Pierre Rochard - Speculative Defense (200TH EPISODE!!!)
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And now, let's enter the Bitcoin matrix with our good friend Pierre Richard, who makes his record-setting sixth appearance on the show. Today, we'll dive into some intriguing topics, including the Trump assassination, Elizabeth Warren's puzzling crusade against Bitcoin, divine intervention, charlatanism, Munchausen syndrome, and why Bitcoin stands above governments. What is real?

How do you define free? You can't jump into cash. Cash is trash. What do you do? You get out. Pierre Richard has researched and written about Bitcoin since 2013. He co-founded the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute in 2014 to curate the best primary source literature. In addition to developing open source Bitcoin software, Pierre is an outspoken advocate for Bitcoin's decentralized governance.

Pierre served as the Bitcoin and Lightning product manager at Kraken for three years before joining Riot as the VP of research. Pierre Richard, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast for the sixth time, sir. How are you? Great. Thanks for having me back, Sid. Yeah, man. I'm super excited to get into this. This is kind of like a full circle moment. You know, you were on episode one. This is going to be episode 200.

Episode one, we discussed accumulating Bitcoin, libertarianism, and anarcho-capitalism. And Bitcoin was at $11,000 then, like $10,900. Episode 13, we did the election night special in 2020.

22, episode 22, the Thanksgiving night special. Episode 65, Bitcoin, FOMO, ADHD, PISD, and speculative attacks. Your wife was on episode 77, Morgan, building wealth, eliminating financial stress, and achieving financial freedom. And the most recent episode in October of 2022 that we did together was 125, work, communism, and spirituality.

So we haven't talked in a while, actually. So this is really great. You know, I started the podcast reaching out to you late on a Saturday night, probably after a couple of beers. And I think you DM to me on a Sunday morning. Let's do it. Let's find some time this week. And I put together a show based on that. So this is really great.

Awesome. Well, fantastic. And congratulations on the 200th episode. That's quite a milestone. I appreciate it. And, you know, this does feel like a little bit of a similar moment in sort of Bitcoin cycles or maybe psyche of sort of the community or retail as similar to maybe October 2020. But, you know, I'd really like to get into recent events and sort of politics and

You know, this seems to be the year where Bitcoin and politics are really merging at a high level. And, you know, maybe, you know, this is August, but let's just start with maybe policy and maybe what we heard at the Bitcoin conference. I don't know if you were in Nashville, but Trump spoke.

RFK Jr. spoke and, you know, the Harris Biden administration has been doing what they're doing. So we can kind of get into that. So maybe what was your reaction to the Trump speech in Nashville? Were you there? I was not. I was already back in Austin on Saturday and I did watch it later that evening. And

I thought it was a great speech. You have to understand Trump's style to understand the speech.

And the, you know, we can get into lots of different aspects of it, but at a high level, it did show that he was positioning himself as the pro Bitcoin alternative to Harris or whoever else ends up running on the Democrat ticket. I guess right now it's Harris Waltz is the favorite. So, yeah.

I think that it's interesting because the Biden administration, in their actions, they have been deeply anti-Vet coin. And they've really tried to go as far as they can. And they have been limited by the legislative branch, and they have been limited by the judiciary branch, the judicial branch.

So, you know, there's lots of, you know, nuances to U.S. politics and to what can be done and what cannot be done. But without a doubt, the Biden administration has been looking for every single angle to take in terms of attacking Bitcoin.

which, you know, it's actually really cool to see how little they've accomplished.

that you can't just by virtue of being the president of the United States, you can't just ban Bitcoin or, you know, you're limited. And that's what the founders intended. And then if we look at the legislative side, Elizabeth Warren. So the reason why the Biden administration has been attacking Bitcoin is because

In order to get out the vote and get elected, Biden made a deal with Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts to bring in the progressives by essentially giving her free reign over financial economic matters, financial questions. And she has really abused or used that role to advance her agenda. The

What ultimately motivates her, I think, is it's a form of Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

And so basically Munchausen syndrome is where you're sick or you pretend to be sick and that way you can get medical attention and that's a psychological need you have. By proxy is when you have somebody else filling in that role of, okay, my child, I'm gonna pretend my child is sick.

