24 Burst results for "Parker Lewis"
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"And especially with what Twitter are doing, it's going to be basically a private CBDC within 12 months from what Elon Musk has said. And if we can get people onto Noster, it's surely a better option. And also if we can, we might end up flipping it where Noster actually onboards people to Bitcoin, not the other way around. I don't think so. So I think that there's no way, until a hyperinflation event happens and it's clear in presentation for you, danger for you, you have to have done some conscious thought about Bitcoin. People have told me, people get brought in by gaming and all this stuff. It's like, no, you have to think about your savings and work and value. There's no way around that. A data point marginally can have an impact. And that, again, I view this as, again, I'll use an example, but it doesn't mean to be biblical, but it's like, there's a flood coming, flood, huge problem, consequential money breaking, massive. We don't know where things are going to shake out. The most important thing to be working on is fixing the money. So again, and that's also not like, that's me being hyper logical and rational. And I see other people that I know get it, get Bitcoin. And I look at it and I'm like, any hour that they're working on, not so they're not working on Bitcoin. And this is like not a crypto bro or trading Bitcoin to get more dollars thing. It's like, we got to fix this because we got one chance. And if 100% of your energy isn't going into the Bitcoin thing you're working on, then it's diluting it. And there's not enough people as it is working on Bitcoin. And so if you're one of those people that has that precious knowledge and the capability to be more focused and to be more, because the other thing is that I think that Noster has nothing to do with free speech. As you've learned, like free speech is a legal standard, not an app standard. I've been in a lawsuit that similarly, we said true things. It was a fraudulent company and those people were convicted. That lawsuit went on for five years. That the ability to say things and not be criminalized or prosecuted or sued, like that's what free speech is about. And it's not adjudicated on censorship of social apps. No, I agree with that. I agree. It's a good way to communicate. And then the last thing I'll say is, I think that Bitcoin is the most important thing to advance in the world. So part of it is the time standpoint, but then on my side, it's like, I'm actively shadow banned on Twitter. Confident in that, but I'm there to reach people that don't yet understand Bitcoin. And the other reality is that Noster is, you know, probably a high, high overlap between people that get Bitcoin and people that get Noster. So it's like, if I'm trying to reach an audience to educate them about something that they don't know, being in a place where I can, where they're more likely to be makes more sense. I understand your argument where people should be focused on their time. I still like Noster. I think the world's a better place because we have it. And I think the integration with Mutiny is very cool. And it's going to make me use Mutiny. It's going to make Mutiny my primary Lightning wallet now, personally. Yeah. And because of the Noster integration. But if we could connect Mutiny to ZapRite. Get Tony on it. You know, but it's the social connections. But anyway, listen, look, Parker. Hey, wait, go back. So why are you more than that? Oh, no, you might owe me in a few days. Right. Gradually, and then suddenly the book is coming out when? It's at the printers. So keep an eye on that. There's a queue, so next week or two. ZapRite, where do people check that out? ZapRite.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E. I like to say, you know, that like Drake meme, people are like, zap, and it's like, and then it's like ZapRite. OK. So zap, R-I-T-E, focus not on getting, you know, fractions of pennies for your tweets. Focus on getting paid for, you know, the hard work that you do day to day. And go check out all the other shows and maybe Parker, because they're all fucking brilliant. Yeah. And then that Bitcoin is not a hedge presentation. It's on YouTube. I also wrote an article for people that want to read better than YouTube. It's on my blog. Gradually, then suddenly dot X, Y, Z.Excellent. Parker, amazing. Thank you. Always. I've always learned it from you, man. I really appreciate everything you do. All right. Well, I'll come check out the football club sometime soon, too. Appreciate it. April. April. I think that conflicts with Bitblock Boom, but we'll get a special trip. Ah, it does. Yeah, it does. I want to come see, you know, get on the ground there. You're one of the people who has to prioritize Gary, and I get that. OK, man. Anyway, listen, good luck with everything. We will pump everything you've done recently out on the show, and yeah, just keep crushing. Appreciate it. Thanks, Danny. Thank you. All right. What do you make of that? Have you got yourself protected? Do you have the insurance should you have banking issues? I think it's a really important issue. Look, I always hope not to use it. We are a fiat-based business at the moment because of Bitcoin volatility. We can't be an entirely Bitcoin business. I do hope one day we will be. But we do have that insurance in place should our banks switch us off, which we've had happened before. I've had personal and business accounts closed. We do have a Bitcoin treasury. We do have the facilities to accept and receive Bitcoin. It's an important point. You know, do you have that for your business? Maybe other businesses need this. So I think I think Parker's raising an important issue. And it's not one of those things you just want to wait to have in place or wait to try and put in place should these banking failures happen. You want the insurance in place ahead of time. I would actually also say what's quite interesting is that with our business, we operate with both anyway, and we primarily are fiat payments. But there are times we have to pay for things in Bitcoin. We have to accept Bitcoin. Yeah, we're already making that transition. So this was a great show. I appreciate everything that Parker brought to the show. And definitely go and check out the company he's working with now, Zapparite. It's pretty cool what he's doing there. All right. We're going to be heading out to Africa in 10 days. Hopefully going to see some of you in Ghana. And we've got our conference in April next year. I don't even know where we're going to be. I think end of January, we're in Canada. We're going to head into Nashville. I can't remember when that is. So keep an eye on our schedule. We'll keep updating you. All right. Have a great rest of your weekend, and I'll see you all soon. You got any questions about this or anything else? Drop me an email. It's hello at whatbitcoindid.com.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"I think that it actually does Bitcoin a disservice to compare Bitcoin censorship resistance with Nostar. I think it, I think it's making the same error that a lot of shitcoins do about decentralization. Saying, oh, I've got this decentralized currency. And it's like, well, how did I just get rugged? You know? And then the third thing is, I think it's a distraction from Bitcoin. How does Nostar rug me? What's that? How does Nostar rug me? No, no. My point is that, um, when people say I have this decentralized currency called Ethereum and it's better than Bitcoin, it's like, well, that's centralized. And you're using the term decentralization trivially. You're trying to equate it to Bitcoin's decentralization. There's no world in which the centralization of something like the dollar or Ethereum could ever be compared with the decentralization of Bitcoin. So what, what a lot of Bitcoiners who would say, 100%, 100% people say that things are decentralized in this Fiat crypto currency world, and they're not decentralized. They're trivial, they're trivializing the word decentralization and decentralization is not trivial. I don't agree. So I've seen this all the time. With Nostar. From people that I respect. Yeah. I'm not going to, I'm not going to call people out. Yeah. You're calling them out without saying their name. I know who you're talking about. But they say Nostar is censorship resistant. So why do you think it isn't? And Bitcoin is censorship resistant. Nostar in no way could be confused as being censorship resistant like Bitcoin is. No, it's not. Yes, it's not the same. But the thing that would have to be true for something like Nostar to be censorship resistant. And again, I think there's a similar parallel where the only thing that I see out there and like I talked to the guys at Mutiny, so I know there's some other things maybe on the hood, I'm not convinced that they can actually just be in an application that they don't actually need Nostar, but where they couldn't be incorporated, is that the only thing I see is social apps. And that... There's more coming. So we've seen e-commerce. There's marketplace. Yeah. I know. Like, I hear that. But like, that's just Bitcoin. You know, like, there's this network of nodes that are actually, you know, decentralized. That yeah, I'll believe when I see it, because when all these people promise these things on crypto, it was like, the only things were like trusted finance apps. It was just finance, it was like nothing, you know? And so it's like, hey, like, this is a messaging protocol, Bitcoin's a messaging protocol, Bitcoin's a messaging protocol to move money. So anything that's not moving money, or Bitcoin, I view it, I just view it as a, like, maybe the people who are working on Twitter should work on that are that are infatuated about social apps should work on Nostar. And you think the people working on Nostar should be working on Bitcoin? I think the Bitcoiners that got infatuated with Nostar over the last 12 months, I see it creating like tangible detraction. And that's fine. That's, you know, they're free to do that. And I'm not going to sound like a moral thing. I'm just saying like, hey, me logically, I think Bitcoin is the most important thing to put all my energy in. And if I'm out there thinking about how to get a dentist paid in Bitcoin or a rancher paid in Bitcoin, figure out how to get the gas station to receive Bitcoin as payment. Again, it's not to try to quote drive the circular economy. The other thing from my article, I don't want to be confused with is like, it's just an each individual business decision to be like, it's on you. You know, if you're a Bitcoiner and you own a business, it's singular, only you can decide whether you receive Bitcoin, but saying it's probably more important and don't be complacent, that none of that requires Nostar, you know. But okay, yes, Nostar doesn't have the same... The thing that the, you know, I guess the thing that the Mutiny guys, I believe what you might be keen on is like Nostar wallet connect. It's like, is there a better way to, you know, broadcast transactions and to help uptime of Lightning wallets? But like, again, that I look at and says like, hey, you need... The problem is the uptime in the Lightning wallet. Work on that. You know, work on that. You know, so I just like, it's like, Bitcoin is moving to not be like esoteric, because I try to be hyper rational, but like, if you think about it from a building block, it's like, Bitcoin's moving monetary data. Anything that's not moving monetary data is moving non-monetary data. Bitcoin moves on the Bitcoin network. And if you're telling me that Bitcoin can only move a certain way because it needs something that isn't in Bitcoin... No, I'm not saying that. No, I know you're not saying that, but that's where these things of like, Nostar helps solve X problems for Bitcoin. No, what I'm saying is, is that Bitcoin is decentralized money, censorship resistant money. I'm saying Nostar is more decentralized than Twitter and more censorship resistant than Twitter. I can't be kicked off Nostar, okay? You can't be kicked off Nostar, but you can be kicked off Damas. How? They shut your account down. Is that true? Yeah. But it doesn't matter. They're going to get primal. They are. Then you go get primal. It's the same thing of being like, well, I'm on Twitter, I'll go to True Social. I don't think Damas could kick you off. They could just kick you off their relay. No, what they can do is they can stop routing traffic because they can... This is why... Okay. But my point is... Hold on. But that's in opposition to my point. My point is it's more decentralized than Twitter. Okay, but it's not censorship resistant. It's more censorship resistant than Twitter. Okay. Because I can have... I wrote about this in one of the archives, I actually took it out of the book. I said, being a little bit censorship resistant, you can't be a little bit censorship resistant just like you can't be a little bit pregnant. So if... I can be censored on Bitcoin. What's that? I can have transactions censored on Bitcoin. Miners can censor me. Send a Bitcoin transaction. I'm just saying they could, theoretically. They can't practically, and that's the point. So if... Because then this is how most of these people who are using Noster are doing it. They're getting information passed through a server, which inherently is censorable and delivered to them. And yeah, you could get cut off, but then you don't have access to any of your data, you know, any of your contacts you had to, you know, or maybe you do... Yeah, you still keep all... You keep the contacts. But like, my point is just like... My view is it's a better scenario. My view of this is the only thing that would make sense is if there's an economic case for you to pay eight relays at the same time for a social app. Okay, let me put it differently. What I'm saying is I've got more optionality that with the existence of Noster than I have with just Twitter. And I have less scenarios where I'm going to be censored than I do with just Twitter. And the mutiny wallet is a really cool way to pay people. I love the mutiny wallet to pay people. I've got a mutiny wallet. I've got sats there. Okay. And I love Tony, Ben, and Paul. This has to do with Noster. So if I want to use a mutiny wallet, pay someone in Bitcoin, I'll pay you in Bitcoin with Noster... Or sorry, with the mutiny wallet. And that doesn't really need Noster. No, it doesn't need it, but it makes it easier. I think we're missing the big part of it though. The world is chronically addicted to social media.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Hmm. I'm with you, Parker. You there? For sure. Yeah. I'm never saying it's a hedge ever again. It's only ever the solution. But I've got an article out there. All right, all right. Fuck off. It's time to pay you back. All right, hold on, hold on. I forgot enough in my life. Can you actually view the invoice, though? Yeah. All right. There's context here. I made a bet with Parker. OK, but you got to read the invoice. I sent you an invoice on ZapRite. It's technically due in 10 days, but I'd like to collect payment right now. It's billed to Peter McCormick from Grabs and Suddenly LLC. It's for No Cash App Shitcoins. And the bet was for 18 months. Cash App did not add shitcoins. I had faith in Jack Dorsey as a Bitcoiner. I had faith in Jack, but I just thought they would add Ethereum. Yeah. And I was wrong. I lost the bet. I'm going to have to pay this on chain, though. OK. You can do that. Yeah? So go to Pay Invoice. All right. Well, I'm going to need my laptop. Oh, do you want me to just do it in? I'll just pay you back. Yeah. You can pay it. I'm going to challenge your Nostar thing. OK, wait. Let me just explain this. So just so you know how this works, so when he clicks Bitcoin, an address is going to be generated directly for my wallet. So that's going directly to my cold storage. It's not coming through ZapRite. And then if he had hit Lightning, that technically would have gone to my, like, basically that's my strike account. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, so you can just capture this. Oh, I was going to try and do it on, I was going to try and show you the tap sign because I bet you've not seen that, but I don't have enough in that wallet. Yeah. You got to do it in this one. Yeah. Well, Danny showed me a very cool Nostar slash Bitcoin integration that's increased my conviction on the importance of Nostar. OK, what is it? It's a mutiny wallet. Oh, the mutiny guys, they work out of the Bitcoin Commons, work just- Love Tony. Yeah. Love Tony, Ben, Paul, they work the table over from me. So we have these conversations. The integration they've put into the mutiny wallet whereby you can just straight up pay people who you follow in Nostar, I think is fucking brilliant. So like- Like when I have a bet with Danny now, he doesn't need to send me an invoice or whatever. I can just go and straight into mutiny and just click Danny and pay him. That's cool. Yeah, but that could also be a, that doesn't need Nostar. What would it use instead? Well, like think about this application here, none of this money is routing through ZapRite as an entity. Yeah. So any application, whether it's Nostar, whether it's Twitter, like you could go, if Twitter built Lightning into it, you could just go to somebody's Twitter handle and pay them in Lightning. Like that's a Lightning innovation. But what if Twitter goes down? What if a Nostar relay goes down? That you're- There's other relays though. Right. But there's other companies offering solutions to their ZapRite, you know, like, so like basically a relay is a central point of failure. So if you have a, you know, my, so my issue with, with Nostar is I don't, from an economic incentive perspective, I do not believe that it's censorship resistant. That's number one.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"But if something has clicked for you about Bitcoin, like, there's no way that anybody holds 99. Like, you know, I don't want to forecast how much your savings are in Bitcoin on the personal side, but mine's more than 95%. Same. Like, you don't hedge, you know, if there's a class of people in the world that have seen this as a solution and that it continues to enforce this fixed supply, that nothing about that will change, like, how do you explain that behavior, right? And so there's a lot of things that quote, that offset inflation. There's only one thing that solves it. And so to call the same thing that solves it in the bucket, it's like, yes, it's offsetting inflation. Yes, it's protecting purchasing power, but it's also, you don't have to get out of that thing back into it at the end of the day. Like, that's like real estate, not, you know, baseball cards, not fine art. You actually need a form of money to solve your problem. And that's what Bitcoin is at a fundamental level. So it can offset the inflation, but it's doing a whole lot more than that. And it's difficult to stay in that in-between state once it's clicked to not get to the point of seeing that like, oh, this is actually the permanent solution. It's a stronger message to say to people, you don't need a hedge, you need the solution. Yeah, and it doesn't set people up falsely because in their mind, what a hedge to inflation is, is something that offsets inflation. Bitcoin's not correlated to the dollar, right? So as there's dollar inflation, maybe, and I don't even, like, I try not to think about the fiat world a lot, but like maybe there's a more direct correlation to gold setting off, you know, 4%, you know, dollar inflation, or maybe real estate does that. I haven't like done the analysis, but those things are correlated with the dollar. And if you've been told a story that Bitcoin, quote, hedges inflation, and you're sitting there and you're going on that and you're seeing inflation in Bitcoin at 69K and you buy it, and then boom, it goes to 16, you're like, wait, what? This was supposed to be a hedge to inflation. It's like, no, it wasn't. It was the solution. And again, Bitcoin adoption happens as knowledge distributes and knowledge distributes as a function of time. So if you buy it under the wrong context, then you can't explain all of this volatility. But if you started to figure out the 21 million fixed supply, you start to figure out how that translates to, hey, if a bunch of people adopt Bitcoin, and like I think about this, if Bitcoin adoption is going to increase by 10X, that will happen, in my opinion, for sure. Clearly, 1000X, whatever, everybody in the world is going to adopt it. But let's just use the, you know, kind of explaining this why it's not a hedge. One person owns Bitcoin, if we increase by 10X, that means nine out of every 10 people is pricing Bitcoin for the first time. They're in a information disadvantage position. The first time that you bought Bitcoin, for me, at least it felt like I was setting money on fire. Over time, it became intuitive. But think about like some high distribution of nine out of 10 people buying Bitcoin for the first time, feeling like they're setting money on fire, the Bitcoin price is going up a lot, they're feeling good about themselves, starts to go down, they're starting to panic. And so that is not acting like what people, like if language is important, a hedge to adopt that, before the reason that it's actually solving the problem, and for the reason that the way it's adopted inherently drives volatility. And that volatility are the precise times that demonstrate that it's not correlated to dollar inflation. And so kind of at the fundamental level, it is that it solves it. But then on the other side of it, because again, and this is my own, you know, existence in the market, the most common single question that I got was, I was told this was a hedge to inflation, and it's going down. And it's like that point of, well, if you didn't know that this was the solution to inflation, that when inflation started happening, you would have already been in Bitcoin prior to that point. You wouldn't be reacting to it, you might be incrementally, you know, kind of growing your conviction in it, but it would have already had to click. That you can't pair knowledge you don't have with the data point in the real economy. And so because I was witnessing this over and over the most common question saying, you know, but people said X, I was like, I never said X, I'll explain to you the real way. And then I'll help explain the world around you, and you can make sense of the volatility such that you don't sell Bitcoin at the right time because it is actually solving the problem of inflation. It's just not your definition of what a hedge to inflation is.