would
take whether it was corporate finance or economics course they would talk about a central bank and
active management of the money supply so what it's not that they wouldn't talk about money but
they wouldn't they wouldn't question what like why the dollar was money or how something emerges on
the market as money and i do think that that will be something that you know going forward you know
Obviously, people are currently going down that journey themselves as they become interested in Bitcoin.
I think on the other side of the horizon, when it's very clear that Bitcoin is the new money and it's the money that everyone is using day to day, that it will be a core part of the education.
People will realize that the curriculum missed.
if they're going to teach economics well we have to teach what what makes a form of money better or
worse and what has you know the history of money which a lot of safety in the bitcoin standard
uh helped elucidate for me and for you know millions of other people who have either read
the book or listened to the audio or read snippets online or listened to his podcast
What inspired you to write Gradually Then Suddenly?
Well, what inspired me to write? Well, the non-intellectual answer was that I was working for Unchained at the time, which is a Bitcoin custody and financial services platform that helps people self-custody.
But I needed a way to reach an audience and writing felt like a good way to do that.
But the more fundamental side of it was I had gone, like, after, I'd say, discussions with SAFE about gold and, you know, kind of getting into the Austrian economic rabbit hole.
And even after Bitcoin clicked for me, after reading an early draft of the Bitcoin Standard before it came out and reading Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos and figuring out how Bitcoin as a network actually works, kind of the glue.
there were still logical questions that almost I had figured out as conclusions through a number
of different data points but I had to consistently like question the logic to test the assumption
because a lot of times people look at Bitcoiners and they think they were crazy the reality is that
that no one wants to store their value in something that will lose purchasing power over time
and if you've gotten to the position of Bitcoin being money and you have a hardened view as to
why that is, most people, to be highly convicted in that view, have had to challenge their own
thinking. I have every incentive to, if I'm wrong, I want to know it. And so even after the idea of
Bitcoin had clicked for me, there were logical questions that I had to test about, like, well,
you know bitcoin being too volatile or you know why can't somebody just out compete it you know
why why doesn't something else come along with a better feature set um you know what about the
transaction throughput you know and so i i had to i had those i i had already worked those through
in my head but i was like well i think that other people would benefit from seeing or reading a very
logically ordered explanation for what are the most common and natural questions about Bitcoin.
And so I thought that that would be additive to the body of work that might accelerate
a certain audience down the path of the Bitcoin rabbit hole and kind of walk them, you know,
leading the horse to water of like, hey, these are all logical things that even if,
Even once Bitcoin starts to click, there are these residual questions that the faster or in a more accelerated basis that you can get to them as a real strong kind of bottoms up view, then you won't be relying on anybody's opinion.
And so I thought it was complementary to what else was out there.
And it was what I personally had to think through and reason through even after Bitcoin kind of in its more holistic view started to click for me.
Wow. What were you trying to get across with the title, Gradually Then Suddenly?
Well, the funny thing was, there was another title that I was originally thinking about,
and I was right on the fringe. It was something called The Intolerant Minority.
But I gave a presentation, and one of the presentations at BitBlockBoom, where the saying
gradually then suddenly is a is a common adaptation of how Hemingway described the process of going
bankrupt in the sun also rises and so it was one character talking to another and one character
asked the other how did you go bankrupt and the other character said two ways first gradually and
then suddenly and my the way I I saw that translate to Bitcoin is that like functionally when a
currency collapses it collapses gradually and then suddenly and the product like when a currency
collapses it's functioning like the the either the country or the government being insolvent
um in in the fiat world and so it applies to how an individual goes bankrupt it's how a country
basically becomes insolvent or at least its government because it happens over a period of
time and then at some sudden moment you you actually realize that that you're insolvent
it's also how people come to understand bitcoin and bitcoin is the other side of the same coin of
the fiat currency collapse and so it you know it's starting to make sense it's starting to make sense
starting to make sense slowly and then some idea will happen or you'll have some life experience
that connects a bunch of dots all at once and at that point but i would describe it as like when you see Bitcoin for the first time or when the picture starts to become into focus it still not crystal clear But everything is kind of at one moment coming to come together in a way where you can not just see that Bitcoin is possible probabilistically but that you could start to order things and explain to yourself why
And so for a lot of reasons, the similarity between the original – it's not even a framework.
The original dialogue in his book that Hemingway described it was the way that people go bankrupt,
the way that currencies hyperinflate, and how people come to understand Bitcoin.
Yeah, which is interesting because, I mean, gradually then suddenly it's become kind of a meme on its own.
Yeah, it was a meme before.
but I'd say the book and the series popularized it in the Bitcoin world.
Yeah. And I think there's different interpretations maybe of the meme.
I think a lot of people, or I shouldn't speak for other people.
I think of it a lot now as sort of like the notion of a price explosion
gradually, then suddenly.
Well, right.
When you can think about price explosion of Bitcoin,
or like the final price explosion of Bitcoin will be the hyperinflation
of all fiat.
and so the other side of bitcoin's price explosion is you know it's like i like to say that
fiat is not collapsing because of bitcoin fiat is collapsing because you can print money out of thin
air but bitcoin is a solution to it and so i think that you know they're i certainly you know
everyone has room to interpret their for themselves it's like in my view there's an individual side of
where it's like when Bitcoin clicks for you.
But then there's also, like you can see on a chart
when a fiat currency hyperinflates.
Like you can see when the Venezuelan boulevard hyperinflated.
You can see when the Argentine peso hyperinflated relative to the US dollar.
Like there's a, you can look at a chart,
and if you're looking at the chart,
all the fundamentals that went into that currency collapse
were those bones were buried,
or the bodies were buried in the years or decades before,
but in a moment you can see when it breaks
and it never comes back.
And I would think of like these more interim moves
is like these interim moves of Bitcoin
going from 10,000 to 20,000 to 30,000 to 100,000.
There are still very few number of people in the world
who really understand what's happening.
