Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten Podcast.
Joining me today is Kaz from Bubble. You might have heard me shilling Bubble the last two or
three episodes because once Kaz and I had recorded this we got to chatting afterwards and this
certainly felt like a good fit for me and a good fit for the guys over at Bubble that are building
this to kind of put our minds together and help each other out because it's a new way for you to
start listening to podcasts it's a way for you to be able to create your own listening experience
so just let me read this out to you which the guys put together for me uh do you want to track
every bitcoin conversation happening across thousands of podcasts right now they have aura
which is a u r a aura by bubble fm monitors the entire podcast ecosystem to find exactly when
experts discuss bitcoin adoption stories investment strategies and the life-changing moments you need
to hear no more missing crucial insights about self-custody inflation hedging or family wealth
preservation buried in hours of content or more topically you know have you been following the
whole core versus not debate if that's all you want to listen to if that's all you want to hear
aura delivers the exact moments discussing real world bitcoin experience technical breakthroughs
or whatever uh you are looking for whatever you want to listen to that's being discussed
in the real world bitcoin kind of ecosystem where the the x the so-called experts are going on the
podcasts to put across their opinions you know you you want to build out the both sides of the
story this is the way you'll do it you can go and use their tech and you'll it will tell you
here's a three minute excerpt from stefan lavera's podcast here's a five minute expert from
the what is money show here's an eight minute excerpt expert excerpt from bitcoin infinity show
Here's a four-minute excerpt from Once Bitten.
All different guests, all talking about the same thing, the same topic, which you've chosen
to give you the bookends that you need to start trying to piece together where you might
fall on a certain topic or debate or just get up to speed so you know what's going on
and who are the players in these conversations.
It's definitely worth checking out.
Kaz is going to talk about it today.
We get into mining and all this kind of stuff as well and his rabbit hole story, obviously.
there's a link in the show notes for Bubble FM
you can go hit that and sign up
and see whether this is going to be something
that you are going to be a power user of
because it's going to help you get through your 40 hours per week
that is for sure
and you don't have to sit and listen to all the hour and 40 minutes of dead stuff
that you don't want to listen to
one and a half times or 2x
you can just curate it
it's really cool
I think it's going to be awesome
and I think it's going to help a lot of you guys.
So that's why I'm happy to start helping them and put the word out.
Now, before we get into the show, obviously, we just had BTC Prague.
What a time.
And the first full day of the conference, Isabella Santos was the moderator.
She asked the crowd, and it was busy in there.
We're talking about thousands of people.
She asked the crowd, put your hands up.
For those of you, this is your first conference.
Over 50% of their hands went up.
That is pure signal.
That's why we do what we do when we talk to people about Bitcoin.
They're coming.
The newbies are coming.
They're hungry.
They want to learn.
So keep having these discussions.
Keep doing what you do best.
Talk about Bitcoin.
And Stack.
Make sure you put them in touch with real Bitcoin companies.
Relay across Europe.
R-E-L-A-I.C-H forward slash Bitten.
Download the app and start Stack and Sats today.
swan in the us swan bitcoin.com forward slash bitten self-custody is very important please make
sure you're telling the people that are buying bitcoin that they need to start taking self-custody
very seriously bitbox had a booth in prague every time i walked past they were absolutely swamped
that's bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten use the code at checkout get yourself a five percent
discount on the Bitbox hardware wallet to keep your keys safe and Bitcoin in your custody.
Head over to plebeian.market to find what you can use your sats to buy. Very important,
very, very important that we start looking to Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. PayWithFlash
are also doing great work with that. PayWithFlash.com. Get over there, figure out how
you can just start selling your goods and services for Bitcoin.
It's a plug and play.
And now they've added invoicing too.
So I'll need to get Pierre on soon
so we can go through the full suite of their offering
because it's growing by the day.
Orange Plap, download it.
The 17,000 Bitcoiners waiting to connect with you.
What are you waiting for?
And finally, please switch to listening to Fountain.
Meanwhile, here's Gaz.
Kaz, nice to meet you, mate.
Nice to meet you, Princey. Thanks for having me on.
Of course. Well, Lauren's not here, unfortunately.
So she, as you know, generally asks the first question.
I think she would probably ask you, what is Bubble?
So Bubble is a podcast discovery platform that we're building.
And so we're a team of Bitcoiners.
We've been around podcasting 2.0 and seen everything that's going on in that area with Adam Curry and the podcast index.
And we found an issue with discoverability with podcasts.
And so everybody has their clips and users can share those.
They're mainly shared as links and X doesn't really like links anymore.
And so there's really no interface to search and find moments that are actually happening in these podcasts.
And so we wanted to build products around moments that are happening and make them instantly retrievable and then surface those to users so you can find new content.
And so that's the general idea.
We have a few different products built around that premise.
All right.
Okay.
So the first thing that jumps to mind is Fountain.
Obviously, you're very well aware of Fountain app and what Nick and Oscar have built.
And kudos to them and kudos to you, because more, you know, this is the Bitcoin ethos, right?
It's not competition. It's collaboration.
If you see something that's working, take what's working from it, embellish it, make it better.
This is what, you know, this is what we need.
Free markets, free market capitalism, whatever people want to call it.
Austrian economics, you know, human incentives, human action.
and I remember actually very well being very excited about the clip function that they rolled
out quite early. In fact, it was one of their USPs as we'd use in the startup world of unique
selling points. And I just don't know whether it ever really took off as they were expecting.
What or is that what you found in your experience using the app and playing around with it?
clearly you you guys believe there's a huge market there for it i'm just trying to figure out
you know i thought i'd be a power user of the clips function on fountain app but
obviously it was early it was buggy uh you had to wait a while then it would crash the app or
whatever but yeah what's give us that kind of arc of this technology what's happened what's
happening and what you guys are hoping to bring to the table yeah i'm a i'm a huge fan of fountain
I also really like Podverse. And I think the UX around being able to share clips is the limiting
side. Like most people that are Bitcoiners are familiar with Fountain. They're pretty tech savvy.
They can figure out how to share a clip. I just don't know if that's necessarily like the main
use case is having somebody listen to a podcast. They find a moment they like, and then they want
to share it over text message or something like that. We have that functionality. The other apps
have that but i see a way of actually discovering new content based on clips and so i think there's
a limiting factor on the human time and in a new media landscape where ai is involved like we've
moved away from traditional media outlets like a blog post things like that because you can tell
things are written by ai now nobody wants to read that and so there's a proof of work element that's
still going on with podcasts and now everybody in the world has a podcast and so it's like i can't
listen to every single thing in the world but there may be moments that are happening in shows
that i that are not usually in my routine that i want to hear about and i want to see what they're
saying and so you can build narratives upon this you can see what's happening across for instance
what every Bitcoin podcast is talking about on a week to week basis if you can aggregate and find
these clips in a new way. And so that's really where the company idea started. One of my co-founders
is really we're from Oklahoma City. We're big Thunder basketball fans. And this was back last
summer and they had a couple of trades. And you can listen to one podcast and maybe get a little
download of what's going on in your interests. But you want to hear maybe what other podcasts
are saying about your interests like not just do i do i listen to daniel prince do i listen to
marty bent but it's i mean there's maybe 40 bitcoin podcasts now and you can build narratives
about what everybody's talking about whenever you can retrieve these clips and so we built our first
product around it's called a podcast digest and so it's we have like 170 of these different
categories. Bitcoin is one AI, thunder basketball, health and fitness. And we aggregate the content
and we've built essentially like a search engine on the backend. And now we can build a, like a
readable digest experience that is, okay, here are the main narratives that every single podcast was
talking about. And then here are the moments within those podcasts that hit on those narratives.