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Maybe gold is a hedge to inflation, but all those people who trade gold, they just want to get more dollars. Bitcoin's the actual solution where you start to say, I'm not storing my wealth in Bitcoin just to get more dollars to offset dollar inflation. I have been able to order, rationally explain to myself why in the future that Bitcoin is going to pay for gas directly, going to pay for a Real Bedford game, food at the grocery store, health care, and that I like to simplify it and say, a new car can solve the problem of a broken car, a new roof can solve the problem of a damaged roof, only a better form of money can solve the problem of a broken form of money. And so if you are out there explaining, because again, the number of times I've heard this, I thought Bitcoin was supposed to be a hedge to inflation and it's going down while inflation is going up. It's that no, it's actually the solution to inflation. Bitcoin adoption happens as knowledge distributes, because if you're at the grocery store and you know nothing about Bitcoin, again, coming back to that prior discussion, if you know nothing about Bitcoin and the cost of your beef costs 50% more today than it did three years ago, and you have no idea how Bitcoin relates to that problem, you're not in a position to quote hedge inflation. So it's that if you have very limited knowledge, it's likely going to cause you pain and heartache. And that once you acquire the knowledge, you realize, no, this is the only viable thing that permanently solves it. And it's a monetary phenomenon, the central bank's creating it and they're destroying the money and I need to save in this. And there's a big difference between trading Bitcoin to get more dollars and saving in Bitcoin because it's the future money that you're going to have to have to eat and survive. What about if you're in a country like Argentina, when the price of Bitcoin is going down in dollar terms, but it's going up in pesos? So I kind of feel like sometimes maybe if you're in Argentina, when you're buying Bitcoin, you kind of are also buying dollars in a way, in that you're buying the fact that Bitcoin is primarily traded against the dollar rate, the primary exchange rate is the dollar. And so, yeah, you could be holding, when you're holding Bitcoin in Argentina and the peso is inflating at an ever increasing rate, you are hedging your local inflation there. And I've seen it. So I've seen it whereby people, they will hold the Bitcoin and each week just be selling it so they can have their pesos. Yeah. And I like, again, that is a hedge there. Well, I think that, I mean, again, if they have not figured out why Bitcoin will store purchasing power over time, they, you know, amidst Bitcoin volatility, they might sell it for pesos at the wrong time, you know? So I think the same thing applies. It's more of a necessity, though, there. People have a necessity for it. But it's the same problem, right? Like Bitcoin's volatile and inflation in the US is increasing. That's reducing the purchasing power of all of my dollars in my bank account. It's the same problem of someone in Argentina of the currency side of it. And so if they're saving in Bitcoin and saying, I'm going to convert back out to the fiat currency at the time that I need it, again, I don't view that as, they're not hedging inflation if they've gotten to the point that they understand why Bitcoin is storing its purchasing power. And so again, it's not to be pedantic. It's just that on the knowledge spectrum, if you're in Argentina and you're dealing with Argentine pesos, one, there's a probable reality that you don't have access to dollars. And so Bitcoin is the thing between Bitcoin and Argentine pesos that's going to maintain purchasing power. But if you're somebody, if you're a crypto bro trading Bitcoin in Argentina, and there's going to be a period where it crashes in Argentine pesos, and you sell it, it didn't serve as a hedge to you, even if Bitcoin stored value over a longer period of time. And so realistically, though, if you're an Argentine and you figured out why Bitcoin will store value much better than your country that prints money faster than, you know, virtually any other country in the world, then you're going to save in Bitcoin and you're only going to re-access the rails of the old system. So I think it's the same problem. I think that, you know, it keys in on, though, that places that are actively going through more pernicious hyperinflation in present day, it's also harder to adopt Bitcoin. So it doesn't make light of the fact that when things are economically less stable, your ability to sit in a comfortable place with reliable power and clean water and knowing, you know, that you have more security, you can sit around and think about all these questions a lot longer and harder, more consciously, if you're trying to figure out, what am I going to do in a week? Or how am I going to get a meal tomorrow? Like it's functionally harder to adopt Bitcoin. But I think the context of this question of like, can Bitcoin hedge inflation is like, if you don't get it, if you don't have an intuitive understanding, because it's still volatile in the Argentine peso, there's just a much more clear market signal that the other currency doesn't work. And that's also what we discussed in our last podcast, which is like where I think hyper Bitcoinization, it doesn't happen until a developed country hyperinflates, that when people are forced into Bitcoin, because it's the only thing working, they act more instinctively than they do conscious or rat, you know, like sitting down and like, working through the mental problem, if like, you have a clear and present danger, because the currency is losing 10% a day, you know, it's like, well, what else are you going to do? It's not, in my mind, hedging inflation, it's protecting all of your life savings. And to be honest, even in Argentina, the majority of people I met when I was there, they still wanted dollars. Even people who understand Bitcoin still wanted dollars. Right. Because if you're in that world, like hyperinflation of a currency is a bad outcome. And I think that I think this is probably one area where Bitcoiners don't think as much about the problem. Like, someone says like, oh, Bitcoin is going to be worth a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars, it's like, well, the dollar is going to hyperinflate. And I'm not in the business of predicting when, I just build the rational, logical case as to why something's gonna happen in the future, and I need to survive all weathers. Well, if Bitcoin is worth 10 million dollars, the dollar's hyperinflating, and that means the US economy, like wealth is destroyed when currency is hyperinflated. There will be some economic disruption. People think we're just going to keep going up via Bitcoin. It's like, no, your quality of life might go down. You might have to sell more Bitcoin than you think you are because you're going to need to eat and access healthcare that becomes more scarce. Right. So I think that in a scenario where the active hyperinflation event is happening, having the currency that can most immediately solve your near-term needs is very rational, right? It just so happens that that's the next best thing, and that currency that they're opting into also is going to have those same problems a few years down, you know, further down the line. In this world of hyperbitcoinization, remind me, but I'm of the belief that you don't think it replaces all sovereign currencies. You still believe we'll have them, right? No, I believe that it replaces it. Oh, you do? Now, sovereign countries will logically try to say, hey, here's some Bitcoin, and I'm going to peg my sovereign currency to the Bitcoin. But there's no rational reason to be like, well, I'll just take the Bitcoin, you know, or if you don't allow me to be in your country to have the Bitcoin, and you only allow me to have your fiat-backed, or Bitcoin-backed fiat currency, like I'll go to a different country. So I just, I don't think that, I don't think that they can coexist, it's like, and part of that's based on my two-sided equation, this kind of getting my origin story to Bitcoin. I figured out why the Fed was always going to have to print more money, like always increasing, accelerating, however you want to think about it, function of time, it's a problem of debt, and Bitcoin solves that problem. But the reason why the world is gravitating to Bitcoin is its fixed supply, and there's this fundamental economic driver fact, however you want to describe it, that economies converge on a single form of money. So if there's this thing out there that has a fixed supply, a form of money that can't be printed, everyone's going to converge on that because they need to trade together. It's an intersubjective problem. So if money converges, or if economic systems converge on a single form of money, and there's a permissionless form of money that can't be printed that's accessible to the entire world, it makes a whole lot of sense for everyone to adopt it. So I am of the opinion that not because I want the US dollar to fail, I actually think that it would be better for all of us if it's extended further out in the future. I think that there are just a lot of signs written on the wall in the banking system, all over the Fed, all over the Treasury, all over every central bank in the world, that says the situation where we're at now is more precarious, and I can't envision it becoming less precarious because they're going to have to print more money than they ever had before. Well, they're printing about what they printed in 2008 to rescue the economy about every month now. I mean, I think what you're talking about is like, right now, I think the US federal government's running between a $2 and $3 trillion deficit. The Fed is actually in the process of trying to withdraw cash from the banking system to rein in inflation. That ultimately ends in a liquidity crisis, which creates a credit event, which then induces the Fed to create all the more base money that then allows the expansion of credit to grow even faster. So I think it's just speaking at the level of a different side. It's like there's more credit being created because the federal government's so indebted, but the Fed's kind of working in opposition, which is squeezing somebody. And that ultimately, the same thing happened in the next months, certainly probably not longer than a year, that just as the Fed ran into a buzzsaw in 2019 that ultimately led into 2020 and $5 trillion being printed over two years, the same setup is there. But much more will need to be printed. But much more will need to be printed because from that point to today, the criticism, speaking just in the U.S., has increased by over $20 trillion. So there's more debt that then needs to be supported, and the only way that it can be supported is by printing ever more money. Is there a fair argument that Bitcoin is a hedge to monetary inflation, just not consumer price inflation? I mean, I think I'm just speaking at a different level, and I really tested myself before I put this presentation out and I put an article out before that to say, am I being pedantic? And so I think that if you figure out Bitcoin, it can functionally help offset better than any other thing the collapse of the fiat monetary system that is most immediately signaled by the rise in price inflation of goods.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Can I challenge you on your Bitcoin is not a hedge? Yeah. What is the TLDR or the thesis? There's two ends of the knowledge spectrum. There's a zero state where you do not understand Bitcoin. And I put it to the point of like, something about Bitcoin, it hasn't clicked. It doesn't mean that until I go into like the graduate and suddenly, it's like the way that I, it's true for my case, a lot of people that I've talked to has been similar to them. They're kind of learning about Bitcoin, they're open to the idea, but it just doesn't make sense. And then they listen to a certain podcast, someone says something in a certain way, or they read a book, and it was written in a certain way, and an idea clicks. Maybe they connect that to the Canadian truckers or Russia getting cut off from SWIFT. They put information together, and Bitcoin becomes possible in their mind. They start to order it as money. That from there, like the picture isn't in focus, but something has clicked to not just say, there's a low probability that I can't explain. I've just been able for the first time to order or make sense of how this actually could be money. Then from there, you start going down a deep rabbit hole. And it's inevitable that you get to the point of seeing like Bitcoin's the best form of money, and you become super-convicted in it, that from that point of like something clicking, if you are on the left side of the spectrum, you inherently, even if you're like, I'm going to take a bet on Bitcoin, it's going to be 1% of my savings. You have no logical or rational basis to explain the world around you. So when Bitcoin crashes to 16k, you have no real basis to know whether it's going back up or whether people are going to adopt Bitcoin as money. So my point is that if you have not gotten to that point of Bitcoin clicking, Bitcoin cannot functionally be a hedge to inflation. That if you are at the zero state or on the left side of the point of your journey for something having clicked, it can't be a hedge because you're not equipped with a proper fundamental knowledge to not make a terrible decision. Hold on, hold on, so you're just, sorry to interrupt, you're saying it can't be a hedge if you don't understand Bitcoin, but if you understand Bitcoin, it can be a hedge? No, then once it clicks, you can't exist in this in-between period because once Bitcoin clicks and you start to order it as money, you recognize in a fairly quick way that it's the solution to inflation and that there's something very different from something being a hedge to inflation and something being the permanent solution to it. And that's the distinction. So it's like you either don't get Bitcoin and the volatility will destroy you. You'll think that you're hedging inflation because someone said it's a hedge to inflation, but a bunch of entities fail and it impacted Bitcoin zero, but there was price volatility and you sold Bitcoin at 16K or you thought you were hedging inflation. So you had a 1% Bitcoin position and it was sitting at FTX and Bitcoin went from 1K to 28K, Bitcoin didn't store purchasing power because you no longer have your Bitcoin. You weren't equipped with the right knowledge. And then from the point where it clicks, where you start to order it as money, again, at that point, it can't be in focus, but the path to getting there, in my view, in every case that I've ever experienced in dealing with other people is inevitable. Like it's a one-way track and it's a fairly quick one. It's not like a tomorrow thing, but it's like a half a year, a year, year and a half that you start to see the problems. And one of the other ways I describe it is that you can't see the problems of the fiat system until you understand Bitcoin. And so once you get to that point of clicking, it's like, oh, maybe real estate could hedge dollar inflation, maybe quote equities, they really can't, but people use them as a quote hedge to inflation.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"But the kind of keying in on that individual transaction level, it's too granular level to think about the problem. And if you extend it out to your overall operations, you can get in and out, and you don't need to be selling every $25 transaction you have. So I think it's actually a lot simpler decision if people start from the, OK, yeah, this is actually solving a problem for my business, creating a redundancy, reducing a risk, and I can go in and out the reverse side if I need to. Next up, today we have Unchained. Now Bitcoiners, you'd be crazy to sell your Bitcoin right now, right? The halving is just over six months away, and we've seen before that this can be a time which sees the price rise as the new supply shrinks. Now selling Bitcoin to cover unexpected expenses can end up costing you missed opportunities. With credit card interest rates up to an average of 21%, and increasing by burning against your Bitcoin, you can actually save quite a lot. And the best part with Unchained, you get to hold your own keys, and you can always verify that your Bitcoin is secure. Unchained's loans dashboard gives you a health status for your loan, so you can easily manage collateral when the Bitcoin price moves quickly. So don't be forced to sell your Bitcoin and miss out on those potential gains. And for more info on this, go to unchained.com and use the promo code, WhatBitcoinDid, to get $50 off concierge onboarding. Also today we have Wasabi, who I am using to keep my Bitcoin private. Now Wasabi is the easiest way to send and receive Bitcoin privately. Even for non-technical people like me, it is effortless and it provides privacy by default. With Wasabi, there is no minimum amount, so you can start coin joining straight away. And Wasabi users can make coin join transactions together with BTC pay and Trezor users, and BTC pay server users can make payments in coin join, which saves on fees and is a privacy improvement. Also Wasabi has just dropped a new feature. Now Trezor suite users can make coin joins directly on the hardware wallet, which is obviously very, very cool. So if you want to find out more, please head over to WasabiWallet.io, which is W A S A B I W A L L E T dot IO.