Once we reach some critical mass of 3% to 5% of the world,
we're never going back to fiat.
And so in my own view, I think of the suddenly moment
is when like the world figures it out and Bitcoin rapidly monetizes.
But I also think about it on an individual level of like when Bitcoin clicks for people.
Like that is a sudden moment and it happens to each person on their own timeline.
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Yeah, I mean, I really like both.
I think being grounded in sort of the individual one is more grounding.
But for me personally, right now.
But why is Bitcoin's fixed supply so important?
Bitcoin's fixed supply is so important because it substantively represents a form of money that can't be printed.
And that, as history has shown, the forms of money that are hardest to produce win.
And in the end, it won't be possible to produce any incremental Bitcoin at all.
And that is the fundamental reason why Bitcoin stores purchasing power.
And why people adopt Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's fixed supply is inherently intertwined with the network's ability to be resistant to all forms of censorship and to remain permissionless.
If Bitcoin were not permissionless and were not resistant to censorship, then its fixed supply would not be credibly enforced without trust.
So they all go together.
But the shelling point of Bitcoin is the reason why Bitcoin might be volatile, the reason why Bitcoin stores value and why people adopt it is because more of it can't be produced.
And if more of it could be produced, the evidence of that would be in its price and would be in the lack of adoption.
The single greatest data point of Bitcoin being able to enforce its fixed supply is its price going up over time.
In present world, that is typically compared against fiat currencies like the dollar, the euro, the yen. At a more fundamental economic level, it is purchasing power relative to real goods and services.
And that's really what really matters. And that Bitcoin's fixed supply at a fundamental level from an economic foundation perspective or from the foundation of money is that it will allow for the coordination of trade far more efficiently and far more effectively than money that can be printed out of thin air.
And money as a tool is what helps coordinate economic activity at scale.
And so, yeah, it's the showing point that you can focus in on and say, you know, why is this form of money better than the next form of money?
Well, because every other form of money is based on trust.
Bitcoin is not.
And the evidence of it is that it has a fixed supply that can't be altered or that a central bank or a government or any third party cannot manipulate.
And so it's really the foundation around everything about Bitcoin's value.
And then the other side of it is that, and I talk about this in the book, which is that money, for very fundamental reasons, due to the nature of the problem that it solves, converges to one common medium or that economic systems converge on one form of money.
because in order for you and I to trade, we have to have a consensus of money.
I have to have the form of money you're willing to accept
and you have to accept the form of money that I have.
And that if we're all out in the market looking for what would make a good form of money,
well, the money that can't be printed or the money that can't be produced easily
becomes what we both look at objectively and say,
hey, we'd rather have that one than any other.
Right. And you go on to explain in the piece reasons.
you know, being Bitcoin can't be faked or copied. And, you know, the incentives are so strong to
cooperate more than the opportunity cost, which is too high to defect. Why is Bitcoin's monetary
policy so credible and resilient? In short, it's because the system is designed so that nobody
has to trust anybody else. And so like when you think about Bitcoin as a system, you could think
about it as a system that has a form of money with a fixed supply and that the alternative to
that is something like gold or a fiat currency that can be easily printed. But another way to
think about it is a trusted system like the Federal Reserves or the Bank of Japan's or the
European Central Banks or a system that has removed the need for trust, which is Bitcoin.
So it's trusted or trustless. And, you know, at the core of that, it is that if you had to trust some individual not to print money, that history has shown that anybody that has the ability to print money will print money.
and for a group of market participants to be able to voluntarily opt in to bitcoin as a currency
system the the only way that that system could work is if no one had to trust anybody else
and that there is a kind of uh you know again it comes back to the showing point which is well
just if I have a system that is, you know, that it's important that nobody have to trust anybody
else, if each individual in the market were looking for what makes for a better or worse
form of money, the one that has the lowest rate of change, the one that's hardest to produce is
ultimately going to win. And so people are opting in for selfish reasons. One, oh, I can opt in
involuntarily without permission to this form of money that can't be printed. And then everybody
who's opting into that form of money has a selfish interest to protect the very thing that they've
opted into. And what they are functionally doing and protecting it, whether it be running a node
or mining Bitcoin, is ensuring that nobody else has the ability to print money. And anybody that
attempted to create more than 21 million Bitcoin, that any of those Bitcoin transactions would be
invalidated. And so it is, there's this common interest that everyone in the world would benefit
from a form of money that can't be printed. And anyone that participates in Bitcoin is not doing
so altruistically, they're doing so in their own self-interest. But by opting in, they're effectively
saying I'm willing to opt into a system which I don't control and I can't print the money but I
can help ensure that nobody else can as well and that you know aggregate of hundreds of thousands
millions of people acting in their own self-interest to enforce the rules of Bitcoin against everyone
else is just simply saying like I'm going to opt into a system in which I can't print money but
I don't have an incentive to allow anybody else to. And so the 21 million sits at the top,
but if somebody had to trust someone else's word or you just had to trust software,
that statement is true. That statement is what one of the Supreme Court justices,
Antonin Scalia, referred to as he would have described that as a parchment guarantee or what
the founders would have described as a parchment guarantee. Like Bitcoin doesn't have a fixed
supply because software code says so or because you or I say so. It has a fixed supply of 21 million
that's credible because it has removed trust and everyone's enforcing the rules against each other.
And so everyone has that same incentive to find a form of money that works, that's hard to produce.
And in Bitcoin, they can opt in and actually enforce the rules against everybody else.
Sure. So now we're talking about sort of the Federal Reserve, money printing,
money creation. Is Bitcoin a hedge against inflation?