And so I can, from a high level, just kind of, I can read, I can listen, I can go directly
into a podcast player.
I can find those moments.
I can find new content or you can search it And so it like Hey I I interested in the Ukraine war right now I don know if you familiar with like the AI community and vibe coding
There's a big meme around it. So within AI, you have a lot of AI development tools
that are making like the process of development akin to just speaking English.
If you're articulate, you're reasonably technical enough to set up a dev tool.
you can build applications now and they call it vibe coding.
It's kind of starting to bleed over into the Bitcoin community.
Steven's been talking about like vibes capital.
It's kind of coming around to that.
We've built an experience called vibe potting.
And so it's just like, tell me what you want to hear.
I have 20 minutes.
I'm going on a walk and then it will aggregate moments from podcasts and play them sequentially.
And you can just, okay, here's everything that's going on in Bitcoin.
Or it's, I want to hear about Bitcoin and basketball right now.
I have 30 minutes at the gym.
And it's just playing clips like it were one podcast together.
All right.
Okay.
My mind is spinning already because this is freaking super cool.
And something I think the psychos, the 40 hour per week psychos are going to be all over.
You know, because if they want to listen to the Civil War, a perfect example, right now in Bitcoin for this last month at time of recording, every single day, you're getting an update.
You're getting beaten over the head with the tweets about knots versus core, op return, opsize wars, JPEGs on the blockchain, yada, yada, yada.
Now, if that's your focus and you want to get down to the absolute nitty gritty of that, and you want to hear both sides of the story, you want to be able to take clips from both sides.
Maybe you listen to Shinobi on What Bitcoin Did or Mechanic on Luke and Canute's show or Samson as well.
Or I had Mechanic on at the end of last year.
Maybe you go back and listen to that to see how this whole thing has culminated.
But people knowing that, let's say I bring Mechanicon again, they know there's going to be an hour and a half of flannel in there.
Maybe they don't like Lauren's first question.
Maybe they don't like me going off on a tangent and saying, oh, yeah, by the way, you know, or the rabbit hole story.
Some people, you know, if they tune into the Once Bits and Podcast, and I'm going to do it to you, we're going to get the rabbit hole story.
people might not want that they might just want to know what's about xyz and they can start curating
it so i totally get it and i'm already excited about it well thank you we are too um so we've
we've built a few different things around that as well so like i think there's different modes when
people are like how much cognitive load they're looking for podcasts people that listen to podcasts
are typically fairly curious to begin with,
but they might have different levels
of what their engagement is with that podcast.
Sometimes like we're trying to think about the use cases
of people listening to podcasts.
They're like usually at the gym,
they're on a walk, cleaning their house,
doing something with their dog.
And they're not always in hardcore learn mode,
like taking notes from a podcast,
40 hours per week studying.
but there may be a time that their cognition is at a different level. Sometimes they're looking
for more. Sometimes they're just like, I want to passively just see what the conversations are like.
And you're kind of like that when you're on social media as well. So if you're on X,
you're not always directly searching for anything. You're kind of just passively
trying to understand what conversations are happening. Maybe I want to engage. Maybe I
don't want to engage. And so we've built a clip feed that feels like you're scrolling X and it's
moments of podcasts with a summary card. And so it's like, I can read, I can listen, it'll auto
play and it takes you directly into these moments. And so that the entire premise of everything we
build is like, nobody has time to listen to all the podcasts in the world. And most people get in
routine, they find who they want to listen to, and they have time for a few shows a week, maybe,
maybe they have time for one. But if you can now discover new things, you might break out of that
routine, find new people to listen to, or put as a podcaster, put your show in front of an entirely
new audience. Because a great example, who's sometimes a horrible example, but I'll use him
in this case is Joe Rogan. He does a podcast like almost every day, it's three hours and they jump
around topics to topic with the guests that may not even be related to the guest background.
And it's like, hmm, taking the Thunder basketball example, maybe Joe Rogan mentions Thunder for like
two minutes in a three hour podcast. And me as a listener, I just want to hear that moment and see
what he's saying and then potentially share that as well like there's a bunch of clip hunters out
there that are especially with Joe Rogan trying to find some viral posts they can like take the
screenshot video of and so we've taken that where you can pretty much take it's not the actual video
of the two people speaking but it's is a it's got the clip in it embedded in an mp4 format
it's got transcripts and artwork around it so they can go from just here I'm looking for this
type of topic boom immediately shared in video form on x and so I think there's like a unique
way that the all the experiences connect together between the listener and the podcaster
that is very cool and I you know I should apologize I did learn a disservice I think
people will probably be searching to listen to her first question
you could do that yeah but that would be super cool right and for me as a podcaster i'm just
thinking why don't i do that why wouldn't i do that and then just tweet that out and say like
530 odd episodes here's lauren's first question you know she's been asking the first question
since she was nine and the array of different answers is you see a different side of the person
that you're interviewing when they're responding to a nine to 14 year old child that you you see a
completely i see it physically on the shift and you know on the on the zoom call but you hear it
as well as the listener and that's always what i i believe that's always what's been uh you know
one of the best parts of the show uh because you the the guest is forced into thinking differently
and not just delivering a stock answer.
Yeah, absolutely.
I'm disappointed that Lauren's not here.
Yeah.
Me too.
So, Rogan, what did you say beforehand?
A bad example or what was the...
He's sometimes a bad example
because he's got a very unique show.
Like some of the examples don't always apply
because it's like, well, it's Rogan.
But in this case, I think he's a good example
because he does hop around topics like this.
I think there's also an interesting angle
for podcasters as well.
And so like the longer your show goes on,
the less relevant your old content is.
And there's not really a way to interface with that.
And as a podcaster, you know,
you sometimes have guests on very early
or you have a theory that you've gone on about that is now becoming relevant again in the news.
And it's like, how can I instantly retrieve moments from my show from a spoken word search angle?
And so it's like, I remember I talked about this, but I have no idea where.
That's probably most podcasters.
And so now it's like, okay, well, if your entire show catalog is now searchable
and you can instantly retrieve anything because we do it.
We do a mix of like AI with semantic search.
And so it assigns like a mathematical number to like what a certain phrase is.
And so as you're searching, it's like a Google search engine
for what's being said on a podcast.
And so as a podcaster, you can now use this as like an asset on your show as well
and be like, well, hey, here's when I said this, boom.
yes i did the amounts of times countless times that i you know something's cropped up in my mind
or something's going around twitter or nostr and you're like hang on a minute who told me about that
and i just can't for the life of me ever remember but if i could now go in and it's bound to have
been on a podcast it might have been in real life at a conference or a meetup but generally
for me specifically it's going to have been on a podcast so man this is huge it's going to be like
just searching my memory yeah like if it's been said on your show you'll be able to find it
instantly and it comes with transcriptions as well that's how we pretty much build everything
and so to build we have a different like in a full ingestion process for we take in a podcast
we transcribe it, we have a very structured way of chunking what's being said and summarizing those.
And then we turn them into a way to retrieve them, search for them based on all of that.
