bitlyrics

Boiling the Oceans – What does Bitcoin mining do besides mining?

March 2, 2024
ORIGINAL TITLE: What does Bitcoin mining do besides mining?
PANELISTS: Kent Halliburton (Moderator), Bert deGroot, Willem von Royen, Lauri Pispa, Jelmer ten Wolde
COMPERE: Troy Cross
CONFERENCE: BITCOIN ATLANTIS 2024

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction (by Troy Cross)

Our moderator is Kent Halliburton. He is CEO and co-founder of Sazmining, a hosted mining operation in Paraguay and the US. Kent, is a friend and someone I’ve worked with for a long time.

Bert deGroot, everybody knows Bert. Bert is probably known to many of you as the ‘Tulip guy’, heating greenhouses with ASICS. But he does many things and runs a company (Bitcoin Brabant) that provides a range of services to do with Bitcoin. He is also a great spokesperson featured widely in the media for Bitcoin and its potential.

There is Willem von Royen, an OG Bitcoiner, Bitcoin miner, engineer, and ‘right-curve’ guy who founded a company (Flowsolve) that promises to do something you never thought Bitcoin mining could do; prepare to have your mind blown completely. I won’t spoil the surprise.

Lauri Pispa, entrepreneur, and managing partner at E-Heat, which does District heating with data centers, it’s amazing and completely uncontroversial, or should be!

And finally, Jelmer ten Wolde, CEO of GreenTech, focuses on heat recovery and energy strategies. Jelmer is the kind of ‘Boy Wonder of heat’, self-described.

This is “what Bitcoin mining does besides mining Bitcoin”

Just a reminder, all the energy that goes into Bitcoin mining machines comes out the other side; energy is conserved it is a basic law of physics. I run into people who think that the energy coming into a miner is split between Bitcoin and heat, but Bitcoin is not a physical thing, it isn’t where the energy goes, and there is no ‘physics’ of Bitcoin itself. So, all that heat, all that energy has to go somewhere, and for the most part, Bitcoin miners don’t use it [heat energy], however, these folks do.

The problems Bitcoin mining solves

Kent Halliburton

Thank you for that intro, Troy. The first question we were going to ask, Troy answered fairly well which is ‘what Bitcoin mining does besides mine Bitcoin’. So, I think we should jump right into what your projects are. When getting to know everybody here on this stage over the last couple of days it is pretty clear that some unique dynamics in the EU are non-existent in the US and North America. I think it is good to highlight those, so I’d love to start just by asking Jelmer what are some of the unique dynamics that you experience and what problems are you trying to solve with Bitcoin mining.

Sustainable heating

Jelmer ten Wolde

The unique dynamics of the European market are primarily power-related and subsidy-related. So, to understand why we do what we do, you need to understand why it’s relevant. Right now, the European Commission, and the European bodies, are heavily pushing toward a carbon-free world. There are a lot of subsidies in place to go to electrified heating and sustainable heating, and they are putting a lot of weight behind this.

So, what does that mean? It means that hundreds of millions, up to billions [of Euros] are used to subsidize the installation of e-boilers, heat pumps, and a lot of other assets to provide, in their opinion, sustainable heat. There is just one big problem with this, in my opinion, it is a very ineffective application of financial support.

At the moment, because we have a company that also sells e-boilers, many of our customers don’t intend to run that e-boiler 100% of the time, they intend to only benefit from negative pricing. So, they only run the e-boiler when there is a negative electricity price so they can produce heat at an economically viable price. In Europe, they are predicting more negative electricity prices over the coming years due to the extensive build-out of renewables, but it still won’t be more than maybe 8 to 10% annually.

So, that means there’s a very heavy subsidy to run an e-boiler for a very insignificant amount of time (8-10%). If you then look at the power markets, right now we have a very extensive energy crisis in Europe, a lot of industries have been bankrupt. We have been paying €800/megawatt as a base load price for the last two years; it has been crazy! In response, a lot of industry left Europe, which reduced the demand side, but in parallel to that, we’ve been building out more and more renewables, subsidized, causing a much larger curve. This means that prices whenever renewables are active are much lower, often negative, which requires load balancing.

So, in Europe, we are creating issues for ourselves by heavily subsidizing a lot of power-related things, and there is no answer on the demand side. Well, there is one answer, I think we all agree on this panel: Bitcoin mining!

It is the superior heating form for sustainable solutions because Bitcoin doesn’t need a subsidy; Bitcoin is the subsidy. This is a very powerful thing for a lot of different industrial users, they don’t realize it yet, the ability to produce heat and get money for producing heat is not very well known. On top of that, the ability to balance the grid in the fast-response markets will further reduce your cost of power to zero; to mine for free in Europe is a wonderful thing.

Bitcoin mining for district heating

Lauri Pispa

I have the same problems you mentioned, so kind of hard to add anything. We started as a mining company and now we’re more like a heating company that provides data centers to people in need of service space, mostly Bitcoin mining. Of course, we are competing against other countries like America; the power is much cheaper than in the EU, and we had the energy crisis a year ago, so we’re just trying to get back to normal after that.

So to start, there is a huge amount of heat produced by Bitcoin mining, and we need to utilize it somehow; it is kind of stupid if it goes to waste. I understand that you cannot use waste heat everywhere in the world, but in Finland, at the moment it is very icy, soggy, and horrible. So, we need a lot of heating, and what better way to produce heat than with Bitcoin mining?

The efficiency of Bitcoin mining is 98-99%, so we are not wasting any energy that the miners use. In our prep panel, Jelmer perfectly articulated that we create double the energy. So, if you use one kilowatt of power for the servers [bitcoin miner], they use one kilowatt of power, but also it creates one kilowatt of heat. So, we kind of produced two kilowatts of energy, which is incredible.

The biggest problem in Finland, where I come from, is that Bitcoin is still seen as the energy-wasting industry. So, we just really need to show the politicians and everybody that Bitcoin mining is a good thing. This is the biggest hurdle that we have at the moment.

Boiling the oceans with Bitcoin mining!

Willem von Royen

Flowsolve is here because we use heat as a product. What we are building is a new miner that allows you to apply the zero law of thermodynamics more directly. We’ve been working on this for three years now and our first application is the distillation of water, for example, desalination.

The application of heat is anywhere you need an endothermic chemical reaction. Bitcoin [mining] makes the process more profitable, so we can boil water for pasteurization, distillation, potassium mining, lithium mining, and all of these things that require heat to separate water from whatever is dissolved in that water. We have been building a Bitcoin miner, a hash board (10cm x 4cm) so small you can add it into any heat application, to heat all the things, and boil all the water.

Bert deGroot

So, Willem will boil the oceans!

Willem von Royen

Literally, boil the ocean, that’s our first application: desalination. We take the waste brine, the very salty brine that you get from reverse osmosis, we boil that and separate that salt. So, instead of pumping it back into the ocean, we boil that water, and we get dry salt and water, pure water.

Bitcoin mining for the home

Bert deGroot

So for me, I started mining at home because I wanted to heat my home, super-small scale. These things are super noisy, so I had to build a box because the wife was not happy [with the noise] and from that point when the electricity prices exploded for my home mining and my heat at home, I had to find a solution and that solution was a greenhouse. I built an aluminum frame around it and put it on Twitter, it had half a million views, so the phone started to ring.

We implemented a few installations at locations where it made sense to use electricity instead of natural gas for heat. As was mentioned before there are heavy subsidies on electricity generation with renewables, so if you have excess electricity you don’t get paid for delivering it back to the grid. So it is better to mine [bitcoin] and use the heat.

At first, it was medium, small-scale businesses and then last year we refurbished S9 miners (five-plus year-old machines), we made them silent and we sold a lot of them to people who just wanted to mine at home using an open-source home assistant. So when they have a negative electricity price, they get paid as the miner switches on. They use a thermostat to heat the home to the temperature they want, they have excess electricity anyway so it is very cheap. We sold these machines for €200 each, just to show what the capabilities were.

Home mining is growing, people want to touch this and see what bitcoin [mining] can do. I hope to see this continue to grow and it makes sense at locations where there is excess electricity in combination with heat demand and where you can replace the natural gas use.

What are the future opportunities for Bitcoin mining?

Kent Halliburton

So, I got to say what you guys are up to is inspiring and I think that there’s some pretty specific dynamics here in the European Union that are making this innovation happen. Most people may not know that energy is much more expensive here in Europe. So to be competitive in the European Union, these guys are forced to innovate but what’s great about this innovation is that it will eventually ripple out to the rest of the Bitcoin miners in the long term. These guys are not only innovating but pioneering for all of us providing mining opportunities elsewhere.

Jelmer, I know you’re excited about subsidies and how they’re helping with the price manipulation, creating more opportunities. You are addressing the problems of today through Bitcoin mining, utilizing heat in various ways, whether that’s heating districts, heating homes, or desalinating water. All these different approaches are innovative today, but what about tomorrow do you see other opportunities that Bitcoin mining has not got to that we can address?

Does Bitcoin consume enough energy?

Jelmer ten Wolde

I think the unaddressed opportunities are still in heating because right now we are not Riot [Blockchain; mining company], we don’t have a one-gigawatt connection, we are modest miners, we are scaling up but we are still not nearly at that volume. What people tend to forget is that energy is a mix; heat represents 80% of the total energy consumed, whilst electricity is only 20%. If you go to the Jesse Pielke HashrateUp Podcast, he always answers with the question “Does Bitcoin consume enough energy yet?”

The thing is we couldn’t consume enough electricity yet, even if we wanted to decarbonize all the heat demand through Bitcoin mining. There is currently not enough electricity to do that, we need significantly more if we want to do heating. This example is to clarify that heat will be the opportunity, but of course, there are many more opportunities, one of the the big ones in the Netherlands is load balancing. In the US it’s becoming more of a topic of curtailment, but in the Netherlands, we use something called AFRR (Automatic Frequency Restoration Reserve) markets, which is a balancing market requiring a rapid response that not many assets can participate in, besides batteries and peaker plants, and we don’t have many of them! They often shut down in March because they also produce heat, and in March there is no demand for heat anymore.

Bitcoin mining and E-boilers can also participate, but E-boilers can only downward balance. So, you have two different load-balancing markets you have upwards and downwards. Downwards balancing is consuming energy when there is an excess, whilst upwards balancing is providing energy back to the grid. The good thing about Bitcoin mining is that it is a base load, so you can remove your load and provide energy back which is qualified as an upwards balancing activity. Right now the grid lacks a significant amount of assets to do this [upwards balancing] so it is paying very handsomely for people to participate in these markets.

This is the largest subsidy we get on our mining activities because it just brings down our price to a very low-cost, allowing us to make Bitcoin mining one of the most competitive heating sources on the market right now.

A year and a half year ago, I would not have given the same reasoning, because the energy market was just completely distorted by the energy crisis. Fortunately, it is stabilizing now and so we’re in a very unique, advantageous position; prices are low and demand for balancing is high. It is growing because as we continue to build out more renewables, we don’t have a solution as to where the energy should go, we are blindly focussing on installing more renewables onto the grid. At some point in the future, we will figure it out [demand balancing], we have already figured this out with bitcoin mining, and that is where Bitcoin mining in Europe can have a big role.

Industrial-scale heating

Lauri Pispa

So we are doing demand response in Finland. The AFRR is more of a Netherlands thing at the moment, it is also in Finland, but we are concentrating on the FCR-D Up (Frequency Containment Reserves). When the activation comes from the grid operator, FinGrid in Finland, we need to shut down from 2.5 seconds to 7.5 seconds, and then we need to get our power back in 15 minutes. The payment for this is quite a lot, and like you said, there are not many who can do this.

It is mainly hydro plants and E-boilers, but now the rules have changed, there are more shutdowns so it is getting harder. Grid balancing is one thing we can do in Finland, but heating is the main opportunity. In Finland, 44% of the heating is produced by district heating, so every small city has a district heating plant. It is not connected to the neighboring one so every city has its own. It equates to something like 33 TWh in a year. So something like 6000 to 7,000 MW every second is being used, and 88% of that is being produced by biomass burning, the fancy name for sawdust that comes from the paper industry. It is a good thing since the EU has labeled it ‘Green’ because trees grow back. But still, you are burning, so it causes a lot of CO₂ emissions.

Finland aims to be a carbon-neutral country by 2035, the district heating facilities are a big part of this. They need to find other solutions, other ways to produce heat, and this is where we come in. The electricity production in Finland is 100% based on renewables, it’s nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro, so we are closing the last coal plant next month, it will be on reserve. Then we will only have renewables, so we don’t have to find renewable sources, but we do need to tackle the higher electricity price compared to the USA, Paraguay, or Africa.

Since we sell the heat to the district heating networks we can get 1.5 to 3.5 cents out of it and you could buy electricity for something like 3 to 4 cents. So if you deduct this and add the demand response payback, we can get close to zero. That is what we need to do to compete against everybody else, figure out ways to increase the use of heat in more places. In addition to district heating, there are greenhouses and huge industrial complexes that can use the heat too.

The only problem is that we need to educate and show that Bitcoin mining is good. Every megawatt of use reduces 1,500 tons of CO₂ emissions If we move away from burning biomass. It is a no-brainer for district heating companies, and others, because we give them CO₂ emission-less heat, at a cheaper price than they can produce themselves.

Kent Halliburton

Before we go on to Willem, I’m curious because district heating is a relatively new concept to me, and I suspect it is for many in the audience as well, what is the history of district heating?

Lauri Pispa

Okay, so there is a huge power plant in every city. They have a reactor or a turbine that they burn the biomass in, and in some cases, it can produce also electricity but in others the plants are old and just produce heat. The price for this has increased quite a lot because of what is happening in Ukraine. So, we can’t buy it anymore from Russia and the price of biomass has gone up significantly. The district heating plant needs to produce temperatures of between 80 to 100°C. A pipe runs to every household that wants to be in the network and it goes around the whole city. It is a pretty simple concept.

Kent Halliburton

So it is another utility, in the same way, we have water, gas, electricity, and sewer. Heat as a utility is an interesting concept and makes sense how you can plug the heat output from your mining operation into that to help offset how much biomass needs to be burned to heat the entire District.

Lauri Pispa

District Heating is in multiple countries, of course in all the Nordics but also Switzerland and Canada. So it doesn’t stop in Finland, you can use this approach in multiple different countries, mostly Northern climates.

Kent Halliburton

Willem, how about you, what future opportunities do you see available for Bitcoin mining with your organization?

Water purification and mineral harvesting

Willem von Royen

So, the issue District heaters have is March, they have to shut down, as you don’t have a base load demand for heat. So what we are saying is if you have extra power, you switch from heating water to purifying it. Instead of burning biomass, where you have a nuclear power plant that’s just generating too much energy, just move that into purification because we could all benefit from a cleaner Planet. The water out there is toxic, it’s very bad, so that is one of the problems we’re trying to solve, to disrupt water purification using Bitcoin mining as a tool.

Kent Halliburton

You mentioned something interesting in the last answer you gave, about opportunities with lithium production and other kinds of minerals. I am curious to know more about those and how they impact the battery industry, for example.

Willem von Royen

Potassium feeds half our planet, four billion people depend on potassium as a fertilizer for food production. So, the way we mine Potassium (Lithium is the same thing) is you pump 2 million liters of water into a cavern underground, that then mixes with the rock underneath, you pump the water out, and you place it into an evaporation pond. You wait 18 months for the water to evaporate, what you are left with is Potassium chloride, which is then scraped off and sold. What we are saying is that instead of losing 2 million liters for every ton of Potassium chloride or Lithium carbonate, use the same water, so are not losing it to the atmosphere.

So we want to close the water loop, because this normally happens in the desert, In Utah there is a little town called Potash (image of potash pontoons), where there is not enough water and you are pulling 2 million liters per hour from the Colorado River. If you stop doing that, stop using evaporation ponds and just evaporate the water using energy [Bitcoin mining heat], instead of having the pond, you build out solar energy [using Bitcoin mining heat] to evaporate the water.

Kent Halliburton

So basically over time, Bitcoin mining harnesses more energy, and I use the word harness intentionally because I think that it is incumbent on us as an industry to stop saying we ‘consume’ energy because I think that’s a false paradigm. We are harnessing the energy and generating economic value. What I hear you saying is that as we grow that energy base, as the network price grows, and the hash price grows, there is this economic opportunity that we can remove a lot of the drying ponds, and all the different things that we are using for water separation. So, Potassium salts (potash) for fertilizers, that can help feed us directly, could come from a byproduct of Bitcoin mining. That is incredible!

Getting hotter

Bert deGroot

So the question about the future is high temperature, that is the issue we all have. It is partially being solved with higher temperature [ASICS] machines that can achieve temperatures of 60 or 70°C, and at some point, they will even reach boiling point. I think that will be the critical thing where we will see Bitcoin mining being implemented more and more in the built environment. Currently, we have a master’s student at MIT who is investigating 62°C input temperature into an elderly home, where a high temperature is required because the elderly home cannot be refurbished, it’s an older building. So, the temperature that has to go into the system has to be this high, meaning we can replace natural gas with an installation of around 80kW Bitcoin mining rig, which would make sense.

Most people would say “a heat pump would be better here”, but when you move to higher temperatures the efficiency and cost of running a heat pump are relatively high. This makes the business case for Bitcoin heating better than for heat pumps. When the Master’s thesis is completed, we would like to build this setup as a test case and implement this more at other sites. The future is increasing the working temperature of the ASIC chips so that they can be implemented in industrial processes. As you move the temperature scale Bitcoin mining becomes more competitive, compared with heat pumps. So, yeah we will see growth in Bitcoin mining especially when we are using these high-temperature chips.

Lauri Pispa

I wanted to add that legacy data centers already produce District Heating and other types of heating. For example, in Finland, and other countries, the efficiency is around 30 to 40% whereas we reach almost 100%, so there’s a huge difference between us and them.

Perspectives on the major blockers of progress

Kent Halliburton

So as I’m sitting here listening to all you guys a couple of things are coming out of the conversation. One is that there are some challenges, that need to be overcome for us to continue to proceed to grow and innovate beyond what you guys are already doing. One of those is education. Another, I hear, is an engineering problem how do we concentrate the heat, right? How do we get to those higher temperature levels? I’d love to hear your perspective on what the major pain points or blockers are for you to progress and grow your businesses further.

Temperature limitations of miners

Jelmer ten Wolde

Yeah. I think there are a couple. The first one is indeed the temperature range. So before WhatsMiner came out with their immersion models, the generic temperature outlet that you could achieve was 60°C, which is considered very low in the industry and very difficult to integrate as a “secondary heat source”. Right now we can get to 68-72°C and people are experimenting with 78-80°C. That is considered to be high, into the range of high temperatures that would solve a lot of the issues of integrating your system into an industrial heat application.

Secondly, I think one of the most complex things is commercial. So if, for example, you look to integrate with a district network, the main issue they face during commercial discussions is that if you preheat their power plant, they will use less fuel. You might say “but that’s the whole reason you’re doing this, we want to reduce CO2”, correct? However, they also produce electricity, they made a legacy investment that they want to amortize over 15 to 30 years, the moment they start producing less electricity the return on investment is decreased. They often split the electricity distribution entity from the heating entity so there is a conflict of interest between those two parties making it difficult to align all the interests of all parties combined. It’s the same with greenhouses, we do a lot with greenhouses, they have gas engines that create electricity so at the moment that there is an arbitrage they give you the electricity and they could also sell that electricity so there is commercial value.

People tend to be very focused on those outlier opportunities and say “Hey but I could make €200” but that is only one hour in the day and they forget the other 23 hours. So for us, it’s primarily about finding the right combination of different commercial frameworks that ensure everyone is aligned, everyone is happy and everyone gets what they want. So we can make a project where all stakeholders are satisfied, that was primarily the challenge over the last two years, to find out how the commercial framework looks. In my opinion, we have defined it now and we are executing upon that framework but in most conversations that is the bottleneck.

Political resistance

Lauri Pispa

Same issues again. One more thing that is good for the heat company, the greenhouse, and the industrial complex we are warming, is that we plug into the same electricity connection. In Finland, the monthly fee is high, so the more consumption you have, the less you need to pay, so we enter providing them cheaper heat, CO₂ emission-less heat, and even lowering their transmission fees because we plug into the same connection. So there are three pros for them.

At the moment I would say the only problem is to turn the heads of the politicians, because in Finland each district heating company is owned by the city, and politicians are on the board. We have been negotiating for years and you might ask well “If you get to like zero cents of energy price why isn’t everybody?” Well, the answer is it’s just not that easy to walk in and say “Hey we’re going to do this”. They are very conservative and have done these things for the past 20, 30, 50 years and this is a very new thing. You need to not only show that it’s working but it’s proven, so to me that is the hardest part for us.

The temperature is the second thing, we need from 70°C to 100°C water. We have in some cases heat pumps, but the heat pump is the most expensive cost in the whole project, so of course we prefer not to have the heat pump. So we are trying to figure out different ways, for example, using the district heating to return water, just like preheating. That is one option, but then of course they pay less, so you would want to produce water that is primed enough so they can use it directly in the network.

ASIC efficiency at high temperatures

Willem von Royen

Okay, so the problem with Silicon, like computational Silicon, is that at 190°C it ceases to be a semiconductor, it’s just a dumb conductor. So that’s the limit for silicon. There’s a lot of research in using different materials like Gallium nitride or Silicon carbide which have junction temperatures up to 650°C, which is 200° above nuclear-safe shutdown! The lithography processes are still low for these materials. So the hotter you get, the more application you have.

So, our absolute limitation at the moment is 185-190°C where you no longer have a smart element anymore, it’s just a heating element. So, yeah, that’s our limitation and we can lean into that because there are loads of applications [for heating] up to 190°C.

Kent Halliburton

So, we’re faced with this challenge of not only chip efficiency in terms of energy efficiency but also with the physical limitations within the chips themselves. It seems that is what is keeping us from going higher with the temperatures and reaching more applications in the heating area, fascinating, how about you Bert?

Moving to sources of excess energy (decentralization)

Bert deGroot

So, a different issue, if you look at the mining rigs that we use, they are all relatively large scale. So, if we want to do this on location, especially in Finland, there is a lot of solar and so people have excess electricity. In the future, they will probably put a battery in place, but you want to utilize the battery fully, so a lot of the time of the year you have excess electricity. You want to match this excess electricity with the miner, miners at the moment are not modular for smaller-scale operations, so we don’t have efficient couple hundred-watt modules that we can just plug in and steer based on this flexible load.

Using home assistant we make it work with the current firmware integrations, but it would be nice to see more development on that side so we can bring the bank home to the people. There is a lot of excess electricity, especially in Europe, local generation is not being fed back to the grid, where they shut down the generation, so let’s make use of that electricity and do it with smaller-scale solutions. That is what I hope to see scale because that would also be cheap.

Current limitations of ASIC chips

Willem von Royen

When you are looking at heat applications, when [ASIC] chips get hot, it’s not the heat so much that causes the damage, it’s thermal stability. So, when you make a chip hot and then it becomes cold, there is expansion and contraction of the physical material that causes damage. So as long as you can keep it at a specific temperature you can compute at 150°C, but keep it there, stabilize it and that’s why we’re doing it. It is not a cooling system, it is a thermal management system so that’s the problem that we’re trying to solve.

Lauri Pispa

I think in hydro [water-cooled] system because the water temperature is starting to get high, but the PSU is on the limit. So, I think the machine can handle it, but the PSU is on the limit so we need to test more and figure it out, I think we’re waiting for your system, [Willem] we are very keen on it.

Willem von Royen

That’s why we built it. I mean that’s the whole thing, the whole design around this was how do you make it stable, how do you make it cheap, and how do you make it fast in that order. It has to be those three things otherwise it’s not viable, so yeah, I think we’ve achieved it but time will tell, it’s definitely very modular.

Jelmer ten Wolde

But I think that’s the primary problem we all face we are brute forcing an application that’s not been designed to do what we want it to, into a mold of heating. When I started doing this in 2018-19, we just took the miners modified them rammed them in immersion at temperatures they were not generally very healthy. The S17s had quite a few issues at that stage, but we needed the heat and couldn’t go at lower temperatures. You see the efficiency drop in your miner chips, so you mine not at 90 J/TH but at 29-31 J/TH. There are downsides to heating with the current miner ecosystem, there are developments right now that are going to change this.

There are multiple organizations, and companies, working on miners that can handle higher temperatures, and chips that don’t lose their efficiency at that level. But it’s also the PSU that needs to be able to handle it and all the components inside, I think we are getting there, and with microBT [WhatsMiner] putting their weight behind this, stating it as a strategic mission of theirs, this will eventually change. They [MicroBT] are the market makers right now, they are controlling the market, so if they say this is what we’re going to do, at some point, it will happen. This might take 5 years, might take 10 years, but it is going there, the miners will change. Then we don’t have to modify the miners into some Frankenstein solution, we can take off-the-shelf solutions and focus primarily on building, generating, and decarbonizing the grid.

The common misunderstanding concerning Bitcoin mining

Kent Halliburton

Beautiful. Well, I mean, really what I’m hearing and gathering out of this conversation here today is just how substantial the engineering problems are and how there is a huge amount of opportunity for us to optimize mining around heat, which we have barely scratched the surface of. I think this is a fascinating topic. We’ve got just about four or five minutes left here, and I’d love to go around the panel quickly and have you guys wrap up by just sharing with the audience something you wish was commonly understood about what you’re doing.

Jelmer ten Wolde

It’s a tough question. I think what would be great for us is if people understood the ‘why’. In the Bitcoin industry, all the miners, or most of the miners, let me paraphrase that, don’t understand the ‘why’, because they go out, they find the site, they put down their miners, they don’t care, they run it, they don’t care, they look at their margins, they’re happy, and they go home to their wives, to their bed, and they don’t think about this for any second. But we are addressing an issue here. We are addressing a problem in the EU and having a very technically viable solution. You know, certain companies in the mining industry are now slowly starting to put their weight behind this, which is also allowing us to tap into deeper capital pockets and do this at a much larger scale. I think in the next year or two, a lot will change, and then the why will become much more known and understood, and also perhaps a vantage point for discussions on why the others are not doing it.

Lauri Pispa

Yeah, at least in Finland, we are close to Sweden and Norway, and what happened in Sweden and Norway was that these miners came, and since they were using spare electricity and they weren’t able to transfer it [heat] to, for example, Southern Sweden.

In politicians’ minds, you’re just using the energy and you’re not using the heat, so that is why they introduced a data center tax, which now makes it harder to mine, it makes it harder for everybody even the legacy data centers. So we need, to not only mine, but to use the heat and demand response and all of this.

We are still a young industry and we need to show everybody that we are worthy and can help people also. I think it’s great what everybody is doing here and this is just a small part of it, we are all from the heat world but everything I heard before, there are so many different things that Bitcoin can do and it is great!

Willem von Royen

Okay, so the thing is, as a company FlowSolve, we acknowledge that we simply don’t know everything. We can’t know. We have some very obvious applications for the heat but the reason we built this, like it is, is that a user of a Bitcoin miner might have a different use case for it. So it is our remit to make it easier for you to apply that computational heat to your own use case, whatever that may be, and of course, we can’t always know that. And yeah, we want to see your stuff being built.

Kent Halliburton

Fascinating. So you guys have built a primitive that then others are going to use to build on top of.

Willem von Royen

Exactly. It’s like Lego, like building blocks, so you know you decide how it’s going to work for you. Yeah, I’m excited to see human creativity on this one as well. How about for you, B?

Bert deGroot

Yeah, as I said, I want to bring the bank home. So I would love to see that we integrate mining close to home for many people so that you see the bank back in the local areas again. The physical touchpoint of Bitcoin is often forgotten, and just having every city, let’s say rural area, or wherever there are communities, we could build solutions where the physical touchpoint of Bitcoin makes sense.

So, thinking of Bitcoin bathhouses, thinking of the district heating, thinking about excess electricity which we cannot put on the grid currently because the grid is not capable of handling it. These kinds of things make sense and when we scale up on that, and Bitcoin is integrated into that story, then people physically feel and see what Bitcoin is doing. Of course, on the other side, Bitcoin is solving a lot of other issues that are good for the environment because it takes consumption down but we just physically have to show this narrative of ‘boiling the oceans’, that it is positive because we need more energy generation. Bitcoin is going to facilitate this and we can bring that back home, so that’s what I hope to see.

Jelmer ten Wolde

In two years, the crowd will be as busy as with the Michael Saylor talk except it will be all about heat.

Lauri Pispa

I wanted to also add, that we need to work together even though we are somewhat competing in the space we are in. So, in the early stages, with everything that we can still share, and you are not my competitor, you are potential collaborators. There are so many places we can go to, so many projects, and we have so much heat to produce, so much.

Bert deGroot

It’s all about proof of work, right? And all of us are engineers, so what we like to do in the end is build something, run it for quite a while, and then show it. That’s the way we do it. We’re not marketing machines, we just want to show that it works. So that’s how we are moving forward and we need to cooperate more. So, on a very tiny scale, what we saw in the Netherlands was we had a small mining group, just a couple of people, and that grew rapidly to hundreds of people, and they are all doing this at home and sharing everything. That is how we exponentially grow the knowledge and that is how it is going to be implemented in the space. So it will grow exponentially, and that’s what we need.

Willem von Royen

I think the biggest respect you can pay an engineer is to run their hardware. We look forward to that, and, you know the future is bright and hot. Bitcoin is so hot right now.

Kent Halliburton

Wrapping up here, I’d like to just point out that this is proof of human ingenuity right here on this stage. I mean, what these guys are doing is the future for all of us in Bitcoin mining, I am bloody proud to be here to see it and sit on the stage and learn more from you guys. So, thank you so much. Thank you.

Summary (by Troy Cross)

Troy Cross

Isn’t that cool? I think these guys undersell what they’re doing.

Willem is distilling water with Bitcoin mining. I’m flabbergasted. If it works, if it scales, that’s insane. How many regulators have even thought about the possibility of distilling water with this thing that they think is evil? Zero.