I would describe it as, at a fundamental level, it's a solution to inflation. And that
the important recognition is that there's a difference between a hedge to inflation
and the solution to inflation. And that hedges to inflation historically have been
things like gold or really anything that has well gold doesn't have their its income tied to
two dollars but something like equities or real estate have become hedges to inflation because
they're correlated to two dollar inflation as more dollars are created the the real estate
earns more because there's more dollars floating around or the companies that earn
dollars have more you know are making more money but the money is broken and the only thing that
can fix a broken form of money is a better form of money and that while something like real estate
or equities clearly don't fix the problem of money they aren't money they are naturally
viewed as hedges you could look at something like gold but gold sits at the the epicenter of
where fiat spawned from fiat emerged off of the back of gold and then was able to completely
sever itself from the original gold-backed monetary system which is where the dollar came
from and and i look at that and say hey we're never going like gold is part of the problem
like if gold was viable as money fiat wouldn't exist that that the problem of fiat exists in
large part because of the limitations of gold. And then I come look at this dilemma and say like,
yes, Bitcoin is maintaining its purchasing power and it is offsetting inflation. And in one
definition, you can say, hey, that's a hedge to inflation. My point is that it either is the
permanent solution or it's not. It's a binary. And by being the permanent solution, it's not just
offsetting the debasement of the dollar so you can get more dollars to buy the goods and services.
It's actually the replacement.
And if you are on that, you can't just exist in the middle of those two points.
You either don't understand Bitcoin and Bitcoin cannot hedge inflation because it's so volatile.
Bitcoin will go down.
You'll sell it.
Bitcoin will go up.
You'll sell it.
It hasn't hedged dollar inflation in either of those scenarios.
But once Bitcoin starts to make sense to you once it clicks and there a function of time where your understanding needs to harden of actually owning Bitcoin experiencing it potentially running a full node controlling your own keys sending Bitcoin transactions that as the picture comes into focus you realize that it is not a hedge like that real estate is viewed to be a hedge or equities are viewed to be a hedge that it is a form of money It a currency system that is fully functional It volatile because it nascent and adoption is not yet at a mature level
But where the end game is, where it ends is everyone adopts Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is perfectly stable.
And Bitcoin's the pricing mechanism.
Prices are denominated in Bitcoin and Bitcoin is used to affect day-to-day transactions
for virtually the entire world.
So you're either at a point of zero knowledge where you haven't started to see why what I just described as the end game.
And realistically, again, just Bitcoin cannot hedge inflation in that world.
And if it starts to make sense, it becomes inevitable that you get to the other bookend of the spectrum, seeing it as the ultimate solution.
So functionally speaking, I don't think it can be a hedge, but it is the permanent solution.
Right. And so you see it as binary and a replacement of the dollar. Why do you consider Bitcoin relative to two guideposts like gold and the dollar financial system? Are those the only two guideposts you would look at?
I think they're the most relevant guideposts to anyone evaluating the question today.
And not necessarily with the exception, but I would say that would extend out to any fiat currency in the world.
I live in a dollar economy, so the dollar emerged from gold.
Gold and the dollar are the two most logical guideposts.
But if you, you know, live in China and you have the yuan or Japan and you have the yen or, you know, or, you know, if you are in the UK and the pound sterling, then the pound sterling becomes the, you know, logical guidepost that it's some form of commodity money and your fiat money.
Because the question is, hey, for practically all living people, it was a commodity money that emerged to a fiat money that got us into the problem where we're at today.
And there's either a view that we're going back to the commodity metal or we're going forward to something else.
And so functionally speaking, I'd say like, you know, I could respond to why it's not like something, you know, anything other than those two buckets of categories.
but those are historically what have been money
and if Bitcoin is money
then the most logical things to compare it against
from a property's perspective
like relative scarcity
the ability to transact
the ability to measure value
the ability to achieve final settlement
to actually transfer value
that those are what have existed previously
and in order for one money to replace another
it would logically need to perform the function of money better than its predecessor or predecessors.
And then the logical question becomes, well, what properties are most relevant or significant
to money?
And how does Bitcoin compare from a perspective of individual properties to historical goods
like the dollar or gold or pound sterling or silver?
that were used as money because those are the inputs that will guide what's going to happen from here.
The monetary properties are the inputs and the price is the output
because the inputs of the properties like Bitcoin's fixed supply,
like the ability to transact over a communication channel,
like it being censorship resistant and permissionless
and understanding some of how the network works,
that hardened understanding is what allows someone to see why bitcoin might go in a logically ordered
way from nascent and volatile to very stable in the end because it would might you know or the way
to think about is it would guide an individual decision of why one individual would adopt it but
that same decision point for any individual is the functionally same decision point for all individuals
All right. I want to cover what is the difference between risk and volatility? Why are they so often conflated?
Risk and volatility, to go into that at a high level.
One, I'll just speak in practical terms for Bitcoin.
If the price of Bitcoin is $100,000 and there's a chance that Bitcoin goes to $80,000, which it recently did, in some way based on a certain time horizon, that's a risk.
Like if you needed your money over the last 30 days and you needed $100,000 to purchase something, if there were a probability that Bitcoin could go down in the short term by $20,000, that's a risk to you.
But at that same time, risk is really a function of future uncertainty.
And future uncertainty has a function of time as a component.
So one month, three months, six months, one year, two years.
The way I think about Bitcoin and why I view it as volatile but not risky is because the basis of Bitcoin adoption is its fixed supply.
And that is a finite surface area.
People can look at the equation and come to different conclusions, but it is can it enforce its fixed supply or can it not?
And then does the logic and reason follow from there that if Bitcoin is able to enforce its fixed supply, then will the world adopt it as money?
Because that's another question.
The way that I look at it is that so long as Bitcoin is able to enforce its fixed supply, it is not a long-term risk.
it becomes the least uncertain thing in the market.
And that the least uncertain thing in the market that's also able to be easily transacted,
sent over the communication channel to achieve final settlement and to facilitate trade,
that then you start to see its volatility not as a risk.
It's only a risk to the degree that you need something in the very short term.
but it's not a risk in terms of its actual fundamental value.
And so another way to think about risk and volatility is something like a bond.
A bond might be – you look at the screen and you might see that its value is trading at par,
and then you might find that the company is bankrupt and its value goes to zero.