And so at this point, like for a podcaster, it's trivial to give them the transcripts that we have,
put the transcripts in the app. So like as you're listening to a podcast, you can watch it like
Spotify transcripts you can cut around and just like the features of podcasting 2.0 with chapters
we can we just build that in pretty much into the app so it's like instead of the podcaster having
to go through and think about well I said this at this point and it's kind of like a an agenda
for what was talked about we're actually using AI to categorize everything that was said and then
build in highly accurate traptors. And so if you're in the player, you can just kind of be
like scrolling down and like, wow, this part of the podcast looks really interesting. I want to
hop directly to that moment. Putting chapters in on a YouTube channel right now is just such a pain
in the ass. So please tell me there's an easier way for me to do that. Because every time I upload,
For those listening, I'm as lazy as it comes to, I just put the video on the Zoom.
So we're going to finish, right?
I'll take this MP3 file.
I'll just upload that to GarageBand.
I'll do an intro, an outro.
Bam, it's out there.
Just the lightest edit if we have a technical difficulty.
And then for the YouTube channel, I'll just take the file that Zoom is going to provide
me after this call, just copy paste that link into YouTube.
Bam Thank you very much I can be placed the show notes over But if I want to add chapters I then have to put like manually type out zero colon zero zero colon zero zero introduction to Kaz and podcasting and then 12 minutes and three seconds switch to the comment Oh my God man it just the worst
Yeah, I used to have a podcast back in the day. So I'm familiar with the mental load it takes to just edit and make your show look good after you've recorded. And so sometimes you'll spend an hour and a half interviewing a guest. And then you'll spend almost the same amount of time writing up what you talked about and making it all look good and finding guest links.
And so again, if the limiting factor is human time, I want everything that we build to be a time saver. And so I want you to just be able to hit fire an MP3 file. And then it's like, okay, my chapters are there because it's being automatically generated.
and I don't have to think about what I was talked about because this is going to be way more accurate
than what my memory was especially right after I do the show and you're trying to you know wind
down a little bit but you also don't want to wait too long because then they're like I can't remember
after a certain point and so there's that like kind of catch-22 there and it's like okay well
I'm not saying we should use AI for everything in the world but there are a lot of use cases that it
can save human time oh huge amounts absolutely ridiculous amounts of time and uh yeah that's what
that's what every tool we ever invent is used for right like that that's you know down to the pen
you know yeah it saves time then dipping a feather in ink and then you know just
absolutely anything. So what you guys are doing, all right, where to take it now?
So why this specific area? You said you had a podcast back in the day, so you've probably,
you know, you're scratching your own itch or you knew the problems or that there must have been an
aha moment for you to then, and your co-founders, so taking an idea to actually doing something
is huge, right? You could have sat around at the Bitcoin meetup. Yeah, we should do this. Oh,
that'd be a super cool tool. And then the next Bitcoin meetup comes around and you've done
nothing about it. You're still talking about it, but you guys actually decided to act on it. So
why? You must have seen that there's got to be, so the incentive structure obviously is that you
want to have a company that's going to make money so you can live off this.
mm-hmm yeah so i mean we're we're all we're very entrepreneurial uh we have another business
together we have a bitcoin mining company the idea actually came while we were out at the bitcoin
mine uh something when you're you're sweating your butt off and you're just like maybe there's
other ways we can do things that we don't we can be in the air conditioning a little bit
and we're all podcast junkies like i said we've been paying attention to these other podcasting
2.0 apps. And I think a lot of them, and not trying to knock on them, there's a lot of great
products out there, but they're not really hitting on this discoverability. Like Fountain, if you're
a Bitcoiner, you're seeing a lot of Bitcoin podcasts like around their app. It seems like
their product is really built for Bitcoiners. We're going a little bit broader with that vision of
there's just a problem in the world that exists that there is not enough time for humans to listen
to the amount of content that's being put out there. And so it came from like a little bit of
a challenge, like, can we even do this? Can we build, because we started with the digest concept
and we're like, can we build something around a specific niche topic and turn it into a multimedia
asset that people would engage with like on a weekly basis. And it's like, I want to see the
trends for health and fitness and what people are talking about and see how that changes over time.
And then as you start building something, obviously, like more ideas come, it starts to
become more of a clear vision. And I just think there's a huge market out there. I mean,
the number of podcasts alone creates a market for somebody to come in and offer services around this.
And I was like, well, there has to be a way that we can make money if this is a problem,
which I think it is like there's a limiting factor on human time and there's too many podcasts in the
world, but people want to hear what's being said. And so if you can build experiences for
podcasters or for listeners that, that solve a problem for them, which is saving them time,
helping them discover new things or on the podcaster side, get discovered.
Um, cause that's what everybody cares about. Like if you're a podcaster,
you want to spend less time editing your show. You want to be able to put out content at a quicker,
quicker pace, and you want to put it in front of new eyeballs. Um, and it's like, sometimes people
might come to your show and become a listener if they just hear a moment they really care about.
And so whenever you build experiences that overlap between each other, it's like your podcast might
not just show up in a digest somewhere. You talk about a little bit more than Bitcoin.
Everybody talks about different topics. And whenever everything is searchable,
you could show up in the the health and fitness digest and then it's like okay well somebody's
coming in from a different angle and they're like oh what's what's once bitten uh who's this guy
and so then there's this way to engage and actually find new content and podcasters
yeah that's huge mate because you know personally and i know a lot of other bitcoiners do this marty
is a classic example you know he has different people on so does k van k van davani uh the um
his show where you you have people on that aren't even bitcoiners i'm thinking perhaps like ashton
forbes for example that came on the show and talked about the disappearance of malaysian
airlines uh mh370 and zero point energy like so now people searching for that kind of content
are going to come across it and find it on the once bitten podcast why is this bitcoin dude
interviewing this guy like what's the connection for me the connection was
like what the hell happened to that plane obviously uh and zero point energy and what
does that mean for bitcoin mining you know like and maybe you've got a maybe you've got a stance
on that so i want to get on to mining but first of all before we move on from this i think there's
a huge possibility as well for people listening to go and check this out how how do we check this
out what what do we download like are you actively you know going yes so you can visit it's the
company's called bubble b-u-b-b-l there's no e dot fm and so on our website right now you can go
we have a progressive web app so everything web-based if you're on ios you can instantly
add it to your home screen and it'll perform exactly like a native app and we're also in
test flight right now in the app store and so i can share that link with you um if they're on ios
they're familiar with uh test flight which is like the beta before you get approved in the app store
and i was really trying to get that in and approved before the show uh but battling with
the app store right now we've been going back and forth um we should be in there i'd love to say by
the end of the month um it's like every time they come back it's like you need to do this now
they just a little insight on this process i don't know if you've ever done anything with an
app store app but it's like they'll reject your app and they'll say here's five things to do and
then you go meet all of those requirements and they reject it and tell you something new and it's
like why did you not tell me all of these things at once the first time you rejected me so we've
been going back and forth for the past week and a half or so very very close i i'm i think we
should be in by the Bitcoin conference. So that's my goal is in the next two weeks, we'll be in the
app store officially on iOS. Amazing. Because the reason I ask is I think there's a huge opportunity
here for people listening now to leverage the tools that you're building and start their own
completely anonymous, even if they like, completely anonymous YouTube channel or Rumble or, you know,
Noster or wherever with your clips and the, you know, the premise being eight minutes a day,
like roundup or 10 minutes a day, whatever. And just bang, bang, bang, small little clips,
YouTube shorts, you know, you could get it on other social media apps as well.