There is more to come because we do a lot of things with low-grade heat. We do a lot of different things: electrifying heating, mitigating methane, balancing grids, incentivizing renewables, incentivizing new build-out of energy. Just think about what you’ve heard.

This is what’s weird: there’s a lot of reputational risk around this industry, a lot of reputational risk. I know a lot more stories than I can even put up here because some of the people doing this stuff don’t want to jeopardize their relationships in business or with the government. After all, the B-word trips people. So we have this weird catch-22. We have incredible stories, we have incredible facts, but we can’t even tell them all because it would jeopardize relationships, because of this weird stigma attached to Bitcoin mining.

I mean, frankly, it’s crazy. I’m a philosopher. I teach epistemology and metaphysics. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and I teach social epistemology. This is a weird social epistemology phenomenon. We know things collectively, not just as individuals, and our collective knowledge system is malfunctioning. Part of what we are doing here, trying to do, and maybe you can be a part of, is fixing the social epistemic dysfunction. That is what we’re trying to do.

This is an amazing story that you just heard. Where does mining move in the future? Well, if you’re not making use of heat, your waste heat, and others are, and they’re getting paid for it, you’d better have some cheap power. You better be getting some other revenue stream, right?

So part of the epistemic dysfunction is that we formed ideas about what mining is during a particular time and place, that was China banning mining, booming the price, everything moving to the US, huge data centers, and not paying much attention to the price of power. But what you’re seeing is the future of mining moving to the edge of the grid, moving to alternative revenue streams, and that’s the story we have to tell.

Follow the panelists: Kent Halliburton, Bert deGroot, Willem von Royen, Lauri Pispa, Jelmer ten Wolde
Watch the original content: Click here
Also read: Crossing The Chasm: Early Adopters To Mainstream
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Introduction to Bitcoin

March 1, 2024
_{Introduction to Bitcoin}
_________________

INTRODUCTION

Alright, how are you guys doing? All right, let’s do this. It’s cool to be in Madeira, Portugal. I appreciate you guys having me and I’m really excited. As Preston said, I’m going to need you to open up the conference, really entertain, come in with a big punch and talk about bitcoin 101. I was like what the fuck does that mean? You want me to spell it? What does bitcoin 101 mean? He was like, “I don’t know, I have no idea!” What your job is up there is to really introduce people to bitcoin. How can you, in a weird way, put together a presentation that hopefully educates, inspires, and introduces what this whole bitcoin thing is about. So I still didn’t know what it meant, but around the time that Preston reached out to me, the Satoshi Nakamoto emails had just come out, the new ones. I found these emails fascinating, in particular this email, and in particular this part. Bitcoin now is 15 years old and there’s all sorts of altcoins, and cryptos, and there’s proof of stake, and proof of time, and proof of history. But, when these emails resurfaced, for me personally, it was a reminder of how important proof of work is. Satoshi in an email said:

This email has to perk everyone’s ears. If that’s true, then how can Ethereum work with proof of stake? How can Solana work with proof of history? If that’s true, we really need to understand what the creator of bitcoin meant by that? So that’s why for my bitcoin 101, what I’m going to try and do is a very ambitious presentation. I’ve got quite the appetite. But, we’re going to try and break down Satoshi Nakamoto’s innovation of using proof of work to create bitcoin. Understand why proof of work is absolutely necessary to have internet money and therefore why altcoins that don’t use proof of work are scientifically broken. That’s what we’re going to try and do together in 35 minutes, okay?

WHAT IS BITCOIN

A failure to understand proof of work is a failure to understand bitcoin. I have to give a shout out to my dear friend Gigi, the great bitcoin philosopher. This presentation is almost an extension of all of Gigi’s work so I reached out to Gigi and I said “hey do you mind if my bitcoin 101 is using a lot of your stuff?” and he was like “I’d be honored!” So shout out to Gigi. This presentation is really in part to him and this presentation is all about. Understanding proof of work so that we can deeply understand bitcoin.

What is bitcoin? The most impossible question to ever get asked. It’s no one’s job to tell you what it is, it’s your job to tell you what it is. It’s what’s in the eye of the beholder. It’s whatever someone wants it to be. However, for this presentation what I’m going to do is tell you guys that bitcoin, in the words of Gigi, is money, plus time, plus energy, plus information. Don’t feel disrespected if you think bitcoin is something else besides that. You have that right. But just bear with me for this presentation, this is what bitcoin is today for the next half hour, okay! We’re going to walk through each of these in detail to understand how Satoshi constructed bitcoin and why if you were to remove any of these, bitcoin would not work. If you remove something like energy from bitcoin, like if you switch to proof of stake, the system would fail. We’ll walk through each and we’ll understand it all and hopefully the conclusion will be why bitcoin is the only internet money.

WHAT IS MONEY

Money is the first section. What is it? Another impossible question. What you guys need to know is that money is information. Let me try and explain the best I can in a few minutes. Let’s say that we have a tiny village on the river and this village has a population of two. One grows apples and one grows wheat. Now let’s say they go to trade and they say would you be willing to trade 10 apples for one bag of wheat? The wheat grower says “yeah of course, sure.” So you have this village of two, the economy is very simple, one has apples, one has wheat, and they exchange. Now let’s say the population of this village doubles. Someone who grows cattle moves into the river village, and someone who makes boots and clothes moves into the village. The apple lady goes, “hey, I got 10 apples again, can I get a bag of wheat?” The wheat man goes “No! I want a steak for my wheat, I don’t want your fucking apples all right.” She goes, “well that’s a problem because all I have is apples.” So she goes to the guy with all the cows and says, “hey can I give you my 10 apples for a steak?” and he goes “I don’t like apples.” I can tell you what though, I’ve been working hard in the field and I need a new pair of boots. She goes damn it, fine. She goes to the guy that makes boots, she says all right “I got 10 apples, do you mind giving me boots, please!” He goes, “yeah sure I’ll take your apples for boots.” and so then what she does is she trades the apples for the boots. She trades the boots for the steak. She trades the steak for the wheat.

What do we learn here in understanding all of this nonsense? It’s that barter is extremely inefficient. What we call bartering is an economy without money. Barter is inefficient and extremely time consuming. It is very difficult to exchange a large number of goods and services through barter. Barter suffers from what we call “The coincidence of wants” which is do you have what I want and do you want what I have? It doesn’t allow for the division of labor. In barter you can only have an economy of two, you can’t hyper-fixate and build something really particular because they may not coincidentally want what you’re making. So in order to have a really big economy the takeaway is that we need something else and we cannot just exchange the goods that we’re creating. So what do you guys think we need to support an economy? Today we live in a world of 8 billion people, not two. I mean how many people are standing right in front of me, there’s not two of us, there’s a lot. We need a medium of exchange. We need money which is a medium of exchange. It’s a market good that you acquire, not to consume it, not to eat it, like an apple or wheat, but to use it to exchange later. So if our apple grower were able and had access to create apples and exchange it for money, then she can hold the money and then always exchange it for what she would need in the future. Money solves barter. Money is more efficient and it makes trade easier and it scales the economy. It really solves the coincidence of wants where I can make something and you don’t need to want what I have for me to exchange. Can you imagine if I walked into the grocery store and I said “hey, I’ll work on Strike Europe tomorrow if you give me a steak!” What would they tell me? Go fuck yourself, I don’t care about strike Europe. Money solves the coincidence of wants. I can work on Strike Europe tomorrow and get paid money for it. I could take the money and I can go get a steak. A multiple choice question, money is more efficient than barter, makes trading easier, allows for us humans to specialize on things, or all of the above. All of these are correct.

GOOD MONEY

Now what makes a good money? Again, a very complicated, very ambitious topic. But for the sake of this presentation, this kind of breaks it down.

A good money needs to be durable. It has to last through time. All the units have to be the same. You cannot have a money where one unit is different than the other. It has to be portable. So you have to be able to custody it. You have to be able to transport it. You have to be able to verify it. It has to be divisible. You have to be able to make change. It has to be hard. Hard to create more of. And the most important property is that your money should maintain its value as you save it. As we learned through the village of the apple grower, money is important to scale an economy and this is what money needs to have. So the better the money, the better the society, the better we can all trade.

The more we can all focus on our interest and building something very specific, very well. Now, were apples a good money for that lady? Well no! Clearly not. Apples aren’t very durable. There are different apples. Maybe you like green apples, maybe you like red apples. Each unit is not the same. They’re not very portable. They’re not very divisible. How do you make change? Like, thank you for your purchase for one apple, your change is 0.27 apples! They’re very hard to make change out of. They don’t last through time.

So we arrive back at this idea of money is information. What makes a good money is it records who owes what to whom in society. Throughout the history of humanity we’ve had primarily two forms of money technology that we’ve been able to use.

We’ve kept lists of things of who owes what to whom and we’ve used physical tokens, like an actual item to record who owes what to whom. For example, an item we’ve used is gold. Gold is a money and it’s an item. How do I know who owes what to whom? If I have 100 ounces of gold, the world owes me 100 ounces of stuff. What are the problems with gold? It is good money. Gold’s very durable. Each unit of gold is the same. However, gold’s not very portable. It’s not very divisible. It is hard though and it does keep its value relatively over time.

Now what about a ledger? For example, what about the US dollar? The ledger is portable. It is divisible. But, it’s not very hard. It loses its value over time. So this is the kind of the world that we live in today as far as money goes. Obviously apples are bad money but we’ve tried all sorts of ledgers and we’ve tried all sorts of physical tokens and things. The problem is that ledgers are very very efficient. They scale to all 8 billion of us but they require trust. Tokens don’t require trust. You don’t need to ask anybody to own gold, or spend gold. But, they don’t scale to all 8 billion of us. They’re not very portable. They’re not very divisible. What’s an example of a ledger that we use today? All of the fiat currency. So the federal reserve keeps a ledger. The European central bank keeps a ledger. The bank of England keeps a ledger. The central banks are all these ledgers of who owes what to whom. They get to keep track of that. What’s an example of a token? Gold, maybe silver, seashells, salt has been used before. We get the idea. One is information. One is a physical object. They’re not necessarily the same thing. This quote is a very important idea.

It’s different than an apple and this shows you that the information exchange is very different than exchanging a physical object. Information money is very different than physical money and very easily copyable. So the thing about a token is I cannot move it over the internet without a trusted party. It can’t scale to all 8 billion of us. It can’t be put on my iPhone. Gold can’t go in my phone. I can’t put gold in my brain. But the problem with a ledger is that it has this double-spend problem which is that if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange that information, we’ve inflated the supply and we both have two ideas. A ledger might reflect reality and it might not. The federal reserve can go back and change history. Someone who operates a ledger can know the future and use it as Insider information. So it requires trust. So tokens don’t scale and ledgers require trust. Keep bearing with me here, we’re almost there.

SATOSHI’S FIRST STEP

So which of these did Satoshi Nakamoto try and create? Going back into his emails and his earlier work. Satoshi writes about historically people have taken up scarce commodities as money and talks about tokens. Satoshi says:

Until now no scarce commodity, no token, can be traded over a communications channel, he’s talking about the internet, without a trusted third party that’s been available. That’s what we just talked about. You can’t move gold over the internet you need these information lists that require trust. If there is a desire to take up a form of money that can be traded over the internet without a trusted third party, then now that is possible.

Even in the white paper Satoshi refers to bitcoin as electronic. He talks about it as a chain. What Satoshi realized and what I want you guys to understand is that in a digital world if you want money to be on the internet you’re talking about an informational realm. The internet is about information. Satoshi’s describing that you can’t put gold on the internet. If Satoshi wanted to build a digital scarcity, which he clearly did, he would have to build a list, not a token. Can you imagine if Satoshi was introducing Bitcoin and I created this physical artifact, like his own physical coin. Of course not. He had to create a ledger. Money was invented as a lubricant for the barter system but were way overdue for a lube and oil change.

That was step one of Satoshi inventing Bitcoin; first understanding money. Why does barter not work and why can’t we barter with 8 billion people. If we can’t, and we need money, what makes a good money? If we’re going to make the best money, is it going to be a list or are we going to invent a token, a physical good, like an artifact. So the first step for Satoshi Nakamoto was understand what money is and then realize that we need to create a list.

DIRECTIONAL TIME

The next section is time. This is where I’m really going to fuck your brain up but just keep bearing with me here.

If you look at the bitcoin whitepaper, Satoshi talks about time a lot. So these three out of eight references are about time. So almost half of the references in bitcoin are about time.

If you look at the third section in the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi talks about it as a timestamp server. I actually just love Bitcoin history. You know if I’m ever not working on Strike, I want to be a bitcoin historian.

If you look at the comments that Satoshi put in the initial code of bitcoin, he talks about bitcoin as a time chain. He does it multiple times. Proof of work to everyone and the block is added to the time chain.

Time is clearly extremely important to Satoshi Nakamoto in creating this invention. Why? Why do you guys think that’s the case? It’s because in order to have a list of who owes what to whom, you have to have the absolute order of the transactions. If I have $10 and I spend $10 to my friend Bob and then another $10 to my friend Carol, one of those transactions is invalid, it won’t go through. So the question is, which one was spent first? Does Bob get the money, or does Carol get the money? It’s incredibly important to have a sequential order in time of a list. So the question then is if Bitcoin is a distributed system, who’s in charge of its time? This is why Satoshi was so focused on time. It’s very subtle to understand how bitcoin was built by Satoshi Nakamoto but it’s super important that if you’re building an independent system that has no outside influence, who’s in charge of time?

Is Bitcoin’s time from a clock? Is Bitcoin’s time on my iPhone? If my iPhone dies, is Bitcoin going to stop working? Does Bitcoin keep time on Joe Biden’s laptop or on Amazon’s web servers or with Elon Musk? This is the problem. If you’re creating a money list, a ledger that’s going to keep track of who owes what to whom and it needs to be truly decentralized and distributed, who’s in charge of time?

What Satoshi came to the conclusion is that Bitcoin has to create its own fucking time! That’s the mind blowing thing about this invention is he said I can’t trust anyone else’s time because that time can mess with the system. So in order for Bitcoin to be its own independent digital money, I have to create my own time. So now we’re going to get into time. The only thing I need you guys to know about time in this whole presentation is that it has a direction. Hence the term “arrow of time.”

Time has a direction, there’s an “arrow of time”. All this means is that the past is different than the future. I was younger in the past, I will be older in the future. I remember the past, I cannot remember the future. The past I cannot change, the future I don’t know. Do you understand? This is what’s called the “arrow of time.” Time moves in this direction.

Now in the physical world this is very obvious. As I just explained, nobody can go back in time to when they were a kid and nobody knows where they’re going to be 20 years from now. But, the key thing about the physical world that makes society work is that the past is certain and the future is unknown. If that was not the case. If we all knew the future and we can all go back in the past, we’d all be fucking dead at this point. It’s the atoms in the universe that allow us to live through time like we do. The problem is in the digital world we don’t have time. All we have is information. The physical world is built of atoms in the universe and physical things. The digital world is just built of bites of data. So in the digital world, for the number 10, I do know the number before it and I do know the number after it. If numbers were time, I do know the past and the future. I would be able to know the future is 11 and the past is 9. If I were watching a movie, I could rewind time to the beginning scene of the movie or I can fast forward time to the very end and watch how the movie ends. So the problem is in the digital world, we don’t have this “arrow of time.” So if bitcoin’s going to design its own time, I sound like a nut job. But, if Satoshi is going to design his own time, I want you guys to understand, we don’t need a precise clock like we’re running the olympics. We don’t care about milliseconds, this is not what we’re looking for. Bitcoin needs an “arrow of time” as I’m describing. We need to somehow replicate the time we have in the real world. We need to somehow have an unchanging past and an undetermined future.

Satoshi talks about this. He says proof of work is the only solution he’s found to make this a reality. To implement a distributed timestamp server on a peer-to-peer basis.

To translate that into normal speak. What he’s saying is, if I’m going to fucking invent time on the internet without any trust, we need to use proof of work. It is the only way that this is possible.

PROOF OF WORK

What is proof of work? Proof of work is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort on their part. For those of you that don’t know what that means, this is my version of it in “Jack-language”, proof of work is proof that you did a certain amount of work to guess a random number. The person verifying that can make the work as hard as they want and they can verify it instantly.

Now the reason that Satoshi uses proof of work and that this is so so so important. Is that this is a piece of data that the digital world can understand. Let me go back for a second. The digital world doesn’t understand atoms, it doesn’t understand energy. It doesn’t have an arrow of time. If I’m counting numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I know the future and I know the past. So the internet, the digital world, the bites of data, doesn’t know what time is. The physical world does because of atoms because of energy. What Satoshi is saying is that proof of work is the only way for us to take energy from the physical world, from this world, and turn it into a digital thing that the internet can understand.

Proof of work doesn’t require trust. Someone can give me proof of work and I don’t need to trust that they did the work. I can verify it myself. Proof of work can be done by anyone. Any of you can do it. You don’t need to get a degree at a college. You don’t need to give me your resume. Anyone can do it. It has unforgeable costliness just like gold does. This is what gives bitcoin a commodity premium, it’s costly to do the work. It allows bitcoin to establish an undisputable history of events.

The future work is unknown and the past work is easy to verify. The key to bitcoin and Satoshi unlocking this whole thing and why we’re all here is that he found a trustless piece of info, a trustless piece of data that can be produced by the physical world, with atoms and with energy, linking this universe to his digital scarce money. Satoshi writes, “in this paper, we propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions.” So proof of work gives bitcoin its “arrow of time.” If you actually look at bitcoin blocks, all they are are transactions and the proof of work as a timestamp. Bitcoin’s just a timestamp server. Satoshi is etching time with proof of work. If you look at the actual Bitcoin blockchain, we can watch this. You can see the purple is the known past that cannot be changed, the orange is the uncertain future.

When you guys use a bitcoin wallet and your transaction is unconfirmed, that’s what that means is we don’t know the future, we can’t change the past and we are living in the eternal now. So this motherfucker Satoshi Nakamoto created digital time. Insane!

Now, is he done? Has he solved time? Can we move on to the next topic? Almost, super close. There’s one last piece. In order for us to have distributed consensus. Again, we’re building a money that’s information. It’s a giant list. In order for all of us to be able to agree on the sequencing of that list, we have to keep in mind of the speed of light. I’ll come back to this because this is why shitcoins don’t work, like Solana, so this is important. The speed of light is around 50 milliseconds and this is the fastest information can travel okay. So the reason that Satoshi was almost done solving for time in a digital realm is because think of bitcoin, the blocks are like a clock. Every single bitcoin block is like tick… tick… tick. Each block is like bitcoin keeping track of time. If the proof of work remained the same difficulty, more work would speed up the clock. If we sped up the clock too fast, we would violate the speed of light. All of us wouldn’t be able to get into consensus in a distributed way because bitcoin would be moving too fast. If bitcoin was the same amount of difficulty, someone could get a lot of energy, plow it into Bitcoin, speed up Bitcoin’s clock and leave us out of consensus. Satoshi talks about this, and says, “to compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest of running nodes over time (so nodes here he’s means miners), the proof of work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they’re generated too fast, the difficulty increases.”

Why are Bitcoin’s blocks 10 minutes is because Satoshi Nakamoto created time and then slowed it down. 10 minutes is an arbitrary number. But, 10 minutes is long enough to make sure that we’re accounting for the speed of light and that Bitcoin isn’t moving too fast for all of us to agree on the ordering of transactions. But, it’s also short enough where it’s a decent user experience that people aren’t going to get super fucking pissed off. That’s how he got to that solution. I don’t know who said this quote, someone super smart, so shout out to you whoever did this, “difficulty adjusted proof of work is what makes Bitcoin a decentralized clock.” Satoshi says, “as computers get faster and the total computing power applied to creating bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to the new production constant. Thus it is known in advance how many new bitcoins will be created every year in the future.”

Once you understand that Satoshi created time, you now understand why bitcoins are stuck in time. This is how we know when bitcoins are going to be issued. This is why it’s the hardest money ever.

Gold is stuck in the ground. Bitcoin is stuck in time. Do you guys understand how mind boggling that is!

This is why if there’s enough demand for gold, we will find more in the ground and we can dig it out of the ground. When someone digs up gold, they didn’t create it, they found it. All the gold already exists, there’s just more in the ground if we want to go dig it up. Same with bitcoin. All 21 million of it already exists but you can’t dig it out of the ground. You gotta dig it out of time.

So if you want to find more gold, you just need to get more tools to dig it out of the ground. If you want to find more bitcoin, you got to solve mother fucking time travel. Do you understand? That’s why we’re at $60k right now its because Wall Street wants more bitcoin and they can’t travel to the future and get it. Satoshi Nakamoto, I mean the undisputed greatest guy of all time, created his own version of time, slowed it down so that all of us can agree on the ordering of transactions, and then he set a monetary policy, the hardest ever, that sticks a physical money in time, not in the ground, insane! You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!

ENERGY

Money and time, those two sections were the hardest. That’s some crazy shit right there, that’s tough!

Energy. So bitcoin’s not totally done yet.

What’s important to understand about energy. Proof of work requires computations. Proof of work is just guessing. It’s a lot of work to guess a random number and these computations require energy. Therefore, proof of work requires energy. There’s no way to do the work without energy. I think you guys all know, I mean not everyone’s a physicist, but everyone is not stupid, right. Everyone knows energy is the currency of the universe. In physics, energy is the quantitative property that is transferred to a body or to a physical system. It’s how we measure the universe. Energy is distributed fairly and accessible to everyone. This is why it’s very important to bitcoin. All of us have access to energy. If you’re born, you got energy. You can’t fake it. You can’t cheat it. You can’t argue with it. You can’t dispute it. Requiring energy gives bitcoin its unforgeable costliness. The fact that proof of work requires energy is the reason that it has an unforgeable costliness like gold. That it has a commodity premium like gold. That it’s hard to make more of. It’s because all of us have access to energy but no one can print it. It’s very fair and you can’t argue with it. Through proof of work, it’s the energy, like the atoms in this universe around us, that connects the real world to the digital bitcoins. When people say bitcoin’s not backed by anything. No…no…no…no….no…no…no…. Bitcoin has atoms from the real universe, it has real energy in it.

Proof of work requiring energy is the reason proof of work cannot be cheated and what connects bitcoin to the outside world. It’s actually the fact that energy spent on proof of work is why you can’t time travel in bitcoin. Remember bitcoin’s “arrow of time.” So if you look at the known past, the reason you can’t time travel in bitcoin and go back into the past is because of the energy that was spent to create it. When people say you have to redo the proof of work, all of the past is protected by energy and you cannot time travel in bitcoin. It’s the same reason I can’t time travel today. I wish I can go back in time 15 years ago and start mining bitcoin as soon as Satoshi released it. But I can’t, that’s impossible! The reason it’s impossible to time travel in bitcoin and say I wish I went back. I said on a podcast recently I bought a painting for six bitcoin once, that was one of the worst decisions of my life, that thing’s not worth $300,000, you got to be out of your fucking mind. I wish I could go back to that past block and change that, but I can’t! I can’t because of the energy piece.

This one blows my mind a little bit, this ones fucking crazy. Lists of money that we know like the federal reserve or the European central bank or the bank of England. These are lists that reference energy in the outside world. These are all just pieces of paper. So when Jerome Powell comes out and says I’m changing the interest rate, that didn’t require any energy! What do you guys think goes into a fed meeting? Jerome Powell is probably like “are we going to raise the rates, or lower the rates? All right, now what do you want on your pizza?” It doesn’t require any energy! But Bitcoin with proof of work, the energy from the outside world is put into its list. So the federal reserve’s list points to energy outside, the energy outside in bitcoin is internalized into its list. You understand? Crazy! Crazy!

So we’re building bitcoin, we are all Satoshi. So firstly Satoshi had to understand money. Understand barter and what was going on. Realized that he needed to create a list instead of a physical token. He had to create his own “arrow of time” with proof of work. He had to slow time down so that we can all get into consensus. He set a hard monetary policy that was stuck in time. Then he uses energy through proof of work to create unforgeable costliness to make it a commodity premium like gold and then uses energy to defend the past. So that you can’t travel through time in Bitcoin. You cannot go backwards in time.

INFORMATION

Now the last piece is just more fun for me, is information. Because of all of this, the information is the asset. When someone says “bitcoin is a bearer instrument” it’s a physical instrument. The thing that racks no-coiner’s brains is they’re like, “where? Where is it? I can’t see it? I can’t hold it? I can’t touch it? I can’t sit on it?” That’s because the information is the asset. When you look at a map of the world, it’s not actually the world. Can you imagine? I flew here from Chicago, it was ridiculous. It was like 12 hours. If I could just use a map and just drag my finger from Chicago to Madeira, that’d be great. But the map on my phone isn’t the actual world, I have to go get on a fucking plane. But in bitcoin, the map is the world. The map is the territory. The data is the asset. The literal physical information is the money itself.

So if you look at the list and the token and how we talked about they’re not the same, the difference between the federal reserve’s list of who owes what to whom and gold’s coins of who owes what to whom, they’re very different. But in bitcoin the list is the money and the money is the list. The only thing we can move on the internet is information. It’s the only thing we can teleport. But because of this, because information is now money, the map is the territory, the data is the bearer instrument. We can teleport value. We can put value in our head. So I got to take another shot at gold bugs. Gold is stuck in your butt, bitcoin is safe in your brain! How would I get gold through the airport? I can’t put it in my brain? My ear hole isn’t wide enough. It’s got to go up my butt, I guess. But the fact that the data is the money allows for amazing things. We can teleport data instantly. We can put a physical money in our brain.

BITCOIN IS LIKE CHESS

So the last piece of information that I couldn’t resist because you guys know I’m a chess player, is Bitcoin is like chess. What I mean by that is that chess as defined is a turn-based strategy game with no hidden information. So even your opponent knows your moves. There’s nothing to hide. Chess has very strict rules. You play by the game and it’s all information.

Like E4 is a valid chess move, you guys know that from me. I love saying E4… E4… E4. It’s a real chess move, it looks like this. Now if my opponent were to say, “Qd4”, queen to D4, that would be an invalid move. The queen can’t make that move. That’s not allowed.

This is a valid chess game. These are all just chess moves, they’re just data. Bitcoin is like chess, it’s just data. This game is actually played out and is the game of the century by Bobby Fisher, it’s one of my favorite chess games of all time. So all you need is the data to understand chess and if you try and make an invalid move the chess consensus rules don’t allow it.

So bitcoin is the same way. All you need is the information. If I go back, to give you all of the historical information in bitcoin. You could download the blockchain and you can play every single move through bitcoin’s “arrow of time.” All it is is information, the information is the asset.

CONCLUSION

This is how Satoshi created bitcoin. He first understood money. Then realized you need to create a list. Then created his own “arrow of time.” Then slowed down time for consensus. Set a hard monetary policy stuck in time. Used energy to create unforgeable costliness. Use energy to defend the past. Made information the actual asset which allows us to censorship resistant teleport value over a communications channel like the web.

These are my favorite takeaways and there’s a lot to unpack here. This is so much fun to put together and present for you guys but some takeaways here.

Difficulty adjusted proof of work is the Innovation – Proof of work is what connects the real world to bitcoin. If you don’t have proof of work, you don’t have atoms that are in the real universe in your bitcoins. This was the unlock and the new Satoshi emails and the new emails that were just released. He talks about it, he’s like this the only way I could figure out how to connect the real world to my digital money.

No proof of work means no real world value.

The other cryptocurrencies that don’t use proof of work, scientifically cannot be money – What do I mean by that? Solana uses proof of history, whatever the fuck that means. Ethereum uses proof of stake now, it doesn’t use proof of work anymore. I googled this morning, when was the last time Solana went down? It was like Tuesday! Solana face’s its 11th network outage in two years, it goes down all the time. Why? Look at how fast their clocks are moving, not their blocks.

Block chain is a scam, stop saying that! Time chain… time chain … time chain. Bitcoin is time! Satoshi created digital time. He created a digital clock. Look how fast their clocks are moving, 400 milliseconds! Solana isn’t accounting for the speed of light. The reason it fails so much is because they’re not able to get distributed consensus. The clock is moving too fast! So whenever a shitcoin is like, “oh we made a faster bitcoin.” They’re lying to you. They’re violating the speed of light. So next time, send someone this presentation and say no … no… no … no. Solana scientifically cannot be distributed money, according to the speed of light, not according to what your fucking favorite influencer told you. I don’t know what Ethereum and Solana may be. These things are technologies, maybe they are securities, I have no idea. But they’re not money, they’re clearly not money.

Bitcoin’s issuance is stuck in time – This is why bitcoin’s going up so much. You can’t find any more in the ground, you’d have to travel, you’d have to invent time travel to find more bitcoin.

Bitcoin is built on time which is our only scarce resource

Blockchain is a scam – Stop using that word. We should call it the time chain. That’s what Satoshi called it

Energy defends our past

It’s a censorship resistant way to teleport value

Thank you guys.

Watch the original content: Click here
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
The technology of bitcoin

March 1, 2024
_{The Technology of Bitcoin – Ben Perrin – BTC Sessions}
_________________

INTRODUCTION

Jack Mallers is amazing when it comes to coming out here and telling you the “why of bitcoin” and that’s really important. But you know what’s also very important, is actually taking action after learning why bitcoin is so important, learning the how. That’s what this presentation is. It is how do you take action, and use bitcoin, and become self-sovereign. So who is this presentation for? This is an odd one because everybody is at a different point in their learning journey. What I’m going to say is that the entirety of this presentation isn’t for anyone but parts of this presentation are for every person. I want you as an observer to follow through with this presentation and I want you to see where you are in your learning journey. I want you to zero in on what you’ve understood and then when you get to the part where I lose you, that’s your homework. That’s the part where you say this is the next thing that I tackle. You don’t need to know everything in this presentation, but I want you to take whatever the next step is for you individually.

At the end of this presentation there’s going to be a QR code that will lead you to a video playlist of step-by-step tutorials on literally everything I cover on this stage today. You can go to that playlist and you can spend the next year on it and level up like nobody else.