It becomes volatile at some future point in time,
But the reason for that violent price movement wasn't that it wasn't volatile – sorry, it wasn't that it wasn't risky.
It was just that the market didn't have the information to cause it to be volatile sooner.
And so it's this idea that volatile things are not necessarily risky, and the reverse is also true, which is that things that appear not to be volatile are actually risky or can be.
And so the short end of it is what is the relative amount of uncertainty?
And the longer you go out in Bitcoin, the less uncertain it becomes because the short-term volatility becomes less relevant to you.
All right. I want to kind of zoom out a little bit here.
I want to throw two questions at you.
Hopefully, I mean, you do an amazing job.
So just another high-level walkthrough would be great.
How indebted is the entire market?
and and like when you like how short is the world dollars yeah so i'll just i'll describe the the u.s
because i i don't have nearly as like tight a view on the the global system but but the dollar and
the fed and the u.s financial system is the largest in the world there are there is a hundred and
approximately 104 trillion of dollar denominated debt that exists in the world and there's about
6.7 trillion actual dollars. So like 17 times. Now at the time of the great financial crisis in
2009, the 104 trillion of debt, and again, that is a very vanilla way of looking at debt. It's not
including things like unfunded pension liabilities or derivatives. It is just fixed liability,
fixed maturity debt in terms of UOX by Y date. It could have a variable rate, it could have a fixed
rate. That number is tracked by the Fed in the Fed's Z1 report, the Financial Council of the
United States. So it's not a number that you have to cobble together based on a bunch of
random sources. That $104 trillion is a Fed number. And that number at the time of the
financial crisis was $52.7 trillion. So another framework that I think about is that the problem
in 2007 and 2008, the great financial crisis, was that we had a credit system that was unsustainable.
There was too much debt and too few dollars. That $52 trillion has now doubled. And the way
that QE is designed to work, the way that the injection of money into the financial system
is designed to work is to prop up the credit system such that the too much debt can be sustained
for a longer period of time, but also the way that it is designed to work is to induce more
debt creation or more credit creation. And so we went from a world that was too much debt
and unsustainable to a world now today that exists with twice as much debt in the world.
And so that relationship between debt and dollars is one of the principal reasons why the Federal Reserve or why any central bank constantly has to print money.
It's also why the dollar has some tethering of value because the debt is represented or has claims against real assets.
It has claims against equity in businesses.
It has claims against cars and houses and personal income streams.
So it's tied to real things, but it's also what ensures that more and more money will be created to be able to sustain higher and higher debt levels.
Right.
Right. And I want to read from your piece.
The existence of a debt or credit system that is in order of magnitude larger than the amount of money that actually exists
causes a few dynamics that may not be immediately intuitive when the Fed digitally creates money.
There's still far more debt that exists, which is what prevents the dollar from immediately collapsing in value in the end.
The existence of more dollars does cause each dollar to purchase less in the future and over time.
But the credit system, given its size, is necessarily at the crux of how it all plays out.
The debt-to-dollar dilemma is what anchors the dollar's value on a near-term basis.
The liabilities are fixed in the sense that the fixed amount of dollars are owed.
In terms of all this, would you want to see the Fed to disappear as soon as possible?
Is that a positive endgame in terms of is it more positive the faster it goes away?
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um i don't know um i think that the you know you could look at it from two ways from a fundamental
perspective you're like hey the sooner that everyone can get on sound money the better
you know another another view of it is hey the the slower the decline the more time that bitcoin
has to mature, the more infrastructure gets built, the less likely the pain is for when
the big collapse happens.
So I don't really take a view as to, you know, if I were to take a view, I'd probably say,
hey, if Bitcoin had five or 10 more years to develop, the amount of pain that is felt
when the big collapse of the currency happens will be lessened.
On the other side, it was like, hey, well, a lot more suffering has to happen
between the next five and ten years of people getting slowly bled out
by relying on a form of money that is just not working
for the vast majority of all people that are using it.
The vast majority of Americans have no debt – sorry, no savings and a lot of debt.
And so it's more of like a slow death rather than like a, hey, would we be better off by a lot more volatility now and a rapid shift to Bitcoin?
So I don't think there's a clear answer.
And I think that Bitcoin is the other side of the same coin.
So it's like once enough people have figured out Bitcoin, it's probably because enough infrastructure existed to allow more people to adopt it.
and it will coincide with trillions more dollars euro yen being digitally created which will also help people understand Bitcoin So I think it going to play out however it going to play out And what I would say more definitively for people is that the way I think about it is surviving in all weathers surviving in a world where it a more rapid shift you know in the next five to seven years or 20 or 30 years that you got to be able to survive in either scenario
And that the only way through that path is through adopting Bitcoin.
Sure.
And then maybe sort of just maybe touching a little bit more on inflation.
What have you seen with maybe your price per pound of brisket tracker?
Oh, price?
Well, I do price per ribeye.
But I also do pay attention to price of brisket.
But I think it's important to track commodities at the same location.
So to really know the true level of inflation.
and because in your local and and i and i look at food because it's the thing that you know we need
food and water to survive um and so when i started looking at a you know my local grocery store which
is a whole foods that i go to you know or i used to go to every week i started paying attention and
i noticed that the price had gone up from 1999 to 21.99 between 2020 and 2021 a 10 increase
um that same piece of beef that cost $19.99 a pound is today $34.49 a pound and you know it
hasn't quite doubled but it's almost doubled over the the course of five years and so you know
whether it's the price of brisket or the price of ribeyes it's like it's the same store the same
piece of meat now there's a chance they might have it might also be substituting in a lower
quality of meat so shrink inflation also exists in commodities based on quality but something to
the tune of 60 to 70 percent aggregate inflation and you know 12 to 13 percent you know annualized
but it's just also interesting to look like i there's a local place that i go and get brisket
probably in the last year i saw the price increase from you know 14 a half pound to
1449 and then I just recently realized that I went you know noticed last time I went there that it was
that it was 1499 because more commonly the way that that inflation actually happens is you know
someone might see the CPI is 4% or 3% or 6% but if you start tracking individual goods that you
consume you'll actually realize that the the real rate for you of things that you consume is higher
and that the way that it gets to levels of 10% and 12% a year
is typically not in a single price increase.