Very unique content that, and you're not doing, you're not doing the heavy lifting. You're not
scheduling the podcast you're not reaching out to the guests you're not you know finding that date
in in two or three months time because everyone's booked up and all of this stuff that just happens
people think podcasts like you know oh there's a new podcast boom that's their experience with it
it's just uploaded download listen that was brilliant great that was crap why didn't he ask
this you know whatever the usual grumbles but the work that went into that behind the scenes
could have been months months of going back and forth getting the right time discussing the topics
getting comfortable with each other and especially when i approach someone like ashton for example
or um george rischel who wrote the book uh organize africa and he came out and talked about
uh organize or um mitch the orgone donor he came on and talked about wilhelm reich and uh
orgo and energy and the ether and all of this kind of stuff.
Those guys, they have no reason to come on some Bitcoin dudes podcast.
Like, you know, it's just weird to them.
It's like, huh?
How many times a day are they getting spammed by other podcasters?
Oh, come on.
I do all the time.
Oh, get this F guy on to come and talk about staking and, you know,
like delete, delete.
All of this crap.
So to be able to, for somebody to be able to use, you know,
A hardcore Bitcoiner, a 40-hour per weeker, can now use your tools to get those minutes in order as well.
It's like, right, he said this, she said that, he said this, they said this, stitch together, you got a short 8 to 10 minute.
You could do that daily.
Yeah, exactly.
I think the angle for using it to make new content is extremely interesting.
like if you take the bitcoin digest it has the narratives for that week and all of the clips put
together you could just say i want to start a bitcoin podcast and use this as an asset we're
not going to stop you we'd love that go ahead and do it and then you play the clips of what other
people are saying about the opera turn debate and take put a take over it and it like you can use other people content to then voice your opinion be like i think they they right I think they shit whatever it is And it like I kind of noticed Adam Curry like they do this with their own show
They have like their own archive.
They find clips of the mainstream media.
They play the clip on the show and then they give their rebuttal around it.
And it's like, well, why couldn't you do that for everything?
yeah immediately i'm thinking about doing a search like niching down what have politicians
said about bitcoin today or you know a weekly show if it's not daily but and then laying down
the uh the rebuttal or whatever it is you know um and that's just one example uh yeah very cool
mate. Very cool. It's yeah, congratulations. I'm looking forward to seeing this all play out and
best of luck with it. But mining. So you mentioned you're already into Bitcoin mining.
How long has that been going? How, why, ups, downs, and we'll get into all the little rabbit
holes and side rabbit holes as we go. Yeah, so we started a company called Red Dirt Mining back in
the very beginning of 2022. We were from Oklahoma. We very familiar with the landscape here. I've been
in Bitcoin for a few years before that. And I was just like, where we want to start a Bitcoin mining
company. How do we do that? And so it's, it's been a long process. I was going to say, but what,
why would you want to start a Bitcoin mining company? No, I don't recommend that.
Were any of you engineers?
It's the hardest business in the world.
And we started in a garage, self-funded, and moved up.
We have investors now.
We've scaled the business.
It's profitable.
But it is a hard grind for a long time.
So were any of you electrical engineers or anything like that?
Oh, no.
If you read my title in Slack, I have in parentheses, not an engineer.
because it came as a joke whenever we first started.
We were trying to figure out all of the airflow requirements
and the thermodynamics that are involved
with actually making these machines run
at a maintainable sort of sense.
You can't just put them in a hot garage surrounded by wood
and expect the heat to dissipate.
So there's a little bit of science involved in it.
And so, yeah, it just became a little running joke like, oh, we're not engineers.
But you don't have to necessarily be.
And you can learn these processes and how things fit together.
Okay, so talk us through it.
There's you.
How many others?
At that time, there was four of us.
Four of you, just Bitcoiners, like talking about Bitcoin all day long, the usual, you know, bitten.
and you now have the Bitcoin derangement syndrome
setting in where you can't stop talking about it
and you're slowly remapping your mind.
Whose garage did you go for?
Like what was the, how old are you guys?
You look pretty young to me.
I'm 29 now.
I guess at that time I was 26.
We were all around exactly the same age.
This was 2022 in the beginning.
So, I mean, machines were going for like $11,000 apiece at the time.
We self-funded the business ourselves to get it started.
And we come from an area with cheap real estate and low power, high energy abundance.
So I was like, we're kind of sitting, you know, we're just north of Texas.
Oklahoma's going to be a mining hub.
And I was like, there has to be a way to run a profitable mining business.
now retroactively looking back it's not that easy um and so we we found a place with very cheap rent
it was like this kind of a ghetto area in oklahoma city they do like a lot of body work on cars
around it and it just had like 800 rent and we're like well that's the cheapest place we can find
rent ogne has cheap power uh let's let's start here and prove that we can even make this thing
run and break even basically it wasn't to be like super wealthy you know when we were that small
and then we had to prove the concept to investors uh they came from an oil and gas background and i
think this is where it gets a little interesting is like i was seeing all these mines these companies
go public in the mining space and i was looking at their cost to produce bitcoin and i was like how
how is that possible? And it's like, as a public company, you know, you have some benefits of like
the economies of scale and, and capital allocation and being able to raise public dollars. But at the
same time, you have a huge administrative burden. Like you have to hire a ton of legal attorneys
and back office people that raise, that make your margins thinner. And I was like, if we just stay
super lean. We handle the operations ourselves. We don't try to just immediately go hire a bunch
of people and we tightly manage our treasury and our capital. Can we prove this concept to an
investor? And the investors weren't even hardcore Bitcoiners. They came from oil and gas. They're
on the non-op side of deals. So they're mainly in the financing side. And at this point, they're a
bit older and so what's interesting with mining is that the machines from a tax perspective are
depreciable and so it's like okay if you have all these royalty checks coming in as an investor
do you want to give that money to the government or do you want to depreciate it against a hard
asset and so we pitched it like hey here's bitcoin it's very similar to oil and gas in some ways
because it's a locally produced hard asset that you sell on a global market.
And they're like, hey, we don't understand everything about Bitcoin, but we get that.
And actually, literally almost to the day, it was like three days after,
we were set to have our final meeting with them.
We'd been talking with them for quite a while at this point, FTX collapse.
So it's like $16,500 Bitcoin.
and we walk in there and it's like, so we said, yeah, they said yes. And so we ended up,
we acquired some property in Northern Oklahoma that had a type of warehouse that we retrofit.