OVERVIEW

Bitcoin is about sovereignty. It’s many things to many people but in some form it’s going to give you some type of sovereignty. That might be from bad monetary policy, it might be from legacy financial gatekeepers, it might be from motivated thieves, or tyrannical regimes, or with the right tools, even from infringements on your privacy. What are the latest tools that you can begin utilizing today to obtain, use, and secure bitcoin in a self sovereign way? The goal here isn’t to be perfect but it is to learn and improve gradually one step at a time using the tools that best suit your individual goals. It is time to level up. Here’s a little overview of what we’re going to be doing and this is you at the end of the presentation.

We’re going to make yourself as sovereign of a bitcoiner as possible and you can attack this from many different angles but these are a few of the areas you may want to dabble in.

Number one is obtaining bitcoin and many of you obviously have bitcoin here but a lot of you have probably obtained it through KYC (know your customer) exchanges where you have to give up your personal identification to do so. That is fine but you may also want to explore how to obtain bitcoin without having to do that. You may want a little nest egg that is just known by you and there’s a lot of reasons you might want to do that. So we’re going to be talking about that. We’re also going to be talking about holding bitcoin in a non custodial way. Holding it in a self-sovereign way where you control the keys to your money. Also, securing bitcoin with hardware. What is that? How do you do that? Verifying bitcoin by running a node. A lot of people have heard the term running a node. Can you show me the hands that are running a node in this audience right now. Damn! Look if somebody beside you just put up their hand you should pat them on the back, good for you guys, that’s amazing. Also, remaining private by using privacy tools out there. Coin join, UTXO management, new systems like Chaumian and Ecash and top of bitcoin which is something very new that many of you may not have tried. Also, we’re going to be touching on using bitcoin day to day. Onchain transactions may be prohibitively expensive at times and we’re leading to a place where for onchain transactions you actually have to think about am I being efficient in how I use the bitcoin blockchain. Things like lightning, liquid, Ecash, Fedimint. These are things coming down the line that you may be using more and more day-to-day, if you’re living on a bitcoin standard eventually. Also, spending bitcoin and what I mean by that is building those circular economies. Building your local communities so that you can do so and what kind of things you can fill those gaps when that falls short. Then also locking down your bitcoin for long-term savings not just for yourself, but for your family, for your grandchildren, and for future generations.

OBTAINING BITCOIN

Let’s dive and chat about not just obtaining bitcoin, but obtaining non-KYC (know your customer) coins. Getting some private bitcoin that you just know about. It goes without saying that leaving coins on an exchange is a bad practice. You don’t want that counterparty risk. You don’t want to leave your money with somebody else. Not your keys, not your coins! That’s a common saying. But what about using exchanges at all? If you are concerned about data on your holdings falling into malicious hands, and that could be government, or otherwise. You may want to consider using non-KYC methods to obtain at least a portion of your bitcoin and perhaps having buckets of risk in and how you do that. Some good examples of how to obtain non-KYC bitcoin we have Hodl Hodl. We have tools like Bisq and Robosats and Peach. These are all, more or less, peer-to-peer ways in which online you can link up with people, send them payments, and use whatever means necessary. So you can send a payment via a traditional payment rail, but it’s not linked directly to a honeypot of information that stores the information, “oh, so and so, bought bitcoin on this date.” No. It’s just you sent somebody money! There’s no explicit purpose to it stated in a database somewhere. Some other options. Of course local meetups, peer-to-peer for cash, what a fantastic way to obtain bitcoin. You can mine, although prohibitively expensive if you have expensive power. I’m from Canada so I need extra heat, so we’ve got our space heaters humming away getting us some KYC free sats. I don’t know how much that pertains to Madeira, but if you live somewhere cold that might be a good option for you getting a little space heater. Even if you’re just kind of breaking even or you’re getting paid back a little bit for the expense of the electricity to use that you would have used on heating anyways, it’s not a bad way to stack a few extra sats. Finally, what I think should be the most obvious way of obtaining bitcoin, but sadly is not, is earning bitcoin for what you already do. Every person here has a job, every person here has a skill, a service, perhaps a business. Every person here has at least begun to recognize that bitcoin is better money. Why in the hell would you not ask for it for the skills that you already have. Why would you not accept it? So if you’re not doing that already, you should. You should make it known. You shouldn’t just kind of put it to the wayside, but you should make it your mission to state, “hey, I’m happy to accept bitcoin” because if you build it, they will come.

Now in regards to some of these services, these non-KYC, peer-to-peer options, there’s people here from all over the world and some of these services can be restricted based on location. But what I’ll say is they are indeed available in Various Places Now (VPN)! Do with that what you will.

SELF-CUSTODIAL WALLETS

Let’s chat self- custodial wallets. One of the first things you’re going to do once you obtain bitcoin is you’re going to want to learn how do you self-custody it? How do you even get a wallet? What are you going to use? There’s a lot of great options out there these days when it comes to either mobile or desktop and you’re probably going to be using a combo of both. They do vary in user experience. Some are more advanced, some are more simplistic, and some hide the advanced features in the background. But some of the features you may want to look for is:
1. The ability to manage multiple accounts not just a singular balance
2. Tools in and around fee management as onchain fees can kind of fluctuate and you need to be privy to that
3. Support for hardware wallets
4. Privacy controls baked in are always useful
5. The ability to have both hot and cold wallets simultaneously on a single interface so you have something for spending and something for saving.
Some of these are examples of the ones that I use most frequently.

I cannot say enough good things about Sparrow wallet. On the surface it looks scary but if you’ve gotten to the point where you know how to set up a basic wallet, write down some words as a backup, and recover, you know what a send and a receive button is, you’re familiar with a QR code, you can start by focusing on just those things and ignoring the bells and whistles. But then as you begin using the wallet more and more, every once in a while, ask a question, “what’s this little extra feature right here?” The medium becomes the teacher and I think that’s one of the coolest things about it. So if you haven’t tried Sparrow wallet on desktop, I encourage you to try it. A lot of you may not realize that if you’re using a hardware wallet with its own software you can in tandem try it out with Sparrow wallet at the same time without having to get rid of the other one. So maybe you’re using a Trezor or something with their Trezor suite, you can pop it over into Sparrow and try it there and just see what it looks like with a different interface and if you don’t like it, you can go back. I encourage you to try.

Other ones for mobile, one is Nunchuk. I love these guys and they’ve got a spot near and dear to my heart and they were very helpful in Canada a couple years back and they build an excellent software wallet. Also Blockstream Green is one of I’ve been using even more lately. The good old default for a lot of people is Blue Wallet and I do think it works incredibly well.

CHOOSE YOUR HARDWARE

Let’s chat hardware. So obviously getting your non-KYC sats into your own custody is fantastic but once you start building up a little bit of a balance you’re going to want to secure your bitcoin and you’re going to probably want to do it with hardware, especially for long-term holding. Most devices are going to do the trick. It really comes down to your personal preferences and what works best for you. Anything is better than nothing. Try not to get analysis paralysis and just sit and not take action.

Let’s talk about a few of the things you might want to consider when you’re deciding on what hardware to use.
1. Do you as an individual like the interface? Is this easy for you? Do you like how it’s done? Does it have all the features that you need? How are the buttons placed on the device? What’s the screen like? Just, do you like it?
2. Is it open source? I think that’s an important thing. Can you audit the code or at least can anyone audit the code even if it’s not you having that skill, personally? Are there eyeballs on it? That’s another thing to consider.
3. Does it have a secure element? This is a chip that holds the keys to your money and it’s segregated from the rest of the device. That’s an important feature that for some people it may be a make or break decision if it has one of those.
4. Is it bitcoin only or does it have that option for the firmware. Why Bitcoin only? One I’ll say is there’s an opportunity cost when your wallet vendor is spending a lot of man hours on supporting every single token under the sun and constantly working to keep up with 8,000 different blockchains and proof of stake Solana. There’s an opportunity cost to that so you’re probably not getting the best bitcoin experience if they’re focusing on all of that. Secondly, with greater complexity comes greater attack vectors. Since you may be opening yourself up to stuff that you don’t want to if you have a wallet vendor that is busy supporting a million shitcoins when they should be focusing on your bitcoin security.
5. Can the device be used without having to use proprietary software or does it at least have the option to do that after setup? Certain devices you may receive it and right away you’ve got to use their app to set up the device and then if you don’t want to use the app afterwards, you can migrate. Other devices, there is no default app that you use and out the gate you get to choose your interface that you’re going to use with it. That could be also something to consider for you.
6. Can you do things like hidden wallets with a passphrase or decoy wallets using pins to get to different accounts so that if you’re under duress it leads to a smaller separate balance. There’s a lot of different cool features that you can get from a lot of these different wallets and it’s up to you to kind of decide what’s important to you and is it useful.
What we’ve touched on so far I’d say are going to be your key tenants
1. How do you get bitcoin
2. How do you self custody first with a hot wallet
3. What hardware are you going to use
If you get to that point, you’re already killing!

LIVING THE BITCOIN STANDARD

Let’s go a little bit further. I’ve been living on a bitcoin standard since 2020. So four years now I’ve been living on bitcoin. I’d say 90 to 95% of my income is bitcoin, I pay my bills with bitcoin, I do everything with bitcoin and it’s ever changing. I’m not saying that I don’t jump through hoops to do it and if it wasn’t for the ideological drive to preserve the fruits of my labor but also just my aversion to dollars and fiat, you know there’s a number of things that come into play there.

You do have to also consider how you are using bitcoin efficiently for those day-to-day transactions. When we’ve seen fee spikes earlier this year and I’m doing multiple transactions a day, three, four, five, and if an onchain fee is going to cost me $50 on certain days, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is where certain mechanisms can help you in and around that.

LIGHTNING NETWORK

Lightning network continues to grow and it allows for cheap and instant payments. It allows for some sender-side privacy improvements. Self-custodial mobile lightning wallets have come a long way and there’s some incredible options. Phoenix, Mutiny, Breeze, Zeus, all of these you can basically start up on your phone and you’ve got a mini lightning node just running on your phone. That is a massive improvement from having to plug and play and set it all up and manage channels. There is a bit of a tradeoff when initially getting onboarded because you are going to be doing some onchain transactions to get what are called lightning channels. It is automated for you now so there’s less to consider there but there is going to be the occasional onchain fee when dealing with it in exchange for not having to rely on third parties to hold any funds for you.

LIQUID NETWORK

Liquid is something that we’ve seen a little bit more of as of late and it’s not for everybody. Depending on how purist you are, it does allow for faster and cheaper transactions. It does add some privacy in terms of shielding the amount that is being sent across the network unlike onchain bitcoin you can always see what’s being sent. There’s some privacy in and around that. Some wallets like Aqua, which just recently came out, they’ve kind of made payments of lightning and liquid seamless so that if you receive a lightning payment or you receive a liquid payment it’s just one unified balance. As a user you don’t really need to think too much about what is happening you can just kind of use the wallet and go. There are some trust trade-offs that are beyond the scope of this talk but I encourage you to at least peek at it and then make your own decisions around it.

Finally, there’s a lot of people that do get onboarded through custodial lightning wallets and if you’re doing tiny transactions of a few hundred sats and playing around, there are examples like Blink, Alby, and Wallet of Satoshi, and coinos, and others. They are obviously going to be the cheapest and easiest to set up for that initial transaction and that initial foray into bitcoin. But, you are surrendering custody to a third party and it’s important to be cognizant of that when you’re making those decisions. At the end of the day, if you’re using bitcoin regularly, you’ve got to consider the risk of everything that you’re using and then use the tool that is best suited for the amount of money you’re using and for your own personal risk appetite.

CIRCULAR BITCOIN ECONOMIES

In the realm of using bitcoin day-to-day, I did want to touch on of course creating circular bitcoin economies. There’s many ways to begin living on a bitcoin standard if you do want to start heading down that road as I have. Some examples of websites and initiatives that you can use to remove yourself from the fiat economy that can help bridge those gaps for you: Bitrefill, The Bitcoin Company, Coincards, these are places where you can get gift cards for more or less anything that you need and you can pay with bitcoin via lightning. You can also find local merchants through a variety of different apps, Orange pill app, BTCmap.org, Satmap.app. These are all different places that you can go to find local merchants, or online merchants, or as I alluded to earlier, list yourself there.

Then I think the most important thing you can do is that you can go to your local meetups and that you can start initiatives yourself. What I’ve done at home is, we’ll say sort of selfishly, I go to my meetup regularly and at the beginning of the meetup I’ve now started going up in front of everybody and saying, “hey, I’m looking for the following thing and I want to be able to pay in bitcoin. Does anybody here do this or offer this?” You’d be surprised in a room of bitcoiners, that already have jobs and already have businesses and offer services, how often you’ll find somebody and if you don’t find them in that room through a “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” kind of way, I guarantee you someone in the room is going to know somebody that does that thing. Even if they’re not a bitcoiner yet, guess what the next topic of conversation is going to be? I was at the bitcoin meetup the other day, somebody wanted a haircut and they wanted to pay in bitcoin and the barber down the street goes, “Oh, humm!” They may not bite initially but that’s going to spark some curiosity and you may just have a barber soon enough. Start those local initiatives. We built something in my home city of Calgary called the Saturday market and within three weeks we managed to round up 35 local merchants to come together to create a local market just through the tactic that I mentioned. Just based on the bitcoiners in town, a lot can happen very quickly if you hit the pavement and you actually begin asking. If you don’t ask, nothing will happen and if not you, then who?

Side note. You guys are doing great so far. If you go on BTC map.org and check out Madeira, there’s a ton of merchants and I was very pleasantly surprised when I touched down here. What I’m going to say to everybody in this room; if you have a business here locally, even if it’s not locally, even if it’s back home, go on BTC map.org tonight and list yourself and then figure out how am I going to accept bitcoin. If you build it, they will come. I’m excited for the next time I’m here and I get to show this map and it’s filled in like three times as much.

FREE SPEECH AND FREEDOM MONEY

Let’s put together free speech and freedom money. Another good way to begin building a strong bitcoin community is through Nostr. This is a new form of permissionless and censorship resistant social media. Bitcoin lightning transactions are natively baked into a lot of the clients and instead of liking posts you actually zap people tiny bitcoin transactions and give them little tips. If you have not tried Nostr yet, I highly encourage you check out something called Primal. It’s probably the easiest initial onboarding that you can do. You can set it up in a couple minutes and it has a bitcoin wallet baked into the app. Furthermore, if you want to top it up with a few sats, you can hit buy bitcoin in the app and it defaults to a small amount of dollars or a few Euros but it tops you up with sats and then you can start tipping people instantly and receiving tips for any of your posts that you put on Nostr. I highly encourage you check it out. If you’re looking for alternatives to Primal, you could also check out Damus on iPhone, and Amethyst on Android. Both of those are super awesome as well. Nonetheless, start poking around. Nostr is a really cool tool in its very early days and a lot is happening.

PRIVACY TOOLS

Now we’re getting a bit further into the weeds, let’s chat about some privacy tools. It’s very likely that a lot of you have already obtained some KYC bitcoin and there’s some degree of record of you having owned bitcoin. But you do need to know that there are some privacy implications to having done that. Furthermore, whenever you use bitcoin onchain and somebody knows your identity, in doing so, them or other third parties can begin to paint a picture of how much bitcoin that you own. If that’s a concern of yours, you can use various tools to help preserve your privacy. You may want to explore things like coinjoin, coin control, also known as UTXO management. Then you may want to dabble in a few other types of tools. I mentioned earlier something about Ecash, there’s a couple cool wallets where you can play around with that. You can also check lightning which has some sender side privacy benefits. Liquid has some amount based privacy benefits but they’re not perfect. These tools all have varying degrees of privacy with various tradeoffs. It’s a spectrum and it’s very difficult to be perfect but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good and start trying out some of these tools today. One form of coinjoin is whirlpool you can do that through Samurai wallet on mobile and it’s also baked into Sparrow wallet on desktop. Other forms of coinjoin include Wasabi wallet join market. In terms of Ecash, I would encourage you guys to check out Enuts wallet and Minibits is another cool one. Then finally, when it comes to lightning and liquid, you guys can play around with some of the previously mentioned stuff.

NODES

Alright let’s chat nodes. I’m preaching to the choir here, half the audience is running a node already but bear with me, we’ll fill everybody else in here. A full node, what is that? It’s simply you running a copy of the bitcoin software which hosts the entire history of bitcoin’s transactions as well as a copy of the rules that govern the network. If you are not running a node you are trusting someone else to do it for you. So what can you do when you run a node?
1. You can connect your wallets to it. If you’re running Sparrow wallet or you’re running some other software wallet you can take your wallet and say “hey, instead of looking at some other person’s random copy of the blockchain, look at the one that I’ve downloaded, that I’m hosting myself.” That’s where you’re going to check for my balance, that’s where you’re going to check that all of the transactions I’m doing and I’m receiving are in line with the rules of the network. Nobody else is telling me that.
2. You will no longer be leaking your transaction data to an unknown third party. When you do a transaction and it routes through somebody else’s node they get to see somebody from this IP address sent a transaction for this amount or somebody from this IP address asked about a balance. If somebody wanted to log that information, they could begin painting a picture of somebody that owns a certain amount of bitcoin.
3. You can also protect yourself from anyone trying to change rules of bitcoin like the 21 million cap. Basically if you’re running a node and you’re pointing your wallets towards your own node, that economic activity is looking at that rule set. if somebody wants to change the rules of bitcoin and say “well there’s going to be 42 million now.” If you’re looking at your own node and you’re looking at those rules you ignore what somebody else is trying to change. It gives you a degree of self-direction and a degree of certainty that this is what I believe to be bitcoin, these are the rules that I’m going by, and if you try to change them, nobody can force me to change the software on my node.
4. Then on top of this, a lot of these devices that you could get now that are plug and play, you can run a ton of other great bitcoin apps alongside them. So not just point to your copy of the blockchain, but you can host your own lightning node and learn about channel management, you can host a copy of mempool.space showing all of the data in the mempool. You can host things like join market for privacy, you can do a whole bunch of different things and you can also host other self-sovereign applications; your files, your passwords, your photos, Nostr clients, AI stuff, and you can do all kinds of cool stuff that isn’t just bitcoin.
Some of the options out there. If you want to try for free, just download bitcoin core on your computer and then link Sparrow wallet to it and you don’t need to spend any money. But, if you want all those additional applications and playing around, some of the options out there I really enjoy; Start9 is what I run. But some other awesome options out there; Umbrel, Mynode, RoninDojo. Each one of those has kind of their own specialties and things that they excel at and it’s really going to be up to you what you prefer.

MULTISIG

The last big thing I wanted to touch on is multisig. This is when you’ve gotten to a point where a lot of you have a hardware wallet and you’re securing your bitcoin that way but you’ve just seen your net worth explode in this past calendar year. Maybe you’re thinking, “holy crap, I’ve got one device, and a written set of words, and that’s all that stands between me and losing my sats forever!” What happens if somebody kicks in my door and threatens me with a $5 wrench? You might be faced with just giving them those 12 or 24 words and kissing goodbye to your life savings. What are the potential solutions there? This is where you can make those $5 wrench attacks impossible, multisig.

You can think of multisig as a digital vault that requires multiple keys to open and if you geographically distribute those multiple keys, then a $5 wrench attack is impossible. You are unable to divulge all the keys to a single attack or in a single location. If somebody wants the rest of them they’re going to be grabbing you, your one key, and going on a road trip. Criminals tend to smash and grab, it’s usually not a lengthy operation. There’s many ways to set up a multisig. There are user friendly options and then there’s the more self-sovereign options. The easy option, at the expense of a degree of privacy, depending on how you do it, would be like a collaborative multisig option or an assisted multisig option. The way this would work is, you have a digital vault with three keys and you require at least two keys to open the vault. You as the individual hold two of the keys and a company holds the third one. This allows you, at all times, to unilaterally move your funds without the permission of that company. Furthermore, the company by themselves cannot move your funds at all because they only have one key. But, if you screw up and you lose one of your keys, you then get to go to the company and say “hey, I’m going to need you to help me with that other key so that I can move my funds.” So it hedges against human error. It hedges against you screwing up and in certain instances it may hedge against something happening to you and your family not knowing what the hell is going on and losing a whole bunch of stuff. But, if they retain one key and they have proof that they are next of kin, they could potentially go to that company and work it out so that they can get access to those funds again while hedging against physical attack at the same time.

Now you can make a multisig on your own of course. You can use something like Sparrow wallet and spin up your own multisig. There’s a lot of moving parts there, it’s not for the faint of heart I’ll say. I basically will say, if you’re worried you’re not going to be able to regain access, don’t over complicate things, keep it as simple as possible. You don’t want to be so good at security that you lock yourself out!

THE TAKEAWAY

Let’s do a quick recap. This is you now that you’ve gotten through this presentation.

There are many ways to level up on the way to becoming a self- sovereign bitcoiner.
1. Obtain non-KYC coins
2. Hold your own keys
3. Secure bitcoin with hardware
4. You can run a node
5. You can use coin join and privacy tools
6. You can choose your payment wallets for day-to-day stuff
7. You can create circular bitcoin economies
8. You can use multisig to lock down coins for long-term savings and future generations
This is the part where I hope you get your phones out and scan and save this playlist for your learning because literally everything we’ve just discussed is in this video playlist. It is like 20 something videos long.

Wherever you were, wherever I lost you, that’s where you’re starting. So sort through this playlist and start learning. I truly truly hope that you guys take this opportunity not to just sit in a room and get excited about the why of bitcoin, but actually take action. Be low time preference. Learn and level up and use the tools so that you can be a self-sovereign bitcoiner.

The key takeaway here is one step at a time. Do not worry about being perfect. Just focus on improving. Thank you guys very much. Have a great rest of your time here. You can reach me in these locations.

Thank you guys.

WATCH THE ORIGINAL CONTENT
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Bitcoin as an investment

March 1, 2024
^{Bitcoin as an Investment – Individual & Corporate Adoption, James Lavish (Bitcoin Atlantis, Madeira 2024)}
INTRODUCTION

There is an elephant in the room that we all know it’s there. We talked about it a little bit. But, we are not doing anything about it. It’s debt. We all love to borrow. Every single person, every single country around the world, every single company, loves to borrow, and it’s a problem.

Back in 2019, it seemed like it was getting a little bit ahead of itself but we pretty much emerged from the global financial crisis, not unscathed, but the whole world seems to be borrowing more and more every year. Still it seemed kind of manageable. If we could just spend a little bit less. Maybe borrow a little bit less. We could reign in a bit. Ramp up productivity. You know we have great technology, maybe that would help. But what did we do instead, we shut down the world and we shut down productivity and we flooded the market with more bonds and more borrowing. Debt skyrocketed and it is up 50% in just the last eight years.

THE WORLD’S DEBT PROBLEM

So we’ve entered what we call an exponential growth phase where debt compounds on itself and I’ll show you how in a moment. But the problem here is in the next debt crisis we could see a 50% rise in just a couple of years. This is where we are. These are the best countries, the G7. Every single country is borrowing more than it makes, 100% debt to GDP that is the borrowing over the productivity of the country.

$100 trillion of debt has been accumulated, a 40% increase just since 2019. This right here is why we need Bitcoin and there is no other escape. But let’s take a peek at the US. That’s where I’m from and it’s the global reserve currency and global reserve asset. It’s the strongest country out there as far as debt to GDP from the world’s view. We’ve got the global reserve asset so we’re doing great. Look at our productivity, solid growth, and that’s what matters, right? That’s what we need is strong growth of productivity and this is what we can borrow from. Here’s the problem. In 2013, we surpassed our productivity with our debt and we haven’t looked back since. The US currently borrows $1 for every $1.33 that we create in productivity. If we look at all the debt in the nation, it’s even worse. This includes all households, businesses, and government. The blue line is what primarily pays for that debt. Can you see the problem?

THE ZOMBIE

If the United States was a company on the New York Stock exchange, I know it’s not, but let’s just pretend so you can visualize this. The issue is we spend so much money that we simply cannot make the interest payments on that debt. So what do I mean by that? Well entitlement spending is like social security, medicare, medicaid. These are programs that are signed into legislation so they are mandatory expenses that we cannot miss these payments. Then when you add the interest on the debt and you compare it to the revenue that we make, we spend too much.

Here’s some simple maths for you. This is from the congressional budget office, these are their numbers, they’re not mine and this is actually what’s going on. The tax revenues for this year are expected to be $4.9 trillion, when you add in those entitlements, those mandatory expenses, that’s $3.8 trillion, plus the $850 billion of defense spending, the $870 billion of net interest payments. So this where we’re spending over $1 trillion every year on interest. We’re getting a little bit of that back because we have inter-government agencies that are sending some interest payments back to us. But you don’t have to be a maths genius to see that this just doesn’t work.

The issue is it’s just getting worse. So this is the budget. This is where the congressional budget office comes up with the budget that the legislators have passed their laws. This is how much they’re going to spend. We all know they’re lying and that they’re going to spend more, they do it every year, and so this is optimistic. What we’re seeing here is that we’re spending over $2 trillion dollars a year more than we make. Now when I say when we make, that’s productivity, that’s the taxes on the productivity, that’s our earnings. The United States government doesn’t “make anything”, they just take things. They just take it from us. So they’re not covering the interest payments, they’re not covering all the expenses, it’s not even close. The thing is over the next 10 years we’re going to borrow more than $20 trillion and we’re going to spend more than we make. Here’s the best part about this, these numbers assume there’s no recession, that it’s a stable environment, there’s no black swans, that interest rates remain stable, this is super optimistic. It’s an absolute joke! This is the balance sheet of the United States.

RECOGNIZING THE ISSUE

So if you all think that we are strong, you’re wrong! Everybody talks about the debt and how much debt we have, it’s $34 trillion. Oh my God it’s another $1 trillion this week. We actually owe $247 trillion when you add up all the expenses that we have to make. My business partner David Foley, mentioned to me this morning that the average baby boomer, the oldest generation in our country, or the second oldest generation in our country, the average baby boomer is 71 years old. So what does that mean? It means that these expenses, the ones in the bright red, are due. It’s like somebody took a grenade, pulled the pin, and threw it in the room. It’s happening and there’s nothing we can do. So what do we do to pay these expenses? We need to borrow. We need to borrow more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more, and more.

The congressional budget office knows. This is their chart. They’re showing how those expenses, that top purple line are the mandatory expenses we must make, that’s a primary deficit. The blue line down below, that’s the interest payments on that debt. So when I said that we’re in that exponential growth phase where debt compounds on debt, it’s because the interest payments are getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Remember you can see in 2006 what happened to those deficits and then again in 2020. They’ve got all the way out to 2051 with no recessions, no unexpected happenings, and look at how bad it gets. They know that this is what’s happening to the debt. It’s going vertical, it’s parabolic!

The treasury knows it too. So remember the treasury just does congress’s bidding. They don’t make the decisions on how much to spend, they just enable it. How do they do that? They borrow. They go out into the market and they issue bonds and we stupidly buy them. In their report that they periodically put this out every single year, they subtitled the report “an unsustainable fiscal path”. They put this out online for the whole world to see. This is a report that the treasury made for congress and they’re basically telling them “hey listen you’ve got to stop, we can’t keep doing this.”

Why? This is a chart that was in that report. I think Lyn Alden found it first but they’ve since removed it but we have the receipts. They put this out there for the whole world to see, they actually admitted it. I think Congress got mad so they took it down.

But why is this such a problem? Well as we were saying debt compounds on top of debt. Here are the interest payments we’re making on the debt. That’s $1 trillion every single year. I know it’s hard to get your head around this because the numbers are so big it’s actually almost laughable, if it was funny, but it’s not.

Here’s what keeps them up at night. This is what keeps the treasury up at night right here. 50% of our debt is coming due in the next three years.

DEBASEMENT AND THE DREADED DEBT SPIRAL

The problem is the interest payments on this debt, the yield on this debt is about 2.3%. If you’re the treasury you issue a bond and that bond eventually matures. Well how do you pay for that? Well, taxes. We don’t have money in taxes, you saw that. So what you do is you have to borrow more, you have to put out another bond to pay the principal on that original bond. When you do that now with interest rates at 4% or 5% you’re paying double the interest rate. That’s why that is happening. As debt matures, we must issue more debt. There’s no way around it. Remember we’re in a deficit. The problem is that we’ve had a few auctions recently and you probably don’t watch auctions. It’s okay, it’s boring unless you follow my Twitter feed. I make it a little bit more fun. In November we had a 30-year treasury auction that was super ugly. What does it mean, it means that it was unexpectedly weak. It was so poor that the treasury kind of scrambled to make sure that everybody knew that they weren going to borrow as much as people thought they were in the future. Well then we had a 20-year treasury auction this month that was equally as ugly. It was the worst tail in an auction in the history of the 20-year treasury. What does that mean? It means that when bonds trade, they trade beforehand in a when-issued market, it’s like a pre-market, they traded at a price that was nowhere near what the actual auction went to. It’s got the treasury nervous.

Why? You might recognize this if you’re from the region. This is an article that was put in the New York Times in 2011 that was about Greece. Does it look familiar? So what happens when a country enters what we call a debt spiral. Well deficits we’ve already told you we have deficits. They require debt which leads to higher interest cost and we showed you that chart of the interest cost. This leads to larger deficits which leads to more debt which leads to eventually higher interest rates. Why? Because you will demand higher interest rates because of the risk that either the debt provider defaults, which we won’t do, but what we would rather do is to allow high inflation. So you want to be paid for that higher inflation which creates even larger deficits, which creates even more debt, and the cycle repeats. We enter what’s called a debt spiral. The whole world is in it. The United States is in it too make no mistake.

So what are the solutions? Well you can have austerity. You could cut spending but nobody’s going to do that though. What government, what politicians are going to cut spending? They won’t get reelected. They can’t do that. They try to trick each other into doing it but they don’t do it. Mele does, that’s right, we’ve got one. So you could raise taxes but raising taxes disincentivizes productivity. It disincentivizes companies from investing in more R&D and expanding on profitable lines so you end up in the same spot. Productivity falls, higher taxes on that lower productivity, it doesn’t work. We’ve seen it doesn’t work.