It's typically multiple price increases throughout the course of a year
and that there is something significant about the price is changing faster.
That once people are able, like an exercise, someone might say,
like oh a beer at the bar is six dollars i remember when a beer at a bar used to cost
a dollar fifty you know and that's some some time back in time but when you can start to
to pay attention or when you start to pay attention you're like oh that that that price
increased three months ago and now it's increasing another four percent today it's like this is
actually a 16% annualized rate of increase that as people start to realize both the degree
to which goods and services are getting more expensive, but also the frequency, that is
really where we get to this point of nearing the stage of hyperinflation when it's not
just the rate of change, it's the frequency of changes that people become more observant
of what is actually happening.
When it comes to Bitcoin, the rules are simple.
Run your own node, hold your own keys, and protect your seed phrase.
That's where MicroSeed comes in.
Unlike bulky backups, MicroSeed is stamped onto a tiny steel washer.
Fireproof, waterproof, and so small you can carry it anywhere or hide it in plain sight.
Go to MicroSeed.io and use the code MATRIX for a discount on your order.
I want to read a little bit more from your work before I get to the final topic.
Bitcoin simultaneously being the ultimate solution to the dollar and it not being immune to the
dollar is entirely consistent with the nature of the problem. An understanding of one and its
challenges necessarily informs the other as a better alternative and how it may be adopted.
Bitcoin is competing with the dollar to replace it as the form of money which coordinates trade
and commerce. If one were to accept that there were fundamental problems inherent to the dollar,
but that it still coordinates practically all economic activity for those that use it,
it would stand to reason that any replacement to the dollar would not be immune to its issues
during the transitionary period. In an academic world, maybe everyone figures it out at the same
time and makes a conscious decision to scrap the old world, adopt the new world, and move on without
any consequences to the sins of the past. The dilemma is that money coordinates trade,
and trade means the physical manufacture and delivery of goods and services in the real world,
which is far more complex than professional economists and academia might suggest.
The world cannot drop a bad money and adopt a better one, like a single individual can drop
a bad habit. It's just not that simple, and that's okay. Today, the dollar exists,
and Bitcoin has a total purchasing power of approximately 0.4% when this was written of the
U.S. credit system, which itself is a fraction, albeit a larger one, of the global financial system.
If the Fed reduces the supply of dollars and increases interest rates, the purchasing power
of Bitcoin will reasonably decline on an interim basis relative to the dollar, because the entire
world still relies on the dollar, including everyone in the dollar economy who has begun
adopting Bitcoin. Bitcoin remains relatively small. It is also liquid, and there are very few
Bitcoin-denominated debt liabilities on a relative and absolute basis, which means it can be easily
sold to source dollars as the supply becomes constrained. In short, dollar inflation can exist
and the purchasing power of Bitcoin can decline at the same time while the fundamental remains
unchanged, that Bitcoin is replacing the dollar as a better form of money to coordinate trade.
Bitcoin has fundamental value because of its fixed supply.
That is the value proposition.
A fixed supply of Bitcoin versus an ever-increasing supply of dollars.
I'm going to skip some of the stats here.
There will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin, and that is Bitcoin's true innovation.
Whenever something happens in the world, and specifically anything that causes volatility in the price of Bitcoin,
I always ask myself, did X change anything about the Bitcoin network's ability to credibly enforce its fixed supply?
Now, one might need to know how Bitcoin enforces its fixed supply and its relevance in order to then evaluate the relative impact of anything to Bitcoin.
But that is to the point.
Without a prior understanding of how Bitcoin enforces its fixed supply or why it's important, it would leave anyone in a precarious position to evaluate any current event or its impact on Bitcoin's fundamental value.
Anyone who claims that Bitcoin will fail due to the failures of a few private companies
almost certainly does not understand how Bitcoin enforces its fixed supply or its consequences.
Separately, anyone who claims that Bitcoin is failing on its promise as a hedge to inflation
similarly could not tell you how Bitcoin enforces its fixed supply.
Ask anyone who claims Bitcoin will fail or otherwise has failed that rhetorical question,
but how does Bitcoin credibly enforce its fixed supply without the need for trust?
The stats I skipped over around the money supply increasing from 2007 to 2024, which you covered prior in the show.
So the final topic I want to get into is medium of exchange.
You're at ZapRite.
You're working on Bitcoin as payments.
Why is the use of Bitcoin as a medium of exchange in payments important?
Sure.
Sure. And I'll tie it back to this idea of why, you know, thinking about this transition that we're going to from a dollarized world to a Bitcoinized world.
And that while people realistically think about the value of a house or the value of a stock or even the value of Bitcoin in dollar-denominated terms, that functionally speaking what the dollar is doing is coordinating trade.
that supply chains of getting goods and services to the grocery store or to a Home Depot or to
to a Walmart is a highly complex system of you know individual supply chains and dollars
transferring to to coordinate all the activity that allows everything that you need in your
daily life to show up as you need it. And that that is the core utility of money. And that if
you think about any individual supply chain, even if one person has figured out Bitcoin, it's going
to require a lot more people than just one in that supply chain to fully shift over. But that
for Bitcoin to work, it ultimately does need to detach itself from fiat exchange.