That way I can be living this fantasy. And in kind of the most perverse form, it would mean that you actually make your child sick. So, you know, you feed them rotten food or something, and then you get to go take them to the hospital. When I look at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that was created by Elizabeth Warren, and I look at all of the

the issues she has with financial industry, you know, 99% of them are downstream of inflation. So basically you have this government that is making people's finances sick and then coming in and saying, well, let's, let's help protect you from these predatory financial institutions. And so with that,

The most horrific thing for her would be for a decentralized alternative like Bitcoin to come along and say, hey, actually, you should stop eating the fiat rat poison and start eating Bitcoin and you'll be healthy. And then you won't need Elizabeth Warren to protect you.

And that is a direct attack on her ego and her identity, right? That for her, she's built up this persona over decades.

of being somebody who is sticking up for the little guy by using government to protect them and their finances. And she's built this power base around that. And it really, it's not even just like, okay, the number of people who have adopted Bitcoin and have seen their financial situation improve.

It's also that she has all of these crypto lobbyists running around Capitol Hill saying, you know, DeFi Web3 is going to revolutionize finance. And, you know, as a maxi, I'm like, OK, I look at the same level of skepticism to that. But for her, you know, she's got it's essentially like

creates an oppositional force of, well, why should we give Elizabeth Warren more power when apparently there's this new technological innovation coming from Silicon Valley VCs that is actually going to solve these problems in a decentralized manner, right? So she definitely, I think her ego, even though there might not have been any intent to attack her to begin with,

Just by nature of the marketing of Bitcoin and the wider crypto sphere, I think it has attacked her ego and has triggered her massively. And that for her, this is really an existential battle that she has to wage against the crypto bros and the Bitcoiners. So, yeah.

Sadly for her though, on the legislative side, she doesn't have a lot of allies. Not a lot of other legislators have their egos wrapped up in this persona. And every legislator has their set of pet issues and some of them might be all about national security. In fact, a lot of them are all about national security, a very popular pet issue.

And then others might be about the environment. All right. So she's had to try to find different legislative angles. And it has really fallen off the one, which is the anti-money laundering KYC angle. So she drafted legislation, DAMLA, the Digital Assets Anti-Money Laundering Act.

she was able to swindle or convince, persuade one Republican to join her on this. And just a couple of weeks ago, he actually backed out of it and removed his name from the bill because he saw that she was just trying to use him and that this was not aligned with, for example, what President Trump was saying in Nashville. So,

Trump coming out with this position and, you know, when we listen to the speech, when we listen to it through a maximalist lens, it's like, okay, you know, he's saying the right words, paying lip service to Bitcoin, but he's also like throwing in crypto and Gary Gensler and all this stuff that we don't care about. And, you know, he's done ICOs and, sorry, he's done NFTs and all this. So, yeah.

we might see it with with some skepticism but the reality from a political perspective is that if if trump comes out positively about bitcoin that means that lots of other republicans have to align with that uh republicans are very careful about how

they are seeing in relation to Trump, right? They want to be endorsed by him. And so they don't want to be going against his perspective on any given issue. So, you know, Elizabeth Warren had very limited success legislatively. Then when we look at what the Biden administration did, so she

over several years was able to persuade the Secretary of Energy, Bramholm, that she should do a survey of Bitcoin miners. And this, you know, first of all, it's kind of a negotiating tactic of like, all right,

Elizabeth Horne can't ban Bitcoin mining in the United States. That's too big of a lift. So maybe first step is to just gather information about them, build up a registry of Bitcoin miners. So then when the day comes that, you know, she can actually ban them or at least get the names of the energy providers that are actually working with these Bitcoin miners and

and get those names out to the activists so that they can apply pressure on them to, you know, just like they have successfully debanked a lot of Bitcoin companies to de-energize the Bitcoin miners in the United States. And so, yeah.

This, it seems to have been a process that was really driven by not so much the Department of Energy, but the White House Office of Management and Budget, OMB. So somehow they concocted this emergency declaration of, oh, we have to send out this survey right now. And here's an explanation. The emergency was that the Bitcoin price had gone up.