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"But if you've got there, then you might look at your business and you might say, I need to have at least six months, because in my personal context, if Bitcoin goes down and I was planning to sell it to buy a house, well, I'll just defer, you know, buying the house until the next adoption wave, you know, like that's in your personal- you might not have that same timeline in the business. Bitcoin goes down, I need to continue to pay my employees. I've got cost-related soccer club, football. Well done. But it just changes the timeline. It's the direct extension of the same problem. You have different challenges in running a business and different things in your control, in your personal context that are less in your control potentially in the business and certainly payroll is a key one of them, but that problem's the same. So if you've already rationalized to yourself why, despite all that volatility, it works over here in my personal context, it's the direct extension. I just have to think about that volatility for the same reason I do as an individual. I just might need to account for 20% of my treasury in Bitcoin or 40% rather than 97%. So what you really say is if you're a Bitcoiner and you run or operate a business, your business should be a Bitcoiner really as well. If you're behaving rationally. Yeah, if you're behaving rationally, yeah, and I would say in fairness that I probably operate as an individual more as a Bitcoiner than the business. The businesses are, but I'd say as an individual I'm much more of a Bitcoiner, as me. No, but I don't define Bitcoiner as like 98% of my savings as an individual. No, it's not even that. It's more like, for example, me and Danny are always making bets, whether we're playing table tennis or it's football, we never make bets in pounds anymore. It's always a million sats, half a million sats, 100,000 sats. Well, we have a million sat bet, by the way. It's an over bet I lost. Yes. We'll come back to that. Fucker. But yeah, but it's always, and I think anyone in Bitcoin, it's just, you know, it is just in sats. When anyone comes to the football club who's a Bitcoiner, they just want to pay in Bitcoin. Whenever I go anywhere and they accept Bitcoin, I just kind of want to pay in Bitcoin. I much prefer to get paid in Bitcoin by sponsors. Like I'm just there naturally in my head thinking about it like that, but my fundamental, like the pillars of my life are now Bitcoin based. When I bought my house, I based it on Bitcoin calculations, but I'm not doing the same with the business. Like people can pay me, but I'm not, I'm still a little bit trapped more in the fiat world of business. I don't think that you're, well, and that might be a psychological thing. I think that it's more reality of that there are different challenges and that running a business is complicated and hard. There's more considerations. And it's fair, and well, I'm willing to take more risk as an individual. Well, but when you say, I mean, you're taking risks to your business, because I think that I think that people that, you know, again, Bitcoin's volatile, I like to say Bitcoin is volatile, but not risky, that endeavoring to have a Bitcoin podcast, that's the risk taking endeavor, endeavoring to have a soccer club, football. Sorry, I'm not doing this on purpose. No, that's fine. I grew up playing soccer. I accept it. It's just, it's hardwired. We're in your country. Having that club, that's a risk taking endeavor, right? We're talking about how you secure the savings that are in that entity to protect against future uncertainty. And that the nature of a business, like, are you going to cut off your nose to spite your face because your customers, you know, many of them are not Bitcoiners, and they want to go see a football game and pay you in dollars? No, you're going to take the dollars, you know? So it's like, you're not going to cut off your nose to spite your face. But that, and I similarly got this question at the old Parkland event in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, which was talking about institutions, when will institutions adopt Bitcoin? And if you think about the logical progression, it's easier to adopt Bitcoin as an individual, because coming to that realization that Bitcoin will store purchasing power over time, the importance of the fixed supply, the credibility of the fixed supply, while all the other nonsense and crypto is snake oil and not relevant, actually probably negative, that that's a personal journey. Now imagine a board of an endowment or a company. If 1% of people in the world, I say max, understand Bitcoin at the level of it intuitively being money, then how are you going to get a majority? You have to be a Michael Saylor. You have to be a Michael Saylor. It's possible, but it's really improbable. It's easier for an individual to make an individual decision that just impacts them. And then if you were thinking about, say, an endowment for a university, and there's 15 people on the board, you don't just have to get eight. You probably got to get 12 or 13, because if it's just teetering on 50%, you need probably an overwhelming consensus to take an action like that. And so when you kind of extend that world over to a business, it's that you're dealing with more people than just one. It's not just you in a savings capacity. You're operating a business. You have expenses. The fiat rails are not magically critical in this present day. And so I think about it as just like the risk that you're taking is the business endeavor. And then the de-risking of it is a combination of holding a percentage of Bitcoin, because in that context, it's just like, well, I need to have less Bitcoin over here because I got more money coming in and out, more people depending on me. I'm OK if something goes wrong over here, but I'm not going to be OK if I let these 10 individuals down, right? But Bitcoin is still solving the same problem. You just have to approach less. Maybe storing 5% of my treasury in Bitcoin or 10% or 20%, enabling the ability to receive Bitcoin payments, but I'm not accepting fiat payments. Both of those two sides of the equation are fundamentally the same. You just approach solving the problem a little bit differently because you're just yourself and you're happy to deal with those consequences versus being in a business context, in my opinion. I think the timing is really important, too. Like now is a much easier time to adopt Bitcoin as a business than at 20K in 2017 or at 69K in 2021. The likelihood is you can build yourself a bit of a buffer over the next few years. So if there's a time to do it as a business, probably right now. Yeah, I think that's technically correct. It's certainly easier psychologically to make this decision and to do it where you think you're at a, quote, local low. I think that, fundamentally, it would be better to buy Bitcoin at 20K than 69K. And I think that most people who are adopting Bitcoin for the first time, they have this inherent fear of, I'm buying Bitcoin at 69K. And that naturally extends to the business saying, if I'm receiving Bitcoin as payment, I'm fearful that I'm doing it at the exact wrong time. Now, the reality is, if you've done it in what I would say is the most rational and logical order, you've first gotten well down the side of why Bitcoin will store value for the long term. And you're less worried about that short term because, now, I think it certainly makes it easier. But where I would distinguish it is, I view it as a de-risking of a business rather than more of an offensive play. Similarly to how I view saving in Bitcoin, because most people would look at me and say, I'm crazy for having 95 to 99% of all my savings in Bitcoin. Prior to Bitcoin, I was incredibly conservative. And I continue to think that. I just figured out why this is the most conservative position to take, saving in a form of money that can't be printed. And so if that clicked for you, that Bitcoin stores purchasing power, and then you're a year or two down your journey, you're like, hey, I have this business and I have the melting ice cube and I have this single point of failure of my payment rails and the credit card fees are taking 4%. Whether Bitcoin's at $69K or Bitcoin's at $20K, I'm going to build the redundancy, reduce another large uncertainty in my business. And if I turn on the ability to get paid in Bitcoin, the world's not just going to flip and be like, you have 80% of your receipts in Bitcoin. Just as you might start saving gradually 1% and 2%, and then one day you find yourself up 99%, you unlock the ability for your customers to pay you in Bitcoin, it might be 1%, 2%. Now, if you're in one of our businesses, that skew might be higher. But if you're like, I got a dentist set up to receive Bitcoin as payment, 99 of 100 of his customers are probably still paying fiat. So if 1% of your revenue, which is a part of your profit, which is adding to your savings or your balance sheet, your cash position, it's ultimately not impacting the volatility. It might be psychologically difficult to say like, oh, that 1% of my revenue is down 20% because I started accepting Bitcoin at the wrong time. But if you're doing it in the logical, rational order, you've already figured out why that will course correct. And it essentially becomes a DCA. It's like, okay. Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking. It's a DCA. But the interesting thing about it as well is that it's the last money you spend. So the football club is a great example because we take about 10% of our payments in Bitcoin. That's tickets, burgers, sponsorships. All of it goes straight into our unchained vault, done, locked up. Every month when I do my accounts, I do my fiat accounts, I do my Bitcoin accounts, and we have how much money is in that, how much money is in here. And then we have like a total, and we have to have the value of Bitcoin at the time, et cetera, et cetera. But during the month, whenever we're making payments, we're making all of our payments in fiat. Yeah. I mean, look, if some- Because the vast majority of payments are probably still coming in fiat. Yeah, we did one. Like we got these little, you know, the little hodlers? We've got a real bit of a little hodler. They wanted paying in Bitcoin, and it made more sense because they're in another country. I wish I hadn't now because Bitcoin's got up, so they've got more expensive. But the point, actually, now I think about that, I'm probably losing money on those. Well, that's spend and replace. But you're thinking in a dollar pound world. What I'm saying is, is that whenever I'm making payments, I never think of spending that Bitcoin. And, you know, that has been a DCA, and actually we're up on all our payments received because we put that into a separate vault. And we've already never, like, I can't see any scenario where we spend that. And so that just becomes like a, I don't know, we have melting ice cubes, what do we do? Freezing puddle of water. You know, it is that hardening rock of money that we keep, and it just sits there forever. So that 1% the dentist does, yeah, it might go down, it might come back up. But the point being, it's like, it's a hard buffer. It's the last, like you said, it's the last dollar spent. Last dollar spent. Last, you know, the last sat spent. And so I do think that that, because a lot of businesses, and again, like, you know, this message that I'm carrying is to Bitcoiners, not to people that do not understand Bitcoin. I think that it's like set up for disappointment and more pain than it's worth to try to like preach a story about like, hey, if you turn on Bitcoin payments, you're going to get a lot more revenue. No, it's a balance sheet problem. It's a balance sheet solution, and it's one of rails. And that if you think about that kind of decision point in the context of a balance sheet problem and a rail problem, then as they're DCA-ing, they're kind of extending the way they think about it in their personal context. And if, you know, you turn it on, and it's 1% and 2%, and it gets to be 10%, you can also go the reverse. You know, because all these people are set up to be able to buy and sell Bitcoin. So I think that a lot of times people are thinking about it as like, well, what if I sell something for, quote, $25 equivalent in sats, and that transaction goes down? It's like, no, you're not managing your treasury or even your accounting on a per transaction level. Typically, your receipts for this item, what did I actually receive, you know, currency gain loss in aggregate, not on a day, but on a month or a year. And so it's like, it's actually, well, this is going into treasury, and then I'm deciding, you know, what percentage of my treasury should be in Bitcoin or not. Because all this represents is for every dollar I receive, quote, I'm getting, you know, in my context, on the Zapprate side, if I took a monthly subscription and wanted to get it into Bitcoin, if I were to just receive the Bitcoin, I'd have 5% more, such that if I took a 0.5% to 1% fee, and still work out better. Now, I wouldn't be doing it with that logic. But I'd say, hey, if the percentage that was paid in Bitcoin was too high to not cover dollar costs, well, in one transaction, once a month, I can sell some Bitcoin out of the treasury to get my balance sheet right between fiat and Bitcoin. It's kind of like this mental break where people think about the complexity on a single transaction rather than a managing savings for my business, my cash position, and what should be in Bitcoin versus what should be in fiat. And if I actually want the Bitcoin, how am I going to get it most efficiently while, again, the way I think about it is what got me set down this path was reducing a long term risk, because it might start off 1%, it might start off 2%. There's a chance that the Bitcoiners in your community might start supporting you more than they did, but I don't think that that's the solution we're talking about.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Yeah, and again, it's like, that is the fundamental side, and it's like, that personal problem extends directly to a business. And this is like, it's not the same exact problem, but it's a direct logical fundamental extension. And that kind of the way I kind of visualize it, and I had it in the article that I wrote kind of the, someone is going next logic as to why the next business and the next and the next until every business adopts Bitcoin payments is that, if I think about it, it's and there's costs associated there, and then go to, and then convert it to Bitcoin. So you know, currently, you know, exactly when we take, because we accept fiat side by side with Bitcoin, on a $25 monthly subscription, about 4% of that goes to the fiat payment rails. And then if we wanted to get that into Bitcoin, we're looking at, now we wouldn't do it on a single transaction, but let's just use on a higher volume transaction somewhere between you know, a half a percent and 1%. So dollar for dollar quote, if we were to just directly take the Bitcoin payment and eliminate the currency system as a source of friction, if we want the Bitcoin, we would end up with 5% more Bitcoin. So once you get to the point of I want Bitcoin, and I have the same problem, my business and the treasury, because ultimately, anything outside of that same working capital dilemma that you have on the personal side, I need to be able to pay my employees six months from now, a year from now, 18 months from now, I have a melting ice cube, okay, I need Bitcoin. Well, if you want the Bitcoin, does it make logical sense to introduce and you have somebody willing to pay you in Bitcoin? Does it make sense to introduce an entirely different currency system in the middle of that, because you will only get less of it at the end of the day? The biggest challenge in there was back in 2021, we had a sponsor come to us and they said, yeah, we're going to renew and we agreed a three-year deal at a good price if they paid the whole three years in advance in Bitcoin, which they did. And Bitcoin was like 43,000 at that point. And during that period, Bitcoin went down to 15,000 and the pound was inflating, sorry, the pound was inflating in a way as well. So wherever I put the money, I was losing in that scenario. Now, look, I haven't had to tap into that Bitcoin, which is great, it's nearly back to even, but that's the challenge, it's that balance, it's that constant balance of what I'm going to keep in pounds, what I'm going to keep in Bitcoin, and over what time periods. Because it is a game. I know, like, I have the full confidence that anything I put in Bitcoin at some point will come good. Even if it's bottom, like top of the market, eventually that top gets beat again. And it's great if I don't have to touch that Bitcoin during that period, but if I had to, that would have been a disappointing scenario. And just that, it is a balancing game that you come to learn and accept and you play as a Bitcoiner, but it is a challenge. It is. And like, if you scroll down, Danny, there's a part of this article where I talk about it, the same applies to Bitcoin payments, it's where it's like, but how could a business accept Bitcoin as payment when it is so volatile? And the logical point is that, like, that dilemma is the same dilemma that you've already rationalized as an individual to save in Bitcoin, right? So if you were an individual and you decided to, you know, buy a bunch of Bitcoin when it was at 40,000, you would have had to, or if you didn't, you're going to touch the hot stove and get burned and not do it again. You already, at an individual and personal level, had to rationalize Bitcoin's ability to store value while it is very volatile, and it's the direct extension to a business. So- If there is a slight difference, I have employee dependence. No, but my point is it's not identical, it's a direct extension. So if you've already rationalized why saving in Bitcoin on a personal level, despite its volatility, it's the same problem. Now you might need to deal with it differently in the business. Like you might say, hey, on a personal basis, I'm just going to have one month. And if Bitcoin goes down, like one month of fiat working capital or two months, I personally think that's low. I'd recommend having a little bit more than that in the rainy day.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"So understand the 21 million, then you can understand everything. Because if you understand the 21 million, you understand why everything else can break. And if you understand why Bitcoin is unbreakable, then you understand why you need both the personal and business insurance. And also, it's the same logic, right? If you started your journey, and it typically starts on a personal level, I figured out why Bitcoin stores purchasing power. If you run a business, you're sitting looking at cash in the bank, and even if you set aside the rails problem and the censorship problem, you're like, well, I have cash there that's losing its value. And if I need this for my personal level, I need it for my business over the long term. And that doesn't mean that suddenly the fiat system and fiat expenses go away, so I still need that. But that's the balance sheet side of a business. So personal side, I've got a savings problem, the 21 million fixed supply solves it for me. Oh, if it solves it for me as an individual, it solves it for me as a business, then the any better or any less for me if I receive fiat and convert it to Bitcoin or just receive Bitcoin directly. And that if you've gotten to the point that Bitcoin will store purchasing power, because it's the same logic, you will say, well, if it's cheaper, if I can get more Bitcoin by receiving payments rather than introducing, if I actually want the Bitcoin, if I introduce an entirely different currency system that has friction and cost, and I'm going to get less Bitcoin, then it would make sense to me to acquire the Bitcoin in the most efficient way possible, at the same time reducing a risk or building in a redundancy of payment rail. It's so interesting, because you say that at a time whereby historically, I don't really keep pounds in my bank account. I keep enough for the next month and then a bit of a rainy day. Anything else just goes into Bitcoin, because what else am I going to spend it on? And you would never consciously do that if you hadn't figured out why over the long-term Bitcoin stores value. Yeah, no, of course, yeah. But I hadn't made the same connection with my business, in that what I tended to do is like, oh, we've made a bit of profit here, you know, staff get a bonus and take a dividend and enjoy it. But I did recently in one of my businesses, my account was saying, this is the profit you're going to make at the end of the year. And I was like, I don't really want to pay a dividend, I've got nothing I want to spend it on. Can I just leave it in the business? She said, yeah. And I was like, yeah, but I'm just, it's the melting ice cube, right? And this is just a bar, it doesn't have a treasury, but I was like, hold on, this place needs a treasury now, because I don't want to keep pounds in the bank. Because one, it's a risk of being lost, two, it's a risk of melting away.