You could just issue more debt which is what we’ve been doing. You just issue more debt, compound the debt, and hope and pray that it works out by the time that you get reelected. You’re not going to retire of course, we don’t retire, we just die in office. So no country that issues its own debt in its own currency would ever default though. What do they do? They just print money. What does printing money do? It causes inflation as we have all experienced. I mean are you fucking kidding me with all this inflation. It’s ridiculous. We all feel it, we know it. If you took an equivalent Euro, I know it wasn’t around earlier than the 90s, I was on Wall Street when it was created. But if you took an equivalent Euro from the European region from 1960, it would be worth just 6 Euro now. A 100 Euro would be worth just 6 Euro and that’s the inflation rate that they admit to you. But it’s worse, we all know it’s worse. If you had a dollar in 1960 it’s now worth just 6 cents and that’s on the CPI the inflation rate that they tell us. But we know it’s a lie. What’s the inflation rate? The inflation rate is closer to the expansion of the money supply. So if you actually use the 7% plus running number every year, this dollar would be worth a fraction of a penny.

So make no mistake. They must keep printing. They have no choice, they have to. They must debase the fiat currencies. Why do they do that? I’ll make it very simple for you. You saw the debt, you saw how much debt is out there. Well how are they going to pay that off? They’re never going to pay that off? How do they keep it going? They keep it going by raising productivity. How do they raise productivity? Not with AI, they fake it. They dump, they flood the market with more money so it creates productivity which is fake. It’s just a higher GDP number. It’s more dollars out there, more Euros out there, and then they make you pay taxes on those higher earnings so the taxes go up. But this is what we call “in nominal terms”. This is not real GDP because real GDP is a lot lower than the nominal GDP. You have to add inflation to get real GDP.

WE HAVE A CHOICE

So they don’t have a choice. None of us have a choice. Except the ones in this arena and some of your friends who have come to understand what Bitcoin is. Now we have a choice. We can opt out of this madness.

Here’s what the global currencies have done against the US dollar. You can’t read this so I’ll read some of them for you. The Venezuelan bolivar is down 99.9%, the Syrian pound is down 99.1%, the Argentinian peso is down 98.3% against the dollar. You saw how bad the dollar was but look at Bitcoin in the corner, it’s up 21,000% and this is before this week.

I won’t go into this, you know what Bitcoin is. It’s decentralized, it’s immutable, scarce, all of that. It’s the most pure, it’s the absolute purest store of value that’s ever been created.

Now this is what you wanted me to talk about, right. We were going to talk about institutional investing, not debt. Well it matters because now the institutions cannot ignore it anymore. They were ignoring it for a long time. Why? Because it’s difficult for institutions to own Bitcoin. I have had this conversation so many times in my life with people who were not in investing like I have been in institutional investing for 30 years. When I talk about red tape, my God. If you are an institutional investor and you want to own Bitcoin, these are the kind of steps you have to go through.

Let’s pretend that you are an analyst and you found Bitcoin. You’re a young, hip guy, you’ve got a hoodie, and you found Bitcoin. You’re like I think we should own some of this. I think we should own some Bitcoin and you convince your portfolio manager that you should own Bitcoin and that’s a tall hurdle. But if you convince them that you should, then he finally gets the point. He does some research and he’s like okay, we will own some but he’s got to go to the investment committee. He’s got to convince the investment manager, the chief investment officer, and then they have to sit in front of a committee that has to be convinced. Then you sit in front of the panel of compliance and they’ve got to get comfortable with it. What is this Bitcoin thing? It’s been used to buy drugs, it’s not real money, it’s fake we shouldn’t be buying this. If you can somehow convince your chief compliance officer that you should be buying Bitcoin, wow! I mean well done, bravo! But you have problems. Where are you going to trade it? How is it going to get settled? Who’s going to settle it? Who’s going to custody it? Are you going to have your own keys? What investment manager from one of these huge pension funds wants to hold their own keys to a billion dollars of Bitcoin? Does that sound like career risk? It does to me. They’re not getting paid for that. They’re getting paid to own bonds. We’ll get into that in a second. You have to go through all of these layers.

For the first time in history, you all have been able to front run the institutions. I remember back in the late 1990s and 2000 we used to have these hot IPOs like Amazon and Netflix and all these super hot IPOs and as an Institutional investor we would front run everybody. It was legal. We would just get an allocation of a thousand shares and our allocation would be at the IPO price which was let’s say it’s $20 for a stock. What happened when that stock got listed that day of the IPO? Well it ran. Not from $20 to $30, but to $50, $80, $100, $180, $1000. Who was buying it? You and I were. So who got the benefit? Well they were selling it to you. They got it at $20 and they were selling it to you at $180. Well this is our time. We’ve been buying Bitcoin for years and they’re just now getting in. The ETFs have changed the world for Bitcoin and I want to make this clear. Bitcoin doesn’t need the institutions to survive. There’s going to be a lot of money that comes into the space really quickly and you guys have been able to get there first.

A second thing is this FASB ruling which is complicated and I’m not going to get into this here. Michael Saylor’s done an incredible job explaining this is one of things that has been a pain point for the companies who own Bitcoin especially for Michael. Essentially the old ruling made companies treat Bitcoin as an impaired asset. If its price went down it hurt your balance sheet, it was very painful. But this has changed so now companies can own Bitcoin. Micro strategy at the end of January, 2024 held 190,000 Bitcoin and I know he’s bought a few more the last few weeks. His purchase price was $5.9 billion.That Bitcoin today is worth over 11 billion. Well done Michael, wow! Apple has $60 billion on their balance sheet in cash. They are sitting on that melting ice cube. I know they think they are smart because they’ve bought T-bills. So they own T-bills and they’re getting 5% on those T-bills and this is great I’m making so much money. No you’re not. Your purchasing power is falling. Microsoft has $111 billion on their balance sheet. Can you imagine when these companies come into Bitcoin! Now they can, there’s no excuse anymore.

Remember we’re really early in the Bitcoin adoption cycle. There is just under one quadrillion dollars of investable assets in the world. Residential real estate has been ridiculous, it’s now $500 trillion. Commercial real estate it says is $115 trillion. Bitcoin is currently 0.1% of the global investment assets.

We talked about the bonds. We talked about how institutional investors own bonds and that 60/40 portfolio. Well now they don’t have a choice but to start paying attention to bitcoin. I mean here’s the US Treasury rate. This is the global reserve asset and this is what happened to the global reserve asset in the last couple years.

This is why Silicon Valley Bank in the United States failed last year. As interest rates go up and you hold this on your balance sheet, this is what happens to your holdings. We had the worst drawdown in the history of the US bond market which caused that bank to crash. It caused the treasury and the FED to scramble and make this fancy program for these banks to borrow without having to be impaired on their assets.

Who wants to own this in their 60/40 portfolio when you could have owned bitcoin instead. This is bitcoin against long-term treasuries.

Here’s Bitcoin versus gold. I like gold and it’s not a bad thing. It’s been a tremendous store of value for thousands of years and there’s nothing wrong with it’s just bitcoin’s better. This is what bitcoin has done against gold.

But surely bitcoin couldn’t have beat the S&P right? I mean that thing has been on a tear with the US markets at all-time highs. Wrong! Here’s bitcoin versus the S&P 500.

The S&P 500 has been driven by the magnificent seven, these few stocks that have been driving it higher. So surely bitcoin hasn’t beaten that! Yes it has! If you own bitcoin for the last nine years, you would have 3x what you would have had in the magnificent seven.

A lot of people say well the problem is there is so much volatility. Look, Bitcoin went up, it went down, it went up, and it went down. You know, that’s right. Bitcoin is volatile! But volatility in a rising asset is good. It’s hard to wrap your mind around that but as an investor I can tell you it’s good. Here’s a portfolio for the last 12 years. That blue line down at the bottom, that’s a portfolio with no bitcoin. The line right above it, the grey one, is with 1% bitcoin. The line above it is with 2% bitcoin, and that third line up at the top, the green one, is with 3% bitcoin. You could have doubled your returns in the last 12 years if you own just 3% of bitcoin instead of a 60/40 portfolio.

If you look at those returns in the last 12 years, the maximum drawdown, meaning the most you lost at any point in those 12 years, was 21% with the 3% bitcoin and 20% without. Whereas your returns were 13% with bitcoin versus 9% without.

Now we have the ETFs. Institutions know all this and they’re coming. It’s been slow and everybody thought that, me included, that optimistically the ETFs and the institutions are ready for it. But they weren’t. So what we had is we have this super highway that’s been built for the ETFs that makes it super easy for the institutions to buy, it’s just like buying a regular stock. Now they could buy it with their same broker, on the same exchanges that are overseen by the SEC, they can settle it with the same prime broker, and custody there. It’s super easy, it’s just like buying a stock. So they can do that now, they know this, and so we’ve seen over $6 billion of inflows since the inception of the ETFs and the assets now are $40 billion and this is just the start. You see a surge. Why is this happening? Because brokers, investment managers, now have their compliance in place. They’re starting to talk to their investors. I’m an absolute proponent of owning your own bitcoin, keeping your own keys, if you can do that. But some of the investment products in the United States don’t allow for you to do that, especially retirement accounts. But you can own bitcoin in your retirement account now just by buying the ETF, it’s super simple!

THE BOTTOM LINE

I’m going to leave you with this. The bottom line is bitcoin has been the best performing asset class in eight out of the last 11 years and if this doesn’t convince you to add bitcoin to your portfolio, then maybe you shouldn’t be managing money. At least not for other people!

Watch the original content: Click here

Also read: Bitcoin is for everyone
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Traversing the African Bitcoin landscape

September 2, 2023
Traversing the African Bitcoin Landscape, Abubakar Nur Khalil (BH 2023)

Introduction

Hi. I’m glad to be here. First, I’d like to thank the organizers for not only the warm reception I’ve gotten, but also the invite to speak on such an important topic as the African ecosystem.

I’d like to start by saying my name is Abubakar Nur Khalil. I run a bitcoin VC (venture capital) called Recursive Capital and the idea is to invest strictly in bitcoin only companies with a specific focus on Africa. In terms of my other work in bitcoin, I do work around Bitcoin core, mostly PR reviews, things around developer education which I do through a program called Qala which I co-founded with three other bitcoiners where we essentially create new Bitcoin enlightened developers through the program. I also sit on the board of ₿Trust where we essentially give out grants to grow the Bitcoin African ecosystem.

I think it is important just to give some more context into why I feel this talk is important and what the overall takeaway I hope you would have after this talk. In general, I’d like to give you enough context or at least efficient context for you to understand the framing around the Bitcoin ecosystem in Africa because there are going to be a lot of talks throughout the conference about that. When the topic comes up, at least you have enough context to navigate through that.

A Brief History of the African Bitcoin Landscape

I think to preface this will be very very important to look where we’ve been in the ecosystem to where we are right now. So I’d like to start by going back in time.

Initially, bitcoin came into the African ecosystem as a scam. Essentially most people in 2017 or earlier thought they held bitcoin whereas they held BitConnect or a bunch of other scammy stuff. So by the time we had the rise in terms of the bitcoin bull market, people realized that, damn I actually wasn’t holding any bitcoin at all. So that has really tainted the space in terms of the perception of people who already have bitcoin as either you’re a scammer, crook, fraud, or you’re someone who is into what we call “Yahoo”, which is essentially internet fraud. It also doesn’t help that a lot of people that do a type of music called Yahoo piano, tend to talk about bitcoin and give bitcoin addresses. Paying for people to be killed through bitcoin. All kinds of stuff that’s not really ideal for the ecosystem.

Government Regulation

In 2021 was when the government started feeling they should be more proactive in terms of regulation around bitcoin so that’s when we had the first ban. People think it’s an outright ban around bitcoin but it’s not necessarily the case. It’s actually more a ban towards having exchanges directly tie bitcoin transactions to customers that they support. So in general it’s not necessarily a ban. It’s one of those things where there’s essentially a curtailment on how you can use bitcoin which has fed into the reason why Africa has a huge P2P Market which people use to circumvent that.

In general, the other thing that happened that same year that was pretty interesting was the eNaira. Now some of you might have heard about eNaira. It’s not a success. I can definitely tell you that. Hand on heart, no one uses it, no one accepts it. It’s ironic because they could have easily just converted all the digital naira’s into eNaira’s but they didn’t. Right now, the state we are in Nigeria we have four different naira’s.

A naira is kind of a loose term; talk about fungibility. So it’s super ironic for us we have the digital notes, we also have the physical old and new notes. For each of them, we have their own varying rates between them and also between USD. So we’re at a stage where really our finances are essentially very very broken and a lot of people find solace in bitcoin and at least the fungibility it provides as well as the escape it has for people to have financial inclusion.

Current State of Bitcoin in Africa

The African bitcoin ecosystem, AN Khalil (BH 2023)

In general, I would say the current state of the Bitcoin ecosystem in Africa has a lot more length, depth, and breadth in terms of how many companies were seen coming out of Africa. The kind of tools, we’ve left the stage where it’s like the Cambrian era of just bland exchanges and people just trying to buy on and off ramps. Right now, we’re at a stage where it’s really a case where we have a huge broad space with varying aspects.

So we have people working on Bitcoin Ekasi. I don’t see a template because each region is different so it’s more of a framework of how to grow grassroots movements around bitcoin circular economies.

Outside of that we’ve seen a huge uptake in mining. The reason is because we have a lot of abundant energy in Africa through a variety of means, specifically hydro, which seems to be the most efficient way to do bitcoin mining. We also have challenges around electrification. The problem is over a number of decades, multiple parties have tried to help out with this. But, the problem is they’re always missing an on-demand buyer which bitcoin mining provides for the first time.

So think of it this way, if you want to electrify rural communities you don’t have essential bridges to link that and you also don’t have the infrastructure to handle that on the initial capacity in terms of the electricity. So people tend to use bitcoin mining as a way to offset that initial energy and then gradually slow it down as soon as people start upticking with the energy.

There’s also a surge in building tools for Africa. The major issue we had, especially on the venture side, is a lot of the early companies were focusing on copying Silicon Valley companies and essentially replicating in Africa which doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. One I’d like to highlight is the fact that, number one, the GDP of California is the whole of Africa.

So in terms of capital flows, it doesn’t really translate effectively. It’s a case where people are flooding the market with a lot more capital than is necessary which translates into companies ineffectively using capital. By just focusing on hiring as opposed to building, which is the majority of the edge that you have as a small company.

The VC Landscape

In general, I’d like to talk just briefly on the VC landscape because that has also evolved quite substantially. I’d say unfortunately we still only have one native bitcoin VC which is the fund I run, Recursive Capital. Other than that, we have other tangential funds who tend to invest in Africa but are more open to Africa as opposed to a specific focus. Now to that end, it’s a case where right now the majority of the work around Recursive Capital is building out a healthy pipeline. This involves looking at companies at the really early stage where they’re not investable. Trying to get them to see where they are and then additionally trying to be a huge signal source for the ecosystem. So that’s where we sit in terms of the ecosystem.

The VC landscape in Africa (BH 2023)

In general, I feel though there’s a lot of progress and there’s still a lot to be done. It’s not smooth sailing. I’d say we don’t necessarily have effective regulation to begin with and there’s no framework for us to follow around the continent. For example, in Nigeria we have the SEC, similar to the US, and a bunch of other institutions that are identical to the one in the US. So it’s a constant battle between what frameworks to use to frame how to regulate bitcoin.

The main reason why they want to do that, which is kind of plausible, is obviously for capital flows. For ensuring that there’s investor guarantees around the investment asset classes. But one thing I think that’s pretty important for us and kind of the work I do on the ground is to ensure that the discussion, at least there’s a bifurcation between bitcoin as well as the rest of the space. Because without that, that wouldn’t necessarily be effective regulation both in terms of the consumer protection side as well as those trying to build for Bitcoin in Africa. So it’s a constant battle and hopefully we win. It’s one of those things where you can’t really say you can guarantee what the future holds but I’m definitely very bullish on that end.

Another thing really worth mentioning is the tools. Now I don’t mean no one is building but in terms of building for Africa where you have to deal with connectivity issues, there isn’t a lot of infrastructure for what you would expect like the “first world”. We need more tooling for people to build more local solutions that are more tailored to the local demographics. It’s a case where right now, the way you should think about it is development is cyclical and it kind of precedes having more companies that are building on top of that. It’s a case where we’re at the stage where we’re really building the rails.

So, take a look at a company like Machankura for example which for the first time is allowing USSD codes, USSD not the token, this is a protocol in which individuals can allow for messaging through short codes. So essentially a platform that allows you to send and receive bitcoin and the good thing from the regulatory side is it doesn’t actually let you buy and sell bitcoin which helps insulate from a lot of the regulations that are around like just shadow banning.

Lastly I’d say the main thing to consider is we still don’t have a pipeline of how to get educators that take someone from not knowing anything, to teaching people. Fortunately we’re starting to have programs like the one Anita Posch is doing around really helping to fix that pipeline. I think that’s going to really help contribute to the space in terms of the health and maturity.

The Future Ahead

Why be bullish on Africa? Personally, on the investment side I think there are two reasons. One, the majority of the things that Africa faces in terms of challenges, Bitcoin uniquely solves those problems in a very very novel way for the first time that we haven’t seen à la bitcoin mining, through electrification, or just allowing for financial inclusion.

At the end of the day it’s way more difficult for someone to open up a bank account in Nigeria or frankly even use cash really for any type of payments as opposed to bitcoin. So it’s a case where we have that and in addition to that we have the youngest continent in the world. More than 60 percent of the population is below the age of 25.

Two things can pan out in the next maybe 5, 10, 20 years. It is either Africa is filled with a bunch of rowdy young people, or highly effective young people building the future for what I feel is bitcoin and the development of digital currencies in general.

Conclusion

I think you should pay close attention to what is happening in Africa because I feel it’s going to reflect the overall trends you’ll see in the space to come. So that’s really why you should be focused on Africa and it’s likely going to be the development capital for bitcoin in general as well as where you see a lot more bleeding edge companies coming out. So I’d like to thank all of you for listening to this long ramble. Thank you.

Watch the original content: Click here

Also read: The Currency Caste System (Hunger Games)
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Two Goldbugs Debate Both Sides of the (Bit)Coin Sound Money Question

May 28, 2025
From left to right: Natalie Brunell, Peter Schiff, Trace Mayer
Intros

Natalie Brunell: Let’s start with what we all have in common. We are sound money advocates. We all like to warn people about this destruction that comes from fiat debasement, but we’ve taken different sides when it comes to Bitcoin.

Natalie: First, I would love to get both of your takes because you have seen the sound money movement evolve over the decades. Trace, you embraced Bitcoin as it emerged. Peter, you rejected it forcefully. Let’s start with you, Trace. Why did you decide to embrace this new technology?

Trace Mayer: I came with a worldview of monetary sovereignty. My blog was called Run to Gold, launched in January of 2008. When I came across Bitcoin, I could see that this limited-in-amountness that it had, along with its ability to be portable over communication channels, could be very disruptive. That’s one of the main reasons I started talking about it.

Natalie: And Peter, why did you decide to reject it? You’ve known about it since it was a dollar!

Peter Schiff: Well, first of all, some of us are advocating for sound money, and some of us just think they’re advocating for sound money. Actually, before I answer your question, a lot of people are even saying, “Why is Peter Schiff even at a Bitcoin conference?” I’ve got to tell you something because I learned this from personal experience at this event. This is not something I’m proud of, but this is a fact.

Peter: Based on what I’ve been told by countless people who have asked me to pose for selfies with them, I am probably responsible for more people owning Bitcoin than any other person at this conference. And every time I tell you guys not to buy Bitcoin, you buy more. So you can thank me, or you can blame me.

Peter: If you want to know the reason I didn’t buy Bitcoin when I first learned about it. It wasn’t Max Kaiser. He likes to credit himself. It wasn’t Max Kaiser who told me about it. It was people at my Senate campaign in 2010 who were working with me because some people were donating Bitcoin in 2010. I don’t know what the hell happened to that Bitcoin because I’ve tried to find it.

Peter: So people in my campaign said, “Why don’t you buy some of this Bitcoin?” What the hell’s that? And they explained it to me, and I actually thought about buying it. I don’t know if it was a dollar or less than a dollar or more. I can’t remember exactly.

Peter: But the main reason I didn’t just take a punt on it, and I thought about throwing 10 grand in or 50 grand. I was going to buy some, and I remember asking the guy, “Well, what’s to stop somebody else from coming up with another one. Can you have another cryptocurrency, or is it just Bitcoin?”

Peter: They said no. You could just make another and have another name, and have the same properties, so in other words, there’s an unlimited number of cryptos that could be created. It’s not really that unique. It’s just the first one. They can make more, and they said, “Yeah, they can make more.” And I said, “Well, then why buy it?”

Peter: Obviously, it went way up, and the next time I thought about buying it was after it went up to a thousand, and it came down to $300/$400. It was there for a couple of years. Some people I knew, smart people, investors, were buying it. I was like what are you buying this crap for? I thought you knew, but if they’re buying it, maybe more fools will buy it. Maybe I should just buy some for the hell of it.

Peter: My biggest mental problem was that I couldn’t pay $400 for something that I didn’t want to buy at $4. I just never could have imagined today all of these people right, because I was telling people not to buy Bitcoin before most of you even knew what it was. I never could have imagined that so many people would find so much value in nothing.

How Bitcoin is Unique

Natalie: Trace, why don’t you educate Peter in the eloquent way that you speak about why Bitcoin is so special, even though we have so many other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is unique and stands out, and has value even though it’s digital.

Trace: Well, when we look at value, it’s all subjective value theory, so things have value because individuals value them, and it’s not on us to put on someone else why they value something. I ran into a lot of these similar issues because when I first started talking about Bitcoin, I targeted the gold bugs and the libertarians.

Trace: The gold bugs because they should know what sound money is, and the libertarians because they’re just kind of crazy. It would be great if Bitcoin were successful. It would be great for these two particular demographics to have a lot of wealth.

Trace: I had emails with Lou Rockwell about having lourockwell.com accept Bitcoin, and encountered resistance in 2012 to that. One of the chief gold bugs, James Turk, who founded Gold Money, and I was actually an investor in Gold Money before I got involved in Bitcoin about 2007. James Turk, one of his main hang-ups, was that Bitcoin was not tangible. That’s, I suppose, a difficult issue to attack, right? So what I did is I went into … because ideas can only be overcome by other ideas.

Trace: You have to be able to lay out your argument and persuade somebody if they’re going to freely value something. We have to really understand these things in order to be a true hodler. You’ve got to have conviction, and that conviction comes because of the understanding that you have in your mind about it and what you desire in your heart to do with it.

Trace: I wrote this article about why Bitcoin is tangible, and the reason it’s tangible is because the word tangible comes from tangent which is a math term (meaning to kiss). Further down in the etymology, it has to do with reality. I distinguished between tangibility and corporeality, corporeality being the physicality, but tangibility being something that’s based in reality, not a hallucination.

Mathematics, for example, is tangible but not corporeal. In Bitcoin’s case, we have special numbers which act as these private keys to move and transfer the bitcoins, just like we have special atoms that act with gold. We have very similar analogies between the two.

Trace: We have to have a little bit more abstract thinking on these ideas of Austrian economics, with subjective value theory and then number theory and monetary theory to get to where we’re going with Bitcoin. It’s sound. Why? Because it’s limited in its internal characteristics, just like gold with atoms, it’s limited by math, numbers, and thermodynamics. Therefore, it’s not limited in amount by extrinsic characteristics like counterfeiting laws.

Peter Schiff has some doubts about Bitcoin

Natalie: So, Peter, Bitcoin is math. Do you not believe in math?

Peter: No, I believe in math. I just don’t believe that Bitcoin has any value. Because you solve a mathematical equation to create one, just like I don’t think Bitcoin is energy, just because you waste energy to make one. I disagree with what Trace said about Bitcoin not being intangible. It’s intangible, but that’s not why it doesn’t have value. Intangible assets can be very valuable, and my problem with Bitcoin isn’t the fact that it’s not a tangible asset; it’s because you can’t really do anything with it. It doesn’t have any real use.

Peter: The only thing I can do with my Bitcoin is I can give it to somebody else. I mean, I can sell it to somebody. I can gift it to somebody, but what are they going to do with it? They can turn around and give it to somebody else or sell it to somebody else. Why does somebody want Bitcoin? Because they think that they’re going to be able to turn around and sell it to somebody else at a higher price. And why does that person want it? Because he has the same expectation that he’ll be able to sell it at a higher price.

Peter: So everybody buys Bitcoin simply because they think that someone else will pay more, and so it’s just a giant, literally a blockchain letter. It’s built on the same foundation as a pyramid scheme. Now you’ve got all these Bitcoin treasury companies that are basically pyramiding the Ponzi, and everybody is buying this with the expectation that they’re going to get rich.

Peter: A lot of people have gotten rich if they bought it early enough. JD Vance was here this morning talking about all the wealth that has been created by Bitcoin and crypto. No wealth has been created. I don’t care how many of these coins are in existence. They’re not wealth. They’re not value.

Peter: But a lot of wealth has been transferred to a lot of people who bought or created these tokens and who sold them, and got wealthy because the wealth of the buyer was transferred to the seller. We’re in Vegas. This is a gigantic casino, and the casinos have winners and losers, but then you have the house that rakes everything but some people make money because other people lose money.

Peter: That’s how crypto works: people are going to make money who get in early, but those gains are going to be offset by the losses of all the people who get in late. Now the question is, and you can look around this room and see all the people here and all the money that’s been spent on all these booths, and ask yourself, am I early or am I late? Because if you’re late, you’re the bagholder. If you really think that you’re going to come to this conference and have 300,000 people here one day, I mean, I’ve never been to a conference this big. The biggest gold conference I go to has 600-700 people.

Natalie: Exactly.

Peter: After this conference is over, when you go home, go on YouTube and look up Peter Schiff Mortgage Bankers because I came to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Convention at the Mirage when that used to be a big hotel back then in 2006. I came there right under the same dynamic I’m coming here.

Peter: I came there to tell a bunch of people whose livelihood depended on mortgage finance that the housing bubble was going to pop and that mortgages were going to collapse. That they were all going to be out of work. I remember telling them that in a couple of years, they’ll have the whole conference in just one hotel room because I knew it was a bubble.

Peter: I came there and I made a deal with the company. I said, “I will come to your conference for one reason. You’ve got to give me a room to tell people about the hedge fund that I just started to short the subprime market. I think that people who are in the mortgage market should put a little bit of the money on the don’t pass side because I think they should hedge their careers and because I have a great investment for them to bet that subprime collapses.”

Natalie: Okay, you called out the housing bubble; we know that. We’re calling out the sovereign debt bubble, the fiat bubble. Nothing has destroyed – no hold on – nothing has destroyed wealth for the majority more than fiat. And I personally believe that the reason we have fiat is because of gold’s fatal flaw, because it is physical, because it requires papering over and creating liabilities. So, how do you answer that flaw in a digital economy?

Peter: Gold doesn’t have a flaw; humans have flaws. What gives fiat currency value is belief. Fiat currency ultimately has value not necessarily because the sovereign issues it and demands that taxes be paid in it, but ultimately, what gives a fiat currency value as opposed to a real currency is a legitimate currency that derives its value from the money that backs it up.

Peter: The money would be gold, and then you would have currency that’s redeemable in gold. Fiat currency has value because people believe in it, because people have faith in it, and that is the only reason that Bitcoin has value. Bitcoin is a fiat digital currency. Just because it’s not issued by a government doesn’t change the nature of what it is, but if you like blockchain, there is nothing that stops you from tokenizing gold, putting it on a blockchain, and using it as a medium of exchange and as a unit of account.

Peter: It is a great store of value which Bitcoin can never be because you can’t store what you don’t have but if you want to use tokenized gold it is faster and cheaper than Bitcoin so I can pay and get paid I can send and receive money instantly around the world with tokenized gold you don’t have to move the gold you just have to move the ownership of the gold.

A history of money

Natalie: Trace, you believe in both gold and Bitcoin. Can you talk to me a little bit about this, because there is a reason why we ended up with fiat. You have been a student of the Constitution, which is supposed to define what money is. It’s not supposed to be these pieces of paper that represent fake promises. So, tell us how we even got here and why you actually believe in both gold and Bitcoin.

Trace: As we talked about with the precious numbers and the precious atoms, the result is a monetary good that is equity-based and nobody’s liability. Bitcoin and gold are identical in that sense, Peter. There’s no issuing authority, there’s no Bitcoin company that issued a Bitcoin. It’s a product of nature now because of the pure proof-of-work nature of the blockchain. I don’t understand that part of the argument.

Trace: When we go back and look at our history, you know we had fractional reserve banking going on, it crashed, and they put Isaac Newton in as Master of the Mint to fix it in 1696, and he came up with the gold standard. We had the gold being left with the goldsmiths. They’d leave gold certificates. Those would circulate.

Trace: Now we had money, being the gold. Then we had money substitutes, such as the gold certificates. Now it was Roosevelt with Executive Order 6102, and then Nixon with closing the gold window that moved us away from these gold certificates to just fiat currency illusions that are like I owe you nothing.

Trace: I mean, there’s no realness to them at all, or even pretended realness, and so that’s how we’ve kind of evolved in our monetary system to where we are today, where we are using this unconstitutional fiat currency. The federal government has no expressed power to make anything legal tender. The state governments can make things legal tender, but they’re restricted by the US Constitution under Article 1, Section 10, Clause 1, which states that they can only make gold and silver coin a tender and payment of debts.

So we have an unconstitutional monetary system, and you know it’s based on this illusion that’s just a colored piece of paper that’s printed, and even more so, just digits in a database that are not limited in amount by any intrinsic characteristics like Bitcoin and gold are.