And so, combined with lots of hand waving about, oh, the grid, you know, it might cause too much stress for the grid, and that they needed to send out this survey without getting any public feedback, which is,

is on because it's like, well, why wouldn't you want feedback from the public on the survey? And why wouldn't you want to take that into account and send out a good survey rather than rushing this through? It's like the clock is ticking on this administration. So plus,

You can't just get things on the administrative record by asking for a public notice and comment and then ignore it. So I think that they did not want to see the comments coming in and they didn't want to adjust their survey in relation to this. So they rushed this out. Thankfully, they made so many procedural mistakes, but also

the rationale for the emergency was so empty that when the Bitcoin miners took them to court and sued them,

The federal judge on the case, who by the way had been appointed by Trump, he immediately saw that this was government overreach and that there was no Bitcoin mining emergency. And he gave them a restraining order and told them that they had to stop the survey and destroy all the data and pay attorney's fees for the trouble that they had caused.

So, you know, this is just another example of Elizabeth Warren trying to weaponize government against Bitcoin. And thankfully, there's another branch of government there to check and balance against that. But that check and balance, you know, that that only happened because Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. So without that.

who knows what would have happened? Perhaps the judge would have said, yeah, there's an emergency. Sure, why not? You know, you can spin things however you want. And even if there's no emergency, you can say there's one. They've done that before. So I think that whether politics matters for Bitcoin or not, it really depends on your perspective of

Okay, we know Bitcoin is anti-fragile. And so we know that TikTok next block every 10 minutes and the system will route around censorship.

That we know, but on the other hand, do we really want to constantly be making our lives miserable in order to make Bitcoin as robust as possible by constantly testing it? So it can also be taken to a reductio ad absurdum. So if everybody destroyed their private keys tomorrow,

Yeah, sure. Bitcoin keeps on working, but nobody can use it. Now, that doesn't, you know, it doesn't make sense to like say, oh, we have to constantly attack Bitcoin. So we could constantly attack Bitcoin by destroying our private keys, but that's nonsensical. It makes a lot more sense to say, OK, we have to fight for Bitcoin on every playing field, not just Bitcoin.

at the protocol level or by saying, oh, let's decentralize Bitcoin mining by banning it in the United States, right? Or by banning it in China for that matter.

Rather, we should try to gain every inch possible on the fiat system. And that means that we're going to find non-protocol ways to defend Bitcoin, even though we know that, hey, look, if we fail, it's not the end of the world because Bitcoin will continue to work.

But if we succeed, then we essentially make it so that Bitcoiners don't have to invest in the anti-fragility. So we don't have to invest in, for example, further hiding our identities because the government is going to arrest Bitcoiners.

And it's like it's basically a misallocation of capital to say that, oh, we should, you know, we should make Bitcoin mining at scale illegal so that everybody can mine Bitcoin at home. And then that way we're decentralized because the government has banned large scale Bitcoin mining.

It's like, okay, but the decentralization was never about is everybody mining Bitcoin at home? The decentralization is about handling. Do they have the option to?

do they have the option to mine it at scale? And so it's like that, it's really about freedom. It's not about are people being forced to do it because there's no other alternative. So, you know, that's kind of my current perspective on the political situation is, hey, let's find ways to make life easier for Bitcoiners, not harder. And the other part of it too is that

when we are able to get Bitcoin into the political conversation, then that means when political candidates take a position on Bitcoin, they, by virtue of the democratic system we live in, they're some of the most influential people in society. They shake the most hands, right? They talk to the most people and the business leaders and all of that in their communities.

So they're able to shape public opinion. And when Trump says something good about Bitcoin, that does shape millions of people's views on Bitcoin.

And it trickles down to your state representative, you know, your local congressman who now he's having to read books about Bitcoin so that he can actually answer questions from constituents when they're like, hey, I heard Trump endorsed Bitcoin. You know, why did he do that? Isn't it a scam? So now they're able to defend kind of the party line. The

So that's great on the right. On the left, it's really interesting because on the left, you actually have the same percentage of voters who are pro-Bitcoin, but you have far more voters who are vocally anti-Bitcoin on the left than you do on the right.