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Why is it not hedging inflation? And that my explanation for that is that except that very few people have any material exposure to Bitcoin yet today, fewer probably understand it at an intuitive level. And if you accepted that number something less than 1%, by definition, Bitcoin's not a flight to safety in the sense that if so few people own it, you can't flee to the safety of something that you do not understand. You first had to acquire some knowledge sometime in the past, then connect something that happens in the present. So that could be I listened to a What Bitcoin Did podcast, I read a book, and then the Canadian truckers get cut off. And this idea of censorship-resistant money makes sense. But if you didn't have knowledge of Bitcoin, then when the Canadian truckers get cut off, there's no way that you could possibly associate Bitcoin as a solution to that problem or that that's a problem that you might share at some point in the future. Same thing with inflation. If you're experiencing food at the grocery store being massively expensive, and you've never learned the fundamental side of Bitcoin and you just thought about it as crypto bros and it reasonably appears a snake oil because the people on CNBC lump it together, you're not going to associate the food at the grocery store costing more as a problem that Bitcoin can help solve. So you have to acquire the knowledge in the past, so then as data points come in in the present to connect it to it, and then to dictate how you change your behavior in the future or in the present going into the future. The same thing is one of payments, right, on the Bitcoin side, that if you do not understand why Bitcoin solves a purchasing power problem in the 21 million, then you're not in a position to then understand, hey, when this entity like Silicon Valley Bank fails and that throws a bunch of people at risk in terms of personal savings, a bunch of businesses at risk, does Bitcoin solve the same problem? If you haven't thought about these problems about how, in the immediate term, because I agree with you, like even for my book for a graduate, and suddenly I need a bank account because if I'm out there releasing, you have a podcast that's capturing people, bringing them into Bitcoin. Same thing for my book. If I want to sell a book to a market of people who don't yet understand Bitcoin, they don't have Bitcoin. So I need to be able to receive dollars. But at the same time, the people who have already figured it out at this point in the present that fiat currency is a problem, and then the next logical extension, which I don't think is a novelty, is that, no, the fragility of that legacy system, if you just associate with the currency itself without associating with the rails, you're not thinking at the right level. And so I think it's just one of those things where it's like, hey, it's not solving a novelty problem. It's solving a critical problem. It's just that you can't wait till it's front and center. Like you can't wait till hyperinflation to save in Bitcoin or you're lost. It's like you can't wait to think about this problem of creating a redundancy in the present to augment fiat rails. If you wait to the point where those rails are no longer working, you're similarly lost and you've waited too long. This show is brought to you by Orange Bill app, the Bitcoin only social network. Now if you're like me and enjoy talking about Bitcoin all the time, you know how difficult it is to find local Bitcoiners, grab a beer and talk about hyper Bitcoinization. Now the Orange Bill app makes it super easy to find nearby Bitcoiners to connect with. And there's also the largest repository of Bitcoin only events. I've been using the app quite a bit recently when I travel has been a bit of a game changer. So if you want to get in touch and connect with me, please do head over to the orange pill app dot com. Send me a DM and start building your local network of Bitcoiners. Next up today, we have Ledger. Now Ledger is the world leader in Bitcoin security, and it's the best way to own and secure your private keys. If you're still holding Bitcoin on an exchange or with a custodian, it might be time to take your Bitcoin security a little more seriously, because remember, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. Now Ledger hardware wallets paired with the Ledger Live app are the easiest and safest way to start managing your own private keys. You can send or sign your Bitcoin transactions with full transparency in the Ledger Live app. And honestly, it could not be easier. I have been a Ledger user since 2017, and I absolutely love the products, and I'm still using the first Ledger device I bought back then. Now if you want to find out more and purchase a hardware wallet from Ledger, then please head over to shop.ledger.com, which is S-H-O-P dot L-E-D-G-E-R dot com. Also today we have Iris Energy. Now Iris Energy is the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy, and they are building next-gen data centers for Bitcoin mining, generative AI, and beyond. Now Danny and I have been working with the founders Dan and Will for several months now and have been super impressed with their values, especially their commitment to local communities. It has been great collaborating with them across everything we do, from the podcast to films to events, and even my football team, Real Bedford. Iris Energy is the responsible way to power Bitcoin and beyond, so if you want to find out more, please head over to irisenergy.co, which is I-R-I-S-E-N-E-R-G-Y dot co.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"So yeah, this kind of like reminds me of why I kind of have a bit of an issue with like CBDCs because if you forget all the dystopian surveillance bullshit, the kind of the way payments work now is we kind of have a decentralized system at the moment in that one of my banks I've got a MasterCard, one I've got Visa, I also have an American Express credit card. I also have cash and have Bitcoin, right? And so if my bank Revolut fails, and I can't use my card, my Revolut card, I can still pay someone with my credit card, or I can still pay cash, or if they accept Bitcoin. You know, I've kind of got this kind of like network of things I can fall back on. But my understanding of a CBDC, if that network fails, everything will fail, like every payment channel, and every traditional payment rail will fail. Yeah. I mean, I really think about it as, I mean, functionally, we already have, you know, speaking the context of the dollar, we already have a digital dollar. If the Fed system fails, you know, if Fed clearing goes down, the banks are functionally at a standstill. I think I saw a week or two ago, there was an ACH bug that was down for a period of time. So I think what you're keying in on, which I think continues to be the case in the CBDC world, is that there's a single point of failure, but there's already a single point of failure, and it's already built on top of software. And so I don't think that that is functionally different. I also think that because we have a Fed dollar, and it is ultimately centralized, and it is already digital, that the concern about a CBDC is like, we've got our answer. It's just marginally worse than what's already really bad. And if you think about what that could represent to how bad the current system is, it's like, well, just focus your energy. Like, I think basically a lot of the concern over CBDCs will ultimately turn out to be, you know, I don't want to say a larp, but it's just like, it's focusing energy in the wrong place. It's like, the system is already broken. We know the system is broken. Don't focus on fighting CBDCs. It's very costless to a politician to say, I'm against CBDCs. It's more costly to a politician to say, this whole system is broken, and I need to support Bitcoin, because the only way we're getting out of this debt problem, central point of failure, surveillance, censorship, is with a form of money that isn't centralized. So do you think we haven't majored enough on payments when we talk about Bitcoin? Because we'll often talk about 21 billion, I don't know how much you focus on that. And we talk about censorship resistance. We talk about the decentralized nature of the network and all the benefits it has to people. But we never really talk about, I don't really often hear people talk about a system that won't go down. Yeah. I mean, I do think that that is a critical piece. My focus on it has been heightened because of the fragility. That has always been the case. I think that that resilient system that isn't just a single point of failure in terms of not relying on a bank, but a redundant system that doesn't go down, I think is probably a side of the Bitcoin payment narrative that is underexposed, or that the people don't value enough. But starting from the point of, I have to have a problem or perceived problem or perceived risk in order to create a solution. And so one of the things that I talked about in a presentation I gave at Old Parkland was that idea that, and this was in Dallas, just across the Metroplex here in DFW, but it was, if you're looking at Bitcoin from a savings perspective and you think that it's blockchain tech or you think that it's crypto and you haven't first identified that it's solving a problem, then you look at Bitcoin from a balance sheet perspective or from a savings perspective as a problem in search of a solution, or sorry, a solution in search of a problem. Same thing applies to payments. If you look at it and say, well, my credit card payments work just fine, Bitcoin payment seems like a novelty and there actually seems to be more friction involved, then it's the same way where you're perceiving it as a solution in search of a problem. In my view, kind of what you're keying in on both in terms of its uptime, elimination of a single point of failure, not just in the context of me sending a payment, but as a network as a whole, that it is solving the same problem. And I do believe it's like, and one of the things I talk about in a couple of the pieces that I've released on payments is that it starts with the same thing. It starts with the 21 million. Like I don't think Bitcoiners should be going around telling people who don't understand Bitcoin that they need to receive Bitcoin payments because you will never get to the figure it out why Bitcoin solves a problem. But if the currency itself is a risk, and it's certainly a long-term risk, the way that I weighted it is much more near-term risk than others might, the rails of that system are also a risk. And so my motivation is saying it's not that we shouldn't keep talking about 21 million. That's critical to the people who don't yet understand Bitcoin. It's like you first have to get to that 21 million, understand its relevance, because if you get there, then the logic to seeing why Bitcoin payments similarly solve a problem to the solution to the same problem, the logical kind of decision is the identical one. It's like if you've come to the idea that Bitcoin will save wealth better, store purchasing power, then receiving Bitcoin payments is just a more efficient way to get it. If you have not yet gotten to that point of Bitcoin stores purchasing power because there will only ever be 21 million, then someone over here telling you that Bitcoin payments will do something for you, it's actually easier to understand the 21 million and getting to payments as it's a one and then the other. Right. So there's essentially two components of that then, because you mentioned earlier the banking failures. The banking system failures means people are cut off potentially from receiving and sending money at a certain time and that's happened in other instances where banks have chosen to cut people off. We saw that with the trucker protests where people were cut off from their bank accounts. They couldn't withdraw money, they couldn't make mortgage payments. So there is the being cut off or the system breaking itself, but also there is that efficiency side of things. So you mentioned the speed of getting a bank account. We're launching an event next year. We announce it. We want to receive payments. It has to be digital. People aren't coming to Bedford to give me cash. And so to register a bank account, I first have to phone up my accountant. She has to register the business. Once the business is registered, I have to get all the registration documents. Then I apply for a bank account, I have to provide the registration documents, I have to go through all this KYC back and forth. It didn't take about a week, whereas if it was Bitcoin, I was like, here's the address. Yeah. And that's a good case. Honestly, I've had instances where setting up bank accounts for businesses takes six weeks. I think it's worse out here. Yeah. And very well might be. But the other side of it is like, and I just went through this process, setting up a bank account for a graduate and suddenly the book to kind of route everything through there. And I have that similar problem. So it's a similar pain point that I have where it's like, I've got a partnership, an entity for graduate and suddenly ZapRite as an entity itself. But that when you set up a bank account, also read the bank account agreement. You know, people who haven't opened a bank account in a long time, you know, checked a box. Now once people are mindful of Bitcoin, you actually read like the 30 pages of a bank account agreement and a Bitcoin address starts to make a lot more sense. Because part of it is the speed. The other part of it is just, you know, you're basically signing away your entire life and, you know, blood money to say like, okay, I do all these things, it's your money. If for whatever reason you don't want to give it back to me that, you know, I'm signing away that or, you know, there's a thousand things that could go wrong. And all for the reason of receiving a fiat money that's losing purchasing power at an accelerating rate. You know, and it's still a necessary part, but the system as a whole is that, you know, to me a breaking point and I don't like to predict things a week, a year. But when you're thinking about building a business and you're thinking about what happens in a year or two years or three years or five, it's like you have to prepare for those time frames and if you're not set up to have a redundancy, then you have another single point of failure and you didn't realize it. Right. So where Bitcoin is insurance at an individual level for the currency failure, Bitcoin payments is an insurance policy for operations of a business. Yeah, absolutely. Like, think about this. So when Silicon Valley Bank failed and Silicon Valley Bank failed in March and most people because of the 24 hour crisis driven news cycle, that's like 15 crises ago. Maybe it's 10, maybe it's eight, I don't know. But it's like there were three or four massive US banking failures. Silicon Valley Bank was the first to go and it went the most swiftly. Like people didn't know there was a problem. 11 a.m. the next day, FDIC takes it over on a Friday. Then you have a bunch of, you know, really wealthy billionaires and Silicon Valley technocrats out there saying, we got to bail out the depositors of Silicon Valley Bank. It's $160 billion bank. And there's a lot of businesses that banked, a lot of Silicon Valley startups that banked, there were other companies that ran their commercial accounts through Silicon Valley Bank. And between Friday and Monday, when all of these really wealthy people were hammering for bailouts because Silicon Valley Bank banked a lot of really wealthy people, one of the very valid concerns of the businesses that were banking with Silicon Valley Bank was how am I going to make payroll, right? And that is 100% a valid, most immediate concern. It's the balance sheet when I have my savings there. That's the 21 million, that's the hold your own keys, like I never have to wake up, you know, having my Bitcoin in Unchained vault when Celsius fails, FTX fails, BlockFi fails, you know, Silicon Valley Bank fails, my money's good and I don't have to worry about if anything ever happened to Unchained, I'm good. That gives me a lot of, you know, sleep at night comfort. But that next immediate problem is, well, if you were Silicon Valley bank account holder and that's where all your money was saved, that's also where all your receipts and revenue was being routed to. So all the way that you had financial pipes was going to that same bank. Now a lot of businesses have multiple bank accounts, but many businesses don't, the vast majority of them do not. And so, and most individuals have a single primary bank account if they're being paid as a contractor. And so it's like, the first thing is how do I make payroll? The next step is, well, shit, that's the past. What about the future? I need to continually receive revenue to be able to make future payroll, to sustain savings in my balance sheet without just being bled out or to be able to pay vendors, right? You know, revenue in, expenses out. And so it's like the first immediate thing is payroll, but the revenue side and the receipts, it's the same thing. And it's that if that bank failed that precipitously, that's a balance sheet problem, your savings, but it's also a rail problem. And if the dollar as a currency system is a risk, then the rails of the system, the payment rails are a risk. And if Bitcoin is the solution to saving and purchasing power, then it is also the solution to the payment rail problem. And it's just that when people are sitting there looking at the number on the screen and number go up, it's really the Bitcoiners that I'm out there advocating for to say like, hey, like, if not you, then who? Like the person who doesn't get Bitcoin is not going to be the person that steps through, you know, a few hoops to receive Bitcoin payments. But if you understand that this is a problem, you should more easily recognize that the payment side of it is a more near-term kind of solution to the fragility of that legacy system. And look, we set up for that already. I have to have bank accounts for my businesses because Bitcoin is too volatile to operate in just on a Bitcoin standard. If I'd started every one of those businesses at the bottom of a market fine, you know, we would have survived. It would have been fine. But we have to have pounds. Actually, you have to have dollars at times. And this is just the reality of business. But if these systems fail and completely fail, if my bank fails and I've got to make payroll, I phone up Danny and say, listen, the bank's failed. I can pay you in Bitcoin. Danny's like, yeah, cool. I'll take Bitcoin. Ben's the same. Pretty much everyone who works with me is the same. We're already set up. We already have a treasury. We already have the technology. We already understand it through the whole company. But you will have companies who will have bank accounts with Silicon Valley, with Silicon Valley Bank. You guys say to them, oh, you should probably have this insurance of having Bitcoin payment rails. They still probably won't convert, even though they've been through it. I mean, look. Well, and that was something else that I talked about in this Bitcoin is not a hedge presentation that it's related to at least that one of the biggest, or not biggest, the most common question I've gotten from people that are kind of on the periphery looking at Bitcoin but don't yet understand it is inflation has been running rampant for the last year and a half. Bitcoin's been going down. I've heard that Bitcoin's a hedge to inflation.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"I particularly liked it down in El Salvador when I used to go down there because I didn't have to exchange dollars at the airport. I could just turn up in El Zonte everywhere except in Bitcoin. Life was easier. But there's certain payments now, like international payments, I still have massive difficulties with getting through the amount of information I have to give to the banks and sometimes they say, no, that person can't pay you. Yeah, I mean, also particularly large transactions, and I've gone through this with my book. I commissioned a painting for an artist in a different part of the world, works under a pseudonym, you know, don't ever know the full name, and paying him in Bitcoin, seamless. He issued me a Zaprite invoice. I paid it on chain. It was enough money. But then for my designer, it was a comparable amount of money and I tried to pay four different ways with Fiat. And because initially it was, you know, basically paying, you know, almost $2,000 in, you know, on a Stripe card, you're like thinking about the fees and also they wanted to, you know, connect to your bank account. Then when I asked to, you know, send via Zelle, there was a limit of $1,000, ultimately was able to then get a Venmo account and pay, you know, Venmo. But like in certain instances, it reduces a lot of friction. Really what set me down on the path though, was that I think that we're going to shift to a world a lot sooner than people think where Bitcoin as a rail for payments are going to be something that becomes more critical and on a faster timeline. And it's not like it's necessarily tomorrow, but it's one of those scenarios where you have to prepare because if you don't and then you're forced to after the fact, it's a lot more chaotic. And the thing that accelerated my thinking around it was really the bank failures in the US earlier this year where it's like, yes, fundamentally, and I just experienced this myself, it was easier to pay a guy in another country over Bitcoin than it was to pay someone in my same country in dollars. That's kind of an edge case. But going forward, if we think about banks as, you know, counterparty risk and a potential source of failure of your savings, and that's one of the reasons to hold Bitcoin, it's also a single point of failure of how you receive or most people receive revenue. And it's a single point of failure because if your bank failed, it's also like, well, that's where all the money was being routed to send all your funds. Well, now you have a problem, like at present, and also, you know, you go set up another bank account for a business. It's hard. It takes time, weeks, sometimes months. So go set up a Bitcoin wallet and, you know, connect to Lightning address if you have one, and you can receive Bitcoin payments far more seamlessly.