And the way that I would think about articulating that is that when we talk a lot about the
importance of Bitcoin's fixed supply and the credibility of its fixed supply and the ability
for the Bitcoin network to enforce its fixed supply without the need for trust, it is inherently
dependent on the network being sufficiently decentralized to be immune to outside force
of someone saying or someone trying to co-opt the system to create more than 21 million or to say
that you can't use the system and that the fiat system as it is constructed is hyper centralized
it's built on top of a central bank and a diminishing number of banks but realistically
five or six mega banks that control everything and that that both create a very permissioned
system but but also sit at the epicenter of allowing the world to exist in such a way that
money can be easily created by the fed and then distributed to everybody that if bitcoin only
worked in a world where you had to convert to the to the fiat system to get dollars back out
to then be able to access the real economy,
the goods and services that you need to sustain yourself day to day,
the actual fundamental utility of money as a medium independent of Bitcoin
and coordinating trade.
If Bitcoin only existed in a world where you could hold Bitcoin
and Bitcoin would store its value in theory,
and then whenever you needed dollars you could sell the Bitcoin for dollars,
that Bitcoin would be so centralized in that world
that the integrity of the system as a whole would not be viable.
Basically, the centralization of the fiat system would extend onto Bitcoin
and then that showing point of its fixed supply would be at risk.
The other side of it is that Bitcoin is technically capable of being used day-to-day in commerce.
and that one of the ways that I contextualize its volatility
is because of its nascency.
If 1% of the world has adopted Bitcoin
and then 10% start to adopt Bitcoin,
and that means that 9 out of 10 people
are pricing Bitcoin for the first time,
volatility is inevitable in that world.
The incremental demand relative to the base demand is so great
and the knowledge of all those market participants is so variable with the newer 9 out of 10 literally pricing something for the first time, learning about Bitcoin,
that that script will flip when 50% of the world has adopted Bitcoin and every incremental unit of demand of Bitcoin is a fraction rather than a multiple.
In that world, Bitcoin will become the stable thing. You won't think of the price of a Bitcoin as $100,000 or $500,000 or a million. The dollar value of everything, just like the dollar, the boulevard value of everything becomes irrelevant.
that things will start to be priced.
The car will cost a certain amount of Bitcoin.
The ribeye at the grocery store will cost a certain amount of Bitcoin.
And just as we don't think if a beer costs $6,
we don't think of the value of a dollar as one-sixth of a beer,
even though that is one way to think about the value of a single dollar.
And so the point is that if we look at the world and say,
hey, the basis of why anybody would store their value in Bitcoin
is because of its fixed supply,
Well, the natural extension of that is if you figured out that equation,
you'd say, well, I could either receive my Bitcoin by accepting through
Paying the cost of the fiat system and then paying the cost to convert fiat to Bitcoin.
Or because Bitcoin is perfectly technically capable of facilitating that trade directly, I could just accept Bitcoin.
So if I'm a merchant and I sell goods and services and I've figured out why Bitcoin stores value,
it's very logical for me to ask somebody if they're willing to to pay me in Bitcoin.
It's a logical extension.
But then when it comes down to its necessity, it is that if Bitcoin didn't logically progress to that world of more merchants saying, oh, well, just pay me in Bitcoin and rather have the foreign money that can't be printed rather than the one that is consistently losing its value, that the only logical explanation for why that alternate reality would exist would be because somebody told you that you couldn't do it, that it was illegal to do.
That by some fiat decree, it would say you can't use your Bitcoin to buy things like cars or gas or as a merchant on the other side to accept it.
And that also, you know, that reality, the only version of that would be that in order for that to exist, because the Bitcoin system remained hyper centralized.
And so it's a combination of the actual economic incentive, which is the most efficient way to transfer value will be just to accept Bitcoin directly, but then paired with the consequence, if that incentive didn't actually play out, if that world didn't exist where people weren't able to functionally accept Bitcoin in payment, it would be not because of a technical limitation of Bitcoin, but because of it being made illegal and Bitcoin not being sufficiently effective.
decentralized at that point where you know some ban in some jurisdiction would be defensible which
um i think about that as like the the largest game of whack-a-mole that you could ever you know
that you could ever conceive of that if if the u.s government couldn't uh ban booze or you know
kind of that you know they might have banned private ownership of gold but they didn't make
gold go away that that bitcoin is a greater utility than than both gold and uh and booze and
functionally based on how the network is actually constructed harder to stop.
And so it's, you know, follow the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.
Well, Bitcoin has a fixed supply.
The most efficient way to get it is to accept it as a form of payment.
It's technically capable of being transacted over a communication channel.
And those facts are what will dictate that the end game is Bitcoin being used day to
day as a form of commerce.
but necessarily someone has to figure out why bitcoin will store value before they're willing to
accept it as a form of payment um it's a very logical you know first a then b rather than a
chicken and egg equation and it just comes down to each individual and as more individuals figure
out why bitcoin stored value then more people become interested in turning around and accepting
as payment and that's what we've seen recently you know we're working on bitcoin payments at
Zapparate. And we do it in a way where people can accept Bitcoin side by side with fiat. So we
integrate fiat rails. It comes with this also recognition that most people that want to,
not all, but most people that want to accept Bitcoin, some people say I'll only accept Bitcoin,
that's fewer and far further between, but more power to those people like SoapBiner.
They use our platform and they only accept Bitcoin as payment, but the vast majority of people take
fiat, but they prefer Bitcoin and we'll see a shift over time. But there's a lot of people
working on Bitcoin payments. BTC Pay Server integrates seamlessly with ZapRite. The guys
at OpenNode, Square, which I think is a huge watershed moment, Square just launched Bitcoin
payments. Now anybody that uses Square with a few clicks of a button can enable it. And a number
of merchants here in Austin, Texas have already started to do that. Now I can buy my eggs and beef
directly for Bitcoin. I can go to the coffee shop and use Bitcoin to pay. All of it is a logical
progression of people figuring out why Bitcoin has fundamental value, why it stores value. The
more people that you add up, the faster the shift to Bitcoin happens. And again, just in that end
state, it's the combination of it's technically feasible and it's perfectly consistent with the
economic incentive that if you know why the 21 million fixed supply is relevant, Bitcoin for
Bitcoin, sat for sat, you'll get more of it than if you go through the fiat system and incur the
cost of the fiat system just to get Bitcoin. Yeah, I agree. And so, you know, one of my
thought so is I used to think the government, you know, if the government couldn't keep drugs out of prisons, you know, how could they ban something?