And it has to do, it's really, it's been a part of progressivism since the beginning of the progressive movement is they want loose money. I mean, they want easy money. They want easy credit. They want people to be able to have access to capital easily. And, you know, that's understandable. That's, you know, but the problem is there's no shortcuts. So the problem,

Combined with the fact that a lot of progressives do view money as something that should be the monopoly of the sovereign. They subscribe to this ideology and monetary economics of charlatanism that the government should be the only one regulating and issuing the currency. And that way they have the most power.

because monetary economics shows that money tends to converge on one monopoly to avoid barter. And that natural monopoly can easily be co-opted by a geographic monopoly on the use of violence. And so throughout history, governments have co-opted the currency. And so progressives want to co-opt it

For their, you know, for their good ends, right? They might look at the past of a king co-opting it and say, okay, well, that was just to enrich himself personally and to build a palace. That was bad. We're going to use it in order to advance social welfare. And so for them, it would really be...

losing a tool in their toolbox, the printing press, if they were to allow Bitcoin to become the dominant currency and to become the natural monopoly of currency. So I think that

That's probably the most advanced argument they have. And you don't hear them use it very often. So like Elizabeth Warren doesn't talk about that because that's not actually she, I don't think she has either. She hasn't consciously thought it through to that extent. And she's really just stuck on her ego of protecting consumers or she doesn't

doesn't see it as being the most persuasive argument, which is interesting because I would argue that her anti-money laundering argument is even less persuasive. She has never cared about anti-money laundering before Bitcoin. So if you look at anything she's ever written, she's never brought it up positively or negatively. She's just never cared about it. And then Bitcoin comes along and

Very quickly, she becomes like this. She's like she wants a police state. And she goes from defund the police to everybody has to register with FinCEN. And all of this is highly regulated and you should go to prison if you use Bitcoin. So it's kind of disingenuous in a way. It's like pretextual that, oh, I don't like Bitcoin. I can't ban it.

For other arguments, right? So in her world, I think that ideally what she would want to ban it for is the volatility. If she could have a law that says you can't have a volatile asset, everything has to be stable, you know, everything has to go up or down 2% a year. You can't just like go up 500% and then go down 80%. That's not okay. Right.

I think that that would be your ideal world. But it's just it's too hard because now Bitcoin being labeled or categorized a commodity, you can't start saying, OK, commodities can only go up X percentage or it goes against something that even on the left is the

neoliberal idea of markets allocating resources, it's a relatively popular view among moderate Democrats. They would say, well, yeah, it has to be well regulated, but ultimately we're not going to have stringent price controls on Bitcoin or banning it because you can't have stringent price controls on it.

And it puts the left politicians in a really tough spot because now they have this vocal minority that is strongly opposed to Bitcoin. And then they have a silent minority that holds Bitcoin, owns Bitcoin, likes it. And then they have a donor class that

of wealthy VCs, tech adjacent people who might typically align with Democrats, but because they want to issue more S-coins and Gary Gensler won't let them, that now they have to apply maximum pressure on politicians to rein in the SEC and to be pro-crypto.

So I think that the best fine line they can walk on this, the Democrats, is to just not take a position on it and to have a bit of a schizophrenic approach of, okay, on the legislative side, I think that they will support a move that will disempower the SEC and

and empower the CFTC in order to move a lot of the tokens, the tokenize the world Web3 stuff to a friendlier regulator without antagonizing the anti-crypto progressives. And so it's kind of, they just have to thread this needle

And then for the presidential election, I wouldn't be surprised if Kamala Harris

just never comes out with anything about crypto or Bitcoin and just strategically decides to stay silent on it because she doesn't want to lose the progressive voters. And she might, I think that the smart move would be to kind of on background signal to the crypto bros, hey, you know, we're not going to do a big crackdown on you.

But we're also we're not going to come out like Trump and do a big speech at, you know, Bitcoin Nashville. So I think that's what they're going to end up doing, which really puts Elizabeth Warren in a box and kind of sandboxes her. But I wonder how long they can keep her in that box. And so they're going to have to throw her some kind of.

some kind of thing to keep her happy. And that might be something really annoying for us, you know, especially on the AML side of, okay, well, let's find ways to make it so that we can't integrate Bitcoin into the banking system.