And so we turned that into, you know, multi-megawatt Bitcoin mining facility. And so over time,
we've replaced those machines, we've built it out. But there was a pretty big learning curve there too.
okay well let's talk about some of those dark days where all of a sudden
shit's going wrong and you can't you can't get ahead you can't figure out why now you've got
investors behind you and they're going to ask questions uh that the price what happened to the
price of the machines what machines were you buying were you buying a mix or did you go for
one one specific machine what what's the best thing that you you know like most people think
diversify the machines right obviously but then you know well that's three different types of
upkeep too because they've got their own unique ways of breaking and whatever else and you know
so yeah tell us some of those stories and thought processes so we started with uh what's minor
machines because you know it gets really hot in oklahoma and so we what we learned is that the
the bitmain machines don't perform as well in the heat at least at the time they weren't and so i
think that was at the time of the s19s uh they they were they got really finicky when it gets
105 110 degrees in oklahoma in the summer and you see this in the past couple of summers
in the south where a lot of miners start to go offline in those big heat waves and so we we
initially went towards the what what's minor machines we've ended up pulling in a mix now
because the new products on the bitmain side have gotten a lot better and the efficiency is pretty
insane so it's like some of those early machines that we had the new bitmain machines are like
you know two two to three times as much hash and way more efficient so it's like it's that's like
two of our old machines running one of the new bitmain machines. And so we've, we've mixed it
over time and it's always to do with like, so we do upgrades every year. It's again, it's what
their sort of royalties look like. Do they, how much do they want to depreciate? Do they want to
do upgrades? How much is that? What are machines going for at the time? And it's always been
different. Like the price of machines, I'm sure, you know, change just as much as the price of
Bitcoin. So it's very dependent. It's like a lever. And whenever Bitcoin goes up, the price
machine goes up. Whenever a new machine comes out, they carry a premium. And so there's always a bit
of trade-off and analysis we have to do there. It's never just like, hey, we immediately know
we're doing this. It's just like, hey, they're ready right now to do an upgrade. We analyze the
market and we see what the best fit is. So you've had a pretty good, I would say,
very front seat at these recent debates, the civil war, if you will, within Bitcoin. And
the trope, well, the miners are happy, so they're getting better fees, so they're not going to say
anything about it. But how do you think about it and what's played out over the last few years?
Are you talking specifically in regards to OpReturn or are you saying like the different sort of transactions that are out there and how that relates to mining or what exactly?
So, I mean, when did this all start in earnest back in probably February 2023?
And, you know, first of all, it was kind of talk of drive chains.
Then it was ordinals and ordinals took off.
Then it was ruins.
Then it was BRC20.
Maybe I'm getting a few of the, maybe I'm getting the order slightly wrong.
Up until, you know, today, you know, Op return.
what in your view have you have you have you felt yourself on one side of the argument the
whole time have you flip-flopped have you you know it's obviously a hot debate and there's no
seemingly no cut and dry black and white answer uh the the the only thing we haven't
well we certainly haven't reached consensus like that's for sure yeah so i'm not into the jpeg
stuff, not into ruins.
From a minor perspective, I think the moments that the fees take off, it's nice.
But my experience with this recent debate is I'm on the side of not filtering them.
I think the issue of having these, this arbitrary data that you can inscribe into the Bitcoin
blockchain, not having a limit is not a problem in the long term.
Like I'm.
not a fan of the other side of the debate. I haven't flip-flopped. And it's not because I'm
like, oh, well, I want to do these things. I have no desire to do those things. But from
a free market perspective, I'd much rather than be propagated by everybody on the chain
and let the free market sort out the fee issue because they have to pay to do this.
And so it's like if there's somebody out there that wants to inscribe something, the price of Bitcoin going up is going to solve the problem because they're going to have to pay more in fees in Bitcoin denominated terms to do these weird experiments.
But the biggest issue I have is minor centralization.
And so I don't think this issue is actually a burden on nodes.
I think the issue of saying, hey, we're going to have these filters that are provably not doing anything because it's like, okay, well, if it gets included in a block, it's still going to be on your node.
And so if you can bypass that and go directly and pay a revenue stream to a huge mining company and then not give the opportunity for every miner on the network to actually mine and solve that block and get those fees, there's a huge centralizing factor on large miners.
And I think we've learned in the past that huge miners are not to be default trusted. And so, in my opinion, like this issue, I'm personally a fan of removing the opportune limit and just saying, okay, everybody can now do these things. And over time, it will sort itself out from a free market perspective.
wow cool well yeah interesting um i take the opposite view i say well certainly leave it
alone for now you know um that let that's and it looks as though that is what's happening um but i
i totally understand like the decentralized mining problem uh that is that is a very very big concern
and something that uh has been trending that way uh for a while um the obviously the other side of
His bait would be the UTXO bloat and making it more and more difficult, more costly to run a node, especially for those people that are coming in to look now to buy nodes and to sync the blockchain.
And they need bigger storage. And, you know, where does this end? And does this open up a really very concerning attack vector?
Because like you said, if there's people out there, and Bitcoin is always under attack, I think we probably should be very aware of that and stay vigilant.
And if there's people out there just waiting for this return limit to be completely removed to use a huge treasure chest of fiat, which they can print.
And if you follow it all the way back to the worst case scenario, I can print it for whatever, whenever, you know, to infinitum.
And then just keep attacking, keep attacking, keep attacking, keep attacking.
Centralize the Bitcoin mining, take over, for want of a better word, the chain.
But, you know, I'm just a pleb.
I don't have all of the answers.
I just want everybody to, you know, I think right now at time of recording, things seem to be easing off a little bit.
And both sides are happy to let sit.
And I'm sure this is going to come back soon.
That's for sure.
There is another PR open.
So I think what I saw yesterday, so they closed the initial PR.
And then there's still a new one open that is changing the default.
And so the default would be to not include the limit, but you can go into the configs or sorry, I said that backwards.
There will be a default limit, but you can go into the configs and remove it.
And so I feel like it's a little Goldilocks zone there that it seems like that's where it might be moving towards.
Did you switch over to knots?
I did, yeah.
Yeah.
So I have a little, like, I think Bitcoiners can do whatever they want.
I'm a volunteerist, so I'm not going to be like, hey, you need to run this.
Like, I don't think anybody in Bitcoin should be doing that.
But I don't like the idea of one person who maintains knots having that type of control,
who has provably lost keys in a very transparent way
and not even cryptographically signing his commits in GitHub.
And so I think it feels a little rushed
to immediately move over to a different client like that
versus just not upgrading to the latest version of Bitcoin Core.
Which I would be curious how many people were even running version 28.
like it's not like you're always updating like and you shouldn't be even like like just seeing a pr
shouldn't immediately like oh i'm going to change everything i'm doing bitcoin wise it's like and
when taproot comes out i didn't immediately upgrade my node it's like i think there should
be like a wait and see a little bit approach with some of this stuff and it's like hey if you're
still running version 25 there's not an issue with that yeah and i wonder as well you know the
the deeper question is how many people are running nodes at all or how many people are actually using
their node it seems like what i've seen on twitter there's a there's a big virtue signal it's like i'm
gonna switch over and run this for a moral standpoint it's like that doesn't matter you
can go spin up 10 nodes if you are not sending and verifying your transactions through them
it's pointless yeah still so much to learn and uh yeah hopefully people well if they're clipping
about the opera term on your uh on bubble this this would be one of the things that comes up right
uh so bitax and home mining where do you guys uh you know what what's your advice for the uh
the solo miner out there that is a you know kind of looking into this world and just wants to be
a part of it wants to start their learning journey oh i think the bit axe is awesome i have one
myself i think it's negligible from a power perspective like it's almost like running a node
there's like no cost to it outside of the hardware but you're putting yourself uh in the position to
solo mine a block. So it's kind of like a little Bitcoin lottery ticket. You're understanding a
little bit of the basics of how mining works and it's a, it's different than the node setup.
So I think starting with something like a bit ax, uh, maybe I saw a really cool project from
somebody on Twitter. I don't know who it was, but he had like a gaming computer, uh, and had like
three or four rows of three bit axes inside of a gaming computer. I had it all rigged up together
with like lights and stuff, I was like, man, this is really cool. I don't know if it's more
efficient than just like buying an old machine or whatever and trying to solo mine like that.