But now I probably think they wanted the drugs in the prison So I think the better explanation is if they couldn if they couldn prevent you from getting booze outside of prison then they not going to prevent you from you know
running Bitcoin nodes. And, and also it's like, there's the other side of that dilemma, which is
as soon as you say, you know, you, you can't do this, it's going to send a loud signal that,
that there's something of real substance to Bitcoin in that it's more likely that Bitcoin is able to credibly enforce its fixed supply
because of bottom up how the system is constructed than it is that a government by decree can prevent people from using money.
And, you know, that I don't think of that as hope as a strategy is recognizing the economic incentives and realizing that money is a very basic necessity that, you know, functionally speaking, you would not have clean water show up to your house or electricity show up to your house on demand or get food at the grocery store if not for the function of money.
And so human beings will find the things out of necessity or survival instincts.
And then governments will adapt around it.
They'll recognize, hey, governments need money too to coordinate their own operations, to coordinate their administrations, to fund militaries.
And things aren't valuable because they're taxed.
The government taxes things that are valuable.
And the more logical way that this plays out is that the regulatory structure adapts around Bitcoin. The jurisdictions that are most friendly to Bitcoin, like El Salvador, will benefit from human capital immigrating to the places that respect and value sound money and that those civilizations will flourish.
It doesn't prevent other people from being more restrictive.
But, you know, I think America itself is evidence of people leaving everything behind to to seek out a better life where where personal freedoms and individual freedoms are more respected.
So, yeah, on the final note, I mean, I think this is the most important topic in Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is payments.
I think it's the least talked about and I think more talked about probably your store value, maybe even unit of account.
Maybe SANS is an outright government ban.
I sort of think that the concerted effort to prevent Bitcoin is payments or delay.
You can't prevent, right?
Just delay and sort of push to the side are things like, well, capital gains transactions.
So not treating it like money.
So you have to kind of think a little bit more like, did I buy this Bitcoin today?
Are there gains or not gains? Are they going to ask me questions about this? Is it going to be a record?
And then the ETFs is sort of – and again, none of this has to be nefarious.
It could be sort of how centralization just begets centralization, right?
But ETFs are sort of like don't custody your Bitcoin. Leave it with us.
Maybe the ETFs get different tax treatment down the road.
So I see sort of like leaving Bitcoin more as a walled garden, sort of a digital pet rock.
That would be sort of the effort to delay it as payments.
And I think one of the other people who seem to be talking about it like you are is Jeff Booth.
And he said several times, you know, Bitcoin doesn't become used as money.
It will fail. Do you see?
I mean, what do you see or what is your note?
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that in the end.
Like Bitcoin does not need to be used by everyone day to day today to succeed.
But if that is not where it ends, it will because it was too centralized to evolve to that state. And if it is too centralized, then everything about the system that holds it together begins to break.
so you know and the other side of it is i think that there's i'm going to wrote about this recently
not in my in graduate and suddenly but on my blog that the vast majority of everyone
is going to be able to understand bitcoin as they're seeing it used as money
that maybe you know to this point 99 of people that have adopted bitcoin have adopted it because
logically it stores value and and that's the logical first place to start you convert a little
bit of fiat to Bitcoin, you convert more fiat to Bitcoin. But as that understanding of the system
and how it works, why it works, that it's defensible, hardens as you experience it,
if you run a business, it becomes very logical to say, well, yeah, if I'm just going to take the
fiat and then convert to Bitcoin, why not just, if I have people willing to pay me in Bitcoin,
it becomes logical. But if it's true that 99% of people who've come to understand Bitcoin,
have done so because they've had this vision of they see they they've seen the inputs the writing
on the wall why it's going to go from this nascent volatile store of value to a full-fledged currency
that that is the pricing mechanism everything priced in bitcoin and traded in bitcoin it also true in my mind that the vast majority of all individuals maybe 99 of all humans will adopt Bitcoin as they see it working as money And that doesn mean that it has to be perfectly stable and it not volatile but seeing that oh actually you know you can actually use
Bitcoin to go buy things like eggs. Because absent that, but like the mental loop is not closed.
It's like if this idea of like, oh, everyone's buying Bitcoin and no one's using, you know, like
saving in Bitcoin is using it, to be clear. I don't want to confuse things like that.
But like, if they look at the world and it's like, everyone has Bitcoin, but they only,
you know, convert in and out of fiat, there's this like, question of like, staring into the
abyss of like, to what end? Of like, hey, is everyone just staring at their digital wealth?
What is the value of Bitcoin? But when they see the closing of that loop, which is, oh,
If somebody had Bitcoin and then they use that Bitcoin, again, when I go and buy eggs with Bitcoin, I'm not spending but a very, very, very small fraction of my Bitcoin.
So the consequence of that is that I'm saving 99.999% of my Bitcoin with every purchase unless I happen to buy a home with Bitcoin.
Maybe I'll spend more based on the relative scale.
But the point being that for a lot of people in the world that struggle to see Bitcoin, it's going to connect for them when that loop is closed.
They might not be doing it themselves, but they might see somebody else and be like, ah, okay, people were talking about this fixed supply and its relevance.
And now I'm seeing businesses accepted as payment.
That's what I needed to figure out what the utility of this thing was.
that starts with its fixed supply, but then as everyone adopts it, it's actually transacting.
And it's not just like the idea of me sending money to you.
It's that what it is doing is it's coordinating trade.
That is how money actually is a utility in creating value,
that people use money to build things like cars and ships and airplanes
and get gas from in the ground to above the ground to refine all of that.
requires a working money. And if you don't have a working money, then those things don't exist.