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"Parker Lewis, how you doing, man? Good to be in Fort Worth, Texas. Is this your first time in Fort Worth? Well, I've flown out of the airport. Yeah, but that's like in the center of Dallas and Fort Worth, so it's technically in neither. This is my first time in Fort Worth. I don't know anything about Fort Worth. I don't know what it is, what it means, what it stands for. We've literally come from the airport to here. It's a bit sketchy. They call it Cowtown. There's a stockyard. They've got a good rodeo here, but I think they still do it. They walk the cattle downtown every evening or night where they basically move the cattle from one stockyard to another. We got to go see that. Yeah, we do. I think we're close to stockyard. Really? I think so. Yeah, I mean, I don't know anything about this place. It's a nice town. I like Dallas and I like Austin. Yeah. We're only here for the Texas Bitcoin Summit. Nice. We had Leon yesterday. I can't refer it to the Texas Bitcoin Summit. Well, just got to change the name formally. Got to change the name. How are you, man? How's ZapRite you were working on last time I saw you? Yeah. At the last stage, the books at the printers, so Graduates and Sudden Leaves at the Printers, and been working on ZapRite for the past few months, and we'll be going forward. Focus on, kind of like think about it, Unchained focused on custody, and then didn't really have a revelation, but just over the course of the last year and a lot of what's happened in the banking system just brought to the forefront the need and importance of focusing on Bitcoin payments, not as a novelty, but as a critical rail. So I've had a challenge with payments recently that you're probably going to just tell me that ZapRite solves. I used to use Blue Wallet, and the thing I liked about Blue Wallet is I could have multiple sub-accounts, right? And so I've got my football club. We take payments on site when you buy your beers or your burgers. We take payments online, and we have people send donations. I've got what Bitcoin did, where I get paid in Bitcoin, and we've now got our event where we get paid in Bitcoin by some people. And I now have three different Lightning wallets for three different reasons to send money to one of my business, right? And so I was thinking, I needed one place to have it all. And I used to be able to do that on Blue Wallet, but you have to actually have the Lightning node set up to do it, which I haven't done. And I was okay using a custodial wallet for it because we'd always sweep at the end of each month anyway. But I don't have that. Are you going to tell me ZapRite does it? I'm going to tell you that ZapRite will help solve that problem. But really what we're focused on is creating a more seamless payment experience for someone like your advertisers, where you can invoice them or a better experience selling tickets at the game, and then being able to connect in multiple wallets so you can kind of have one account where funds go to different Lightning wallets or accounts or different ex-pubs if you want to receive on-chain payments. So kind of helping to, and then also to allow fiat payments side by side with Bitcoin, because that's how we think is a critical way that people will actually adopt Bitcoin payments is creating this unified experience between paying in dollars and paying in Bitcoin. It is interesting because previously using Bitcoin was a novelty. I would only pay because it's like, oh, I'm a Bitcoin, I should spend some Bitcoin. But there are definitely lots of instances now where I find I prefer it. It's better. It's easier.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"There are just a lot of signs written on the wall in the banking system all over every central bank in the world that says the situation where we're at now is more precarious and I can't envision becoming less precarious because they're gonna have to print more money than they ever had before. Hello there from Texas. We are just about packing up now. It's been a great week here, me and Danny. We've been out for the North American Blockchain Summit, which hopefully will be the North American Bitcoin Summit next year. Seeing loads of Bitcoiners has been really cool. It's been really cool to hang out, grab some dinner, just catch up with everyone. So much is happening in the industry, so I think it's an exciting time and Danny's a bullish as ever. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the massive legends at Iris Energy, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. I'm your host Peter McCormack, and today we've got Parker Lewis back on the show. Now I know you all love Parker. Every show we make with him is amazing. And whenever I'm with Parker, I always feel like I'm learning more. He's one of my kind of key signals to go to. It tends to be him and Pierre. When anyone is arguing about anything to do with Bitcoin, I always want to have a look at what Pierre's saying and what Parker's saying. And Parker got in touch. We discussed making a show and he wanted to talk about the importance of payments in Bitcoin. And in the show, we'll get into that. But the key point that he wanted to get across is that with the banking failures this year, if you don't have Bitcoin set up, if you don't have Bitcoin wallets, you don't have the facility to accept and send Bitcoin, then you don't have the insurance against a catastrophic failure in the banking system. You don't have insurance against should the bank turn you off for any reason. And so this was a real kind of light bulb moment in that I already have this. I hadn't really thought about it for others. We already have this with our business if there is an issue with the banking system because we operate with a Bitcoin treasury, we've got it. So it was a great show to make. I really appreciate Parker coming in and discussing this with us. I do want to just close out by thanking Lee for everything he's done. Lee Bratcher putting on the summit. He's brought together some amazing people. It's a great conference and it's in its third year. He's really, really crushed it. We were very fortunate yesterday. We got to interview presidential candidates Vivek and RFK. So they'll be out next week.
Simply Bitcoin
A highlight from What is Bitcoin's Full Price Potential, $1M by 2030? | EP 848
"Welcome to another episode of Simply Bitcoin Live! We are your number one source for the peaceful Bitcoin revolution. We cover breaking news, culture, medic warfare We will be your guide through the separation of money and state Gotta fix my green screen a little bit But yeah guys, it's uh, it's pretty crazy. So Cathie Wood She's the founder Of ARK investments. She went on Natalie Brunel's podcast called coin stories great podcast highly recommend it and Natalie asked Cathie Wood about This report that we've covered on the show many many times about what the expectation of where bitcoins price is going to be by the year 2030 and Cathie Wood's report broke it down into three separate cases the bearish case the you know The mid case and then the bull case and she kind of breaks it down so we'll pay you guys about a clip of the Natalie Purnell podcast if you guys want to watch the full thing check out the video description and Then we're gonna talk about during the news segment Another propaganda hit piece from the New York Times and what we're gonna do is if you just read them by themselves They don't really tell you much. But if you connect the dots and you look at the Historical I Don't want to say performance but the historical behavior of the New York Times the so -called paper of record Parker Lewis when he came on simply Bitcoin IRL, he said something really interesting because I brought up the legacy corporate media and His answer it wasn't my answer. This Parker Lewis's answers as a known ego. They're not legacy corporate media. They're government media and the New York Times has a history of covering up State atrocities and this goes back to the early 1900s when the Soviets initially took power There was there was a New York Times reporter stationed in Moscow and he purposely hid the Ukrainian genocide the whole hold him a door and He reported to the New York Times that you know, the Soviet experiment was it was was wonders It was it was it was amazing for the world and it wasn't until the 90s that New York Times Apologized that this guy Was covering all of this stuff up also in the 2000s The New York Times was the paper that reported that Iraq supposedly had weapons of mass destruction Right, this is the same New York Times that is saying that you know It's reporting that Elizabeth Warren is saying that Bitcoin could potentially be used for For you know for Russians to circumvent US sanctions, this is the same New York Times that released the infamous Propaganda hit piece that Walter America did such a good great job, you know fighting back with the you know Stop the presses, you know Twitter account But this is the same New York Times that you know Basically said that near that Bitcoin mining was bad for the environment Pierre Richard made that really famous video Where you know, he took a co2 meter.
Simply Bitcoin
A highlight from Vijay Boyapati | You Are Early to Bitcoin | Simply Bitcoin IRL
"You Yeah, welcome to another episode of simply Bitcoin IRL today we have a well first of all happy to be back We haven't done an IRL in a couple weeks. I think the last guest was Parker Lewis We have a very special guest lined up for you guys today the author of the bullish case for Bitcoin and also fellow Co -worker with me over at Swan Bitcoin. We have Vijay boyapati. I'm super excited for this episode Vijay We just we just crossed paths in California, man It was super awesome to see you and now it's super awesome to work with you as well. So, how you doing, man? Uh, yeah, I had a great time at Pacific Bitcoin and it was great doing a panel with you I guess it wasn't a panel. It was kind of a fun game Um but yeah, I'm super excited to be part of Swan and Honestly Pacific Bitcoin Mmm, I didn't say this but it just occurred to me the feeling I had when I was there was the same feeling I had At the first Bitcoin conference I went to which was almost exactly ten years ago. The first Bitcoin conference I went to was in 2013 In San Jose, it was just the Bitcoin conference which is called the Bitcoin conference There was there wasn't really any other conferences. There were no shit coin conferences. It's just the Bitcoin conference and I Just remember the the sense of excitement Just how cool this was like this people just discovering Bitcoin like this could potentially change the world I got that same kind of sense of excitement at Pacific Bitcoin and just the sense of fun as well, which is really awesome Yeah, yeah, it was I never forgot the Pacific Bitcoin and and I and I felt that energy too and I've heard that for multiple people and I never forgot last year where price of Bitcoin was sitting at like $16 ,000 and you have Michael Saylor sitting in front row watching every single panel This guy's down billions of dollars, right and he's just cool -headed Looking at the panel trying to have a good time talking to other Bitcoiners So that feeling that energy I don't know if it's the the airplane hangar or you know The way that Swan throws these events. They're very very special They're homey in a way and I think in and I love the Bitcoin conferences But maybe it's the size like the you know, the Bitcoin conference is thrown by Bitcoin magazine. Maybe it's the size I don't know what it is. Maybe it's that California feeling I don't know, but I know exactly what you're talking about when you say that it's it's a it's definitely a very very special event So, you know your presentation on stage was absolutely epic because you started to undress yourself And what I mean by that is you you know, you took off your sweater and you showed something It was a pretty epic introduction for you joining saw Swan So my question is why'd you join Swan in the first place? What what made you want to work here or work? Oh, that is a good question. Well The way it happened. I'll just tell a brief story I got an email from Cory obviously CEO of Swan I got an email from him out of the blue saying I want to chat with you and It was on a Friday and I said, you know, I'm taking the kids camping I can't do a call right now and he said okay Monday and I I took the call zoom call on Monday and I Thought he was gonna ask me about like Swan might be raising some money It's a great company or maybe he was gonna invite me to Pacific Bitcoin or something like that But when I got on the call, he was on the call with yarn as well which surprised me a little bit and I was like, huh, what's going on here and He asked me about how my job was going and he asked about a company that I didn't work for anymore Cuz I didn't keep LinkedIn updated. I didn't really use LinkedIn So I had like a job listed on there from like seven years ago And he was like, how's that going? You know, I was like, oh, you know, I don't really work there anymore and he said well we want to just take a shot and see if you want to work at Swan and I'm so blown away. I did not expect that at all I Had expected an invitation to Pacific Bitcoin to speak or something like that and And I I thought huh, that's interesting Let me find out about swine I knew Swan was Bitcoin only and I knew what the business generally was But I didn't know that much and I didn't know exactly who worked there And so I spent the next week or two just speaking with with people at Swan and I was honestly blown away like the team that Cory and Jan and Brady have put together is awesome and the philosophy of like this is a Bitcoin company We're all Bitcoiners. There's no non Bitcoiners, it's like he Cory told a funny story actually he was like we were interviewing this engineering candidate who's like pretty good and One of the questions he had was what's your favorite Stefan Lavera episode? And the person didn't know the podcast and Cory's like no, no, no, we're not we're not hiring him So it's like really hardcore. It's like this is a Bitcoin only company and I thought that was so cool because I've been interested in Bitcoin for a long time now since 2011 and I've always been supportive of the companies in this space but to be able to work at one and to be surrounded by Bitcoiners and people who love Bitcoin and you know To be able to hang out with you and and folks like you is just it's honestly a dream for me to be able to Join Swan. So that's that's how I ended up at Swan Yeah, man, that's so first of all that backstory is super interesting Yeah, it's it's a it's a company full of Bitcoiners complete on the mission It's a Bitcoin only company, right? So yeah, it's it's uh, you know, and it's it's what you said there's it's incredible group of extremely talented Bitcoiners hardcore Bitcoiners that uh That are totally on the mission. So it's it's super super happy to I'm super happy to have you like you know part of the fold part of the family and Yeah, man Upwards and onwards. Anyways, man, so you did a presentation on the bullish case for Bitcoin That's what that's you know, that's what you're known for, you know, I think it was Michael Saylor Please correct me if I'm wrong BJ that wrote the preface to this incredible article that eventually became a book Right, which is absolutely insane when you wrote that initially and it's been a while now since it was our first release Did you have any inclination? You know because sometimes I'll make a video so like I look like I love making content I love making videos and sometimes when I make a video or when I title something properly I have a like there's a little voice in the back of my head. That's like this is gonna pop off I'm very confident about that. You don't know to what extent but you're like, okay I'm pretty sure this one's gonna do really well that being said did you have any idea that? That article that medium article that then became a book was just gonna blow everyone's minds away Not at all not at all. And I mentioned this at the start of my talk at Pacific Bitcoin I said I and honestly thought that it would be read by a few friends and family members people who knew me and Knew that I was really into Bitcoin and probably getting annoyed at me talking about Bitcoin all the time I think I did have a little bit of hope that it would be Maybe read by a few people outside of my friends and family circle and I was hoping Like my big hope was maybe a few people on Wall Street will read this and it'll click for them and they'll be like, oh I get it. This isn't some like this isn't beanie babies or something like that. This is there's something fundamental here That's really important And and it would click for a few people. I had no idea what happened would happen none at all And it got it's been read over a million times It's been translated and not by me but by volunteers in the 20 different languages I think it hit on a nerve because people at the time were trying to understand like This was the I started writing it in the beginning of 2017 I'm a really slow writer and I only published at the end of a sorry the beginning of 2018 But I think at the time it hit a nerve because people really wanted to understand Bitcoin That was the first wave of like regular people coming to Bitcoin before that It was kind of like a libertarian Cypherpunk thing. It wasn't like regular people not that many regular people cared about Bitcoin I think 2017 was the first wave of regular people And there was just a lot of interest like what is this thing? Why is it becoming so valuable? And and so I think I Had been thinking about it since 2011 I have background in Austrian economics and I put a lot of thought into like Why does this have value to me? That's the most important question. Why does it have any value? Why is it? Why is it more than zero and And I think there's like a good economic argument for why it does and that's what I put into my article I think it hit a nerve because people were trying to answer that exact same question Like why does this thing have value and then it just got you know a momentum of its own and you got shared around a lot and You know was mentioned on in some media and podcasts and stuff like that and it kind of blew up and then people started Translating it and that's in 20 different languages. So yeah, it got a momentum of its own and the doing the book was an interesting thing because I was like people kept asking me to turn it into a book because they were Literally physically printing it out and giving it to people like hey, you know Bitcoin It's like to evangelize a little bit because they've discovered something important They want other people to know about it And so they're printing out my article and I can you just turn it into a book so I can give them a book It looks better if it's a book I was like, ah, I don't really want to do that because like I didn't know what I'd want to add to the article I don't want to just like type the article into a book and publish it but a few years later I a bunch of stuff had happened the pandemic had happened and the Federal Reserve had gone completely crazy and Created trillions of dollars in new money and I thought okay There's some new stuff that I want to revisit and I could add to the article and so the book is quite a bit expanded it's like It has like a bunch of stuff that's not in the article and I revisited that in 2021 And the funny thing is I when I started when I launched it and I started selling it I remember going to the swan dome at the Miami Bitcoin conference and I've had this relationship with swan for a while actually where like I really like this one people like hanging out with them and I remember basically launching my book in the swan dome when I was like 100 degrees out and inside the dome it was like probably 120 degrees and It was a madhouse in there.