Natalie: But doesn’t Bitcoin fix for exactly what caused the issue in the first place, the fact that you can’t send or verify gold very easily, especially when you’re talking about a global interconnected world?

Trace: Yeah, so I did an interview with Saifedean years ago, and we talked about – I brought up this issue of the cost to run a gold full node. You have to have a refinery; you’ve got to melt down the gold; you’ve got to recast it. That’s a very costly process. The Bitcoin network does all of that for 15 cents.

Trace: Because of the nature of the Bitcoin network and the triple-entry bookkeeping that we have with Bitcoin, it’s acting as both the asset and the rails that we transfer it with at the same time. We look back over our history. They developed the telegraph, and then we started sending money over the wires. That’s where wire transfer came from.

Trace: Money’s always kind of had this dual purpose of transferring value through time, but also transferring through the distance vector. Usually, you’ve had two different instruments that do that. Gold and silver, salt and cows. Humanity has come up with all different types of things, and Nick Szabo has a lot of writing on this topic. We’re now living with a new innovation, and that innovation is what Satoshi solved. He solved the double-spending problem. What do we get to do with that? We’re experimenting with that now.

Intrinsic Value and choosing to adopt bitcoin

Natalie: Comments, Peter?

Peter: Well, first of all, you said that both gold and Bitcoin have intrinsic value, and that’s not the case. Bitcoin doesn’t have any intrinsic value; that’s always been my problem with it. All you can do is send it to somebody else, whereas gold is money because it’s the most liquid commodity.

Peter: Gold was a valuable commodity before we discovered that we could use it as money. Gold is used in industry, not just jewelry. That’s probably 50% of the use, but gold is used in aerospace. It’s used in the computer business. It’s used in medicine. It’s used in dentistry. It’s the most valuable, the most useful metal that we have.

Peter: What’s special about it is that it doesn’t lose those properties over time. In a thousand years, the gold that you have today will be just as useful as it is now. It doesn’t rot it. It doesn’t decay, and so it’s real. And yes, constitutionally, you’re correct. Gold is supposed to be money. It’s the only thing that the states can make legal tender. The federal government has no constitutional authority to make anything legal tender.

Peter: All the government can do, the federal government, is coin gold and silver. That’s all it can do, so we have an unconstitutional system. We went off the gold standard. The dollar used to be defined, but it wasn’t that the dollar was backed by gold. The dollar was defined as a weight in gold, and before we had even the Federal Reserve, we had private banks that issued currency backed by gold, by real money, dollars on demand.

Peter: I’ve got no problem if the people in this room want to waste their money buying Bitcoin. Fine. It’s a free country. But where I do have a problem is when you bribe the politicians to buy Bitcoin with my money, because I don’t want to buy Bitcoin, and I don’t think the US government should be buying Bitcoin. I don’t think any of the state governments should be buying Bitcoin. It’s kind of ironic that something that was created, you know, to be anti-government is now completely dependent on government.

Peter: I don’t think we’d have Bitcoin over 100,000 right now if it wasn’t for the election of Donald Trump and what’s going on with the government to try to misdirect resources into Bitcoin, into crypto, and now all these companies like Strategy and other copycat companies that are levering up and issuing stock and borrowing money to accumulate Bitcoin.

Peter: To the exclusion of other more valuable things, I mean resources that are wasted on crypto are resources we can’t use to build factories. We can’t use those resources to create things that we actually need, and so now we have to run larger trade deficits to import more stuff that they’re making in China. We’re wasting our time coming up with Fartcoin, and we’re not creating things that people really need now.

Natalie: Peter, the free market is telling you something. There are 30,000 people here. The White House has embraced Bitcoin. You have your own strategic Bitcoin reserve. Which, by the way, who is sending Peter Bitcoin? Please stop. I mean, when are you going to say, “Okay, the market may be right, this is an emergent phenomenon, and it should be the market that decides, and maybe you’re on the wrong side of that.”

Peter: Just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t mean that I’m going to give in to the peer pressure to believe it too. You think that the whole world is in on Bitcoin. Look, I can tell you that when I walk down the streets of a busy city, maybe one person will recognize me during the day. Pretty much everybody in this room knows who I am. So, most people don’t own Bitcoin because if they did, everybody would recognize me when I’m walking down the street, but they don’t.

Peter: You get into an echo chamber, and the people who like Bitcoin surround themselves with other people who like Bitcoin. They all reinforce the same delusion, and something like 50% of the people in the world who own Bitcoin live in America, which is a pretty big number. Nothing we should be proud of as Americans, but you get in a group and it reinforces this mass delusion that everybody has.

Peter: To me, it’s like a giant cult, and you’re worshiping this god. Nakamoto is the Lord, and everybody just believes, and everyone says, “I’m going to buy Bitcoin, and I’m never going to sell it. Never sell your Bitcoin.” Yeah, you know who got you to never sell your Bitcoin? The whales that are selling you their Bitcoin. Where do you think all the Bitcoin is coming from that everybody is buying? It’s the people who bought it a long time ago that are laughing all the way to the bank as they’re selling you their worthless tokens.

Satoshi Created a Monetary Good

Natalie: Well, actually, Wall Street is buying from us. We got it before them, so that’s pretty great. Trace, I’d love for you to respond to Peter before we wrap up.

Trace: Well, I’m not selling anybody anything. I’ve honed in on the scarcest asset on the planet that has liquidity with 110 stock to flow. Peter did say that I said that Bitcoin has intrinsic value. That’s not what I said. I said it was limited by its intrinsic characteristics. Nothing has intrinsic value. We as humans ascribe value to things through subjective value theory. That’s an important distinguishment.

Trace: Then it gets to our next point about entrepreneurship. One of the great things about entrepreneurship is that the entrepreneur is able to take time, labor, and capital, combine them with their vision, and produce a good for the market. The entrepreneurs who are successful have profits. The entrepreneurs who have losses are those who are unsuccessful.

Trace: What Satoshi did was create a new monetary good as an entrepreneur and introduce it into the market. People, through their own subjective value theory, have honed in on it and decided I want some of that. It’s creating a schelling point, and it’s become the most liquid high stock-to-flow asset on the planet. We’re only 16 years into this.

Trace: I have some gold UTXOs, some gold coins. I’ve had them for 25 years. There are some institutions that have had gold UTXOs for millennia. Where are we going to be in another 16 years and another 16 years after that? And then another 160 years after that.

Trace: Bitcoin is just going to continue to crank that stock-to-flow higher, it’s going to get scarcer, and humanity is going to be putting their savings and their retained earnings into it because it treats that capital well. Because it has this high stock to flow, a stock to flow that’s now twice gold’s, but it’ll eventually be even higher, so it’s a superior monetary good in many of those ways.

Natalie: It’s an emergent bottom-up phenomenon. We are out of time, unfortunately, Peter. I’m so sorry, and what I will leave you with, Peter. This is just a lesson from my heart to yours because I do really appreciate your work and your sound money leadership. You can be for something without being against something. You can be for gold without being against Bitcoin. We are all for Bitcoin, I’m not against you, Peter, and I know that someday you will be on stage when Bitcoin’s a million dollars, and maybe you’ll finally get it. Thank you so much.

Peter: Natalie, I do think that a lot of I think Bitcoin is doing a lot of harm, so that’s why I’m against it.

Watch the original content: Click here.

Also read: Boomers and Bitcoin
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
The Unlock: How Bitcoin Creates an Endless Energy Future

December 12, 2024
Speaker: Eric Hersman

Conference: Africa Bitcoin Conference

YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/sVLXIi2hw98?si=WsmsLH68D3W5mur4

Introduction

Unlimited and untapped renewable energy unlocked by Bitcoin

In South Sudan my parents were linguists, they were working on taking a language that had only an oral tradition and making it into a written tradition. This is something that takes 10 to 15 years, takes a long time. One of the fascinating parts about growing up there was that the money that was used was actually cattle, okay? So the Toposa had been using this for many years and each of these white beads represents a herd. A herd of cattle so roughly 20.

This is 120 cattle that are accounted for on this one string of beads and you can see people wearing four to six of these at one time. If you need something smaller than that, you use goats. If you need something smaller than that, you break it down to beets. My sister and I, you see there, pumping our water, my parents built this metal house that we lived in. We didn’t have electricity, we didn’t have power. We had paraffin lamps and candles and we made do with that and we were fine but one of the things I think that’s very important for all of us to understand is that, we have a lot of electricity.

We’re used to our Wi-Fi working. When we go to the hospital we expect it to be open at night. Our water runs out of our faucets, right? and we’re a little bit distanced from what energy actually does today. We see it as something that’s valuable but we don’t actually understand how valuable it is.

The world’s most foundational commodity is energy. Everything depends on energy in one form or another as a production input by virtue of the proof of work model. Bitcoiners understand this. Bitcoin cannot be created or transacted without the expenditure of very large amounts of energy so I did a quick calculation based on a 24J/T Bitcoin mining machine. It takes 914 kilowatt/hours to make one Bitcoin (1 BTC = 914kWh)

Let’s make that real, what does it mean to you or I? Well, that same amount of energy would power different amounts of energy in different places, in different homes, right?

So in the US it’s very different than it is in Africa, than it is in Asia. The story of human progress is the story of energy. Energy is the base layer for all of this progress. It doesn’t matter if it’s healthcare or grades, education, it doesn’t matter if it’s security, it doesn’t matter if it’s productivity. Everything is built on this one main source.

There’s this fantastic little video put together, a documentary put together by the BBC called the human power station. I’m just going to show the beginning of it for you to understand what it looks like.

“Hello, welcome to a very special edition of Bang Goes the Theory. Now we’ve put up this house outside our studio and inside a family of four are fast asleep and they’re here to take part in a massive experiment. The only thing is they’ve absolutely no idea what that experiment is. In fact we’ve genuinely no idea whether or not it’s going to work.

Liz, are we up and running in there? We are indeed Dallas. We are about to do something that no one in the world has ever tried to do before. We’re going to unplug that house from the main supply and try to power us in a completely different way.

Welcome to the human powerstation. 12 grueling hours, 80 human dynamos but just one question can we really pull this off? Oh my God guys!”

You can still find this on YouTube and I really suggest you watch it because it’s really funny. One of the interesting parts is that it took 24 cyclists to heat the oven and 11 to provide the energy just to make two slices of toast. Why does this matter? It matters because of this slide that we’ve seen many times before, which is, there’s no such thing as a low energy rich country. If you do not have electricity, much of the electricity for your population you will always be behind those that do and to give you real numbers on this, the US, up in the upper right, uses 5.5 times more energy than the whole African continent combined.

A map showing Africa’s current and future power grid transmission lines.

When we look at the continent of Africa we see a major problem of 800 million people in the world who don’t have any electricity, 600 million of them are in Africa and in the most recent IEA report that was done this year in the past 20 years we’ve seen major increases in electrification across Asia and Latin America but Africa has maintained 600 million. We haven’t improved at all. Why is that? Because the model’s broken.

If we want to actually light our world, we have to think about this model completely differently. Every average African uses about 6.1kWh per month across the continent. That’s not a lot of energy. If you’re trying to build a successful energy company and your customers only use 6kWh it’s really hard to make returns on that investment.

Let’s look at it even closer. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a Malawian village or you’re in the United Kingdom. The pockets of wasted energy here are large, you can find it everywhere so everywhere above the line is not being used, that’s stranded power. At gridless our job is to monetize the stranded power.

We do that by pushing electrification further to the edges in Africa, looking for these off-grid energy sites that aren’t utilizing everything that they have. The other reason we do this is because by pushing the hash rate of these miners to these little areas, we’re also decentralizing the Bitcoin network.

What does it actually look like for ordinary people? I’ve built this energy site on this far left side. I’m only making a small amount of returns when gridless comes along. We fully monetized the stranded power and we share that revenue in bitcoin with the energy partner and they are finally able to be a sustainable company.

I wanted to take a real world example. This is a 700 kilowatt site in Zambia. It was built more than 15 years ago and was grant funded at first, fantastically well built. Really well built. The local community was a part of it, in fact they did it all by hand. There is no machinery used to build this site. It’s something that we actually haven’t seen much across Africa. That’s how well built It was but over the last 15 years they’ve never used more than 35% of the energy that flows from the river through that turbine.

Dan, the owner of it, we started talking about it with him because he’ heard about what we’ done in Kenya and he said well, could you come here?

What do we do really?We take containerized Bitcoin mining and we put it wherever it needs to be right so it’s this geographically agnostic buyer of Last Resort realtime demand response system for energy and if you have wasted power you have to think about what my friend Alex said, which is, at night the people sleep but the river never sleeps. There’s energy to be monetized here and that matters.

What does it look like when you’re making one of these Bitcoin mines? We started off with a Bitcoin mining container designed, engineered and built here in Nairobi because we realized it was about a quarter of the cost of importing one. We then put that on the back of a truck. It could go 2000 km down to Zambia like this one is. We unload it and then we start doing our connectivity with starlink.

We also connect to the mobile network operator, we have a couple different forms of connectivity and we don’t drop any shares then we load what my business partner Philip calls the world’s dumbest computer into these mining containers. They only do one thing ,they don’t do anything else. They only mine Bitcoin. Once they’re loaded in there, we turn them on. This whole process takes about three days and I’m just “kym” while I’m there, kazi ya mkono.

All I do is plug in things and carry heavy loads. By day three you have a fully functioning Bitcoin mining container set up in this new site and that really means something to the owner of this energy because that next morning he picks up his phone, he makes bitcoin. He sees it in his wallet and he goes we’re having breakfast. There’s nowhere to stay here by the way, we’re camping on the side of the river. He looks at it and he’s like, I just made money. Yeah you get that every day. Every day.

You’re not waiting for somebody to make payments to you. He looks up and he says, I can finally start thinking strategically about my business. I’ve never had enough money to even have my powerline workers paid on time and now I can. This is the power of bitcoin mining in energy.

I was curious. I wasn’t from the energy sector. I’m from the tech world and bitcoin mining makes sense to me because we built hardware and infrastructure before but I didn’t know anything about energy when we started. I read about 17 research papers on airplane flights, which is the best place to do it and I wrote my own paper to make sense of it which I called Energy and Bitcoin in Africa and the basics of it is this, you don’t have to read it.It’s not important that you read it. What’s important is that you understand the problem.

The national power grids have gone about as far as they will go. The reason why is because, the people who need energy now, live in far-flung places and they don’t have the population density to get a return on investment of major power grids so the answer for this is through mini grids. Small energy sites that can be put wherever they’re needed. They look like this, they’re simple and I broke this down as simple as we can. You see run-of-river hydro. We also operate biomass and geothermal but run-of-river hydro really is the right answer for Africa.

The water comes into a 4-bay, goes into a powerhouse turbine, powers the bitcoin mining data center, the houses and the businesses. That Zambian site had about a 1000 families households on it when we first came there and just over 200 businesses. That’s maize mills, health care, education, government offices, mobile phone towers, all those types of things. This time I was there a month ago, it was over 1500 households now and they needed more of the energy. What does that mean for us as Bitcoin miners? We turn off miners. That’s the answer.

We actually turn off miners and move them somewhere else and this is something that you can also do with bitcoin mining that you can’t do with other industrial off-takers.

You can be really really flexible. The World Bank states that Africa needs 140,000 mining grids to meet the demands of the 600 million Africans who don’t have power.

The African Mining Association claims that there’s only 5,000 that have been built. We have a problem. Up until this point, Gridless has been dealing with the symptom which is, how do we make off-grid energy profitable? The disease is that we need more energy built. How do we get more energy built? We need different types of financing because as you saw from that first chart for 20 years, actually about 60 years, we have had the same model for energy financing and we haven’t hardly put a dent in the numbers.

It turns out that the same financial technology that enables us to address the symptoms is the tool that also eradicates the disease which is bitcoin. In this case, we take bitcoin and we make it into a financial reactor. We create a treasury that we borrow against with USD and we can now build tangible assets. Gridless energy creates a financial reactor that produces both more energy and more bitcoin over time which in turn creates more energy again.

If I was to break it down it would look like this. We take fiat investment, create a bitcoin treasury, lock it up with our lender, build energy with it, make more bitcoin and put that back into the top again. It’s a pretty simple model and we often wonder why nobody else has done this yet.

Bitcoin financing unlocks this endless energy and it does it in a couple ways. We use bitcoin to finance new energy development. We use bitcoin mining to make energy profitable already and we use bitcoin as the market maker for the energy price.

This last one deserves a little bit more explanation. How much do bitcoin miners get

paid? If you were to take our usage of kilowatt/hours and break it down into dollar cents we get paid between 7 and 10 cents per kilowatt/hour that we use.

Anybody who’s willing to spend one or two cents more so 11 cents or 12 cents, they would be paying us more money so we should turn off miners and allow them to get it. You say 11 to 12 cents per kilowatt/hour is that expensive. It’s not that expensive. We know in rural Africa on offgrid energy, people are paying between 30 to over a dollar per kilowatt/hour already today.

If they could get this wholesale energy at 12 cents that’s actually cheaper than any of us here in Nairobi pay. They could actually get cheaper energy than the rest of anybody else on the continent. This way there’s a new model that actually breaks the current paradigm. Gridless energy is going to be doing this. For the last year, we’ve been doing feasibility studies on our first three sites in Malawi and Kenya and the idea is that we will be on the front edge of this as well as the back edge. We can make it profitable for everybody along the way.

One way that I like to say this to make it even more clear is that in today’s model, $20 million would build you 10 megawatts of power and in 30 years you’ll still have 10 megawatt of power unless you go raise more money. In the Gridless model, where we build a treasury $20 million converted to bitcoin builds 1 – 4GW over that same 30 years.

Key benefits of real bitcoin returns.

I don’t care about the bitcoin returns as much as I care about the model being 7x more capital efficient in 10 years and 148 times more capital efficient in 30 and these are 50-year assets just so you understand. Why is this important? The economics are just unequal but for Bitcoin it matters because it decentralizes the bitcoin mining.

We’re moving into small-scale mining happening all over the place. This is already happening but we need to see more of it and instead of having these large 100 megawatt, 200 megawatt bitcoin mining farms, we can have 1 – 3 megawatt bitcoin mining farms spread across 100 countries. What it does for energy is we can finally make it profitable but we can also make it a new future for Africans where we can have more reliable power in the places where people live and for Africa it just means that we can finally put a dent in that $600 million figure. There is a near unlimited supply of energy to be developed in the one place on earth that needs it most in Africa and Bitcoin is what unlocks it. Thank you.

[Applause]
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
FINANCIAL FREEDOM IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Evidence from 25 countries

December 12, 2024
Speaker: Ella Hough

Conference: Africa Bitcoin Conference 2024

Original Video: https://youtu.be/MI2AzmhwYbw?si=sAnPswbznd7Af_OG

Introduction

Good afternoon everyone, thank you all so much for being here. My name is Ella Hough and I am a junior fellow at the Cornell Brooks Tech Policy Institute and I am also in my final year at Cornell studying the first undergraduate independent major program on bitcoin and unfortunately I am not Professor Sarah Kreps who I’m sure you all were expecting to see. She was very hoping to be with you all, unfortunately the airlines had other plans but I am very fortunate to be able to work with her on this study; the first of its kind looking at the global adoption of Bitcoin across 25 countries as supported by the human rights foundation and the Reynolds foundation and I hope to do her presentation justice today and I very much hope that you all will get to meet her.

To share just a little sliver of her accomplishments, she is a permanent member on the Council of Foreign Relations. She has written seven books and she was also an active officer in the US Air Force, so she’s truly incredible. As many of you may or may not be familiar with for many years, Chainalysis has done a crypto adoption index however no one has ever looked at specifically just Bitcoin and how Bitcoin is or is not being used as a tool for financial freedom around the world and this study aims to serve as a baseline of understanding looking at who uses Bitcoin and why they use it.

Conventional wisdom holds that Bitcoin is a speculative investment but this is a developed world bias as high income countries have greater disposable income available for savings and investment spending 13% versus 56% on necessities such as food however as a study entails, we’ve structured our research to go past assumptions and go layers deep below the surface diving into the nuance.

To begin our research is designed with two parts: a quantitative and qualitative part. The quantitative component is the largest ever of its kind serving 25,000 individuals across 25 countries and the quantitative component aims to provide contextual information to build a story around the data and ensure we are better at capturing the nuance and here’s our team. We have brought 13 students from the Cornell Bitcoin Club to support these efforts and this club is a part of a larger organization called the Bitcoin Students Network which I co-founded with Arsh Molu who also works at the human rights foundation to really support students in learning about Bitcoin across 65 countries and so these 13 students are a part of the Cornell node; Of this network are each assigned five different countries to better see regional insights that might arise and they come from all majors, grades and interests across the school and this is a little bit of how our process looks to best do the quantitative component and perform these interviews so we really try to lean into the peer-to-peer nature of Bitcoin to better reflect the very values of Bitcoin and financial freedom that the study is about and better bring privacy trust and connection to the forefront.

Now you might wonder how did you go about choosing the 25 countries that you’ve chosen which include democracies, non-democracies cover all major continents, religions, sizes and stages of development and the answer is that Professor Kreps, Kriner and Flores scored 178 countries off of 18 factors of Interest covering inflation rates to banking access to prevalence of remittances to legal status, corruption, civil unrest and then when constructing the survey to be used we looked at 15 different categories of individual level attitudes from their awareness of Bitcoin versus cryptocurrencies, perceived riskiness that they might have towards Bitcoin, their motivations for using Bitcoin, their trust in the financial system and Bitcoin and their financial knowledge.

Currently we have the preliminary results back from the United States which I will share a bit with you today. To begin Bitcoin awareness is considerable at 84% which notably is 8 points greater than that of crypto, however, ownership is still fairly limited and as you can see from the middle chart there is still considerable room for education given a low knowledge of about 21% versus 23% for cryptocurrencies and about a third believe that Bitcoin will be the main form of payment within the next 50 years. Next, we see that ownership is highest among men that have a high income and are in the millennial age range and notably this aligns well with results from Professor Troy Cross which he found earlier this year in the Nakamoto progress project report understanding Bitcoin adoption in the United States.

Finally in terms of risk from this chart you can see that Bitcoin is perceived as not terribly riskier than foreign currencies, corporate bonds and stocks but much riskier than the US dollar, gold or real estate. So now this is a two-year study and over the course of this year and next year we will continue to receive data from the other 24 countries which Kenya is one of the countries which will allow greater country level and regional level comparisons and next year we hope that our work will be beneficial for increasing shared understanding especially amongst policy makers of the factors driving Bitcoin adoption, usage patterns and the broader implications for financial inclusion and technological innovation and we very much look forward to sharing that information with you all and if I may give you all one next step please do look up Sarah Kreps and the work that she does. She’s also a fellow at the Bitcoin policy Institute and has written some great reports. Thank you all very much for your time and enjoy the rest of the conference.

[Applause]
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Bitcoin Dada: Redefining Financial Freedom for Women Through Bitcoin

December 11, 2024
Speaker: Marcel Lorraine Atieno

Conference: Africa Bitcoin Conference 2024

Video: https://youtu.be/7LsIK40NcK0?si=ZVTJa9Viug1D142Y
Table of Contents
[Open][Close]
INTRODUCTION
CHALLENGES FACED BY AFRICAN FEMALES
BITCOIN DADA MENTORSHIP
DADA DEVS
COMMUNITY OUTREACH
BITCOIN CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
SOLUTIONS BUILT FOR AFRICANS BY AFRICANS
IMPACT OF BITCOIN DADA
I am Marcel Lorraine, I’m the founder of Bitcoin Dada. Bitcoin Dada is, it’s a non-profit organization that helps to empower the African female through financial education, and we leverage on bitcoin to do that. I’m going to go into that a bit later, but let’s start by acknowledging that the majority of us in this room are Africans and you’d agree with me when I say being an African is hard, right? Is it? But then I’m going to continue and say being an African female is even harder.

There are certain challenges that we face as African females and I’m here to share with you these challenges and have in mind that these challenges come actually in different forms, shapes, and levels. This stems from social economic hurdles as well as gender based discrimination. The first thing that I want to talk to you about is for example in Kenya currently we have seen the rise of femicide. It has been on the rise since 2017. Last year we had about 152 killings, this year for the last three months a female has been killed every single day. So every day we have news that this particular woman was killed at this particular point and you know what’s surprising about it, only 15% of these female die in the hands of the stranger, meaning 75% are killed by people they actually trust and loved. This was a report made by one of the largest media platforms in Kenya which is Nation Media so like I said I’m going to talk about the challenges and just help you understand what we go through as women. I want you to imagine with me these certain scenarios.

Imagine being in a position where you cannot afford sanitary towels that by forcing you as a female, as a young female to actually engage yourself with older men risking early pregnancies, unwanted pregnancies or infections. Imagine yourself being in a scenario where you’re paid 77% less or 45% if you’re lucky and you’re in the urban centers. Imagine a case where you’re in the same economy you have the same responsibilities, but you have a lack of substantial collateral. Imagine yourself being or seeing your male siblings go off to get higher education while you get to get married off at an early age. Now of course for the ones who are in the urban areas this might not be the narrative and for the majority of you, you might not necessarily have had to experience this but in one way or another when you go outside the urban cities in Kenya or even in Africa, in other African countries this is the case.

So how does Bitcoin come in? For me before, Bitcoin there was not really like a chance for actually for us females to get true financial freedom or independence or even a voice. Through Bitcoin Dada we are trying to change that narrative and telling our communities not just as the females that there is a way that we as African females can also contribute by building Africa with this new technology. How do we do this? At Bitcoin Dada we have training every Tuesday and Thursday. We meet every Tuesdays and Thursdays just to learn about financial education which is the most important thing because for you to understand Bitcoin you need to understand the flaws of your current financial fiat system. Every Thursdays and Tuesdays we accommodate mothers, wives, working professionals, businesses, just to help them understand where the world is going and what’s wrong with the current leadership or the government or you know the control system that we are currently in.

We’ve been doing this since 2022. We’ve done seven cohorts and we came up with Dada Devs. Dada Devs is a new product. We just recently graduated our first set of developers and like Femi said and he keeps on stressing this, that we need to build solutions for Africans by Africans, right? The African population, this is something that I should have mentioned when I started this speech, but the African population is composed of half if not more of the African females. That means we make most of the transactions. We’re paying the bills, we’re taking care of the children, we’re doing most of the transactions that are happening at home. It’s us the women who are doing and I believe you will agree with me when we say that the majority of our mothers are actually the pillars of our homes. True or true?

When we are building solutions we want to have input that is coming from somebody who actually understands the challenges, right? So that is where Dada Devs comes in. We’ve been building applications that actually cater to our needs not just as women but also as Africans. Last but not least is the mentorship program which I feel there’s a big gap when it comes to educators. We normally just teach people bitcoin is freedom, you know, bitcoin is the next thing hodl, for the next 10 years, don’t sell your bitcoin, right? But then what happens after they’ve learned this? We introduced a mentorship program where they will refine the skills that they already have.

Remember everybody that comes into this space has a different skill set so for example we have writers, we have developers, we have entrepreneurs, we have investors as well. So we get bitcoiners and we’re very lucky to have support from bitcoiners. We have Okin in the house, Okin who’s been in space, thank you so much for being one of our mentors. Of course we have Femi Longe who’s also joined us several times, we’ve had Jeff Booth, we’ve had Jessi, we’ve had Vlad. I think I saw Vlad somewhere and several others. We have had Renata from Fedi and so many others who’ve actually helped us fill in that gap. By doing this we’ve seen that there is a change. So the beauty about the mentorship program is that our ladies can go into the bitcoin’s ecosystem, the tech space or even the larger community and get employment and that is very important. You just don’t teach people what Bitcoin is and at the end of the day they go back, they’re still poor, they’re still struggling and they’re still dependent on their fiat. I want to share a couple of stories that really stand out within our community and these are not the only ones but they are representative of what we have been able to do.

For us at Bitcoin Dada is not just about the African female, it’s about making the community around us better. We try to include everybody and especially the underprivileged. We’ve been able to work with this school from Kibera slums. For those who don’t know, Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa where we actually donate basic hygienic products as well as educational materials. Every bitcoin donation that we get during this fundraising period, it helps to keep these girls in school to avoid them getting taken advantage of and every time you donate to Bitcoin Dada you’re essentially helping the young ladies stay in school. I’ve seen her, she was really smiling at me. Like I said the mentorship program helped these ladies refine their skills and be able to actually get employment into their space. I would like to highlight one of the brilliant minds that we have or we’ve had in the Bitcoin Dada space, she’s called Sharon. She’s right there. She works for Btrust. I believe her bosses are here, Abubakar. She works for Btrust and when she joined Bitcoin Dada she really didn’t know where to put her skills into so through the mentorship program she got a job at Btrust where she gets paid in bitcoin and now she thrives and also tries to help other ladies along. We’ve had a lot of females also getting employment in the tech space which is a plus for us.

I would like to highlight a new project. We have so many projects that are coming up with the Bitcoin Dada ladies. I would like to highlight BitBiashara by Roslyn. Basically what BitBiashara is, she onboards merchants so if you’re here this is your first time in Kenya or even if you’re Kenya and you’re wondering where can I go to spend this bitcoin of mine or how do I or how do these people who actually accept bitcoin find it. The best person to approach would be Roslyn from BitBiashara. She’s been doing an amazing job. They recently had their first merchant meeting and you can follow them on Twitter as well. So we are basically creating bitcoin circular economies.

Last but not least is the African solutions that I’ve been talking about we’ve come up with a few products that we are currently building and I’ve highlighted SatsFlow, reason being is because we are launching it today and we are launching it today we have a workshop at 2 p.m. at the TBD, I would encourage you to come and see not just SatsFlow but other products that we’ve been working on. We have a very controversial t-shirt and I would like one of the ladies to just run really fast here cause I want everybody to see this. 3 2 1 not fast enough but yeah so this is not our logo but I felt like Maxis do anything for attention and I was like, we are also women we can do worse and this is it. So if this does not make you get to a workshop, there’s something wrong with you. Thank you Edith. Edith is our community lead from Uganda.