But even with something like, like an S9, like I, I think a lot of us started there.
And so like, you don't even need to upgrade the power in your house to do something like that.
At this point, like you're going to have a little bit higher of a, it's not going to be super
profitable. But if you're looking at it from like a, Hey, I want to learn about this technology.
I don't need to upgrade my voltage in my house to make it work. I can run it in my garage
fairly easily. Um, I think going with like an older machine like that and looking at it from
the solo mine, um, like not trying to pull everything, not trying to like, Oh, I'm trying
to manage my costs and like make this super efficient. It's like, no, it's like you're,
you're putting yourself in the position to learn and potentially solo mine a
block in the future. I think that's a good way to think about it.
Yeah. The fact that there've been solo mining blocks is unreal.
I honestly thought those days were so far gone,
but then when they just started dropping, like first of all,
that first one, I was like, what? Like no way. And then a second,
how many have been solo mined by bit taxes now?
It surprises me every time I see it because I'm like,
this number is way higher than it should be probabilistically yes it's unbelievable uh it's
uh and that is what we need like this is you know back to your your concerns about centralized mining
people plug in a bitax in their garage or their basement or their attic like this is how we
decentralized okay unstoppable absolutely so get out there guys go and get that bitaxe and
again like to at the beginning of the show i said uh you know you've got fountain app out there you
guys are building on what who's going to be the next bitaxe right there was there was not nerd
miner arguably was first then bitaxe i don't know sorry if i'm doing anyone a misjustice there but
But NerdMiner, you've got no chance, right? Zero.
I'm not throwing shade on NerdMiner there, but you're not going to mine a plug.
But with Bitex, provably so.
So what's next?
Because somebody will come out with a faster smarter quieter more powerful in every way BitEx competitor It must only be around the corner
Yeah, this is what I love about Bitcoin is because we continue to push the limit of what
we think computers can do.
And so, I mean, every time I see a new top line machine come out, I'm like, I can't believe
we're still doing this.
It feels like at some point we have to reach a theoretical limit.
And then we just like blow past that.
And then as Bitcoin goes up over time and the machines start to sort of like have their different lifespans, like there's really interesting applications around heat reuse and things like that, that I think people could be looking at from a, okay, this is a way like there's, you know, a lot of guys that are heating their pools or heating their house in the winter with old machines.
and it's like it's not always like a learning experience or a I'm trying to make money off of
this there's a practical practicality standpoint as well and I think there's going to be a lot more
products like that in the future like if these machines keep improving it's going to get to a
point where like you have something that's way more powerful and more efficient than a bit axe
that looks like a nice heater in the side of your house.
And it's like, it's very quiet
and you're making money from Bitcoin that way.
So I'm excited to see things like that in the future.
Yeah, it's happening.
It's coming.
All right, mate.
Before we, yeah, we've probably got another 20 minutes or so.
Rabbit hole story.
It's got to be done.
It has to be done.
People have to know where you've come from,
like what you found in the past. I find actually, there's probably a time in your life when you were
younger that predisposed you to finding Bitcoin. And you might not even figured out what that is
yet. But yeah, give it what was going on when you were growing up? And what kind of led you to the
rabbit hole? Yeah, so my Bitcoin story starts back in college, I went to University of Oklahoma.
and I was it's my I really think it started a little bit before that in high school I was
very interested in economics and politics and I just saw like Ron Paul and everything that was
going on in that campaign and I remember like taking this government class in high school and
I was the only person in the class that like registered as a libertarian and my friends were
like what does that even mean I'm like well here's what it means but it didn't I mean this was
like in 2013, 2014. Like I didn't, I did not find Bitcoin that early, but then went to college,
was studying economics and MIS, which is like IT business. So I was taking a little bit of
programming classes and I wanted to go into cybersecurity actually. And I was deeply
interested in like ethical hacking and like some of the stuff around that. And I remember I was just
really in a learning phase that was like my coursework was not doing it for me. It was just
like, okay, I'm doing this stuff to get through college and get a job one day or whatever. And I
was just teaching myself kind of like how people go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole about ethical
hacking. So I was like setting up raspberry pies and like doing stuff on my own network and trying
to come up with new ways of like learning and penetration testing on my own and found Bitcoin
kind of tangentially connected with the deep web. And I was like, huh, this thing is pretty
interesting. And I immediately like this was before a lot of the monetary side of Bitcoin
had developed. Like I did not come in from like an Austrian perspective. It was very technical.
And I was like, okay, I remember I was reading the white paper and like, I tried to keep like rereading the same sentence until like, I knew what it was actually saying. And it was like this, it was the first thing in my life that was extremely interesting. And I was like, there is gotta be something here. And why can I not even explain what this is to somebody?
And so I was like, I have to learn about it because I find it interesting, but I can't talk to anybody about it because I don't even know what it means.
And so it really started there in which that's been a long journey.
I've pretty much been in Bitcoin since then.
I don't know if I've talked about this on a podcast, actually.
And so all through college then was like deep into Bitcoin.
I wanted to go directly into Bitcoin at the time.
was graduating 2017 2018 right after that whole ico boom and i went to work for a big tech technology
consulting company accenture and it's just like 400 000 people in the company at this time and i
was like how do i stand out in a company of this size like i'm not the best programmer in the world
i'm like you know how do i differentiate my skill set and i was like there's one thing i know really
well and i was like i understand bitcoin architecture and so i immediately went in
and i was like i want to do bitcoin stuff and so i actually got wrapped up in the corporate blockchain
uh sort of i don't even know if you can call that an industry because it was a lot of like
proof of concept stuff but there's a small group of about 30 to 40 people out of that 400 000 people
that were exploring these technologies.
And they like allowed me to,
instead of like first going off
and you sometimes in a big tech consulting environment,
like get put on honestly bullshit projects
that are not exciting at all.
And they just work you to death.
But they let me do a lot of research on that industry.
And I like built internal assets
for how we would like have engagements with clients.
and I was seeing firsthand like they were very keen on Ethereum
and I was not.
And I had a very practical standpoint from it.
I could see what the people now talk about in Bitcoin on Ethereum
from a firsthand perspective.
It doesn't work the way that people say these things work.
And I actually had an initiative.
I was like, we should build basically a way for companies because Accenture consults for some of the biggest companies in the world.
And I was like, I don't think the market is for building applications on a blockchain.
I think it's for helping a company develop a strategy around holding Bitcoin as an asset.
So it was like two years before Michael Saylor was in Bitcoin.
And I was like, we need to teach companies how to hold this thing and like how to legally and compliantly do things around holding this asset that I think will be valuable in the future.
Of course, I was a young, like just fresh out of school.
They like laughed me out of the room.
So very quickly, I got like disenfranchised there.
Left.
this was 2020 started a bitcoin podcast and then went to work for swan for a few years
so i was there for about three years uh started the mining company on the side while i was working
at swan i left what year is that so what is it may i left in december uh two years ago and so
I've been fully on my own on the mining company. But I also now teach a Bitcoin class at OU.
And so we, at the same time we were doing all this mining stuff, we started the Oklahoma
Bitcoin Association. And we did that because we were like, well, we just had an experience with
our, with OG&E, our power provider, like they just up and raise the rates. And we're like, man,
We want to make sure that we can have a favorable legislative environment and policy to kind of protect our business a little bit.