The Café Bitcoin Podcast
A highlight from CPI, SBF Trial, Blockstream Lightning, and Swan Private Macro Friday with Sam Callahan, John Haar, Cory Klippsten, and more! - October 13th, 2023
"Hello, and welcome to the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the best way to buy and learn about Bitcoin. I'm your host, Alex Danson, and we're excited to announce that we're bringing the Cafe Bitcoin Conversations Twitter Spaces to you on this show, the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast, Monday through Friday every week. Join us as we speak to guests like Michael Saylor, Len Alden, Corey Clifston, Greg Foss, Tomer Strohle, and many others in the Bitcoin space. Also, be sure to hit that subscribe button. Make sure you get notifications when we launch a new episode. You can join us live on Twitter Spaces Monday through Friday, starting at 7 a .m. Pacific and 10 a .m. Eastern every morning to become part of the conversation yourself. Thanks again. We look forward to bringing you the best Bitcoin content daily here on the Cafe Bitcoin Podcast. Good morning. Welcome to Cafe Bitcoin. Jacob, that song is such a banger. I love that every morning. Yeah, shout out to Tip and Z for letting us play that. Yeah, Tip crushed it at Pacific Bitcoin. I'm sure you guys talked about that, but that was awesome. What's up, everybody? Michelle, for those who are interested, I just put the lyrics up in the nest. She just put the lyrics online yesterday. Peter, bro, I went to sleep. You were on a space. I wake up. You're on a space. You've been killing it. I went to sleep during that space as well. Peter, stars rising. That's what I was going to say about you, Don. Yeah, I got a few issues, too. It's all good. We're all degenerates. I thought you were on your way to El Salvador. Yeah, quick couple of errands. Need to get a quick surfing. Need to check in real quick here. See what Sam thinks about the big appeal day today. Get some predictions and then hop in and I'm gone. What's the appeal day? Today, if I'm correct, Sam probably knows the details, but it's the deadline at midnight for the SEC to appeal the decision that was reached during Grayscale's Spot ETF appeal. Yeah, that's right. So basically, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals judges ruled in August that the SEC denying the conversion of GPTC to an ETF was arbitrary and capricious, which means that they didn't think it was right. And so this is the deadline for the SEC to challenge that decision. And so we'll see if they'll kind of either decide to bend the knee or not, or if they'll just try to decide to fight it or give a new reason for why they should reject the conversion. You know, there's a couple options that they have available to them. But today's the day, so we'll see what the SEC is going to decide to do. Yeah, Sam, I think whatever buys them the most time, I think they're going to request panel appeal, not submit an actual appeal themselves, buy some time, maybe pull that back. But who knows, maybe they just throw in the towel. They could. I mean, I feel like people are attributing a low probability of that. But I mean, they certainly could. Why would you throw in the towel when you don't pay for the legal services that you require? Yeah, that's a good point. I think but I believe the least likely option is that they submit a formal written appeal with a new justification as to why they won't approve it. I think they either go for the panel review from the appellate court or they just say we're done. The other idea is they could agree and then decide to just remove the futures ETFs. But that seems really unlikely, given their size and popularity of the product. They could. They got some options. They got some options. Hold on, the futures market in Bitcoin is like popular? Who even uses that? Fiat Maxis. It's used by institutional traders for hedging and all kinds of things. People think it's very popular. It's like a security. Someone needs to do a meme like in that movie Castaway where he's talking to the volleyball and he points and he's like, no, we got time. We got time. And they got to replace it with Gensler. I don't have the skills. Michelle, what's up? Hey, guys. So I don't want to derail the conversation completely from the macro, but I did want to make a little bit of an announcement. This morning, I bought gas in SATs over Lightning. We are beta testing our merchant system, and we've integrated it at a Shell gas station here in Sarasota, Florida. I pinned a tweet into the nest. And everything went well, which is super exciting because I'm the product developer. It worked. And so if anybody's in Florida and wants to come to Sarasota, you can buy gas with Bitcoin. Gas priced in Bitcoin. Let's go. That's fucking awesome, Michelle. What's the scaling look like on this thing? Well, we're still beta testing. There's a couple of features on the back end that need some updates and some tweaking. There's some features that are coming down the line that we kind of want to roll out before we really scale it. But we have five or six merchants that are each testing different pieces of the system. We have a full API integration. We have a couple of e -commerce tools and then the actual merchant terminal. For a lot of the gas stations where we have ATMs established, we'll probably be the first sort of set of adopters. So we're kind of slow rolling it. But if anybody is out there and wants to accept Bitcoin, feel free to DM me or fight federal, and we'll get you set up. if So just I'm understanding correctly, the product just kind of makes it easier for merchants to integrate with Lightning and accept Lightning payments. Cool. What was your mission? Go ahead, Sam. Sorry. Well, no, I'm just I'm curious to learn more about it, Michelle. So what's your guy's goal? Why did you guys start to build out this product? And where do you see it kind of fitting in to Bitcoin's adoption as well as why did you guys build it? What problem are you trying to solve? Yeah, sure. Well, it's really about Bitcoin and Lightning adoption. So Byte Federal is one of the oldest ATM companies. I think they're kind of one of the least known right now because they've grown really slowly. But everything is built in -house. We build all of the ATMs here in Florida. We built all the software that runs the ATMs, and we host everything that happens within the ecosystem. And prior to me joining the team, we have a wallet. We're in the process of redesigning and rebranding the wallet. But the goal really is to enable full -scale circular economies with the ATM, our wallet, and then the merchant piece, which is like a merchant terminal. Of course, if you have like at a farmer's market and you're just a sole proprietor, you can always do a direct peer -to -peer transaction and accept Bitcoin or Lightning directly into your wallet. But we have a lot of merchants that host our ATMs, and they have bigger needs, and they want like a physical terminal, and they want an integration into their existing systems. So we've been working on building that. That's super cool. I think like merchant adoption of Bitcoin and accepting Lightning is kind of the next wave adoption. of And I know like Parker Lewis is kind of focused on that now. And merchant adoption, it's like demanding to be paid in Bitcoin. Each merchant doing that is going to build on itself and kind of drive Bitcoin adoption forward as it continues to be used more and more as like a medium exchange for goods and services. I think it's kind of early days in that, but I think that is the next wave. And it just occurs at each merchant. So building the infrastructure and easier tools for them to accept Lightning is definitely a crucial step. So Michelle, that's awesome. So cool to hear. Peter, what's up? Hey, Michelle, are the merchants able to convert into fiat if they want? Or is it just they take Lightning and then they do with it what they want after the fact? Yeah, there is a conversion option. So of course, our bills are still in fiat. So there is an ACH withdrawal feature that's built in. And they can either hold the Bitcoin or SATs in there. They can hold it if they want. But no, there is an option to cash out in fiat. And it's an ACH settlement. Are you targeting specific individuals who are already Bitcoiners? Or is this more about, you know what I mean? I mean, what's the market? Kind of. Yeah, kind of. So the guy that we set up today is near our office. He has a very successful ATM, a very active ATM. And the reason for that is because he is super into Bitcoin. He's a Bitcoiner, right? And so when people come into his gas station, he's like, hey, you can buy Bitcoin here. Like, I know you're here for gas or a soda, but you can also get Bitcoin. So he's really like a Bitcoin evangelist. And so we have developed a relationship with him. And he actually informed a lot of the decisions that we made as we were building the product.
Bitcoin Audible
A highlight from Read_767 - Pay Me in Bitcoin theory.
"If the merchant wants the Bitcoin and you pay in fiat, that is you shifting the burden of fiat friction onto them. And paying your valued vendors in Bitcoin is the opposite of mutually assured destruction. It's mutually assured survival. The best in Bitcoin made audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. What is up guys, welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else you know. We have got a wonderful read. We have Parker Lewis back on the saddle doing some writing and I know his book and lots of really really cool things are happening with the Gradually Then Suddenly series, which I absolutely love. And anybody who knows all of the audio is available on this podcast. I will be linking to the first piece, I think there's like 15 of them or something, I'll be linking to the first piece in the show notes and maybe maybe I should take this opportunity to kind of put them all together somewhere. I'll see if Parker is linking to the audio on the actual articles because I also have the link to the Gradually Then Suddenly website where you can find all the written versions. Actually you know what I'll do in the meantime, just in case, I will make a Spotify playlist. That is a really easy way to get the link. So that's probably what you should see in the show notes instead, a Spotify playlist with a link to the Gradually Then Suddenly series by Parker Lewis. But anyway, we've got a different one today and it's based off, or it's the same theory or the same theme I guess as the Bitblock Boom speech that he gave, the presentation that he gave. And it's a really interesting way to think about merchant adoption in Bitcoin and how we're moving from the store of value to the medium of exchange phase and why there's not actually a chicken and egg problem here, that there's fundamentally an order of operations or order of events from the concept of how the merchant sees or understands the value of Bitcoin or how all of the individuals in Bitcoin see and understand its value before there is actual reason in widespread adoption for accepting it as a means of payment. So anyway, I won't head off the article too much. We will go ahead and get right into it. This episode is brought to you by Nodeless. Nodeless .io slash guy is my special link. This is the easiest way. No setup. Don't set up a node. Don't worry about BTC pay server. This is the easiest way to get all that functionality, to get it plugged into your WooCommerce store, get a donation page, set up a fundraiser, accept it on your website or for your project, set up paywalls, whatever it is, even design simple webhooks with none of the Bitcoin or Lightning overhead. Nodeless does all the work and you just get the Bitcoin forwarded directly to you. There's no subscription here. It is a simple 1 % plus 100 sat fee. Signing up doesn't cost anything. There's no KYC. This is literally the perfect way to get the person who you know is interested in Bitcoin but has yet to accept it or doesn't really know how to deal with running a node or doing any of that stuff. How did they get plugged into Bitcoin? How do they easily accept it? That is what Nodeless is for. To make the entire process as painless and simple as possible. Right now I'm offering, don't know how long I'm going to keep this up, I'm offering, if you go to my link right in the show notes, set up your donation page, literally takes a couple of clicks and tag me on Noster or Twitter with the link. I will throw you 10 ,000 sats. So check it out. It's nice to have 10 ,000 sats and you should put those sats on your cold card hardware wallet, which you will also get a 9 % discount for with code Bitcoin audible. You know, if you want to keep your Bitcoin safe, you need a cold card. Check them out. All the details are available in the show notes. And with that, let's get into today's read. And it's titled Pay me in Bitcoin theory by Parker Lewis.
Simply Bitcoin
A highlight from Europe's Anti-Bitcoin Bill Reveals Plan to Stop Adoption | EP 829
"It's all going to zero against bitcoin it's going up for ever more you're against bitcoin you're against freedom yo welcome to simp with bitcoin live we're the number one source for the peaceful bitcoin revolution we will be your guide through the separation of money and state speaking of the separation of money and state interesting news coming out of Europe kind of not as bad as the proposed bill by Elizabeth Warren that we covered on one of simply bitcoins simply bitcoin lives episode this week but it's something very similar right this idea that every single transaction needs to be KY seed right and then I think that will inevitably lead to the any host unhosted wallet needs to be KY seed all right the the wording specifically in the Elizabeth Warren bill included any minor any validator any software wallet so you know it's just of course the powers that be that tremendously benefit from having a monopoly on the creation of money having controls on money of course to benefit themselves of course they're not going to be okay with this and this was the theory that was originally you know put out back in the 90s in the book the sovereign individual I'm going to read you guys a passage from that book because I think it correctly predicted exactly the reactions from governments I don't think governments have been able to they're not used to this environment where they have competition and most importantly not only do they have competition but they can't shut down the competition right because we remember we saw Facebook try to launch their own you know digital currency and they got shut down real quick the thing with Bitcoin right and Bitcoin only right because aetherium is inherently centralized meaning it will inevitably be co -opted so they have no choice but to ally with the state and they were in order to survive but with Bitcoin can't be stopped and because it can't be stopped it creates a forcing function in the long term as more and more individuals choose to opt out of inflationary money into deflationary money so yes of course times are changing but it's not only on the money front right we're not only living through the disintermediation of money but we're also living through the disintermediation of information and yesterday was a historic day I've never seen this in my life the UK Parliament sent Russell Brand an extremely popular independent content creator a letter to rumble we love rumble by the way we're on there subscribe to us on there and shout out to our rumble audience as well it's been growing by the day so we appreciate you all they sent a letter to rumble asking rumble to demonetize Russell Brand like YouTube did so we have governments that are directly asking platforms to demonetize content creators of which they don't did they don't agree with that is absolutely absurd and these are the same governments that want you to trust them with central bank digital currencies if they had central bank digital currencies in place they wouldn't even have to ask the platforms they could just flick the switch themselves so when we say Bitcoin or slavery or how beauty on said it and I'm starting to lean this way to Bitcoin or death we are not exaggerating and you have to choose what world do you want to live in in the future and most importantly what world do you want the future generations your children your children's children to live in so it's gonna be a great episode I'm really looking forward to it you have to stay on top of what's going on anyways we also we also have a very special treat for you guys we have the head of customer experience from foundation devices the maker of the passport hardware wallet and he's gonna do a live demo for us during the culture cement segment so I'm really really pumped about that let me bring up let me bring him up on stage Bitcoin Q &A you're quite well known on Bitcoin Twitter as well how you doing buddy yeah doing very well thank you very much for having me I'm psyched to shoot the shit with you guys this evening well even in my time but yeah certainly some interesting goings on especially around the Russell brand thing so I'm sure we'll be able to share some insights on that one but not a good look yeah I completely agree man it's it's some some interesting times we are living through people some people call it the fourth turning I don't know man but the phrase that sticks with me the most is weak men create hard times hard times create strong men strong strong men create good times we're definitely going through this era and then I think it was actually Vladimir Lenin that said the very very famous quote right where there are decades that nothing happened and then there are weeks that decades happen I think we're definitely living through this moment of time anyways no more delay let's bring up my legendary co -host not optimistic today no smile oh there's this smile sorry I was caught reading the channels optimistic fields how you doing bro well I am doing wonderful and I'm actually really excited for this culture segment today guys I got a sneak peek of the demo that we're going to see and I think there's gonna be awesome this might be a simply Bitcoin first for the live show but to the news stories and stuff it really just goes to show that if you speak the truth you are the enemy of the state and I think more and more and more people are waking up to this because they either continue to de -platform you from your banks or de -platform you from social media for saying what they don't want to be said you know for saying the quiet part out loud and you know this is why we do our show in a very particular way so that we can survive on YouTube but man it really just goes to show that the powers that be are completely terrified of people talking about the truth hence why you guys need to talk about it more and continue to spread that signal but it just goes to show that this is the the last I don't know the last gasp of the great Leviathan you know what's them saying like darker before the dawn like this is their last grasping at straws to control the truth and and I mean I've been saying for a while I think the monopoly on truth is slowly and dwindling they're going to try to make examples of this so you know just be prepared we know what's coming so protect yourselves protect your family and continue to spread the Bitcoin truth the Bitcoin signal actually just truth with a capital T I suppose anyways Niko let's let's get into this one let's get into this one let's get into the show man I'm really really excited alright guys let's get to the numbers we have a lot to talk about today and I'm super is your Bitcoin in cold storage really secure is your seed phrase really secure stamp seeds do -it -yourself kit has everything you need to hammer your seed words into commercial grade titanium plates instead of just writing them on paper don't store your generational wealth on paper papers prone to water damage fire damage you want to put your generational wealth on one of the strongest metals on planet earth titanium your words are actually stamped into this metal plate with this hammer and these letter stamps and once your words are in they aren't going anywhere no risk of the plate breaking apart and pieces falling everywhere titanium stamped seeds will