That economies don't scale without a working form of money. And so I think that Bitcoin being used
as money, not only is it the logical endgame, it is what will allow people that otherwise
aren't able to see it to then adopt it as money. But it's also with that recognition that
if I'm spending my Bitcoin, somebody else is saving it. There will only ever be 21 million
Bitcoin. 100% of all Bitcoin is being saved by somebody at some point in time. And the more that
it is facilitating trade and direct commerce, the more value it's creating. But at that same time,
when I'm spending my Bitcoin, I'm saving all my other Bitcoin that I'm not spending. So it's both
at the same time. Sure. All right. Well, then before we roll out, tell me a little bit more
about ZapRite and where we could find ZapRite and maybe how can I use it? Can I put my Bitcoin
matrix store on there and sell my t-shirts and my mugs? Well, you should be using it if you have
sponsors. So ZapRite is a payment platform that facilitates Bitcoin payments and fiat payments.
We don't process fiat payments. We allow people to connect fiat rails like Square on the fiat side,
Stripe on the fiat side, PayPal on the fiat side, but then rails on the Bitcoin side,
like Lightning facilitated by Strike or OpenNote, or you can connect a cold card or another hardware
wallet. We support non-custodial payments, custodial payments. We meet people where they are,
but the idea is that, and we typically focus on things where, at least today, goods are purchased
online. So that could be a WooCommerce or e-commerce store, but we have invoices. So
if you invoice customers as a way to bill, and that's why I was mentioning, you know, if you
invoice sponsors, that you can send an invoice and they can have Bitcoin methods of payment,
side-by-side fiat methods of payment. So you could, you know, have automated ACH alongside
a button to pay in Bitcoin. And that way, you don't have to have a discussion with your customers
as to whether they want to pay in Bitcoin or not. You just give them both options. And you give them
both options in a way that puts Bitcoin on a level playing field. Fiat puts all that in one system,
makes your life easier. And every customer that comes through a checkout or every customer that
is paying you, whether they're paying you via an invoice or a payment link or an e-commerce store,
they see that they have that option. And then also we just released in the last few months,
a tickets feature. So people that are hosting Bitcoin conferences or retreats or summits
that now they can have a full end-to-end ticket experience.
And so if you're going to a Bitcoin event,
you might experience and go through the ZapRite checkout flow
and pay in Bitcoin or pay in fiat,
but then say, oh, hey, that was really seamless.
Maybe I should do that too.
And so they can find us at zaprite It Z Again we typically don focus on point of sale If you in the U go sign up for Square
If you don't use Square, maybe consider changing to Square.
Our view on point of sale is that the large point of sale providers will need to have an interest in Bitcoin like Square does in order to adopt it.
And maybe ZapRite, we would love to integrate into a POS system, but recreating the POS system is a challenge.
And so for that reason, we really focus on the kind of the epicenter of where the most likely commerce transactions between businesses that want to accept Bitcoin and Bitcoiners that have Bitcoin that are willing to spend it.
And so we also have an API. So if you have a custom application, you can integrate our API and be able to manage one single API and facilitate all of your Bitcoin and fiat payments in a seamless way.
So, you know, if you build people via invoices, if you have a basic web store, if you're hosting an event, you know, check us out at ZapRite.
You know, custom application or API is phenomenal.
But we're just building out to, you know, where we think the highest leverage is in terms of where the most logical early adoption of Bitcoin payments is.
That's awesome.
I'm going to have to sign up.
Yeah.
I think it sounds fantastic.
It comes with a 30-day free trial, so you can test it out, plug it in, get all your payment methods set up.
Honestly, ZapRite can be set up in 10 minutes.
It's super easy.
It's a phenomenal product.
It sounds like 10 minutes well spent.
After you solve payments over at ZapRite, are you going to finally run for mayor of Austin?
Yeah, probably.
Depending.
You know, my first goal would be to get somebody else to do it that I trust.
But if the world has solved sound money, then I could go think about, you know, other problems.
But if we don't fix the money, then, you know, there's not a lot of use in, you know, trying to fix city politics.
So I'll either do that or I have dreams of creating a butcher shop one day.
So, you know, love beef.
You know, so I don't just track the cost of my ribeyes for kicks on the Internet.
I, you know, really value my local ranchers and want to be part of a solution there.
Wow.
Maybe we could find a couple of investors because we could do Satoshi Steak and Alehouse and we could have an in-shop butcher.
You know, a little meat market in the front of the steakhouse.
Yeah.
I think it would be great.
This has been such a pleasure.
I've been looking forward to this a long time.
It's definitely been awesome.
So dope.
Please let everyone know where they can find you and your personal work.
Yeah.
So if you're a business owner that is interested in accepting Bitcoin's payment, definitely check us out at zaprite.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E.
If you submit a contact or like a contact form because you're interested, I'll likely be the person that gets back to you.
I handle most of our inbound.
I'll help you directly.
And then if you're not yet there on your journey of, you know, Bitcoin's not quite making sense, but starting to come in focus, you can find my book on Safety in a Moose's website. The author of the Bitcoin Standard is there exclusively. That website is thesafehouse.com. So safe is spelled S-A-I-F, thesafehouse.com. My book is Gradually Than Suddenly, but there's a number of other great Bitcoin books there. Buy one, buy them all.
Um, you can, uh, also, um, so the book's called graduate and suddenly, I also have a blog that I,
I put out content, you know, once a month or every other month, um, gradually then suddenly dot X,
Y, Z. And I'm on Twitter X at Parker A. Lewis. I think, uh, I think that pretty much, uh,
covers most of the basis. Nice. Uh, yeah, the books coming out of the safe house are of the
highest quality. I can attest to that. And if you guys are going to shoot Parker a note via ZapRite,
please put it in the Bitcoin matrix and maybe the notes just so he kind of sees maybe some of the
flow from there. But I appreciate this so much, Parker. This has been such a pleasure.
Yeah, I really enjoyed it, Cedric. Again, sorry that it took this long to get on, but I'm
excited to finally do it and really enjoy the conversation.
Likewise. Thank you so much.
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