So they could continue to, and it seems like they are continuing this Operation Chokepoint 2.0 of debanking all the exchanges, all the brokerages, any kind of Bitcoin or crypto-affiliated businesses in order to separate them from the banking system. And the only way to push back on that would probably be through the judicial process,

And I think that they like where that's essentially it seems like the Federal Reserve has a lot of discretion about who can use them, even though they're supposed to be a public good. They seem to get to decide who gets the rails or not. I think that.

We'll see how the future goes. I think though that a Harris administration would basically be the Biden administration continued with perhaps a slightly friendlier tilt, but not a big crackdown and not a big opening up either.

That was a really insightful breakdown. With Warren, back in the day, with her protect the consumer sort of mantra, you would thought and sort of fight the power in the banks. You thought she would be the biggest proponent of Bitcoin. And it's weird seeing the way she's morphed from maybe that perspective. I really, really. Yeah, I just want to say, you know, for her, it's regulate the banks, right?

And if there are no banks to regulate, then it's really a frustrating world. You know, she has to go on GitHub and submit pull requests of like, hey, I found a bug in your wallet software. You know, that's like that. That would be real consumer protection. And that's not what she wants to do. Right. It's unfortunate. But thinking about politics and politics.

You know, I'd love to hear your take on the Trump assassination. I mean, do you think that had anything to do with Bitcoin and maybe what he was planning on saying? I think that it would be maybe giving Bitcoin too much credit to say that it was related to that. I think that these assassination attempts and actual assassinations and

they always lend themselves to lots of conspiracy theories, which I find odd because, you know, there's historical events that happen that are not heavily laden with conspiracy theories. So, you know, it really, it is bizarre. Now, in this particular case, it's even more bizarre that, you know,

he, you know, dodged the bullet and quite literally. And so that, that I thought was, I do, I, you know, I, I'm a God caring man myself. And I think that in situations like that, it is, it is God, you know, kind of readjusting things. So what, what,

What how ultimately that fits into God's plan. God only knows we can make guesses based on kind of what we would expect to be the natural consequences or what the subsequent events are after that. And that, you know, it.

in my own life, uh, when I have close calls like that, or I even something not to draw a bad comparison here, but when I stub my toe on something, it's like, um, it's, I find it to be a source of humility, right? That, uh, God is humbling me and reminding me of my mortality and that, um, you know, I've got to make the most of the time I have here. And then, uh,

ashes to ashes, dust to dust. You're only here by the grace of God, and he can take everything away from you overnight or in a split second. So perhaps that was it. But who knows? It might have had other reasons to it, and only in the fullness of time will all be revealed to us.

Perhaps it was so that he could speak at Nashville. I don't know. And the, you know, there's all sorts of

Yeah. Then there's the conspiracy theories about how it happened or how it got so close to that. But ultimately, that's just that's that's God led to happen that way. And I do now think that, you know, as we're speaking here on August 12th,

It's the prediction markets now have them 50-50 between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. So I've heard some people argue that Biden actually dropped out of the election because of the failed assassination attempt.

That is that Trump started really gaining a tremendous edge over Biden and it really tilted the odds in his favor. And that in order to, you know, send things back in the other direction, that it just only made sense to replace Biden with Kamala Harris. So that, you know,

We'll see what happens on election night. But right now, the prediction markets have it at 50-50. Yeah. Yeah. Talking about sort of a prediction market, I found interesting that, well, I mean, going into it, I kind of assumed Price would dump. I remember I was in the room for the Trump speech yesterday.

And the person next to me, she was like, oh, man, price is going to rip. And I'm like, I don't know. Every conference it always dumps. And I don't know. I think that's interesting. I'd love to hear your thoughts. And, you know, I mean, Trump did get to make the speech and price did dump in the subsequent weeks. And what do you make of that? I mean, I know there's so much we'll never know what moves Bitcoin price. I'm not saying, you know, tell me what move Bitcoin price or why that happened from A to B. But what did you make of that or what's your takeaway there?