On the Africa Solutions, we have had a couple of projects coming up. So we have the SatsFlow, we’ve had pay with Sats, we’ve had edu Bitcoin, we have Tando, we have Impact donate so like I said if you want to learn about more these projects please show up at our event later on at 2 p.m. In the past two years since we started we’ve had a huge impact and the reason why we’ve been able to scale is because the challenges are so many and for Bitcoin Dada we do not victimize Ourselves, right? We know the problem is there but we try and come up with solutions that can actually help us instead of sticking to victimization level.

We’ve expanded to 11 different African countries. We’ve had job placements for the ladies, we’ve trained over 500 female and 200 youths, we have collaborated with universities to bring them financial education and just to introduce bitcoin into the universities. Wealth accumulation which is a very strong point because if you’re African you know African females have no right to inherit property unless they really work their ass off and actually buy their property for themselves. With bitcoin this is really important for us because with bitcoin you can start accumulating your wealth with even just $1, right?

We have had solutions built for Africans by Africans which I just talked about. Creating Bitcoin circular economies, which is very important, like Femi said, sitting on Twitter and just saying hodl hodl, I don’t think we’ll ever get to that hyperbitcoinization level by just doing that. We need to go out into the community and reach out to the people in a more relatable way. We’ve had mental health awareness so we work with a professional so it’s not just about our financial well-being but the overall well-being of these women.

We have collaborated with universities and I must add here that we have had support from a product such as Bitnob, I don’t know if the Bitnob guys are here, we’ve worked with them. Thank you so much. We’ve worked with Bitnob to do activations in universities. We’ve also worked with Machankura as well and then lastly a community approach. I just want to stress on this when I say Bitcoin for us is not just a digital currency it’s a tool that will liberate us as Africans from the financial constraints or the financial chains that have been long imposed on us. Please let’s use Bitcoin as it is, as it suits us as Africans and not just copy pasting everything that we see from the west.

As I leave the stage I want to leave with a quote that really resonates with me and it says, “I am not free while any woman is unfree even when her shackles are very different from my own.” The reason why I chose this quote is because a lot of people come to me and ask me why do you do what you do? What do you gain from helping these women? I believe whether you’re female, male, white, black, Muslim, Christian, if any of us at some level, we are caged, at some point that will also affect us. It really doesn’t matter oh I’m living a good life these people having problems, those problems will definitely trickle to you at some point so it’s very important to understand that we need to do something as a community, as the Bitcoin community at whatever level that you can and as I leave for my African sisters who are in this space whether you are a dada or not I would like to say that I might still be learning but I’m definitely taking you along with me.

Thank you.

Watch the original content: Click here
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
PROSPERA AFRICA AND BITCOIN

December 9, 2024
Title: PROSPERA AFRICA AND BITCOIN

Speaker: Magatte Wade

Conference: Africa Bitcoin Conference 2024

INTRODUCTION

Guys I just want to tell you quickly about my story so it takes you to why Bitcoin and why am I talking to you. I’m senegalese and I was born back home and then my family moved to Germany very early on. My parents were economic migrants so they had to leave me behind when I was age two to migrate to Europe and they left me behind to be with my grandma. Some five years later when they figured that the immigration journey had worked, they came back for me and that meant the second time for me being separated from my family.

So the first time my parents left me behind, the second time I had to leave my grandma behind. Needless to tell you how traumatizing the whole experience has been for me. I remember that arriving in Germany I was around age seven and I looked around and I’m thinking to myself, wait how come they have this and we don’t and at that point, what I was primarily speaking of was, how come back home when grandma says, Magatte it’s time for your shower, it would literally take between 45 minutes to an hour between the moment she made that decision and the moment that water touches my skin and then back in Germany I look at my mom who says, Magatte time for your shower.

For those of you here who are not Africans and didn’t live under these circumstances, the reason why it took so long, is because grandma had to get a stove of coal going and once it’s really going on, she puts a pot of water on it, waits for it to boil then we put it into a bucket, mix some cold water, drag it to the shower area and there at last I could take my shower. So for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s what it is all about. And here in Germany mom says, Magatte it’s time for your shower and I’m like where is a bucket of hot water? I’m not getting butt naked in this cold weather and she said, come on you silly just jump in the shower. Jump in, turn the knobs around, the water is coming down, the temperature I want, the pressure I want and I’m thinking this is not real.

It was like that about everything. It was like that about the paved roads compared to the non-paved roads back home. The grocery stores where they had more apples than my little brain could count. It was just amazing. The whole thing was like that and then my question was, how come they have this and we don’t and it became literally the defining question of my life because eventually that question became how come some countries like mine and so many others in Africa are poor while others like the US, Australia, New Zealand all of them are rich.

POVERTY IN AFRICA

What is going on? and across the journey of trying to find out I’ve heard it all. To this day with a very straight face, you have people looking at you and saying, oh darling it’s not your fault, it’s just the IQ theory. You know the theory according to which us blacks and browns are simply not as smart as others. The low IQ theory and they say, oh well because you’re so dumb and it shows in the state of your nations. Okay whatever I continue. Some people say, oh it’s malnutrition. Others it’s colonialism, it’s the stealing of your natural resources and then I’m thinking to myself the problem is, none of these makes sense to me.

Let’s just take for example the colonialism which many people like to use and I’m sure I’ll have some haters in this room because I’m one of those people who stick out there and say, Africa is not poor today because of colonialism and I’ll explain why. Will explain that in a second but on the colonialism thing, I’m thinking to myself, Ethiopia has never been colonized yet for the longest time, Ethiopia was a posterpresser child for poverty in Africa. Conversely, Botswana being colonized before and Botswana has been one of the top performers on the continent forever.

Botswana along with my country of Senegal are the two only nations in Africa that never had a coup. Never had a civil war. So even on the colonialism part it doesn’t add up and then over all of these other reasons, talk about my low IQ, my laziness, the fact that we just fight all the time, makes no sense because the same people, the minute they cross over to another place, all of a sudden their circumstances change. So I’m thinking to myself now, wow, well the only theory interesting in this equation is the place that these people happen to be in or not. So now I’m thinking it must be with a place. What is it about these places that if you’re there, you get to self-actualize and if you’re not, and some of the places where you’re there, you don’t self-actualize.

ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY

Continue on my journey. Family moved from Germany to France and then after business school in France, I decided to move to the US. Land of opportunity and there long story short, because I’ve only got 10 minutes, there at some point when you connect the dots, I finally get into the entrepreneurial journey.

I was living in Silicon Valley. In the heyday of the dotcom boom so I was starting to see this magic of entrepreneurship, this magic of doing out of nothing and it was rather amazing and eventually I built my first company and then my second and then my third. What all of these companies have in common is I manufacture in Africa, consumer brands, and my market place is the United States. So we manufacture in Africa, sell in the US but the first time I did this, you would be shocked at the shock that I had because when you were to compare what we would call the doing business environment it was shocking.

I walk you back. This was in 2003, boarding in 2004 when I built my first company. You look back in Senegal where the sister company was, it took almost two years to formally legalize the business. In the US, less than half a day. On one side you had employment at will. On the other hand, the government has to give you approval to hire or fire anybody and so on and so forth.

It was like about everything and so when I saw that, I thought to myself, oh I guess it’s because we’re poor and that’s why everything is so hard and then conversely is because they’re rich and that everything is so easy. Just come to think the minute you say that, you realize to yourself, well wait you’re poor because you don’t have enough money, at least not enough money to take care of your basic needs, you don’t have enough money because you don’t have access, you don’t have a source of income.

BUSINESSES NEEDING AN ENABLING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

A source of income for most of us is a job. Where do jobs come from? From the private sector, the businesses, isn’t it? Now do you really believe that business happens in a vacuum? Do you really believe that? No it doesn’t. Businesses need an enabling business environment. But wait you just told me that these African nations of ours are the hardest ones in the world to do business in.

What it means is, Africa as a region has the suckiest business environments in the world. This is the environment in the world where business people are the least free to enterprise. These are the nations that have the least economic freedom and in this regard I dare to speak of Africa as a village because when it comes to this issue it is sadly a trait that we all share and then what does it show for? Africa is the poorest region in the world today so there I had my answer. Why are we poor and others are not?

We are poor because we have the worst economic freedom threshold in the world. There you had it. So the minute I understood that, I’m thinking to myself okay, what do I do? What can I do to make the business environment better? At that point that’s when I got started and became involved in the policy work. I really had to work on trying to find how we can lower the barriers of entry for businesses in African nations and so that took me into doing policy reforms work so we were financing a bunch of free market think tanks around the world including in the US and I’m still in a way wearing that hat.

We still invest in free market think tanks in Africa to work on these issues but at the same time I’m looking around I’m thinking okay we got to go faster because you know piecemeal legislation takes forever. By the time you’re done destroying one regulation and law over here, 10 more have popped up over there. It took the Americans for Elon Musk to talk about this to finally pay attention to the issue of laws and regulations. We have been talking about it for the past 15- 17 years so here we are doing piecemeal legislation work and I’m thinking it’s all great because we need to do this work but something major radical needs to happen.

PROSPERA CITIES

Why? because while we’re doing this piecemeal legislation work, every single year I have millions and millions and millions of young people coming to an age of work in this continent with no prospect for work. This is a ticking bomb, this is not sustainable . I got to go faster, I got to find a better way that’s when I eventually started to pay more attention to this thing we call the startup cities. Some of you may have heard about it as the charter cities. I call them the startup cities. By now we brand them prospera cities. These are next generation special economic zones. Everything you know of economic special economic zones, this is a whole nother level above.

In these special economic zones, they have their own law and their own governance when it comes to business and in these places I give you an example why they’re so cutting edge next generation for example you have choice of law. Some zones have it but in our case we are the only ones where you’ll have choice of regulatory, meaning if you’re a biotech company for example you get to choose which regulatory body you are under and if you don’t find it, we’ll custom create one for you. You have all of these elements to these zones.

What you’ve done is you’ve created one of the most attractive business environments in the world. At scale and when we’re done with these, you’re looking at zones where their own countries, they would be ranked on the top 10 rankings of a doing business index rankings in the world meaning that you have zones that are way up there with Singapore, Denmark, Hong Kong and places like that. That’s the revolution we’re bringing to Africa.

AFRICA REVOLUTION WITH BITCOIN AS LEGAL TENDER

Last time I spoke to some of you about this. I was talking to eight nations out of eight, four were interested. Now that I’m talking to you we’ve made some progress. I’m speaking to 10 nations and I’m in very advanced negotiations with two countries. One of them is landlocked, one of them is not and guess what guys?

In these jurisdictions we’re also making it that Bitcoin is the legal tender.

What you’re getting to look at is on the continent, you’re going to have jurisdictions where you can just focus on your work. Of being bitcoiners and building all types of companies and services that are related to bitcoin without having to worry about the gray area of what you’re doing and as we’re doing this, this is the reason why I’m so bullish when I tell people that in my lifetime, I will see our continent leap frog from the poverty that it’s known for into prosperity in my lifetime.

We’re going to become global co-creators in innovation and prosperity because that’s what happens when you have the best business environment in the world. You attract prosperity and you attract innovation. The world has no idea what’s coming its way and for those of you in this room who don’t know these numbers, these numbers matter. I will repeat them. By 2050, ¼ of the world’s population will be African. By 2100, it’s one out of two people walking this Earth that will be African.

This is our time, we have the tools. Bitcoin is one of the biggest tools in the toolkit. We’ve got everything we need. Africa bitcoiners follow Prospera Africa, we are your best allies on this journey and let’s go do it.

I don’t need all 54 Nations to agree on this. All I needed is one and guess what, I’ve got two and I think if I’m lucky I might get three before the end of 2025. So the time is ours and I have never been more excited about our future than I am now. Thank you guys and with that, go build.

Watch original video here: https://youtu.be/kJ9GsF8hvqo?si=5aL6KDERQ-LnEkmL
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
A Practical Approach To Orange Pilling w/ Sam Wouters

November 23, 2024
Frustration with getting friends and family to listen to Bitcoin

A lot of Bitcoiners get very frustrated when they find out that it’s actually quite difficult to get their friends and family to listen to them and to do something with Bitcoin, or to even to start reading or learning about it. So they get frustrated, and this especially gets vented a lot around Thanksgiving every year, of course, where you sit around the table with your friends and family and you realize that yet another year has passed and they still haven’t done anything with all those resources you sent them. You’ve had those conversations with them, and they’re just like they’re making fun of you. They’re like, “What is this weird thing? It’s still not really going anywhere.” They repeat the things you hear on the news, that just keeps going on and on.

A lot of Bitcoiners get frustrated about it, and this gets shared online too. Where on the one hand, Bitcoiners talk like this, “Bitcoin’s the hardest money,” and “laser eyes until $100,000.” And Bitcoiners are really dedicated and passionate about the asset that they’ve invested in. And on the other hand, those same people are like this, “My mommy won’t buy Bitcoin no matter what I tell her.” And you’ve got this really strong and interesting dynamic going on there where on the one hand, people are super passionate, but they just can’t seem to get other people to care.

So why does this happen? Well typically, people try to “orange pill” others about Bitcoin. They try to open their eyes about this whole world that’s out there once they start learning about money and about Bitcoin, and we kind of force it onto them. And a lot of people take this approach, and it’s like a metaphor from “The Matrix” to kind of go down the rabbit hole and start learning about Bitcoin. And what do Bitcoiners do then?

Overloading with information

We talk about Bitcoin as early as possible. We’re not really listening to the person, we’re just waiting to speak. We want to tell our story and get them into the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Or we talk about Bitcoin as sound or hard money and digital gold, and it’s going to fundamentally change the way people use money. We refer to it as a hedge against inflation. We talk about how banks and governments can’t be trusted with money printing—how that’s such a big problem. And we refer to the history of money, to the removal of the gold standard, “What the Fuck Happened in 1971? (LINK)” We use terms like “self-custody,” and “decentralization,” “blockchain,” “permissionless.” Like let’s sprinkle a little of that on top. That’ll definitely get them excited. And then, “Read this Bitcoin book! Like I’ve just got a whole stack for you! I’ll even buy it for you. I’ll ship it to your house! Please just read this Bitcoin book.”

If you’re looking at this list and you don’t understand what is wrong with it, then it’s quite likely that you haven’t been particularly effective at getting people interested in Bitcoin. It’s not that anything in this list is wrong and that you shouldn’t be doing it. It’s that it’s too much information at once, and you’re kind of like overloading the person, and giving them too much in one go.

A lot of Bitcoiners are focused on this metaphor of the “journey versus destination”—on getting people to the destination. I want to have orange pilled this person, and I’m just gonna blast everything out, and hopefully some of it sticks, and they get into it. Looking away from that destination, let’s look a little bit at the journey. What is the journey for the average Bitcoiner? And the audience can tell me here if I’m wrong or not. But on the y-axis, you have perceived Bitcoin knowledge, like how much you know about it, on the x-axis, time.

So when you start your Bitcoin journey, you very quickly realize, “Wow! I know nothing about this thing! It’s so complicated; there’s so much information that I can be learning about, but I just don’t really seem to get it.” Then very soon after you’ve been learning, you’re like, “Wow! I know Game Theory—or at least what the word is! I can explain it to people!” You know economics, you know mining, cryptography. You feel like you’re the smartest person ever. Then you very quickly realize, “Wait! These are all really complicated fields that you can dive into and spend thousands of hours learning about to become an expert!” You suddenly realize, “Holy shit! I know nothing about Bitcoin!”

Spreading knowledge about Bitcoin

The tricky part there is that you’re kind of faced with a choice. “I could become an expert about those things.” But most Bitcoiners realize- you don’t need to be an expert at mining to hold a couple thousand dollars or some bitcoin and benefit from the price increases that that gets. So instead of going down that route of, “I’m gonna become an expert at it,” instead, “I’m going to start spreading the knowledge.”

So we get into this next phase of the Bitcoiner’s journey: knowledge sharing. Initially, when you start your sharing knowledge, you talk to your friends and you realize, “Oh my God! My friends know nothing about Bitcoin!” It’s like, “I thought I was bad, but they’re worse.” And, “They don’t understand money; they understand nothing.”

Then of course as you start explaining, you naturally get ridiculed, like, “Yeah, but this is a Ponzi scheme. It’s going to zero! What is this thing going to do? You still can’t buy anything with it! You can’t use it to buy your groceries, et cetera.” So that’s just how it goes.

Then, what does any rational person do at that point? They double down. You start giving them more information. You’re going to bring them the best pitch ever about Bitcoin to get them super pumped and excited about it. And you think you sound like a genius. In practice, however, you pretty much come across like this, “Bro, please buy some Bitcoin, bro! I promise your life is going to get better! Just protect yourself from inflation! And please just read this Bitcoin book, bro!” That’s how they look at you.

The response you’ll typically get to this is something along the lines of, “Man, that’s crazy! Catch the game last night?” It’s pretty frustrating if you’ve just given it your all and they really just don’t seem to get it. Now you basically feel ignored. And what does any rational person do when they’re getting ignored about something they’re really passionate about? You triple down—of course! Any rational person would.

The importance of Bitcoin education

But once you triple down, you very quickly realize the unfortunate truth, that actually, you kind of need new friends. And here we are, Bitcoiners, we all go to meetups and events like this and conferences to hang out with other Bitcoiners, ‘cause we kind of need new friends who also get it. And the problem is, once you go through this journey and you get frustrated with people just not getting it, a lot of Bitcoiners give up on education. We just stop trying because we’re like, “These people, they just don’t seem to get it.”

Then we get into a situation like this, where a lot of Bitcoiners, instead of reflecting on themselves, and being like, “Oh, maybe my Bitcoin explanation was bad, and that’s the problem,” they’re just like, “No, we’re still early! That’s the problem!” Right? Like they just don’t seem to get it, and all they need is just a bit of time. And you know, Bitcoin price will go way up, and all of them will regret their lives and their decisions. And they’ll come back to me, and then they’ll just buy it in higher and start learning about everything.

But in practice, that’s not really how I think it’s going to go. A lot of people wish for it to be that simple, but it doesn’t really work that way. A lot of people just aren’t going to get into Bitcoin. They’re going to be incredibly salty, and they’ll vote for politicians who will happily redistribute your Bitcoin, and that might be a world we end up in. So we shouldn’t give up on Bitcoin education.

Instead of focusing on the destination we’re trying to get to or thinking about what journey are we on here—like can I this person down rabbit hole on their Bitcoin learning journey—you should actually think about the company, as cheesy as this might be, like the company on that journey. Which people are you actually talking to? And what do they think about Bitcoin? What’s their perspective on it? And what’s the delivery of your message to them? That’s so incredibly important when you’re educating people on Bitcoin.

This is not a unique problem to Bitcoin. If you look at TED Talks, which everyone is familiar with, the second biggest TED Talk of all time is by a guy called Julian Treasure, which is about “How To Speak So That People Want To Listen.” And speaking is an art. Education is an art. And a lot of people never really learned how to get very good at it.

Improving Bitcoin education through better conversations

Naturally, if you’re trying to convey technologically complex things, such as Bitcoin, to a lot of people, but you’re not necessarily the greatest educator, then you’re kind of going to fumble and give a watered-down version of what some influencer said about Bitcoin you thought sounded really amazing. And then when you try it out yourself, it just doesn’t really land, and people look at you like, “What are you on about?”

This is a very universal problem: everyone wants to learn how to speak in ways so that others want to listen. That’s what I want to share some tips with you about. Now,

it needs to start with this: You need to acknowledge that if you aren’t necessarily the best educator—that you might not have the skill set and insights today to teach anyone about Bitcoin. If you can acknowledge that, then you can start improving how you do it. But if you always just say, “Yeah, but the other person’s the problem,” like, “My explanations are good. They just don’t seem to get it.” And you know, “If they don’t come to me, then I’m not going to bother any more.”

So let’s start getting better at Bitcoin education. And I’ve got three tips for you today to dive into that. Just practical stuff:

Have better conversations

First is to have better conversations. It’s incredibly important to think about this as a conversation, in which you want the person to feel good about what you have to say. And a first tip there is to use questions, rather than lectures. So someone could be like, “Oh, Bitcoin, what’s that?” And I spend the next ten minutes talking and explaining to them all of the qualities of money and why they need this and what’s broken about the world. Or I could ask them, just stupid, simple questions, like, “What could be better about the dollar?” or something like, “How are you saving money today?” and, “Is that working out for you?” or, “Do you have any tips for me?” Then you get them invested in the conversation. It’s a very different mindset. You’re not trying to get them invested in Bitcoin, you get them invested in the conversation, so they even want to have it in the first place. And if you do that, you can have much more productive conversations.

Using visuals for Bitcoin education

Second tip I want to give is that Bitcoin’s very abstract. Once you get excited and hyped up, you start waving your hands around, and explaining the blockchain with your hands, and people just look at you like you’re insane. One of the things Bitcoin struggles with, or people struggle with about Bitcoin, is that it’s so abstract, and they can’t hold it in their hands, so you can visualize it while you’re explaining it to them. You can make it much simpler.

A really practical tip I can give you there, I do this myself, on my phone, I have an album with Bitcoin pictures, or like graphs, visuals, of all kinds, like: price-related, US dollar related, mining and energy related, political related. While you’re having a conversation, if you’re like, “Oh, that question you asked there, let me go and Google that and find a stat for you” or show that graph that I was thinking about a few weeks ago. You lose them. You’re going to spend a minute trying to find the thing, and the conversation just dies out. Instead, I can just go to my folder on my phone, and pick out one of these images to try and make the point that I want to make. If you don’t have anything like that, I’ll share the visuals afterwards. I’ll be sharing them online along with all of the tips I want to give around Bitcoin education. You can just download them there and get started with your own folder that you can build up over time with anything that excites you.

What you can then do, is you can start combining questions and visuals. Because if you have a conversation with someone, you’re like, “What do you already know about Bitcoin?” They’re like, “Well I heard it wastes a lot of energy.” You can pull up a graph and be like, “Well that’s interesting, because if we look at the top left here, actually the negative reporting about Bitcoin and energy has been decreasing for years now, and it’s actually been turning quite positive. So maybe this information you have about it, it’s not really up to date anymore.”

You’re not necessarily convincing them from a skeptic to a believer at that point, but at least they’re like, “Oh, maybe I need to take another look at this and this prejudice that I have didn’t actually end up making sense.

Effective communication strategies

Again, you can ask a question, like, “How much renewable energy do you think Bitcoin uses then?” Then use the next image where it’s like, “Oh it’s actually 56%.” Then they might say, “Oh, 56 is just over half. That’s bad.” You might have another graph that shows like, “Well actually, out of all the industries out there, Bitcoin’s pretty green.” So you can make a lot more progress this way. They can start looking at your folder too, like, “What’s this? What’s that?” You get them so invested in a conversation, which is much harder to do if you’re just standing there and waving your hands around, kinda like I’m doing, I suppose.

This is really important about the conversation part, like people will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but they won’t forget how you made them feel. That’s the point of the conversation. Because if you go too far, you bombard them with information. Next time you talk, try to talk to them about Bitcoin, they’ll be like, “Yeah, but that was a pretty bad experience last time. You were just rambling at me, I never got the chance to ask a question. And it’s just not really something I want to dive into again.” But if you have a really pleasant conversation, they’re like, “This is a cool person. I really love talking to them,” and “I’ll hear them out again.” You make so much more progress, so get the person to like you, it goes so far to educating them about Bitcoin.

Second tip is to find a good angle. People talk about this a lot. When you talk to non-Bitcoiners, you want to find out what makes them tick. For a lot of people that’s just like getting rich. Everyone likes the Bitcoin price. That’s naturally the topic that a lot of people will converge to. But that’s not really specific enough.

Finding the angle that resonates

Let’s dive a little bit deeper in that. Why do people want to get rich? Well some of them, for like, personal, financial reasons, they want to save for a house, they want to provide for others, they want to retire at some point. Then you have people who care a lot about society. They want to build up their local community, and need money for that. Or they care a lot about human rights, or the climate. If people will come at it from a business angle, who are into entrepreneurship or finance, or energy industry. And then you have people who love technology. They care about innovation and data and all of these things. If someone gives you the impression that they’re interested in a specific field within any of these things, you can just provide examples that resonate with them. It doesn’t make sense to talk to someone about Bitcoin’s energy usage, if they’re just primarily interested in saving a house. Then you might want to talk more about, “Okay could you save some wealth in Bitcoin?” and, “How would that work out for you?” Similarly, if someone’s a developer, it doesn’t make sense to talk to them about Bitcoin as a tool for human rights if they’re not necessarily interested in that. If they’re just trying to build some cool Fintech app or something. So, find the angle that resonates with them and guess what, the only way to figure out that angle is to ask them questions. If you’re the only one talking, you’re never going to figure out what they care about. You have to ask questions to get to know the person.

Take one step at a time

The third, and final tip I want to give, is to take it one step at a time. A lot of Bitcoiners get super passionate when you get that chance to give the Bitcoin pitch and to try and convince them that Bitcoin’s amazing. They’re just like, “I’m gonna turn this person from a sceptic into a believer, and they’re going to sign up tomorrow, and I’ll send them all these links and things,” and that’s not quite realistic.

So we developed this model, the Bitcoin adoption funnel, to highlight what that journey throughout Bitcoin looks like for people. It’s kind of a different look at it. But at the top is the discovery phase. Most people have gone through that at this point. They know Bitcoin exists. They might not be able to explain much about it, but they’ve heard the name somewhere. There’s some brand recognition.

Tips for having better conversations about Bitcoin

Then they get into learning, and that learning can be very brief. It can just be like a one minute video, in which some news reporter says that it wastes too much energy and is useless, and for a lot of people that might be where the journey ends. Others are like, “No, I want to read articles and things.” Depending on what the content’s like, that will form their opinion, their perception of Bitcoin.

That’s really the layer I want to focus on here. You’re not in one conversation going to turn someone pessimistic into an optimist or a believer about Bitcoin. If they have those prejudices, at best you can sort of neutralize those, so hopefully you can have another conversation next time if they like the first one. Try to be very cautious about how far you take this.

Those are the three tips I wanted to share:
1. Having better conversations
2. Finding a good angle to the conversations
3. Taking it one step at a time.
But they’re just three of seven in total that I have put into writing, and I’ll be releasing probably next week or in the coming weeks by Twitter and LinkedIn.

So if anyone wants to look into that, and download the pictures that I have in my folder as well to explain Bitcoin to people, then feel free to take a look at that. I won’t be going through the other points too much in depth here as I’m coming up to time. But really, if you want to make friends and family listen to you about Bitcoin, then start with yourself and think about “How can I make this a pleasant experience for them rather than just bombarding them with everything?” If you’ve made that mistake in the past, like you’ve really turned someone off to Bitcoin. Honestly one of the best things you can do is, to go up to them and be like, “Look, I know I was annoying about Bitcoin to you in the past, but I hope you know that I did that because I really care about you, and I want something good for you.” Start with that apology, and maybe they’re like, “Okay, I’ll hear you out for once. It’s great that you’re coming out about that.”

Anyways, if you want the slides, if you want the writing that I’ll do around it, or the pictures, follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn and you’ll be able to find everything there really soon. Thank you very much to the audience and the conference. Hope y’all have a great time. Bye.

Speaker: Sam Wouters
Conference: Bitcoin Nashville 2024
Presentation Date: July 26, 2024
Click here to watch original presentation
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Building Bitcoin Country

July 27, 2024
Speakers: Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert interviewed by Natalie Brunell
Bitcoin 2024 Conference – July 27, 2024

View the original video here on Youtube

Natalie Brunell:

Max and Stacey, I’m so excited to talk to you because, as a former broadcast journalist, you were the first two people talking on TV, like a decade ago, about Bitcoin. And you’ve orange-pilled more people than anyone else I know. So, first of all, give a round of applause for that, because they’ve gotten a lot of people into Bitcoin.

Let’s talk a little bit about El Salvador. How’s life there?

Stacy Herbert:

It’s filled with volcano energy, because everybody has coffee from a volcano. If anybody wonders how Max Keiser is able to walk out on stage like that everywhere he goes, it’s because he has coffee from a volcano.

President Bukele makes his own brand now, it’s Bean of Fire (BeanofFire.com). You could actually go buy some coffee right now from President Bukele. I swear to God, he actually grew it himself, personally. And you could buy it with bitcoin or over Lightning.

Max Keiser:

Smells like freedom!

Stacy:
Yeah!

Max:
Smells like economic freedom!

Stacy:
Yeah!

Natalie:
So talk to us a little bit about living in El Salvador, what it’s like, what bitcoin adoption has been like over the last couple of years, because a lot of people were at the Bitcoin conference. That was the first one I attended (2021), when the announcement was made that it was going to be legal tender; the first country to do so. How has it been since then?

Stacy:
Does everybody want to hear the answer to that, or do you want to hear about Trump? Yeah! You see, they want to hear about what Trump said about President Bukele.

Well, you know what? What I think about that is that President Bukele is the biggest rockstar on Earth right now, right?

Last night at two in the morning, I was up. Who posts to President Bukele, but Elon Musk, right?

President Trump, the 45th president of the United States, spends part of his RNC convention speech, to millions and millions of people (an important speech), to mention one leader, one other head of state, and that is President Bukele. So, never in El Salvador’s history was the head of state ever that important?

I think it just shows that good times are ahead, because El Salvador is now an important player on the world map. Also, I think probably many people in this audience have actually been to El Salvador. *audience cheers*

You see? Don’t trust, verify. Just as they were booing what President Trump had said before about bitcoin being a scam, most of these people in this room have been to El Salvador and they know, they verified for a fact that it’s safe and that things are changing for the better there.

Natalie:
Well, I did want to address what happened in that speech. Can we dig into it a little bit more? I think it took a lot of people by surprise. There was the inauguration, I know both of you were there, and we saw a lot of prominent Republican figures there, including Don Trump Jr., right? Matt Goetz was there. So where do you think that came from?