And I was like, there's nobody doing this.
So we started the Oklahoma Bitcoin Association.
And as I did that, I reached back out to an old professor.
I actually gave a Bitcoin presentation when I was in college for her class.
I was like, hey, this is where I've been.
This is what I've been doing.
This is what I'm doing now.
Would you like me to come just like give a presentation about Bitcoin?
And I did that and it had incredible feedback.
Like we had all the students staying after sending Bitcoin around on like lightning wallets.
And I was sending them stuff on, I think on Moon Wallet at the time.
And it was just, she was like, I've never seen the engagement from students like that.
And so we ended up going back a few times.
And then I was like, hey, I think there's an angle for a full class here.
And she was taking over the department at the time.
And so this was last fall, actually.
That was my first semester teaching a full-length Bitcoin course.
And so I had to build out the entire course.
There was no rubric.
There was nothing.
She was just like, you know this stuff.
And so I built an entire course, and I'll be teaching it again in the fall.
How many people signed up?
We had 32.
two. So it was a 4,000 level class in the business school. They're all MIS majors. So like, again,
they take some programming classes and database classes. And I wanted to teach the class.
So there's a lot of different angles of Bitcoin. There's the monetary side, there's the tech side,
there the philosophical side And I was like how do I weave all of this into one class that not just skipping around that nobody can follow And so I was at this time one of my now co sent me a podcast
that chronologically goes through the Bible.
And I was like, huh,
what if you could teach a Bitcoin class chronologically?
And you start pre-Bitcoin
and you go into some of like the cypherpunk movement
and all of the technology that had to happen
to even enable Bitcoin.
And then each week you use like a big Bitcoin event
in its history to explain the technology,
the monetary side of it.
So like one week in the early on,
we, sorry, my dog is getting a little wild down here.
Like the Bitcoin pizza,
like, you know, whenever they exchanged 10,000 Bitcoin
for pizza and it gave its like first uh monetary like example so it's like okay there's an event
now we can use this to explain how bitcoin transactions work and so like the entire semester
which we go all the way up until current events uh by the time the end of the semester's around
we're like we're caught up we're this is like real time now so that's how i approached it
that's cool what i was going to ask you what what kind of reading materials do you uh give out or
tell people to go and read because obviously you know in a general university you'll be like oh
yeah read such and such an author or here's this textbook do you have uh are you pushing
shilling anything in particular so i had them read two books this this last semester uh jan's book
which I think is a great technical overview of how Bitcoin works, and then layered money.
So I wanted them to have a little bit of both sides. And I want them to be familiar with the
arguments around CBDCs and some of the other stable coins, because I really see that is where
kind of the new threat is coming from. Like, I don't really see CBDCs as the big threat anymore,
but I see it being like this underhand approach to the Bitcoin dollar with stable coins.
And so I wanted them to have enough of a technical grounding in what Bitcoin was that by the end of the semester,
we could talk about some of the more pressing issues and they could actually have like a debate around what these things are.
the people signing up are they coming in just because it sounds interesting or are they coming
in are you getting crypto bros like signing up and yeah i got some ethereum some solana some tron
or you know what's the mix so there were there were a couple people that had interests around
some of the other coins um i did i feel like i did a pretty decent job of of not just like oh
how we would engage with somebody on Twitter about why those things are wrong. Um, cause I
have the practical experience, like I said, coming from my early work experience of like, Hey, I've
seen these things. There's a lot of deceptive marketing going on that it's, it's not actually
how they technically work. And so I feel like I quickly snuffed out some of the, uh, the people
that were like really interested in that stuff. I mean, there were always questions, uh, but I think
when you're engaging with somebody in person, it's a lot different than like the 2D experience
that you have on Twitter. And what you would say to like a someone with no profile picture talking
about why Ethereum is the best cryptocurrency is not necessarily how you engage with a student
that you actually know on a personal basis and you've seen week to week. So if they had a question,
And it wasn't like I would just immediately try to shit on it.
But I would try to give a really good steel man argument for them and then bring it back to Bitcoin.
And the mix was great.
I mean, I think there were a lot of people that didn't even know what they were getting into, but they were like, hey, this seems interesting.
And the timing of it couldn't really have been better because we had started the class.
I think Bitcoin was at 50 to 60,000 at the time, and it hadn't previously broken its all time high.
We go through about half the semester. They take their midterm. We break the $69,000 all-time high or whatever that was. We end the semester. Bitcoin breaks $100,000 for the first time. The day of the final. So it was like they were like, wow, I took this class. I learned all this stuff. But now I've seen number go up. Like I'm really interested now.
What's the mix of males to females?
It was almost 50-50.
Wow.
I think we had 14 females and the rest were males.
So like two or three more guys than girls.
But it was a good mix.
It's cool that you use Nick's book because he teaches,
I can't remember the name of his university,
but Nick Batia, for those not.
So Layered Money is written by Nick Batia
and he runs his own course at a university wherever he lives.
And Jan Pritzker wrote Inventing Bitcoin,
which I mean, these are great books, both of them great books.
Jan's book, particularly very, very approachable for, you know, complete noobs,
but also a great book just to flick through if you've been in the Bitcoin space for a long time.
And I remember discovering it early in my journey and Jan and coming on the show
and talking about his rabbit hole experience and leaving his home
just as the Chernobyl incident was about to go down.
like incredible story uh so yeah great that's awesome so it's so good to know that you're doing
that Nick's doing that uh Ella is uh Ella Hoff she's doing her own thing with um her university
I can't remember the name of these universities maybe that's I think Nick's at uh USC University
of Southern California. And he was a professor before too. So I think like he had an in,
he discovered Bitcoin was already teaching economic classes there. I was not a professor.
And so I'm very interested in getting Bitcoiners connected with the universities that maybe their
alma mater or like the local university around them to become adjunct professors to actually
teach this. So what do they, what, what, yeah, that's a good point. What did I get at the end
the course is it a degree is it a certificate is it a is it points towards something or was it just
a filler course like what's the so it's an elective course uh it counts towards their major
which right now it's in the business college it's open to all business majors i think we had a
we had like 10 people that were like finance or economics um some people were even like
supply chain majors and the rest were mis like it business and so it counts as credit towards
all of them it's a 4 000 level course very cool bullish very very bullish right okay well we'll
we'll end on the last question as always the same one and it's just crossed my mind that somebody
could probably use bubble to search this as well now and just put together every single answer
that's ever come before uh if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody who would
you give it to and why so that's a tough one i'd say at this point it's my grandparents
I think the most important people that you can bring into Bitcoin are your family members.
And so my family, immediate family is at this point, they didn't listen to me at the very beginning.
But now they're like, OK, they're pretty much all in.
I'd say my grandparents or my uncle.
Well done, mate. Very, very well done.
Yeah, the perfect, perfect response.
Of course, there's no wrong answer, but it is very nice to hear.
you know, those nearest and dearest. And yeah, this is how we win. And like what you're doing as
well, with, with bubble, with the mining, with the teaching. Hats off, man. Thank you very much.
Thank you for everything that you're doing to, you know, lean into this space and help
everybody else that's coming, you know, right behind you.