Yeah, I think that the Bitcoin price in terms of, you know, what would move it, it would be the U.S. government actually buying Bitcoin. So campaign promises to do it, you know, and things like that can't get factored in.

it really has to be the movement of funds, right? The actual flows that would move it. And so, because I think that

Bitcoin's price is really driven by its adoption. And it can't be the expectation of adoption because we all expect it to get full adoption. And so if it was just the expectation of adoption, we'd be at $10 million. It's actual adoption that was the price. And then on top of that,

You have the waves of adoption that happened because we're social animals and got this herd mentality. And then on top of that, you've got the momentum traders and the people with leverage. And so, you know, people were leveraged to the hill going into the Trump speech, I suppose. And so when when they get liquidated, then the price does go.

There might also be the case that after Trump's speech, the Biden administration sent some Bitcoin to Coinbase and sold some Bitcoin to kind of send a signal of, hey, look, this guy is making promises, but maybe there won't be any Bitcoin left for him to hold.

And from my perspective, it's like, OK, well, you guys are just going to have to buy back in at a higher price. Many such cases. People have done that before. It's OK. It's not it's not prudent statesmanship. And it's certainly not wise, but it's political. And I think that that really symbolizes kind of this the problem with all this partisanship. Bitcoin should be nonpartisan.

it should just be, Hey, look like, um, whoever, regardless of who's in office, we want to have a Bitcoin strategic reserve. And there might be some disagreements about how much, or, you know, uh,

went to sell it, what to use it for, but it should just be bipartisan that everyone acknowledges its importance. Now, the good thing about this strategic reserve and that proposal is really about shifting the Overton window and shifting the conversation because for too long, we've been arguing about

Anti money laundering, or the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining.

when really the strongest conversation Bitcoiners can have is, should you buy some or not? That's where we're at our best. That's when we're not on the defensive, we're on the offensive. And so regardless of the libertarian view of, oh, the government should never hold Bitcoin, that's irrelevant.

to the political view of we should argue over whether we should be buying Bitcoin or not. And in addition to kind of removing

Because politics and even legislative process, it's all about timing. And so the more time you use up talking about whether to buy Bitcoin or not, the less time there is to talk about other issues. It's actually kind of a DDoS thing that is good to keep in mind. And furthermore, if we're wanting to orange pill people,

We want to be talking about the tremendous appreciation and value of Bitcoin. And that's something that the data proves, right? So it's not like a hypothetical of, oh, yeah, Bitcoin hasn't done so well over the past 15 years, but we promise it will do well over the next 15 years.

Rather, it's a debate over, you know, is it going to do as well as it has or not as well? And it also, I think, gets to the value proposition, because when we're talking about Bitcoin mining, if you think Bitcoin has no value, then even the smallest amount of Bitcoin mining would be wasteful.

And so it's kind of like you have to establish that Bitcoin itself has some amount of value. And the only way to get to that conversation is to talk about whether you should hold it or not, because Bitcoin's strongest value proposition is long-term savings. It wouldn't be great to have a bill out there that's like, oh, should the government use Bitcoin to...

pay for oil, you know, like just this transactional use case. It's rather, okay, let's talk about is Bitcoin great for long term savings? Senator Lummis' bill to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve says, buy 1 million Bitcoin and hold it for 20 years.

Right. So that is a great way to orange pill because now you're framing it as, okay, this is for long term. It's not day trading speculative position.

I was listening to another podcast, George Selgin on Laura Shin's Unchained podcast. And he was saying that the government should live paycheck to paycheck, that they should only have enough money on their balance sheet just for their operational needs and that they shouldn't have any kind of strategic assets or a monetary asset like Bitcoin or gold

you know, for the longer. And to me, it's like, well, do you really think that the government will not have any unexpected expenses in the future that you would want to have some kind of savings for? Unless you're an anarcho-capitalist, right? Now, I say that, and yet I'd say that I made this point on Twitter that holding Bitcoin is

the government holding Bitcoin is a step towards anarcho-capitalism because now you're having the government bend the knee and say, okay, here's this monetary sovereign that is above me. And this is Larry Fink. Larry Fink was on business television making this exact point that Bitcoin is above governments.