survive nearly triple the heat produced by a house fire they're also crush proof waterproof non -corrosive and time proof all things that paper is not allowing you to huddle your Bitcoin with peace of mind for the long haul stamp your seed on stamp seed alright guys I literally made it super easy for you guys you can scan the QR code on your screen it will take you directly to stamp seed website you can get you could store your generational wealth on titanium so you don't have to explain to your children why you lost your Bitcoin because you stored it on paper you can use promo code simply get 15 % off anything on the stamp seed website at the time of recording the Bitcoin price is twenty six thousand five hundred and seventy sats per dollar three thousand seven hundred sixty four block height eight hundred eight thousand seven hundred twenty nine blocks to having thirty one thousand two hundred seventy one having estimate April 21st 2024 total lightning network capacity four thousand eight hundred fifty five Bitcoin capacity value one hundred twenty nine million US dollars realized monetary inflation one point seven five percent the market capitalization of Bitcoin currently sitting at five hundred and seventeen billion dollars Bitcoin versus gold market cap four point zero one percent in the grand scheme of things Bitcoin is still a baby if Bitcoin reaches not if when Bitcoin reaches the gold market cap that is five hundred thousand dollars per coin and I think that's just getting started anyways we played you guys a video yesterday of a member of the United Nations talking about how we are in an information war we played you guys the video and she was basically recommending that that that they no longer have people to call on on Twitter to censor information she was also saying how there's an army of people that are propagating United Nations approved information well you know she's she's talking about as if the information that's coming out of the United Nations is a matter of fact right she's talking about the problem of disinformation disinformation well my question to you guys is who gets to decide what is disinformation and what is information right well we advocate for on simply Bitcoin is individuals not central planners not governments using their own critical thinking abilities right to dictate okay this is a good idea this is a bad idea right this is how the American this how the American Constitution it's literally written like that that there's a reason that the First Amendment is the way it is right the government or Congress should make no law you know basically censoring or stopping the freedom of the speech of people right and they made it that way for a reason because if there is a central authority if there's a government that gets to dictate what information is true what information is not true history has shown that they'll use that power to protect their own political mode right so thank God for the internet thank God for technologies like Bitcoin thank God for technologies like Noster for example they can't do this anymore and because they're not able to do that they're freaking out number one and number two and number two it becomes a forcing function over a long period of time but that doesn't stop them from trying here is the former New Zealand Prime Minister at the United Nations saying that that words are weapons of war right weapons of war if so if you say something against the government that all of a sudden becomes a weapon of war and again this has escalated it is escalated to the point where the UK Parliament has asked rumble to demonetize Russell Brand who's a very popular content creator who goes against the legacy corporate media's narratives right and it kind of embarrasses them so what are they doing they're attacking his money they're saying rumble okay they can't they've tried to deplatform people before they've gotten a lot of pushback so what they do instead is that they attack his pocketbook obviously YouTube complied they demonetize Russell Brand's content but rumble said no we're not doing that so love that of rumble we're on rumble we support rumble that's awesome but another thing that I want to say is that the allegations against rubble Russell Brand are just that they are allegations they have not been proven so something that has not been proven is a justification to shut off someone's living that is insane anyways let's check out this letter and this is a letter by part by the UK Parliament the specifically the cultural culture media and sport committee to the CEO of rumble Chris Palavoski who says dear Chris I'm writing concerning the serious allegations regarding Russell Brand in the context of of his being a content provider on rumble for more than 1 .4 million followers the cultural the culture media and sports committee is raising questions with the broadcasters and production companies who previously employed mr. brand to examine both the culture of the industry in the past and whether that culture still prevails today however we are also looking at his use of social media including on rumble where he issued his preemptive response to the accusations made against him by the Sunday Times and Channel 4 his dispatches while we recognize that rumble is not the creator of the content published published by mr. brand we are concerned that he may be able to profit from his content on the platform did you hear what they said the government is concerned that Russell Brand might be able to profit from his content because there was some allegations made against him conveniently a lot of Russell Brand's content is criticisms of the government so I mean big coincidence I guess you would you could say we would be grateful if you could confirm whether mr. brand is able to monetize his content including his videos relating to the serious accusations against him is so we would like to know whether rumble intends to join ryu tube in suspending mr. brand's ability to earn money on the platform we would also like to know what rumble is doing to ensure that creators are not able to use the platform to undermine to undermine the welfare of victims of inappropriate and potential potentially illegal behavior so they asked rumble to demonetize a content creator an independent content creator that's the key word when we had Parker Lewis on the show and I was talking about the legacy corporate media he didn't say no Nico it's not the legacy corporate media it's the legacy government media so anyways why is this happening I think Jeff Booth said this perfectly we read this to you guys the other day and this all boils down to the money this is why we say as Bitcoiners fix the money fix the world here's Jeff Booth he says because broken money Elon Musk said how did most of the legacy media go from superheroes of free speech to supervillains of speech suppression and Jeff Booth says because broken money ensures the centralization of power by stealing the productivity through inflation that should flow to society in the form of lower prices then those enriched by that theft and subsequent power must control the messaging to keep it but it all it wasn't only Jeff Booth that said this here's an article from our friends over at Bitcoin magazine of nine Bukele the president of the country shining on the hill the Savior El Salvador the first country that made Bitcoin legal tender the beachhead for the Bitcoin movement around the world he goes on to say the most vocal detractors the ones who are afraid and pressuring us to reverse our decision are the world's most powerful elites and the people who work or benefit from them they used to own everything and in a way they still do the media the banks the NGOs international organizations and almost all the governments and corporations in the world and with that of course they own the armies the loans the money supply the credit ratings the narrative the propaganda the factories of food supply they control international trade and international law but their most powerful weapon is their control of the truth and they're willing to fight lie smear destroy confiscate print and do whatever it takes to maintain and increase their control over the truth and everything and everyone I think come from Nico or simply Bitcoin that came from the president of El Salvador name Bukele so what is happening here two things are happening here thing number one the internet has empowered individuals and those individuals can now use the internet to uh to grow these massive platforms themselves and because they're individuals they're a lot harder to co -opt and at the same time we are witnessing the distance remediation of money that internet has allowed Bitcoin and Bitcoin has empowered individuals to choose their own money too so government states NGOs international institutions right that have had this privilege of having not only having the monopoly in the control over money but also the monopoly in the control over information it's quickly diminishing in front of their eyes and of course that system is fighting back they can't take that they've been used to operating in a system where they've been able to control the narrative they've been able to control the truth and that is slipping through their fingers and they don't know what to do and that's why they're short -circuiting the way they are that's why we've gotten to a point where the UK Parliament is literally asking a platform to D monetize an independent content creator not to mention all the stuff that was revealed during the Twitter files where it was exposed that the US government even though that is explicitly against the US Constitution the government should not be censoring speech was asking Twitter to D platform D boost and censor certain speech and these are the same governments that also want you to trust them with central bank digital currencies and they expect you to believe that they're not going to use central bank digital currencies as a weapon as a forcing function in order to control your actions as a individual and this was all predicted I might add in the book the sovereign individual which we'll get to during the new segment but this is some crazy times now what can you do to protect yourself in this particular situation do your own research pick what information sources you choose you you want to choose I love Twitter because it's like a news aggregator and the the news that you know pops up pops up Noster is a great platform rumbles a great platform YouTube is is good to do your own research don't rely on a single information source and then most importantly the most empowering thing you could do is to opt out of state money opt into Bitcoin I think that's the most powerful thing you could do look the most important the most important vote you can make that voting for a Democrat or Republican it's not to say that it's not important to vote but the most powerful vote that you can do that will actually change things is voting with your wallet opt out and the way that you do that is you buy Bitcoin earn Bitcoin mine Bitcoin and take that said Bitcoin into self custody the moment you do that you're part of the peaceful Bitcoin revolution whether you are aware of it or not and that is how we win if enough people take self custody we win and there's nothing they could do about it speaking of self custody we have the head of customer experience with us today Bitcoin QA and you guys make it super fucking easy to take self custody with the hardware wallet that you guys make and not to mention the awesome application that you guys make so Bitcoin QA what's your take on this whole Russell brand stuff I can't believe we've reached this point if I would have been told this five five six years ago I would have said that's impossible there's no way that's that that's so ridiculous what's your take on all this yeah before I enter you I've just got to say that was one hell of a fucking monologue I take my half to you that was fantastic yeah kudos and yeah the whole Russell brand thing man just completely shocking another example yet another example of government overreach Russell brands been a thorn in the side of the UK government if you can't tell by the action by the way to anybody's listening that I'm from the UK and he's been a thorn in their side for years and he's a very well educated man he's very well spoken and he has drawn a lot of following by speaking out against money printing against government policy he was rabid about the whole covert thing pharmaceuticals getting rich because of you know yeah you know all of the corruption that went on over those couple of years and I see this recent letter as that them seeing the opportunity as they're into trying you know get one back on him you've touched on earlier that the fact that all of these are just allegations at the moment and the fact that they're going around trying to take money off him from you know he's not been convicted of anything at all that's not see won't be but right now they're just allegations and they're trying to take his money off him it's just completely shocking and they're just trying to lash out because he's been a pain in their ass royally for years so yeah I mean they're just they're just overreaching and leveraging their powers wherever they can just to kind of deep platform and then hurt his wallet as well unfortunately yeah 100 % they attack his money they attack and again like they attack his money and they're also like hey guys these CBDCs like we'll respect your privacy you could trust us what are you talking about anyways Opti what's your take well I actually I kind of want to ask Q &A question because there is some talk about this in the chat what's your thoughts on Russell Brand being like controlled demolition Q &A whoo how do you mean like basically that this is like an orchestrated attack you know once everyone's talking about this maybe Russell Brand isn't necessarily as much of a truth speaker as people are making him out to be like does he actually believe what he's saying or is this just kind of one of those things where you know you create a figure and then you kind of tear him down to discredit the whole movement in general the whole truth movement yeah possibly I think I think most of what he says is genuine he before he started doing all of the YouTube stuff like he was he was a you know some form of a celebrity he had a big following and could have monetized himself as a product in many many other ways by coming out and being as outspoken as he has against the the prickly topics of like money printing and you know COVID etc he must have known you know he's smart enough to know that would have been incredibly divisive to people that followed him so I lean towards the fact that he's genuine and the fact that they're probably gonna try and use him as a scapegoat to warn ward off other people that kind of speak out against any government policy etc etc yeah I'd agree I mean like especially considering what his status was it's hard to follow the incentives and be like yeah he's got a lot to gain from this when in reality he's on the verge of losing everything so I'd agree with you and then just kind of going back to the beginning of this rant and and people are saying epic daily Nico Jones rant today so good job Nico I like when Nico gets get animated remember growing up guys when I grew up I had a saying and I'm sure your mother told it to you as well and we all probably said it in kindergarten you know sticks and stones but words may never hurt me and now we grow up in a world where words are violence like what is going on guys and that's a convenient it's a convenient way I know Nico I was getting there I'm asking rhetorical questions on the show now okay I'm learning some Nico Jones tactics but as we know guys as we know guys you know if you can stop words from being said then you can stop thought and if you can stop thought then you can ultimately stop behavior and this is where they're going they want to ensure that you guys sell censors so that you guys don't lose everything and this is where we are guys that they are absolutely afraid of people speaking the truth they're absolutely afraid of the average person waking up and exposing all of their lives because that's all they have they have lies and favors and they have the monopoly on truth as we think now is more important than ever to speak your minds to make sure you're having these conversations to as the saying goes you know speak truth to power and all that good stuff because there's been a constant theme throughout 2023 or actually rather since 2020 basically is that if your voice is too big and you talk against the establishment then the powers that be will do anything they can to put you back in line and whether that means you know breaking your reputation taking all your money dragging you through the court of public opinion we know what their tactics are and if you're following along closely then you know what the playbook is and it's almost like they're doing the same thing over and over and over again but I think the silver lining of this is that it seems like their playbook isn't working as well as it used to which in some sense should be absolutely terrifying because then they're going to go to even more extremes and you know I'm not gonna say what everyone's thinking but it's gonna get crazy guys and so I think it's just becoming very very clear that as an individual just even a normal person that doesn't have a platform like you want to do whatever you can in your power to protect yourself and hence why we always say that it always boils down to the money guys so protect your money protect your livelihood by taking your Bitcoin into self -custody by saving in Bitcoin and because remember guys this is always about theft they want to take your wealth and put you back in your place and then distribute it and make everyone feel good and we're seeing this happen in real time and it isn't lost on me that this is done via a letter you know it's just like hey how nefarious can a letter be but if you're reading in between the lines then you know how nefarious this letter actually is and that this is a coordinated attack on someone that's talking against the establishment and if people like Russell Brand you know say what you want about him but if people like him can't speak about the truth and they also get run through the grinder like imagine what would happen to an average individual like there's no hope for us if people of that stature can't talk about what's actually going on in the world and hence why it's so important to continue to double down on independent content creation spreading the truth talking about all this stuff because this is all we have we have the truth on our side and as the saying goes you know the truth will set us free so just just don't be afraid you know be brave but also be smart out there and the best thing you can do is just protect yourself and protect your money protect your family and I think as more people do this then the world will slowly but surely start to fix itself anyways you know amen we'll see what happens amen preach brother all right everybody let's get to the news we got a lot to talk about today let's check it out no no no no no no before we do that before we do that I have to give a shout out to our awesome sponsor Bitcoin 2024 it's gonna be the largest Bitcoin conference on planet earth it's gonna be in Nashville Tennessee it's not gonna be in Miami this year July 25th through the 27th 2024 you definitely want to get your tickets quickly before the prices go up for a GA it's 349 for an industry pass it's 849 for a whale pass it's four thousand seven hundred forty nine Opti and I are gonna be there it's gonna be awesome check out Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville Tennessee the year of the having Opti and I are gonna be there some other simply Bitcoin members are gonna be there it's gonna be awesome use promo code simply to get a 10 % discount on the already discounted tickets to Bitcoin 2024 all right now let's hit the news the daily news I want to give a shout out to our sponsor foundation devices it's self -custody done right they built a premium grade hardware wallet called passport right here in the u .s.