Well, thank you very much for having me on Daniel. And thank you for what you do.
there's a little bit of a i'd say a big debate right now between podcasters and developers with
this latest op return and what you're doing is very important like this is where more people
learn about bitcoin yeah it's going wild appreciate it mate and uh yeah look forward to
how can people like reach out to you learn more about bubble is there any if there's any way they
can help you with the course or anything at all that they feel they can add value to you what's
the best way to reach out i'd say just on twitter i'm responsive to dms uh you can find me at btc
k a z on twitter and if you're interested in bubble definitely go sign up the you can create
an account for free and you can start using some of our tools to explore podcast moments
excellent all right man well thanks for coming on and uh yeah i look forward to seeing you in real
life on that thanks for it too thank you kaz thank you everybody for listening do go and check this out because like I said at the beginning and like we talked about during the first third of this interview
I think there's a lot here.
There's so much to come from it,
the way that you can be able to curate your listening
and get up to speed on these topics.
So bubble.fm, or there's a link in the show notes
to make it very easy for you with a little affiliate code in there,
which if you sign up, that'll be great.
If not, just go and use the free trial, whatever they're offering you, because it is brand new.
Just reach out to Kaz.
Ask him any questions.
These guys are at that point where they're just looking for feedback.
They're looking for the first users to come.
Every startup has this initial stage where they ship the product, but they need to listen to the marketplace.
If you're the marketplace giving the feedback, then it's going to just be even better for you going forward.
If it's already good out of the box, imagine how better it's going to be if you're part of the first tranche of people that are helping give the feedback and let the guys listen to what it is exactly that you need or what direction you might take this in with your own content.
Because you could literally become a content creator using their tool, right?
that there's so much scope, absolutely huge amount of scope.
And all of it is great for Bitcoin
because you can start curating educational pieces
or entering into discussions that you would have been weeks behind
getting up to speed with
if you had just tried to trawl through all the spaces,
all the pods, all the YouTube videos,
getting mixed up with the the noise instead of the signal i mean this is a signal separator this tool
it's uh it's massive like i said really happy to help these guys uh get the word out there
and um again conferences so podcast aside conferences uh get to one like i said at the
beginning of the show there's over the 50 percent of the the btc prague audience were new i met a
bunch of them families too which was great to see and they're all committed to going back to
prague at least next year and they'll be committed to going to another conference as well it's you
cannot put into words i was part of a panel about building communities within bitcoin uh geordie
was on the panel from satlantis uh mariel from venezuela that has now managed to push a bitcoin
education program through the university there. We had a two-star Michelin chef up there. We had
Rod from Bitcoin Park. I was representing Orange Pill App. And we were all just talking about success
stories and people getting together. It's so refreshing to hear. And it starts with one
person's action. And that one person's action is you listening to this podcast right now.
It's you picking up your phone, paying $4 a month to join Orange Pill App. Yes,
it's a paid app because you're not the product you pay scammers and bots and crypto bros are
kept away you want the signal you look for the signal you find it's going to tell you in your
city how many bitcoiners there are and if you by the way you get a thousand sats to mess about
within the wallet when you first sign up and you can just drop a message to everybody say you want
to drop a message to everybody within 50 miles of you and it's a very loose geolocation by the way
It's not like, you know, geo-tracking you down to the millimeter.
You can just send out 100 sats to 100 people saying,
hey, I'm going to start a Bitcoin meetup in the orange Satoshi pub lounge down the road at the local village hall, blah, blah, blah.
And you are now the guy.
You are now the person starting the local Bitcoin meetup.
and it doesn't matter if no one comes because do it again the week after and then the week after
and before you know it because you are sending out the signal it's like you are literally you
know the batman signal you're just sending up the great big orange and black bee into the clouds
saying i'm here let's fucking go let's meet let's build something nothing stops this train but it
takes you to get off your ass and go do that now all right that's my run over please stack bitcoin
like and not bitcoin treasury companies there was a lot of this chat going around at the conference
this weekend a lot of people had their success stories of how they'd honed into the latest
bitcoin treasury company or you know listed stock the listed stock okay that's different
there's something there because if a small to medium-sized enterprise is taking itself
it's doing the original sailor play I'm going to run out of music in a minute but I've got some
shit to say here if there is a business that is run properly and is always already cash flow
positive and has been cash flow positive for the last handful of years it's got the same CEO it's
got the same management team you can look at you can just do all that basic due diligence the
boring, trad-fi due diligence on a company that you are looking to invest in, go do that.
You could even hire someone to go do that. Just do the basic due diligence on what would this
look like to a normie financial advisor or someone like that. Would that be a good investment?
especially if they are going to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet.
That is very, very interesting.
That gives that company 5, 10, 15, 20 year runway
which it did not have before.
However, what else is going on right now
is a bunch of companies are just spinning themselves up out of nowhere
and calling themselves Bitcoin treasury companies
and their service, in air quotes, that they're offering into the marketplace
is a way for the pent-up pressure of fiat currency
that is completely tied up in equities or bond markets
or people's private pensions, which you can't get access to.
Like in Australia, probably your superannuation fund
or in the UK, they'd be called your SIP,
which you can choose what to buy,
but you're not allowed to touch it until you're,
depending which country, right?
55, 58, 60.
people are hooning into these bitcoin treasury companies this is like 2017 ico craze all over
again these are penny stocks like on fire it seems so look again there's going to be some good actors
that are building these companies and helping put people in the right place to actually do it properly
within the guidelines of you know of how they're supposed to operate but it is still
why would you do that rather than just buy Bitcoin?
Because you're looking for the huge gains in the short term.
That's it.
It's high time preference behavior.
And that's not what you came for.
I made a tweak today.
Came for the Austrian economics,
stayed to day trade the MNAV.
A lot of Bitcoiners are going to get wrecked
and lose their Bitcoin if this is what they're considering doing.
that is my opinion that is what i wanted to share with you guys so let me be clear again a company
with a solid performing business is offering a good or service into the economy and is looking
to put bitcoin on its balance sheet to give itself a longer runway and look after its employers
and be able to be around for the next five ten years and improve their product that's low time
preference that is probably worth you looking at especially if it is in a pension vehicle money
that you're not able to get to.
But smash buying a Bitcoin treasury company
that's just been announced 30 minutes ago
with all the bells and whistles
and the AI-generated mission statement.
Don't do it, guys.
Or think very, very carefully about doing it.
That is my warning.
Please stack your stats.
get over to relay.ch forward slash bitten get over to swan bitcoin.com forward slash bitten you can
stack with those guys take self-custody like i said at the beginning bitbox.swiss they've been
around for a long time now they're one of the longest standing in the sector swiss made swiss
security fully open source they even run a bug bounty so if you've got the chops you can go and
try and break it and win a prize for finding something that is wrong on that particular device.
Yeah, bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten.
Use the code bitten.
Take complete and utter total control of your Bitcoin.
That's as simple as that is.
Paywithflash.com.
If you want to start offering your goods and services for Bitcoin,
these guys have now made it plug and play.
It's so damn easy.
And there's invoicing built in there now as well.
so start demanding to be paid in bitcoin and you shall plebeian.market another perfect place for
you to go and check out what's going on who's selling who's selling products out there is there
anything that you want is there anything that you need is there anybody you just want to support
by sending them some sats just in exchange for a t-shirt or some honey or some marmalade or
all of the other weird and wonderful things that people are making out there and offering into this
parallel economy. I've rambled way too long. I hope you enjoyed this one with Kaz. I'll catch
you guys soon. Thank you so much for listening.