And so when a government adopts Bitcoin, it is a sign of tremendous humility and acknowledgement that the let's call it the private sector, even though it's kind of a misnomer that, you know, society outside of government has a resource, a strategic resource here that

historically has been the monopoly of governments as we were talking about. To me, it really is a... It's almost like... I don't have a good metaphor for it, but it's like when you've got Bill Gates using an iPhone. If you're an Apple fanatic,

Why would you say Bill Gates should not use an iPhone? No, he's surrendering. He's conceding that you have the superior technology. Why would you view that as a negative? And so that's really the way I see government adoption of Bitcoin is it's them conceding the argument to the anarcho-capitalists that

And anarcho-capitalism has created a product that is superior to the government product. And it's the free market. And so I see it as the most significant positive since governments adopting gunpowder or something like that, right? That they've identified a superior technology. Now, it's important to keep in mind that at the same time,

them holding a million Bitcoin does not give them power over Bitcoin, right? It doesn't give them any control over the network. And that is also a critical point that people often miss, especially when we were talking about the ETFs. So, oh, no, BlackRock's going to control Bitcoin. They're going to do some kind of fork or something. But the reality is that

they're bending the need of Bitcoin and that they're accepting that they're just a peer on this peer-to-peer network, you know, no more powerful than anyone else. So there's not really anything to worry about other than are they securing their private keys or not, which apparently they're using Coinbase custody for. So who knows how secure that is? You know, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. Yeah.

Did you see, get a chance to hear RFK Jr.'s speech? No, I missed that. I heard good things about it, but I didn't catch it. So yeah, he had a lot of great, I mean, it sounded like Saifedean wrote the speech. A lot of great content, a lot of great sort of changes for Bitcoin that would be good. No taxation on any Bitcoin transactions, no capital gains. Bitcoin could qualify as a 1031 transaction. Yeah.

Lots of things, including Free Ross, right? Which Trump mentioned, right? And so one question is, do you think RFK Jr. matters as a candidate in this election? And the reason I ask that is along the lines of voting. So one of the reasons I started this show, one of the reasons inspired by you, inspired by your good friend Michael Goldstein, a.k.a. Bitstein, right? And he was on a show. He was on an early Bitcoin, What Bitcoin Did, Peter McCormack's fantastic show.

And he was talking about, it was voting. And sort of the takeaway I got there is two things. One, voting can take a lot of your time. Maybe you have to wait in a line for six to eight hours in some areas. And so you have to do a cost-benefit analysis, I would think, about what else you might be doing with your time to maybe advance your own life, like maybe starting a podcast and recording an episode and getting it out, right? And using that six hours to do that.

But it's also like, does my vote even count like where I vote? And how do I know that it counts? I mean, we're both accountants here counting background. I mean, it's hard to audit this thing and find out if your vote actually counted in the way you intended it to. But, you know, you look at something like Ross and like if there ever was a single issue voter for me, a reason to vote would be like free Ross.

But I also think that RFK Jr. might be the best of the three candidates, but I'm not really sure that he's in the race. So what is your sort of thoughts on that? Like just voting in general, is it worth your time? I mean, it sounds like it is. There's a lot on the line here. And RFK Jr., is he a part of this race, this conversation? Yeah, I guess on the voting question, you know,

It's funny, there's the question of, are there better uses of your time from a productivity perspective of improving your life? There's also the question of, are there better uses of your time to get the political outcome that you want? And so I think that there's, I don't think that there's anything intrinsically wrong with voting. I know that there's...

Some libertarians argue that it's like unethical or something. But, you know, if there's long lines to vote in your area, that definitely is a huge red flag that they are trying to suppress the vote. And so, you know, mail in your ballot, I guess. But it might save you time. I don't know if it gets counted or if it, you know,

gets rigged or not. So, yeah, I think it's fine to vote. And it gives, for me personally, I like to vote because I actually was not born a U.S. citizen. I became one. So I used to not be allowed to vote. And I see it as

The fact that it is insignificant in the big picture and yet I still do it, I just kind of see it as like a humility type thing. You know, like, okay, everybody's vote counts once, hopefully only once, and we should all do it to express our political views, right? Just like sometimes I fill out a survey, right?

when a website asks me for my feedback. It's just like, all right, let's participate in this poll. But there are other ways of participating in the political process that do have greater impact. So even something as small as sending a letter to your congressman

could have a greater impact depending on the circumstances or just meeting your congressman and saying, hey, look, Bitcoin is really important to me. Then that can have a big impact. So I think that there's little things like that. Also, in a lot of states,