Max:
Jealousy, because at CPAC, President Bukele gave a speech. Donald Trump gave a speech. Who was everyone talking about? President Bukele. Donald Trump got a little jealous. And he’s like, “Oh, I gotta talk this guy down.” But President Bukele is the most popular leader in the world right now. Bitcoin is legal in El Salvador, and it is the new shining city on a hill. El Salvador is the first country out of the world turning, right?

Stacy:
YEAH!

Max:
El Salvador is a beacon of freedom. El Salvador already put bitcoin on their reserve. All these politicians are up here saying, “We’re gonna put it on our reserve.”

Well, guess what, folks? They’re lying, because they’re held in the pockets of the central bankers and Jamie Dimon. All those folks are not gonna let them do that. If you really want freedom, you want to smell the volcano of freedom, move to El Salvador. Do what Ayn Rand suggested; if you’re not treated well in your country, leave, get the fuck out. Go to a real country, like El Salvador, with a real leader, with real people, and real entrepreneurialism.

Fuck the US! They’re not giving you what you want. You don’t get freedom of speech. You don’t get freedom of expression. You don’t get freedom– any kind of freedom. Move with your feet. The voting? Not gonna get you nothing! Walk out! Walk!

Natalie:
What did you think of his response? Bukele tweeted back that he’s gonna take the high road. Did you get the inside scoop on how he really feels?

Stacy:
That’s because he’s a leader, right? He takes the high road, but we’re not leaders.

Max:
No, no, we’re like the IRA.

Stacy:
We take the low road.

Max:
I’m like the Bobby Sands of El Salvador.

Natalie:
So, for people that watch that and maybe don’t know a lot about El Salvador, why is what President Trump said wrong?

Max:
Because he suggested that the President and El Salvador were dumping criminals over the border into the U.S. Not only is that materially and factually wrong, but it’s highly offensive. The MS-13 gang was birthed in Los Angeles, then the Clintons dumped them in El Salvador, and they went on to kill tens of thousands of Salvadorans. So, it is highly offensive to suggest that the opposite is true. That’s why I got my dander up, because it’s not just being cute. He’s not just trying to be a rival at the sorority cotillion, like, “Oh, he’s got a better dress than I do,” and being a bitch.

He’s making factual errors. He’s saying the wrong thing, and he’s insulting tens of thousands and millions of Salvadorans, and the Salvadorans made bitcoin legal tender. Salvadorans are the beacon of free speech. The Statue of Liberty is now a volcano in El Salvador. So, get in line, pal.

Let me tell you something, you don’t change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you, Donald. So, you’ve got to come to the Bitcoin side. You’ve got to get in line. You’ve got to bend the knee, which you probably are not going to be able to do. You certainly won’t hear much out of one ear.

Stacy:
No, that’s too soon! That’s too soon.

Max:
Too soon? It’s a rough world! Okay, Bitcoin fixes this! It demonetizes violence. Okay?

Natalie:
Well, you actually said on the first podcast that I did with you that Bitcoin is an explosion of love. Sometimes we need to share a little love with our enemies to get them to understand maybe what they’re wrong about. So show a little, do you have a little love you want to show for Trump?

Max:
I do. I have a special flower for Donald Trump when I see him. I’d like to present this flower, and express my love and gratitude for at least raising the political game in America to a new standard of forthrightness and truthfulness.

I am a big Trump supporter, and I am voting for Trump for a third time coming up in this next election. But you know, Trump is from New York, I’m from New York, and so we speak like New Yorkers. This is how we do it in New York, and that’s the way it is.

Stacy:
Yes, exactly. We did vote for Trump and we will vote for Trump. I believe that he’s the best hope for the United States in terms of Bitcoin policy and the restoration.

You know what? Bitcoin in El Salvador falls under President Bukele’s policy of economic liberty. And that is very American in the concept. It’s an enlightenment ideals of life, liberty, and property. The security situation in El Salvador also falls under that same sort of thinking of the president.

So, Trump did misspeak, I’ll say he misspoke. I think he’ll probably correct himself here once he shows up and he speaks in front of this audience here. He’ll see that this is President Bukele land here instead of, you know, somebody who hasn’t yet proven himself in terms of Bitcoin. Bitcoin in El Salvador is economic liberty and so was the security policy.

Natalie:
Many people expected smaller countries and those furthest away from the money printer to be the first to embrace Bitcoin. But now we’re seeing global superpowers and American presidential candidates talking about Bitcoin. What’s your take on that? Did you see this all along in game theory?

Stacy:
Max did, I’ll say. But I mean, this seems way sooner than I expected, right? And I didn’t expect the U.S. to be El Salvador’s first follower. Because, the United States will be our first follower, I believe. But, El Salvador is number one. We have the first mover advantage still.

We listened to RFK Jr.’s speech yesterday, and he was great on Bitcoin. Really, really good policies on Bitcoin. It’s good that RFK is out there, because he was unfairly and undemocratically excluded from the Democratic Party process of debating Joe Biden six or seven months ago. The world could have figured out that, well, the voter could have known then what they know now, instead of having Kamala Harris imposed on you.

We have two major candidates; we have RFK and we have Trump pushing for bitcoin. I think that’s better. It’s better for El Salvador for sure, because the United States is our most important partner. We have the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency there in El Salvador, the U.S. dollar and Bitcoin. So it’s better if we’re allies across the whole top and down.

Max:
The analogy that I like is: Bitcoin is gunpowder. If one country adopts gunpowder, then you really have to adopt gunpowder as well, to get into this paradigm of mutual assured destruction or survival. Now, we’re entering into the global hash war, or the global Bitcoin war, which I wrote about five years ago. When everyone was saying that, “Oh, all these countries are going to ban Bitcoin.” I said, “No, in fact, that’s the opposite. They’re all going to embrace Bitcoin.”

Max Keiser

They’re going to competitively mine bitcoin and hoard bitcoin, because it becomes a new global Bitcoin standard. And, we’ll see every fiat money go to its long-term value of zero. It’s demonetizing gold; you see that in the ETF market. People are dumping gold ETFs and buying bitcoin ETFs. It’s demonetizing the stock market. It’s demonetizing the bond market. It’s demonetizing the property market. It’s demonetizing the fine art market. Everything goes to zero against bitcoin. Everything goes to zero against bitcoin. Anything you hold as an asset, the purchasing power relative to bitcoin is going to go down.

This is what I suggest: people who are going to speak English, look up a dictionary for the definitions before they open their mouths and say these words, because they’re incorrectly using them. But, come to me and I’ll help you. And, if in fact you don’t take a suggestion, then I’m happy to get more forceful.

Natalie:
I’m glad you brought up how Bitcoin will disintermediate and demonetize politicians. I want to better understand your philosophy on politicians, because people are looking at everyone from Trump to President Bukele and saying, “Why are we so supportive of them?” We’re trying to basically shrink the state and shrink their power, why should Bitcoiners be excited that these politicians are talking about bitcoin? Shouldn’t we not care about them?

Stacy:
Well, because, like I said, in El Salvador, President Bukele puts Bitcoin under his larger policy of economic liberty. If you read the U.S. Constitution, you read about that we have the freedom to pursue life, liberty, and property and pursuit of happiness. So these are the foundational ideas behind Bitcoin as well. I think somebody who basically will be there to defend those rights, that’s the purpose of the state.

If you read (Frederic) Bastiat, if you read The Law, that’s the purpose of the state, is to defend those rights for you, for us, right? And that’s all you want. You don’t want all this other stuff, like Kamala Harris might support, right? You want them to stay away from you, to stay out of your business, and let you just operate your own business and build.

Stacy Herbert

That’s what President Bukele does all the time for El Salvador. He says, “Come build”. Soon we’ll be giving away 5,000 passports to people who want to build, to highly skilled people who are motivated, who want to come build. That’s what we want, builders.

You want a leader who’s going to be like that, and stay out of your way. Any leader who’s going to adopt Bitcoin is a leader who is easier to trust, because they’ve already made that decision. That’s a powerful decision for a leader to take. It’s like, I’m going to give up power, because I no longer have power over the printing press.

Natalie:
How do we discern when they’re talking about Bitcoin, if they really understand it, or if they’re just trying to get votes?

Max:
Bitcoin is a magic mirror. If you are of good character, it makes you a better character. If you’re a bad character, it makes you a worse character. If you look at somebody, like Craig Wright, the Bitcoin magic mirror revealed that he’s a true scumbag.

Stacy:
Boo!

Max:
If you’re somebody like Michael Saylor, the Bitcoin mirror exposes somebody with a high degree of integrity and a passion for education and a deep understanding of bitcoin. Same thing in the political class. You have Cynthia Lummis, who I think you can say gets it. She’s been orange-pilled, and she’s working hard in politics to make positive things happen.

Other people in politics who talk about Bitcoin, we’ll find out soon enough whether or not they’re just being narcissistic, self-serving assholes or whether they are genuinely hardcore Bitcoiner maximalists.

You know, nobody escapes the guillotine. Bitcoin is the new guillotine of the 21st century. All the toffs who are posing and not really worthy of the power that they get, they’re gone. Goodbye, have a nice day. You’re gonna be disintermediated and you’re going to zero.

Stacy:
By the way, I want to say there is something that Trump did that is so Bitcoin, and that is to get up and say, “Fight, fight, fight!” That was pretty Bitcoin. Okay, that was honey badger of him. That was wild to see. It seemed like a Bitcoin meme of the era of say, 2015/2016, come to life. It seemed like a honey badger. Everybody’s watched those videos over and over, right? Where you see these things that are insane. What are they doing? Why are they taking on that lion? And it seemed like that to me. That was good. That’s very Bitcoin.

Natalie:
So are you hoping President Trump makes his way down to El Salvador? Maybe pay you guys a visit? See what it’s like down there?

Stacy:
Yeah, he should pay us. That sounds like a threat. He’s going to pay you a visit. *laughs* Very New York, you know? I’m gonna pay you a little visit.

No, we have some coffee for him.

Max:
Yeah, definitely.

Stacy:
We’ll give him this one. I have a brand new package to give him, but we’re gonna give him this open one now that he was so rude, right?

Max:
Yeah, come on down to El Salvador. You’re welcome anytime, Donald Trump. Look and observe how the Bitcoin country operates and works. It’ll be an inspiration. I know Don Jr. has been to El Salvador and he’s buying property in El Salvador. He’s had great meetings with the president. And (Matt) Goetz has been to El Salvador. He’s buying property. All the smart money is going to El Salvador.

All the smart politicians are going. So it’s only a matter of time before the orange pill drops and “the Donald” makes his way to San Salvador.

Max Keiser El Salvador Flag

Natalie:
We only got a couple minutes left. I did want to ask you: I saw you paid a visit to Nvidia on behalf of El Salvador, what’s that about?

Stacy:
El Salvador is becoming the tech hub of Central America. When we have our website up, you’ll be able to apply for citizenship. If you are willing to come build, we’re looking for 5,000 of you. Part of this is we are planning on being the tech hub.

Remember, President Bukele just pivoted to the economy for the second term. We have very big plans. Cathie Wood said that El Salvador’s GDP is going to increase by 1,000% in the next five years, because of Bitcoin and AI. She’s the one that told us we have to do this. She made that prediction, we need to make it come true.

Natalie:
Final thoughts in the last couple seconds here. What do you want people to know about Max and Stacy and El Salvador?

Stacy:
We would love for you to come join us. The more, the merrier. We’re building amazing things. We’re very excited to have a first follower. I think it’s going to be good for the relationship between the United States and El Salvador when we’re a Bitcoin country here in the United States, as well.

Max:
Yeah, I would just second that. Come on down and visit for a week or two and get to know the country. You’ll be pleasantly surprised. A lot of people who visit end up living there. The opportunities are fantastic.

We’re opening up a Bitcoin bank soon. So you’ll be able to borrow against your bitcoin and buy some property. You’ve got both the rise in the property price plus your Bitcoin at the same time. You’ve got a brilliant place to live.

Plus the building is about $150 per square foot, which is about 90% cheaper than you find anywhere else. So you’ve got the bank for the bank for the bank for your bitcoin. So it’s really the opportunity of a lifetime.

Hope House El Zonte El Salvador

Natalie:
Well, you said earlier, don’t trust, verify. I had the chance to spend some time with you in El Salvador. I didn’t know what to expect. It was one of the friendliest, most hope-filled places. We got to go to Hope House and talk to some girls. We taught them about Bitcoin. I think that a lot more people will be moving with their feet, maybe not just to El Salvador, but Bitcoin nations around the country. So thank you so much, Max and Stacy, everyone.
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Bill

July 27, 2024
Speaker: Wyoming State Senator Cynthia Lummis
Conference: Bitcoin Conference 2024

Date: July 27, 2024
View the original video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ou_oxWsCcc&t=324s

Before you all leave, have we got a present for President Donald Trump! Here it is! This is the Bitcoin Reserve Bill!

I’m reading from the text: In the Senate of the United States, …to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a network of secure storage vaults, purchase programs and other programs to ensure the transparent management of Bitcoin holdings of the Federal Government.

My name is Cynthia Lummus, and I’m the Bitcoin Senator. When Satoshi Nakamoto, in January of 2009, mined the first Bitcoin, he brought about an asset that will change the world. This is our Louisiana Purchase moment.

This Bitcoin Reserve that we’re going to create will start with the 210,000 Bitcoin that President Trump just mentioned, and pull it into a reserve stored in geographically diverse vaults, and that’s only the beginning. Over five years, the United States will assemble one million Bitcoin (5% of the world’s supply), and it will be held for a minimum of 20 years, and can be used for one purpose: to reduce our debt.

This Bitcoin is going to be transformative for this country. As President Trump just said, we are printing too much money, we are spending too much money. We printed in 22 months, during covid, the same amount of money that had ever been printed in the history of the United States.

Well, no more!

With a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve we will have an asset that in that period of time, before 2045, can cut our debt in half. As Michael Saylor said yesterday, if we put $3.3 million in a Bitcoin Reserve, we will eliminate the United States debt. We will be debt free because of Bitcoin!

This asset is transforming not only our country, but our world. The United States needs to be the global leader, as President Trump just said. You know what, we don’t have to raise taxes to do it. We have the funds now. This bill provides that not only will the asset forfeiture money be transferred into this Reserve, fulfilling President Trump’s promise that he won’t sell any Bitcoin, but we will convert excess reserves at our 12 Federal Reserve banks into Bitcoin over five years.

We have the money now. But we’ll no longer be holding it in the U.S. dollar, an asset that is designed to debase at least two percent per year. We’ll be holding it in an asset that will grow in value, that throughout its history has grown 55% per year. This is the solution! This is the answer! This is our Louisiana Purchase moment!

Thank you Bitcoin! It’s your love of freedom, your innovation, your thoughtful design, your keeping this asset alive, well, free, and in support of individual sovereignty that is going to save America.

Let’s make America free again Bitcoin! This is our present to the United States of America! Thank you.
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
The Importance of Supporting Open Source Development

July 27, 2024
Mike Schmidt, Christian Keroles, Aaron Daniel & Hong Kim

ORIGINAL SPEECH TITLE: Why Open Source Development Matters
SPEAKERS: Mike Schmidt, Christian Keroles, Aaron Daniel & Hong Kim
CONFERENCE: Bitcoin 2024
Introduction

Hong Kim:

Thank you everyone for coming. We will be talking about the importance of funding open source development. I am the CTO and co-founder of Bitwise, one of the ETF providers that launched earlier in January (2024), and in that context I’ve gotten to know Mike and CK and the organizations that fund Bitcoin development. I wanted to bring this topic to the audience.

Could all of you quickly introduce yourselves?

Mike Schmidt:

I’m Mike Schmidt, the Executive Director at Brink, we’re a 501c3 in the US that takes in donations from the community and routes those to the Bitcoin core developers working on the software underpinning the Bitcoin Network.

CK:

I’m CK, the Director of Financial Freedom at the Human Rights Foundation. We also support open source development as well as Bitcoin education and even translating Bitcoin resources into different languages to make it as accessible as possible for everyone across the globe.

Aaron Daniel:

I’m Aaron Daniel, the co-Director of the Open Source Justice Foundation, we’re also a 501c3. We’re the newest of the group up here. Our mission is to spread access to justice globally with free open-source software, so we give grants to developers working on open protocols like Bitcoin, Nostr, and Fedimint. Especially those building dispute resolution tools.

The Importance of Open-Source Funding

Hong Kim:

I think maybe a good place to start is around the question of why donations or other kinds of open-source funding are important or necessary? There’s often conversations on Twitter or Nostr these days stating that Bitcoin is supposed to be done, complete. Is it a liability for devs to be tinkering with Bitcoin? Could you make an argument for why we, as a community, should continue to fund open source development of Bitcoin?

Mike Schmidt:

From the Bitcoin software side of things, you have two things; you have a digital asset that is entirely based on code, and number two, all code requires some form of maintenance. Even if we’re not talking about something like a change to the Bitcoin protocol, the fact is that there is Bitcoin software that has codified the Bitcoin protocol in it and we want that to continue to function into the future.

We need people working on this software, and there’s no foundation or governing entity that is funding it, then it really is up to all of us to decide whether we either donate our time as a developer or somebody who can contribute, or donate money to support somebody who can contribute. That may be a highly philosophical kind of approach, but I think it makes sense.

Lately, within the Bitcoin project there’s a more tangible reason why this is valuable.

Recently, the Bitcoin core developers released a bunch of historical vulnerabilities that occurred in the code. If you look at these 10 vulnerabilities that are many years old now, what you’ll see is that the people that discovered these vulnerabilities in the code at the time were actually being funded by certain organizations to do that work. If you extrapolate that into the future, we’ll be glad that we’re funding people because there may be other bugs now that we want these people to be finding and fixing.

CK:

Mike’s organization really focuses on working on Bitcoin Core software, which is the base layer blockchain, and there’s a lot of ideas around ossification in Bitcoin, this idea of not changing Bitcoin. I think personally there are certain elements of Bitcoin that are already ossified, things like the 21 million hard cap and SHA 256 as a hashing algorithm. On the other hand, we’re still very early, and if you talk to any of these developers that are intimately aware of the code, they will be the first to tell you that this code is not good enough to continue to scale to the whole globe. They’ll tell you that this technology needs to continue to get better and it needs to continue to get more well organized and get patched up.

Even beyond the core level of the Bitcoin blockchain, all of us know that the Bitcoin wallets aren’t there yet. All of us know that the levels above Bitcoin, like the applications, are not there yet. A lot of that technology is also open source and very experimental. The technology needs people who have the time and bandwidth to explore how to push the entire ecosystem forward.

Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is mostly focused on that application layer, on the layer in which people are really engaging and interacting with Bitcoin. However, the entire stack needs to continue to get hardened and continue to get worked on. I think one of the biggest reasons is because we’re just still so darn early in this evolution, when you think of Bitcoin as being a 15 year old project. We need it to be a multi-hundred year project. How can we, at this early stage, dictate what it will be and what the software should look like in the future?

Aaron Daniel:

Bitcoin is core public infrastructure, and as such, it needs to be open-source. We saw what happened recently with CrowdStrike—proprietary software that became core public infrastructure but wasn’t open. When it failed, it shut down all our airports.

Switzerland has recognized that core public infrastructure must be open-source; they recently passed a law mandating that all public software be open-sourced. However, Bitcoin is the purest form of public infrastructure—no federal funding, no government creation—it was built by the people. Because of that, it’s up to the people to fund it. That’s why community engagement and funding are critical—to find and fix bugs and ensure long-term maintenance for generations to come.

The Need for Public Support in Bitcoin’s Ongoing Development

Hong Kim:

That’s a great point. One thing people often miss when discussing open-source funding is that software isn’t static. Even Bitcoin Core, the node that you run, needs to keep up with operating systems like Linux, Mac, and Windows, which update regularly. The same applies to compilers and programming languages and all of those incompatibilities need to be resolved and maintained. Sometimes it’s intuitive to developers, but it’s not intuitive to everyone that — everything evolves. Bitcoin did not have some ICO or pre-mine where you funded a lot of money into an organization, it’s necessarily public work, it’s necessarily open source, and didn’t have any sort of fundraising entity, and Bitcoin must adapt accordingly and it necessitates us to fund it ourselves.

CK:

Unlike other projects, Bitcoin didn’t have an ICO or pre-mine that funded an organization to maintain it. It exists as a public good, meaning it requires public support. Thankfully, we’re now seeing companies that rely on Bitcoin investing in its development. This is an incredibly healthy and bullish sign for the ecosystem.

Ensuring Decentralized Funding for Bitcoin Development

Hong Kim:

When we were launching the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, we asked ourselves: how can we ensure that both the assets and investors of this product contribute to maintaining the network they depend on?

It’s about protecting an investment. It’s not a donation—it’s self-investment, much like the U.S. government’s security budget for national defense. Bitcoiners should think of their funding contributions in the same way. There’s a necessary budget to maintain the security and development of the network.

That brings up an important question—how do we ensure that funding sources don’t introduce bias, influence, or capture Bitcoin development? This is a concern often raised by figures like Michael Saylor, who worry that developers could be influenced by centralized funding sources. For instance, Jack Dorsey is frequently mentioned as a major funder of Bitcoin development. Some argue that a single large contributor could lead to centralization of influence. How do we prevent that?

Mike Schmidt:

At the end of the day, everything Bitcoin is open-source. We should always remain sceptical Bitcoiners regardless of what anybody says because you can look at the code, the proposed changes, and review the code ourselves. If you can’t do that, you can hire someone to audit it. Transparency is our baseline defense; it’s the floor. Beyond that, decentralization exists in funding sources. Today, at least a dozen organizations are funding Bitcoin Core development, and each has its own governance structures. At Brink, for example, our board oversees substantial donations, and a separate grant committee allocates those funds based on developer proposals. Even if a donor wanted to conditionally fund a project, there’s no way their demands could override our governance process. For example, if a donor from an exchange comes to us and says we’re going to conditionally donate to you but we want you to do XYZ, first of all that luckily hasn’t happened in the ecosystem, but if it did happen, if it wasn’t work that we were already going to do, we would not change what we are going to do based on that donor. So our board approves substantial donations that come in, we have a separate grant committee that then allocates those funds to different developers based on certain proposals that they put together and work they are already doing. So there’s no way that that would be able to trickle down, that the demand from a donor would get past the board, past myself, past the grant committee, then get to a developer, including independent board members and independent grant committee members and developers would not voice some sort of a concern. There’s the decentralization component and then there’s the governance of the organizations component and then the developers peer-review at the bottom of it.

CK:

Brink’s structure is a great model. At HRF, our grants are also no-strings-attached to us. As we give out those grants, those are also no-strings attached grants. Applicants submit proposals, and if they’re strong, we provide funding with no specific demands. We trust developers to do what they propose, and we reassess during the next grant cycle. This ensures that Bitcoin’s development isn’t dictated by any single entity. Also for HRF specifically, we’re not working at the Bitcoin core level so a lot of the emphasis is on the application level and people don’t like what applications are build they’re not going to use them. There really isn’t a ton of danger there but obviously for our reputation and process we always want things to be successful so we want to fund projects that have product market fit and are actually going to be helpful. That is part of our reflection process on the backend of delivering these grants. I think it’s really important because there’s lots of these organizations now that are trying to fund open source and one of the key principles is this no-strings attached receipt of the money and distribution of the money.

Mike Schmidt:

Some people still suspect hidden motives in Bitcoin funding and don’t believe in the no-strings attached ethos and there must be some hidden motive by donors. What I would say to that is you would be surprised how many individuals and organizations genuinely want to see Bitcoin succeed. They see funding as an investment in Bitcoin’s future rather than a donation and are willing to make them without any strings attached.

Aaron Daniel:

When it comes to centralization, we need to step back and have some perspective and see where we are in the progression of Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s funding landscape is progressing toward decentralization. Five years ago, things looked very different. Now, we have multiple organizations—OpenSats, HRF, Brink—distributing funds. This diversification will only continue to grow and progress towards decentralization.

At the Open Source Justice Foundation, we see two parallel paths for decentralization:
1. Creating more nonprofits that act as funding nodes for various projects. We’re developing a Foundation Formation Kit to help open-source projects establish themselves with minimal overhead. This will create a Cambrian explosion of nonprofits in this space.
2. Supporting the cypherpunk ethos by enabling peer-to-peer funding through platforms like Nostr and Fedimint. This will facilitate getting peer-to-peer payments directly from the supporters to the builders. We’re also backing a bounty board, FundSolver.com, where anyone can fund the development of specific Bitcoin features.
We need more eyes and support on these initiatives, but it’s an exciting direction and we’ve just got to have the long-term view as Bitcoiners and we’re in this for generations.

No-Strings-Attached Funding for Bitcoin Development

Hong Kim:

That’s an important historical perspective. In Bitcoin’s early days, development was entirely voluntary with people donating their time. Then, exchanges and miners started funding some developers. More recently, organizations like Brink, HRF and OpenSats formed to delegate the task and have the desire to provide evolution into this structured funding. This evolution has made it massively helpful and allowed ETF providers like Bitwise to donate without concerns of undue influence. Our contributions go to reputable organizations that distribute funds in a neutral way, maintaining Bitcoin’s integrity without us having to establish a committee and review and also having to deal with the perception that we are unduly influencing the development in some way when we really don’t want to. With these organizations, we have two degrees of no strings attached; were making a no-strings attached donation to Brink and HRF, and OpenSats, and you guys do that as well. The multitude and the layered no-strings attached makes sure that Bitcoin aligns so that even financial products like ETFs can donate even 10% of profits and credibly claim to the broader community of concerned Bitcoiners that we’re not really dictating neither the distribution or what the developers actually work on because we don’t even have a line of communication with them. Another direction I’d like to dig a little deeper on is if there are developers that actually want to obtain a grant from these funding organizations, how do they actually go about it? Can you describe that process and what it looks like for HRF?

CK:

For developers wondering how to secure a grant, the first step is to apply. At HRF, we encourage open-source developers to make their work public. Apply at hrf.org/bdfapply and engage with key people in the ecosystem. Many developers want to be “discovered,” but in reality, you need to articulate your ideas and reach out. Having an open dialogue and applying it’s going to help your project be successful and for our organizations to be able to get you funds.

Mike Schmidt:

Even if you’re not a developer or wealthy donor, it may be confusing how you can contribute. But, there are other ways to contribute. Testing projects, writing documentation, and designing interfaces all help the ecosystem. There are now foundations dedicated to routing support for these non-technical but crucial contributions.

Aaron Daniel:

At the Open Source Justice Foundation, we welcome grant applications and donations at opensourcejustice.org. We’re honored to be part of this effort, and we encourage everyone to get involved in securing Bitcoin’s future.

Hong Kim:

Thank you all for this insightful discussion!

Watch the original video: Click here
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```
Donald Trump Bitcoin 2024 Keynote Speech

July 27, 2024
Speaker: Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States
Conference: Bitcoin 2024 Nashville | Day 3
Presentation Date: July 27, 2024 | Click to watch original presentation.

Introduction

Hello, Bitcoiners. Thank you very much. Hello. It’s good to be with you. It’s good to be with you. So, Secret Service just told me, “Sir, we’d like a little more time.” I said, “You take all the time you want. You can take two hours, three hours, to hell with the people that have been waiting out here.” And I’m sure they don’t mind either. But it is a great honor.

A lot of things are happening in the world. We just heard, you probably heard, that Israel was just attacked, or is severely attacked. And Hezbollah, it looks like. And this is things that won’t happen. I mean, you just can’t. They have to respect us. They have to respect. They cannot do this. They cannot do this. What they did just now with that attack is terrible. It just happened. And so, to all, God bless everybody. This is so serious.

They have to respect our country. This would never have happened with us. And we just cannot let it continue. So, we just wish them all a lot of luck. This happened to us as I’m walking on the stage. You probably, most of you have heard about it. But it just, it’s a terrible thing.

But I’m thrilled to be here in Nashville to become the first American president ever to address a Bitcoin event anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the world.

I want to thank David Bailey for inviting me. Special guy. You know, this whole love affair sort of started, David, about four months ago, was at Mar-a-Lago. I took a picture with him. I mean, he’s a nice looking guy, he’s okay. He’s out here someplace. But I took a picture, it got published – Trump and David Bailey. All of a sudden, your industry went through the roof. So, David, congratulations, whatever the hell you do, you did a hell of a job. But as well as all of the Bitcoin luminaries and legends here, you have legends in this room. They really are. Congratulations. Would the legends please stand up?

Oh, everyone’s standing anyway. That’s nice. I used to say, “Sit down, everybody, sit down.” But it’s nice when they stand.

Acknowledgements

Including Tyler and Cameron. Do you know who that is? Winklevoss. These are great guys. They look like male models with a brain, you know? They’re male models with a big, beautiful brain. Michael Saylor is here. Cathie Wood. Cathie Wood. Ron Paul and Rand Paul are here.

Vivek is here. Vivek Ramaswamy. Where’s Vivek? Where are you, Vivek? There he is. He’s great. A man that I call Bob, but you probably know him as Kid Rock. Where’s Kid Rock? Where is he? He’s great. He’s a good guy and a talented guy.

And another talented guy, he was so incredible. This one, he went and he played at the funeral of a great fireman who was killed, fire chief, killed a week and a half ago at the rally. And Billy Ray Cyrus went and played music for the family. And it was supposed to be so incredible. I’ve heard so many things about it. And Billy Ray Cyrus is here. Where’s Billy Ray? He’s around here someplace, and he’s great. He’s a conservative guy. I said, “How did you get such a liberal daughter?” How did that happen, Billy Ray? And by the way, Kid Rock was incredible at the convention. You probably saw him. He was great. He was great.

Another one, Jake Paul. You don’t want to fight this guy. You know? You don’t want to fight him. He’s got a big fight coming with Mike Tyson. But he’s glad he didn’t fight Mike when Mike was 19. He told me that today. But he’s a fantastic guy. Very talented guy in a lot of ways.