Simply Bitcoin
A highlight from Parker Lewis | Why Bitcoin is Inevitable | Simply Bitcoin IRL
"Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Simply Bitcoin IRL. Today we have a very special guest and someone who I've been looking forward to have on the show for the first time, Parker Lewis. But before we start the show, I want to give a very special shout out to the Bitcoin company that makes this show possible, Swan Bitcoin, best place to build your Bitcoin stack, it's being built by Bitcoiners, it's for Bitcoiners, they incentivize dollar cost average and they incentivize self -custody, definitely check out swanbitcoin .com today if you haven't already done so. Alright everybody, no more delay, let's jump straight into it, let me bring Parker up on stage. Hey Parker, how you doing? Doing well, glad we could finally get together to do this and sorry it took me so long to be here but I'm very excited. Well no dude, I'm a super fan of your work and your essays, some of them that I remember you dropped while you were at Unchained and it really, really made me kind of rethink about, there was this piece, basically it was called The Great Definantialization, sorry English is my second language. It's a word I made up I think, so it's not readily available. But it was, it explains a lot, it explains a lot, right? It was very, very kind of influential in my perspective of the world and my Bitcoin journey as well. But before we get into all of that, I really want to ask you about what's your take on the ruling FASB's today in terms of, basically this was one of the three things that Michael Saylor said would be necessary in order to take Bitcoin to the next level. So what's your take on that? Yeah, I mean I think that it's, one it's a very logical move, it was a no brainer. I think that I didn't read too much about it today but I did see the news and I believe the vote was unanimous, I'm not sure exactly how many votes there are, but that it was very clear that it was the right thing to do. I think that it reduces a source of friction without doubt, Michael Saylor's talked about this quite a bit, but ultimately for those people who are not familiar, what the rule in certain types of companies, and there's different standards for public companies and private companies, but the standard that public companies had adopted was, I think it was treated as an indefinite life intangible, and effectively what that meant was that companies that held Bitcoin on their balance sheet would have to market it effectively the lowest value it had ever traded at, and basically impair the Bitcoin, and then as it traded back up they couldn't write the asset back up. And so what the FASB basically changed today was saying that companies could mark Bitcoin on their balance sheet at fair value. So as it goes down, they market down, as it goes up, they market up, rather than only marketing down and never marketing it up. I think the reality of the situation is that that does, I think, reduce some friction for some companies. I think if somebody was valuing a square who has Bitcoin on their balance sheet, or a micro strategy, they were probably looking past that and being like, okay, they disclose how much Bitcoin they have, how much is actually worth, so I think the market was probably treating it from a market, mark to market basis anyways, but I think for accountants and for finance departments, treasury departments that are considered about their borrowing basis and their balance sheets, there's certain things that are tested against their balance sheets. So I do think that it reduces friction, particularly for large companies, large public companies to putting it simplifies things for them. And yeah, and I have been following it for for for quite a while. Right. And it put them like in this kind of predicament, right, where they couldn't they couldn't accurately report a loss on the downturns. And it was it just became accounting. It was an accounting nightmare. So it de -incentivized companies to put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Now, the other two things that Michael Saylor brought up, which would be major catalyst number one, was the Bitcoin spot ETF. Right. So we all know what's been going on with BlackRock in the news. We've been hearing it, you know, we hear rumblings coming out of the SEC, how, you know, it seems to me like they're running out of road, like they're running out of excuses. They can only delay this for so long. The grayscale lawsuit, you know, they got defeated there. So what's your take on this whole situation? Do you believe it's it's politically motivated from the SEC? Why do you think why do you think they're taking so long to approve a spot Bitcoin ETF? Yeah, I think that that I don't know if it's yeah, I guess in some way politically motivated or state motivated, I don't want to say politically motivated in the sense that I don't think it's one party versus another. I think it's more of the interests of the federal government and particularly the Fed Treasury impacting the SEC. And so I think that what I would say is it does feel like they're they're getting at the end of the road in terms of excuses and that the conventional wisdom with the likes of BlackRock coming in is that an ETF will get approved very soon. I'm someone who is just cautious around that. I think that there are very large, powerful interests that ultimately do not want Bitcoin to continue to even incrementally gain ground and kind of be a potential future threat to the dollar. I think that is ultimately what it is, not in a threat in a bad way, but in terms of competition, it's providing an option for people to opt out of endless fiat debasement like everybody is paying attention to Bitcoin is figured out. But that has consequences for the Federal Reserve, for the Treasury Department, for FinCEN. And I think that currently the SEC is basically the fall guy or the front man for other interests within the federal government that would rather not see Bitcoin proliferate via an ETF. And so even though typically BlackRock gets what BlackRock wants until an ETF is approved, I'm skeptical that it will happen in the short term. And I don't think people should necessarily or people should not be making investment decisions as to whether or not an ETF is or isn't going to get approved. Like maybe it's inevitable in the long run, but Bitcoin replacing the dollar is also inevitable in the long run.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"So in the introduction to Gradually Then Suddenly, I talk about how it was how Hemingway described the process of growing bankrupt. It's also how countries' currencies hyperinflate, as well as how people come to understand Bitcoin. And that functionally, a country, at a country level, is bankrupt, or at least they were bankrupt a long time ago. But when their currency hyperinflates, that's when it becomes apparent that at the country level, they're insolvent and that nobody wants the counterparty risk of their money. And it is how people happen to understand Bitcoin. I feel like people search for it, or I like to say it's difficult to see, but people focus in on it and they're hearing things from Bitcoiners, listening to your podcast, reading a show, but it doesn't necessarily click for them. The puzzle pieces don't come together. And then something happens. Either they consume one piece of information, one thing happens in the world where they connect a bunch of ideas together, and it's like a flash in the brain that says, ah, maybe these people aren't all crazy. And not just in a low probability way, but in a way that you could suddenly, even if it was a fleeting moment, could describe to yourself why Bitcoin could be money. And then the trick or the challenge is being able to consistently get back to that same point. That kind of happens in this flash where, again, consuming a video, a podcast, reading something, or Russia gets cut off from SWIFT, Canadian truckers get frozen from their bank accounts, Silicon Valley bank fails, is my money actually in the bank? So it's oftentimes a lived experience. In that moment, the pieces come together, but then you've got a lot more work yet to do to be able to reliably get back to the point of, yes, Bitcoin is money. Do you remember what yours was? Yeah, I do. It's actually hard to describe. But I was up in Wyoming with Will Cole. We had been listening to podcasts, talking about Bitcoin for quite some time. I had started to get there. But I was hung up on the idea that Bitcoin was too expensive, that how is everybody going to be able to get Bitcoin if, at the time, it was like $2,000 or something, or like $3,000. I kept trying to do it. Yeah, I think it was the end of 2016. $3,000. Maybe it was like $1,000. It was somewhere around there. And I was thinking, but how are a billion people going to get this if there's, you know. And today, it's difficult to go back and be like, oh, that was so illogical. But that was the thing that was tripping me up. And Will made this comment. We were literally coming off, we were leaving the ski slopes. And he was like, you know, realistically, Bitcoin needs to be worth about $10,000 in order for it to even be relevant. And he might have said it'd be relevant to large institutional people or banks, something like that. And for some reason, the way he said that, I connected that Bitcoin actually gets more valuable the more, quote, expensive it is, and therefore, it's never too expensive. But for whatever reason, I had been kind of coming around to the idea of Bitcoin possibly being viable, but it didn't make sense. And that comment about Bitcoin, I was struggling with it being too expensive, and Will made a comment that it needs to be worth at least $10,000 for it to be relevant globally. And part of that that I heard or connected was that as Bitcoin becomes more valuable, you can send more value for a lower nominal unit of the currency, such that as it becomes more valuable, it becoming more valuable is more realistically an output of more people valuing it. And as its value increases, thinking about it as if I could send $1,000 for 0.1 Bitcoin versus one Bitcoin, more people can send 0.1 Bitcoin around. Well, it doesn't just happen by imagining, it happens because more and more people in the world adopt Bitcoin as value and are willing to transfer and transact their actual real world value for a form of money that can't be printed, albeit that it's digital and it's hard to understand. So, yeah, for me, that was the one. It was like it all fit into place like that thing I had. I still had some work to do from there, but for whatever reason, that was a particular comment that made the puzzle pieces come together. Do you remember yours? So is the idea that the more expensive it is, the less risky it is? No, it's that the more expensive it is, quote, the more expensive, the more valuable each unit of the currency is. Oh, I see. And like one way that I would equate it is, and I might get my math wrong, but like at $1,000, you would need 10 Bitcoin to send $10,000 across the world over a communication channel. If there are 21 million Bitcoin, that equates to a certain maximum number of people that could send the equivalent of $10,000. But if Bitcoin were worth $10,000, then 10 times number of people could send that same amount of money. And so it's like if you think about how it actually happens is more people value this as a currency. The one Bitcoin becomes the equivalent of 0.1 becomes the equivalent of 0.01. And what that actually means is that the network is capable of facilitating more and more trade. Yeah, I get it, because you're just using much smaller units. Yeah, more people are adopting, more people have come to see, this is actually valuable, this form of money is more valuable than my other form of money. And as that happens, each on average, people have less and less Bitcoin, but the marginal unit, nominal unit is worth more and more. It's kind of the opposite of what you were thinking. Yes. Yeah. I was hung up with the opposite. Not enough people are going to be able to get this because it's too expensive. And I was like, oh, no, as more people adopt it, it becomes more expensive, but it becomes a greater utility because more people are adopting the form of money, which equate to more and more trading partners. And that's what money is there to do to facilitate trade and exchange. I had a similar one recently, and I'm still not sure if I've actually clocked onto something here. I was saying to Danny the other morning that, you know, save Bitcoin suddenly goes up to $200,000, and I was to sell 10 of my Bitcoin, $2 million, say. And that would be a significant part of my Bitcoin, but I would be highly incentivized to do it, even though I know it could go much higher in price. Because at that point, the amount of things I could do in my local town, businesses I could build or properties I could buy or investments I could do, I could have a meaningful impact. And, you know, I don't need infinite amounts of money. And I kind of had this moment where I realized that someone would be willing to buy the Bitcoin at that price, and I'm willing to sell it. And whereas within fiat, with this continued inflation, we've been borrowing from the people to try and put themselves in the same situation in the future. I can get off the train a little bit. I can take one step down now and do the things I want to do. And in doing so, somebody else is joining the network with that Bitcoin to try and do the same in the future. And it was kind of that reversal, and it kind of like, it kind of really hit me at that moment. You're investing in the present rather than taking from the future. And basically someone like in theory, like somebody who doesn't have Bitcoin is entering the economy. At the same time, you're taking your Bitcoin to produce something in the present to ultimately make the Bitcoin more valuable too. Yeah, but it's like handing the time preference bat on over. Right. I mean, because when you think about it, it's like sometimes not spending money is high time preference, right? I think too many people, not too many, I think I'll describe myself when learning these concepts. One of the things that was intuitive was that a lower time preference was associated with saving money. And I think that's part of it. But the other part of it is not spending money can also be high time preference, where it's like, imagine if you had nothing but only save money and you were just sitting there appreciating your stack of Bitcoin, but you didn't have a home that you could call home. Or imagine like, hey, something's broken on your car and you didn't fix it today. And then it broke down in the future and you had to spend 10x not spending today would be. And so in your case, it's like, hey, you've saved for a long time and now you can sell a percentage of your money, of your savings in order to invest in something real, right? Now, what you probably wouldn't do is take the 10 Bitcoin and just sell them for pounds and let the pound and be like, oh, now I've got two million pounds. I'm just going to watch them wither away. It would be to consume something in the present. And that's really what money is there for, to bridge the present to the future, intermediating a series of transactions. And it is always between money and real goods. And there's some people that have very little money and a ton of debt or a ton of assets, but no good money. And they're going to have to allocate out of that and actually get money. But that every Bitcoiner that's sitting there is doing the exact same thing. It's just that we've been saving for years, tolerating the volatility. As more people come into the economy, we will, on average, have to part with Bitcoin. People will basically bid it out of the current holder's hands. But it's also rational to say, oh, if I'm converting that into something that I'm going to consume in the present, we all have positive time preference. That was one of the concepts that I got from the Bitcoin standards. People have high time preference, low time preference, but everyone's positive because our lives are finite. And consuming in the present is not a bad thing. It's just make sure that you're also planning for the future. And that's what you would be doing if you converted some of your Bitcoin. You're consuming in the present for the future. We're also creating new allocators of capital with a different set of principles. That money's been hard to earn. That you've paid for. It's not borrowing from the future. It's something tangible, physical that you've saved. You're parting with it in an honest exchange to consume in the present. You're paying for what you're consuming in the present versus borrowing from the future. Yeah. And you're paying with past time, the time you sat on that. And didn't consume. And didn't consume. And so you come up with a different set of principles for how you allocate that capital. It's an interesting thing. Do you remember the things that flipped you? I remember only one thing, but I had zero knowledge of economics when I came into Bitcoin. And I do remember one kind of light bulb was thinking about fiat as a changing measurement for investment. And so if you're constantly changing the rule that you're measuring things with, how would you ever get some things solid? And the Bitcoin was like a fixed ruler. It's like Stephen Lupka, isn't it? He talked about it. I can't remember the first time I heard it. I've probably explained that badly. I mean, when I tried to explain what I hung up, I tried to write about this once and I couldn't get it onto paper well. Because the things that kind of confuse us or hang us up, I think are all similar but unique. And then the thing that allows us to unlock. Yeah, you might have heard something. 10 other people might have been struggling with something similar, heard the same thing and not had it unlocked. So I think that being able to explain something that otherwise in hindsight appears less clear doesn't matter what unlocks the mental blocks to see Bitcoin. But I think that that's fairly standard. So I had one moment in 2018. So 2017, I was first getting in. I was trading a lot of shitcoins. I bought everything. Everything, Dash and XRP and everything. I used to keep this spreadsheet of what I bought, the price I bought, the price is now the value. I used to track the value in dollars and Bitcoin. But every day I focused on the dollar price. And there was a time when my portfolio was going up in dollars but down in Bitcoin. And I thought I was cool. I thought this was good. So I'm increasing in dollars, increasing in dollars, and then the market crashed. And at my peak, I always remember the numbers. And my peak, or very close numbers, in my peak Bitcoin, this is quite depressing, the total value of my shitcoin portfolio went up to 186 Bitcoin by the bottom of the bear market at 18 Bitcoin. And that, to me, was a real trigger of like, that was a real lesson. I was like, shit, the game was to accumulate Bitcoin. The game wasn't to accumulate fiat, which I had thought it was. And that was a gradually then suddenly moment where I eviscerated all this Bitcoin. I was like, huh. And so ever since that moment, the game has constantly been to accumulate Bitcoin and kind of ignore the dollar price. Yeah, obviously, when it goes to $70,000, you're thinking of things I can do with that money. But generally speaking, and I haven't, and I don't think I'll ever get back to that the value of Bitcoin, stop thinking of it in the moment and consider it in the long term. And so that was a real changing moment for me. Painful. But at least what we want to talk to you about is like, you've talked about gradually then suddenly, and I'm starting to think a lot more about what then suddenly means. We had two Demis during yesterday, and one of the questions I put to him is, I don't know what then suddenly means. I keep thinking of the current world, but we have Bitcoin rather than pounds and dollars. But it's possibly a very different world. And I don't know what that world is. So I wanted to get into that a bit more with you, but also talk about the then suddenly trigger, what makes that happen. And we've been talking a lot about BlackRock on this trip. And the reason we've been talking about BlackRock is not that we think an ETF is a good idea. We've seen the issues with the Grayscale Trust, and I know they're slightly different. But at the same time, locking up those pools of Bitcoin rather than people holding self-custody is worse. But at the same time, the number one asset manager in the world flipping to be in a Bitcoiner, calling Bitcoin hope, saying it's money, saying it's the best money because it's global money. That is a signal to the world and signal to asset managers and to investors. But there could also be a signal there because whatever you think about ESG, if BlackRock don't want to promote the ETF, there's every chance they say that Bitcoin is positive on their ESG scales, which might flip further narratives in media. So it feels like it could potentially be a trigger that sends us towards the then suddenly moment. But I'd love to know what you think. So I think probably most fundamentally, and it's not like it's weird because I'm not rooting for this, but I think when developed country currencies hyperinflate is the other side of when there's a rapid, like the last cycle of Bitcoin adoption, that people in mass will turn to it when they have to, not when they want to. And thinking about when currencies fail and there's currencies failing all over the world today, the Venezuelan boulevard has obviously failed. The Argentine peso has functionally failed. The Lebanese pound is failing. The Turkish lira is on the way that those aren't the dollar, euro or yen.
What Bitcoin Did
"parker lewis" Discussed on What Bitcoin Did
"The end game of all of these currencies is hyperinflation, the dollar, the euro, the yen, every yuan, the ruble, all of them. But I think that when one of those currencies that's run by more of a developed nation, that that's when everyone is forced to adopt Bitcoin because it's the only thing that works. Happy Monday. How are you all doing? Did you have a good weekend? What did you do? I obviously had a whole weekend of football. The men drew with Cottfosters away, and the ladies had the start of their season with a massive 4-1 win at home against Stevenage, a very good team, so that is very cool. Before we get into today's show, I do want to tell you a little bit about our live show that's coming up in Sydney on September the 9th. We have Nick Bartier, Willy Woo, Checkmate, Rusty Russell and Dan Roberts all on stage. It's our first trip to Australia. So if you want to join us, please do head over to whatbitcoindid.com and click on WBD Live. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the legends at Iris Energy, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I have my good friend Parker Lewis back on the show. Now listen, Parker has been on the podcast a few times, and most of the time we've been covering his Gradually Then Suddenly series, a brilliant series of essays that he's written, which if you haven't checked out, where have you been, please do go and check them out. But when we were on Austin, we decided to get Parker in and talk about the idea that maybe something like a BlackRock ETF could be the trigger for the suddenly he has written about. So Parker is absolutely great in this. He's always great. You know that. You know Parker. He absolutely crushes it. And yeah, you got any questions about this, you know what to do. You can drop me an email. It's hello at whatbitcoindid.com. Enjoy the show.
What Bitcoin Did
A highlight from Will Blackrock Be Bitcoin's Suddenly Moment? With Parker Lewis
"The end game of all of these currencies is hyperinflation, the dollar, the euro, the yen, every yuan, the ruble, all of them. But I think that when one of those currencies that's run by more of a developed nation, that that's when everyone is forced to adopt Bitcoin because it's the only thing that works. Happy Monday. How are you all doing? Did you have a good weekend? What did you do? I obviously had a whole weekend of football. The men drew with Cottfosters away, and the ladies had the start of their season with a massive 4 -1 win at home against Stevenage, a very good team, so that is very cool. Before we get into today's show, I do want to tell you a little bit about our live show that's coming up in Sydney on September the 9th. We have Nick Bartier, Willy Woo, Checkmate, Rusty Russell and Dan Roberts all on stage. It's our first trip to Australia. So if you want to join us, please do head over to whatbitcoindid .com and click on WBD Live. Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin Did podcast, which is brought to you by the legends at Iris Energy, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100 % renewable energy. I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I have my good friend Parker Lewis back on the show. Now listen, Parker has been on the podcast a few times, and most of the time we've been covering his Gradually Then Suddenly series, a brilliant series of essays that he's written, which if you haven't checked out, where have you been, please do go and check them out. But when we were on Austin, we decided to get Parker in and talk about the idea that maybe something like a BlackRock ETF could be the trigger for the suddenly he has written about. So Parker is absolutely great in this. He's always great. You know that. You know Parker. He absolutely crushes it. And yeah, you got any questions about this, you know what to do. You can drop me an email. It's hello at whatbitcoindid .com. Enjoy the show.