Governor Joe Lombardo, who’s fantastic, and we’re doing well in his state. And he’s going to make sure that there’s no hanky-panky going on. And if that happens, we’re going to win his great state. But you know who he is and he’s a fantastic governor. Senators Bill Hagerty, Marsha Blackburn, Cynthia Lummis, Tim Scott. And Tim was great. Boy, I’ll tell you, he was such a strong voice for me. He was on so many shows and did such a great job during the primaries. He was incredible. I want to thank him. He’s a special guy.

They’re all special people. They’re warriors. Tommy Tuberville. You know Tommy Tuberville? Senator from Alabama. And you have many members of Congress: Andy Ogles, Thomas Massie, John Rose, Mark Green, and French Hill. And the next U.S. Senator from Ohio, I hear he’s doing very well, Bernie Moreno. Where is Bernie? I hear Bernie’s doing well. The great Laura Loomer. Some of you know Laura, she’s a fantastic person, great woman.

And a tremendous developer from New York and Florida, ne of the best, Steve Witkoff. And he’s got his son Alex with him today. That’s an incredible family, development family. They’ve been supporters from the beginning. Howard Lutnick. Cantor Fitzgerald. Incredible. One of the truly brilliant men of Wall Street. And a whole group of his distinguished guests. And a lot of our distinguished guests. We have a lot of other people here. And I won’t bother anymore.

Make America Great Again

That’s enough. Because we have to talk about crypto. We have to talk about Bitcoin. We have to talk about all these great companies. But our country is blessed to have the extraordinary talent, energy and genius represented in this room. It really is great genius. Not all of you, but most of you. Many of you. But this is the kind of spirit that built America.

And this is the spirit that’s going to help us make America great again. That’s what we’re doing. I stand before you today filled with respect and admiration for what the Bitcoin community has achieved. It’s incredible actually. I sort of say to my sons it’s like incredible because they know so much about it. They’re so aware of it. Much more so than people that are a little bit older.

The Bitcoin Industry

But I say this is the steel industry of a hundred years ago. It really is. I think you’re just in your infancy. I can see it happening. In just 15 years Bitcoin has gone from merely an idea posted anonymously on an internet message board to being the ninth most valuable asset anywhere in the world. Can you believe that? Is that right? That’s a big deal. Think of that.

It’s already bigger than Exxon Mobil. Soon it will be surpassing the entire market cap of silver. Not bad. How about gold? How about gold? Let’s go gold. And one day it probably will overtake gold. But based on the way it’s going now it could very well be a possibility.

There’s never been anything like it. And I don’t think you’ve ever seen anything like it. And most people have no idea what the hell it is. You know that, right?

The Bitcoin Community

So what happens when they figure it out? That’s going to really be something. Bitcoin is not just a marvel of technology. As you know it’s a miracle of cooperation and human achievement in a lot of relationships that are formed. I just did a meeting, a roundtable with a lot of the leaders. And it’s amazing.

There’s a great camaraderie. It’s really interesting. Not only there’s competition but there’s a relationship. There’s a friendship that’s developed with a lot of these people. I noticed it. I don’t usually see that too often.

I see the opposite actually. They want to get each other. They want to kill each other. These guys have a great feeling. Very smart people too. Congratulations on all that you’ve accomplished.

This room is amazing. The people in this room. High IQ individuals. I’m running against a low IQ individual, her. I’m not even talking about him. Her. I got a low IQ individual.

America First

The reason I’ve come to address the Bitcoin community today can be summed up in two very simple words. America first. Because if we don’t do it, China’s going to be doing it. Others are going to be doing it. Let’s do it and do it right. My vision is for an America that dominates the future. We have the best economy. The highest standard of living. The safest and most beautiful cities.

And by the way, when I say safest, our cities are going to hell right now. Our cities are going to hell. We’re going to fix our cities. We’re going to work with Democrats that have destroyed our cities. But we’ll work with them and we’re going to get our cities back. We’re going to bring our country back.

And we really were the freest and the most ambitious, most dynamic nation ever to exist on Earth. And we’re going to get that back again. Because we’re not there now. We’re a nation in decline. You know it. We know it. Doesn’t sound nice. But it’s okay because we’re going to bring it back. We’re going to bring it back fast. Right now, it’s embarrassing. It’s embarrassing what’s happened. Even today when you look at what we just said that would never have happened if they respected our country.

If we don’t embrace crypto and Bitcoin technology, China will. Other countries will. They’ll dominate. And we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is. And we want them to be successful. I want China to be successful. But we have to be the most successful. That’s what’s going to happen.

I want the United States to be first in technology. First in science. First in manufacturing. First in artificial intelligence. And first in space.

You know at MIT my uncle was a professor there. Dr. John Trump. He would have fit in with this room very nicely actually. That’s why I mention it. And I believe he was the longest serving professor in the history of MIT. He graduated. We have a very intelligent family actually. He graduated tremendously. I think he has three different degrees. But they said would you like to stay on John, and be a professor? Well I’ve got a lot of offers I assume he said. But I’ve got a lot of offers. He was there for I believe 41 years.

When I was in the White House the head of MIT came to see me. And they presented me with a book on my uncle. He was a legendary guy in the academic world and in the world of MIT. So I understand a lot about what you’re doing. And I have great respect for highly intelligent people. And you are highly intelligent.

Energy Demand and Production

America’s destiny is to lead our rivals in everything and to surrender our industries to no one. To no one. You know some of you are involved with AI. But you also have the same thing. You need a thing called electricity. You need a lot of electricity.

You know AI needs to be really dominant. And China can do it much easier. We have environmental impact statements to do. But we’re going to do things that nobody thought were possible.

You need tremendous amounts of electricity. You need double the electricity of the entire electricity that we have right now in the United States to dominate. And we’ll get that done. Who would think we can get that done? But we’re going to get it done.

We’ll be having power plants built at the sites. We’ll be releasing people from certain ridiculous requirements. And we’ll be using fossil fuel to make electricity because we’re going to have to. We’ll be using nuclear. We’ll be doing it in an environmentally friendly way. But we will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, “please, please, President, we don’t want any more electricity, we can’t stand it.” You’ll be begging me, “No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough.”

Electric Cars and Elon Musk

You know, in the Midwest, they just opened, it was very interesting, they just opened up two chargers, you know, a charger for the electric cars. And, you know, I love Elon. He’s great. He endorsed me and great endorsement and everything else. But not everybody has to have an electric car. I told them that. So we’re going to get rid of that mandate if you don’t mind. Some people want gasoline propelled cars. Some people want a hybrid. And some people like an electric car. They’re great.

I think they’re great. I think what he’s done is great. I think he understands it. I guess he probably wouldn’t have endorsed me. He knows who I am in this. But he did. And it’s just like they did these chargers in the Midwest. There are eight of them. They spent $9 billion to build eight chargers to charge up a car.

And at that rate it would cost approximately $12 trillion to put the chargers in. Somehow that’s not working. The country would have to file for Chapter 11. We’ll do a Chapter, you know, it’s called Chapter 7 instead of a Chapter 11, but it’s the equivalent. No, we have to use our brain.

The Party of Common Sense

We are the party of common sense, okay? We have to have common sense. But what we do have to do is we have to produce tremendous electric or AI and for all of the other things, including the things that you’re doing, and we’ll get it produced and we’re going to get it produced fast, or we’re not going to be able to compete with China and other countries.

So we’re going to get it produced fast. This afternoon I’m laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the Bitcoin superpower of the world. And we’ll get it done.

Bitcoin and Crypto in America

If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA it’s going to be. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon, as we say, it’s going to the moon, I want America to be the nation that leads the way.

And that’s what’s going to happen. So you’re going to be very happy with me. You’re going to be so happy. You’re going to say he’s the greatest guy. That’s why I’m proud to be the first major party nominee in American history to accept donations in Bitcoin and crypto. And they’ve made a lot of them, I might tell you. And I appreciate it.

Since we made that announcement on May 21st, we have already raised $25 million, much of it in Bitcoin, crypto, and others. Others that are very, very good also. But as you know, our excitement about the future of Bitcoin and crypto could not be more difficult from the approach of our opponents.

United States Presidential Election

Look, our opponents have gone a difficult route. They’re going old-fashioned stuff. We’re going to take it right down the middle. We are so different from anybody else in terms of a campaign. First of all, we understand it. They don’t understand it. They are blocking your path. They’re blocking your way. But I’ve made it a lot easier for you because the SEC has been very, very tough on you. And now they see that you’ve embraced me. All of a sudden, people that were under investigation, they’re being let go. They say, “oh no, we don’t want to do that. We love crypto.”

Let me tell you, if they win this election, every one of you will be gone. They will be vicious. They will be ruthless. They will do things that you wouldn’t believe. But right now, because of me, they’re leaving you alone. So please say, “thank you, President Trump. Thank you very much.”

Bitcoin and Crypto Voter Base

And the reason they’re doing that is, I’ve heard from some of your great geniuses that talk to me about this subject. I’ve heard from Vivek. 175 million people in some form are involved with this world of crypto and Bitcoin and all of the others. 175 million. So when they heard that, they said, “let’s be nice to them, at least until after the election.” So I’ve taken a lot of pressure off a lot of people. A lot of people are very happy today that about three months ago weren’t so thrilled.

But three and a half years, is that right? Look, he just said that’s right. And you know it’s right. For three and a half years, the current administration has waged a war on crypto and Bitcoin like nobody’s ever seen before.

For those who work in this industry, they target your banks. They choke off your financial services. Have people seen that? Yes. Yeah, they have. Put your hands up. They block ordinary Americans from transferring money to your exchanges. They slander you as criminals.

But that happened to me, too, because I said the election was rigged. “He said the election was rigged. He should spend the rest of his life in jail for making that statement.” Of course, they say it about us, and it’s okay, right? No. And by the way, we’re doing very well on the election.

Covering a Lot of Territory

You know, we lost a candidate recently. Crooked Joe Biden. And I thought, we lost this wonderful person. And he’s actually a terrible human being, if you want to know the truth, so don’t feel sad. And we have another worse. He’s the worst human being.

And I sort of made an analogy last night. Last night, think of this. I was speaking in front of a very powerful and very strong, very religious group, Christian group. Christians, evangelicals, Christians. And then today, I come in front of Bitcoin. And now I’m going to Minnesota to do a rally. You think my life is so great, don’t you, huh? But I cover a lot of territory.

I go from religion to Bitcoin to a rally. And I don’t get it mixed up like other people do. Where they come out and they say, “may God bless everybody involved in the Bitcoin world”. But actually, we mean that, because you need blessing because you’ve got to do something very spectacular.

But we had an incredible time last night talking to Christians, largely Christians, a Christian group. And this is so great. And then we have a very big rally in Minnesota. Hasn’t been one since 1972. Richard Nixon, can you believe it?

And I think, you know, I think we’re leading Minnesota. But there’s some hanky-panky that goes on in Minnesota. But I think we’re doing good. So we’re going to leave here. We’re going to go there for a big rally. But this is such an honor to be with you.

Weaponizing Government

Sadly, when we see the attacks on crypto, it’s a part of a much larger pattern that’s being carried out by left-wing fascists who weaponize government against any threat to their power. They’ve done it to me.

Did you see I just won the big case in Florida? Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Good. Now, it’s a big case. That was the document case. I have Presidential Records Act on my side. Biden didn’t. By the way, Biden, they said, here’s what they said.

The State of the Current Government

They said, “he’s guilty as hell, but we’re not going to charge him because he’s incompetent.” I won the case the old-fashioned way. It’s called, you win. I wouldn’t have wanted to win the way he won. “Trump won the case because they called him incompetent.” Think of this. So they called him incompetent. So he’s incompetent to run for trial, to stand trial. But he’s not incompetent to run the country.

How does that work? But he’s not doing it anymore because he didn’t do particularly well in the debate. Did anybody watch the debate? Not too many people. Somebody said to me, “you did horribly in the debate.” I said, why? “Because there’s no way he can continue forward.: That’s how bad he was. They said, I understand that. And that’s exactly what happened, actually. We had a great debate. It was a tremendous debate, actually.

You have to open the eyes. You have to see what’s going on. We have a country to run. The problem is that Kamala is worse than Joe, is worse. She’s a radical left lunatic. Defund the police. All of the different things. And so far we’re doing. She’s got a little honeymoon going on right now. But when people hear about her. And she’s against crypto, by the way. And she’s against it very big. So I just want to let you know. You’ve got to get out and vote.

It should be no surprise that these same totalitarians are hell bent on crushing crypto and obliterating. And that’s what they want to do. And that’s what they stated. Well, I mean, they’re there right now. You have the SEC. You know what they’re doing. Obliterating Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Stands for Freedom

The reason could not be more clear. Because Bitcoin stands for freedom, sovereignty and independence from government, coercion and control. The Biden-Harris administration’s repression of crypto and Bitcoin is wrong. And it’s very bad for our country. It’s really quite un-American.

As you know, six days ago, we officially defeated the worst president in the history of the United States. I believe he was the worst president in the history of the United States.

National Security

Think of it. Millions and millions of people have come into our country. They’ve come in from jails. They’ve come in from -think of it. Insane asylums. Mental institutions. They’ve come in as terrorists. We have the largest number of terrorists coming into our country right now.

The same people that you just heard about from Israel. That did that in Israel. They’re coming in and nobody checks them. Nobody knows what’s going on. We have no idea what’s going on. They’ve lost control of our country. And only bad things can happen.

Political Opponents

So it’s not going to be that way. We’re not going to let that happen. We’re beating them and we’re beating them badly. And we have to make sure that we do. We need to do it for our country. And you can’t just be a fighter and have your man lose the fight. Or woman. But in this case a man.

He’s losing the fight. He’s down by 15, 16, 17 points. They say that, “you’re not going to win Joe, you’ve got to get out.” He didn’t want to get out. He said, “I’m not getting out.” He said, “you’re getting out.” He said, “I’m not getting out, I have 14 million votes, I’m not getting out.” They said, “if you’re not getting out we’re going to institute the 25th Amendment on your mental competence.” He said, “like I said before I think I’m going to get out.”

Okay. And they got him out. But it’s like, think of this. You fight, you’re in a campaign. You spend a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort. And he’s losing. And then they say let’s take him out of the fight. We’ll put a new fighter in there. The new fighter is her. Probably my second choice.

He will always be my first choice but she’d be my second choice. And again, if we don’t win this race and I know you’re not that political but you have to be political because your whole thing, I mean you have a lot of politics involved in what you do. If we don’t win this race this country could be finished as we know it. This country is going to be in bad shape and we have to be in there. We have to fight and we have to win.

I pledge to the Bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ anti-crypto crusade will be over. It will end. It’ll be done. It’ll be done. The moment I’m sworn in the persecution stops and the weaponization ends against your industry.

And as long as I’m in the Oval Office Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas. Do you remember? Yes, I’m an Indian. Yes, I’m an Indian. She said, I’m an Indian. Why are you an Indian? You don’t look like an Indian. No, no, my mother told me I have high cheekbones. Oh, that’s why she was an Indian.

So I named her Pocahontas. Elizabeth Warren and her goons and she’s very nasty to you. She hates your people. She hates everything about you. We’ll keep their hands off Bitcoin. They’re going to keep their hands off crypto. They’re going to let it grow. We’re going to let it grow.

SEC Leadership

On day one I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chairman. I didn’t know he was that unpopular. Well, I didn’t know he was that unpopular. Let me say it again. On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler. I will appoint a new SEC chairman who believes America should build the future, not block the future, which is what they’re doing.

And Kamala Harris wants to make him Treasury Secretary. That’s not good. That’s not good. He was Hillary Clinton’s finance person. Did you know that? Crooked Hillary. Remember Crooked Hillary? Do you remember her? Anybody remember? He was the finance chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign against the gentleman known as Donald Trump.

Not a popular person within the… Actually, she came to my wedding. Do you know that? To our great First Lady Melania came to our wedding, and Bill came to our wedding. But it’s amazing things when you run for office, a lot of things change in your life. A lot of things change.

Vision for Bitcoin in America

As president, I will immediately shut down Operation Chokepoint 2.0. They want to choke you. They want to choke you out of business. We’re not going to let that happen. And no longer will your government sit by and watch as Bitcoin jobs and businesses flee to other countries because America’s laws are too unclear and too tough and too angry and too stiff. We will keep each and every Bitcoin job in the United States of America. That’s what we’re going to be doing.

Upon taking office, I will immediately appoint a Bitcoin and Crypto Presidential Advisory Council. Would anybody like to be on that particular council? Please raise your hand. Their task will be to design transparent regulatory guidance for the benefit of the entire industry and they will get it done in 100 days.

We will have regulations but from now on the rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry. People that want to make it clear and simple, straightforward and fair. People that want to see your industry thrive, not dive.

Next, I will immediately order the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to cease and desist all steps necessary because, you know, there’s a thing going on in your industry. They want to move the creation of a central bank digital currency. It’s over. Forget it. CBDC.

There will never be a CBDC while I’m President of the United States. And I will always defend the right to self-custody. Self-custody.

You’re going to have a great industry. And we’re going to be fuel for your industry, not demolish your industry. America will once again be a nation that protects property rights, privacy, freedom of transaction, freedom of association and freedom of speech.

We’re going to change our… We’re going to go back to the old days when we were a nation that was building, not a nation that was eating itself alive from within. As part of our effort to provide regulatory clarity, we will create a framework to enable the safe and responsible expansion of stable coins.

Do you know what a stable coin is? Does anybody know? Please raise your hand. Allowing us to extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers all around the world. America will be richer.

The world will be better. And there will be billions and billions of people brought into the crypto economy and storing their savings in Bitcoin. So that’s the way it is. That’s pretty much the way it is.

Threats to the U.S. Economy

Those who say that Bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards. I believe it is exactly backwards. Bitcoin is not threatening the dollar. The behavior of the current U.S. government is really threatening the dollar.

The danger to our financial future does not come from crypto. It comes from Washington, D.C. It comes from trillions of dollars in waste, rampant inflation, and open borders while giving welfare and free health care to all of the illegal aliens that are pouring into our country by the millions and millions and millions.

Violence Within the U.S.

It comes from printing hundreds of billions of dollars to fund endless wars overseas while our cities are like combat zones here at home. Two weeks ago in Chicago, 117 people were shot and 17 died. Afghanistan doesn’t have anything like that.

You know, you think about tough places. Look at what’s happening with our cities. What’s happening in the last three years, last three and a half years.

Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Think of it. 117 over Fourth of July weekend. 117 people were shot and 17 died. This is the United States of America? I don’t think so.

U.S. Military Strength

By the way, when I was president, we had no wars. We had no new wars. We didn’t start any. Remember when Hillary said, “he’ll start wars, look at his personality.” No, I said, “my personality will keep us out of wars.”

But we finished off some of the old ones like ISIS, which they said would take five years to do, maybe more. We did it in four weeks. We beat ISIS in four. Because we have a great military. And it’s not a woke military, by the way. Maybe some of the people on top are woke, but this is not a woke. I got to see that first.

When I looked at what they did and what they did for me, they were unbelievable. They did things that nobody thought were possible. Our real generals and our soldiers, there’s no woke. They’re trying to get them to be woke, but these people are not going to go woke. I can guarantee you that.

Common Sense this Election

With your support this November, we will restore competence and we will restore common sense to our nation’s capital, because ultimately it is about – it’s not are you conservative, are you liberal, are you progressive. They like progressive. It sounds so nice, right? It’ll destroy our country. It’s actually become a terrible word.

It’ll destroy our country, but it’s not about that. It’s about common sense. We want to bring common sense back in. This is all common sense that we’re talking about today. And Bitcoin and crypto will skyrocket like never before, even beyond your expectations. And you are the people that are doing it.

The Economic Impact of this Election

As we stop the war on crypto, we will immediately, and we’ll do this very quickly, begin to build our economy, because when America is prospering, Bitcoin is soaring, and it’ll go up with it.

We had the greatest economy ever, and we will soon have it again. Under the Trump administration, the typical middle class family income rose by $6,000 a year. People don’t like mentioning that. America had more money to save than at any time in many decades. As a result, during my four years in office, now you have to listen to these numbers. These numbers are like beautiful, and I don’t want to repeat myself.

Listen to these numbers. As a result, during my four years in office, Bitcoin surged by 3,900% from $898 the day I took office to $35,900 the day I left. That was the biggest jump, I guess, in just about any industry.

Think of that. Now compare that to just after three and a half years of Biden and Harris adjusted for inflation, Bitcoin is up 50%. Now 50% sounds good, but not when you’re comparing it to almost 4,000% right? 50% – normally you say, oh, that sounds pretty good. Let’s not put that into the speech.

No, 50% is not good. When people can’t afford groceries or rent, they have no savings to store in Bitcoin. This administration caused the biggest inflation in the history of our country, and people are being wiped out.

From the very first day we take back the White House, we will replace the Biden-Harris economic stagnation with a brand-new Trump economic boom. You’re going to have a tremendous boom.

You know, you have a lot of great analysts out there. Scott, I’m talking about you, Scott, one of the greatest of all, and others that say the stock market’s going up because they think Trump is going to be elected. And if Trump isn’t elected, this country’s going to go into a depression the likes of what you had in 1929, and I hope that’s not true, but I can understand it, and I can understand what they’re saying.

The stock market game, they think is because it looks like we’re going to win the election, and I don’t know what’s going to happen with the election, you know? They cheat like hell, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. But if we win it, this country is going to be boomtown. It’s going to be booming like it never boomed before.

Tax Policies

The current administration’s economic plan includes trillions in new spending and $5 trillion tax hikes. They want to increase taxes by $5 trillion. They want the expiration of the Trump tax cuts to take place.

They want a wealth confiscation tax so that when you make all of your money that you’re going to make and all of the people you’re going to employ, they want to take away your money in the form of a first-time-ever tax, and a gigantic capital gains tax that will exceed substantially in many states over 50%.

My plan is the opposite. We will lift the workers, and we will create savers out of so many people, and we will reward success. We will not punish success. They want to punish success. They want to punish genius. Not going to let that happen. I will make the Trump tax cuts permanent and deliver massive tax cuts for families and individuals and businesses that produce jobs. That includes no tax on tips. You know that, right? Going to get rid of the tax on tips.

America for Business

I will cut unnecessary and burdensome regulations, fight every day to make America the best place on earth to build a business, including a crypto business.

It’s going to be the best place. You’re not going to have to go to China. You’re not going to have to learn, gee, how do I learn Chinese? I want to learn it very quickly. I have a little granddaughter that speaks fluent Chinese. Can you believe it? And it’s a wonderful thing, but it’s not easy, but you’re not going to have to do it.

Most importantly for our citizens, we will end the inflation nightmare that this administration has created, and we will end it quickly. It’s got to end. It’s destroying our country.

You know, inflation is a country buster. You can go back many, many years to Germany, and you look at what happened to Germany during their huge period of inflation, destroyed the country. It’s a country buster.

Bitcoin and Inflation

The Bitcoiners, and I say to you that you recognize the dangers of inflation long before most others did. You understood inflation, frankly, better than anybody else. You know that, don’t you?

If only they had listened. They didn’t listen to you. They didn’t listen to you. The trillions of dollars in ridiculous waste approved by our opponents resulted in the very inflation disaster that Bitcoiners had always predicted. Twenty, thirty, and even forty percent of the value of every dollar was wiped out and wiped out quickly.

You understood that, but a lot of other people didn’t. The life savings of millions of Americans was rapidly destroyed. And very simply, uncontrolled inflation is a stealth taxation of the middle class. It really is. It’s a stealth taxation. I call it the Biden tax. Now I’ll call it the Harris tax or the Harris-Biden tax or whatever the hell we’re going to call them.

But it’s a disaster. It’s a tax of 50%. It’s a 50 %tax. Inflation, think of it, it’s a 50% tax on people. Five-O. This is a human tragedy, and it’s destroyed people. It’s a national disgrace. It’s destroyed everything in its way. It must never be allowed to happen again, and it won’t. When I’m president, I guarantee you it won’t happen because we’re going to do things that make sure it doesn’t happen.

They’ve allowed pricing to get totally out of control. We’re going to do energy, bring it down to levels that people have not seen in many, many years. We had it at levels. We were at $1.87 for a gallon of gasoline. You don’t see that right now.

For four straight years, under my leadership, we had effectively no inflation. None. When I left office, it was 1.4 percent. And then it stayed there for almost two years. Remember when Biden said it was nine? “I inherited nine percent.” That was just another lie. Misinformation, disinformation.

We gave them a hot country. We went through the COVID. We did an incredible job. Never got credit for that. Always got credit for the economy, for the military. We rebuilt the military. We created the Space Force. We did so many different things. Never got credit for that.

You know what? We gave them a great country with essentially no inflation. And after two years, they drove this country and they drove inflation through the roof. Two years, cost of living went up, in some cases, by over 50%. They say 22%. They like to say 22, but it could be much higher, and it is much higher depending on what they include. They don’t include things like interest rates that went from 2.5% to 10%, but you can’t get the money.

Foreign Policy

When I return to the White House, I will stop the wild and wasteful spending of this administration. I will end the endless wars. They never stop. Again, we had no wars. We had no new wars under your favorite president, President Trump. We had no new wars. They thought I was going to start a war. Let me tell you something. I’m going to stop World War III because we’re closer to the World War III that we’ve ever been since the end of World War II.

I will seal the border and stop the invasion of millions of people pouring into our country illegally. We will totally defeat, and we will do this quickly. We will defeat inflation, and together, we will bring back the American dream for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.

The American Dream

We will bring it back, the American dream. You don’t even hear the, you don’t even hear the statement American Dream anymore. You don’t hear those words anymore. We used to talk about the American Dream. A lot of you people are in the American Dream, but you’re going to be crushed if you don’t elect me. I hate to tell you.

You don’t elect me, you’re going to be crushed. You’re going to say, Alice, what a mistake it was. We went for a person who has no talent. She’s been a failure at almost everything she’s done instead of Trump. And look at us now. We’re going to move into an extremely small house from our beautiful house.

Energy Policy

But we will end the war on American energy and we will very simply drill, baby, drill. We’re going to drill, baby, drill. We have to.

It’s what we have. We have more liquid gold under our feet than any nation in the world. More than Saudi Arabia, more than Russia. We don’t use it. We don’t use it. They use it. We don’t use it. We go out and buy oil from Venezuela. Amazing.

But we won’t stop there. We will harness American energy in all forms. I have set the ambitious goal that by the end of my term, the United States will be the number one lowest cost of energy and electricity of any nation on Earth.

We can make it so inexpensively. Because of what we have under our feet, we can make it so inexpensively.

Bitcoin Policy

And with low energy costs, America will become the world’s undisputed Bitcoin mining powerhouse. You’ll be a Bitcoin mining powerhouse. You will not have to move your family to China. You will not be moving to China.

As we implement these reforms, Bitcoin and crypto will grow our economy, cement American financial dominance and strengthen our entire country long into the future. Many Americans do not realize that the United States government is among the largest holders of Bitcoin. Does anyone know that?

How about that? The federal government has almost 210,000 Bitcoin or 1% of the total supply that will ever exist. But for too long our government has violated the cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart. Never sell your Bitcoin. Right? That’s right, isn’t it? Huh? That’s right. How did I figure that one?

Never sell your Bitcoin. And so, as the final part of my plan today, I am announcing that if I am elected it will be the policy of my administration, United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future. We’ll keep 100%. I hope you do well, please. This will serve in effect as the core of the strategic national Bitcoin stockpile.

As you know, as you know, most of the Bitcoin currently held by the United States government was obtained through law enforcement action. You know that. They took it from you. “Let’s take that guy’s life. Let’s take his family, his house, his Bitcoin. We’ll turn it into Bitcoin.” It’s been taken away from you because that’s where we’re going now. That’s where this country is going. It’s a fascist regime.

And so as I take steps to transform that vast wealth into a permanent national asset to benefit all Americans, today I repeat my pledge to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht to a sentence of time served. It’s enough. It’s enough. It’s enough.

Pro-Bitcoin Presidency

That’s where we are as a country.

Ultimately, my promise to each and every one of you is this. I will be the pro-innovation and pro-Bitcoin president that America needs and our citizens deserve.

This will be one industry, but this will be a thriving industry, a great industry, and I’m going to be doing the same thing for every other industry also. Our nation has never thrived by trying to censor new ideas and shut down the dreams of our people. America always plants our flag on the next frontier and pushes boldly ahead. We have to do that. We haven’t been doing that for a long time, especially the last three and a half years. It’s gone the exact opposite.

American Legacy on the Bleeding Edge

Those of you in this room inherit the legacy of generations of American pioneers and patriots, risk-takers, and renegades who settled this continent, built the modern world and lived on the bleeding edge. You live on a bleeding edge. You do know that, Bitcoiners, don’t you?

You are the modern-day Edisons and Wright Brothers and Carnegies and Henry Fords and what you do in your lifetime stands a chance to outlive us all and inspire humanity for generations to come. This will go down as a very important day in the history of your industry. Together you are building America’s future with your own smarts, your own grit, and your own skin in the game. You have a lot of skin in the game and that’s what you’re doing. It takes courage to do it. Most people don’t have that courage.

Closing Remarks

My job will be to set you free and to let you do what Americans do best and what you are going to do better than anybody: win, win, win. You are going to win, win, win. With energy, passion and in brilliance like we have, rarely seen before, our country cannot fail. We’re in a failing nation right now, but we’re not going to be for long.

Our country cannot fail. With your help, we will save our nation, we will restore our republic, and we will make America and Bitcoin bigger, better, stronger, richer, freer, and greater than ever before. Thank you all. Have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you’re playing with, and we are going to make that one of the greatest industries on Earth. Good luck and God bless you all.

Thank you. God bless you. Thank you.
```
Disclaimer: Transcripts provided on bitlyrics.co represents solely the opinion of the speaker and is not by any means financial/legal advice or an opinion of the website. The content has been transcribed with maximum accuracy. Repetitions and fill words have been amended in order to enhance the reading experience. The full text may not be confirmed by the speaker. Please, refer back to the above-provided source of content for more certainty. If you are a speaker and wish to confirm/amend your speech please contact us.
```