They'll be proposing a piece of legislation and they'll hold a hearing and anybody can just go and speak at that hearing and they'll give you two minutes. And I've gone to speak at some of these hearings about Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining. And I give them a piece of my mind, professionally, of course. And then that, I think...

can have an impact. I don't know if it did when I did it, but hypothetically. And especially if it's recorded and then you take the recording and then you tweet it out and you tag the senators on it, and then it gets lots of social media engagement from other Bitcoiners. And then the senators are like, oh, wow, I guess this is something that I should be cautious about because

social media engagement is very high on this and it really registers in their brain. So there's a lot of different angles to it. The other piece, obviously, is giving money. I actually think that giving money is

even less effective than voting. It's funny because people, people will say the opposite of like, oh, you know, you're these politicians are bought and paid for, but usually, you know,

what what giving money does means that a politician who already agreed with you will listen to you uh repeat things that they already agree with you on uh is kind of my my read of it and so it's kind of stroking your own ego of oh i got to spend time with this politician and they you know

So that's fine. It's like, you know, there's there's worse ways to spend your money. And, you know, ideally, you get a nice dinner out of it, maybe a social event and some networking and you meet some other people. So there's that. And then there's the educational piece. And so going to a senator's office and meeting with their staff,

and explaining to them, you know, what Bitcoin is, that can have a tremendous impact because a lot of these

elected officials are older and on, especially on issues relating to technology, they will rely on their very young staff to get a perspective. And so if you're able to orange pill, you know, a staffer and they're going to be enthusiastically repeating your talking points,

you know, to their employer. It's different than if you're telling, if you're trying to persuade the senator yourself versus their staffer who has been working with them for several years on a lot of other issues that they trust, right? It's the web of trust. And so I think that that kind of education of kind of two or three degrees removed where, you know,

you know, it's not glamorous or anything, but you spend the time talking with lots of different people and answering their questions and doing it in a way that is meeting them where they're at and, you know, not talking over their head or anything, but just, you know, getting them to understand why it's an important issue and how to approach it. I think that's

For me personally, at least, that's been the most rewarding and kind of the most impactful approach to politics. And I think that ultimately, that plus people...

ratioing politicians on Twitter. You know, like when Elizabeth Warren comes out with something that's anti-Bitcoin, she tweets something anti-Bitcoin and she gets a ratio and people are like making fun of her.

That is good. And then when another politician comes out and says something positive about Bitcoin and they get lots of positive engagement, that's also good. And, you know, a lot of politicians, they actually work Twitter themselves. It's not like they are delegating that to somebody else. They're the ones who are scrolling through the tweets.

And in a way, you're programming their brain. So even if you think that it's like a waste of time, it might actually be even more effective than going to their office and speaking with a staffer by engaging with them directly on Twitter. And they might not like or retweet what you said.

but they read it and you know, it's like you planted a thought in their brain. And so I actually think that it's a platform that really has democratized, you know, communication quite a lot, even though Nostra is better, obviously, but politicians are not on Nostra yet. Once they get kicked off Twitter, then they'll be on Nostra. Right. And sort of maybe a final thought around politics. Yeah.

What do you think about sort of Bitcoin and prospect for war right now and how Bitcoin might react to that? I mean, I hope we don't have war and

You know, we saw Bitcoin sell off last week when there was a mix of people talking about the financial situation, kind of liquidity seizing up a little bit, but also the prospect of war. And so I think that Bitcoin, because it is such a good, high-quality asset,

people sell it when there is bad news and because they can and because the stock market is closed and you know or other assets are less liquid. And so by virtue of trading 24/7 and having this liquidity I think that it makes it a really good asset to sell when you need to get dollars to match dollar liabilities.

So I think that the short term would be bearish in any kind of negative scenario, whether it's war or a financial crisis. But then you get that V-shaped recovery afterwards when that panic selling is through and people start adopting Bitcoin because either

They don't want to use a bank because there's a financial crisis. They don't trust the banks. They think that it'll take too long for them to get bailed out. Or they think that their government is going to collapse because of the war and that they need to get their wealth into something that's much more transportable, 12 seed words that can cross the border and that will not get debased in order to buy more weapons.

So that's definitely, I think that at the same time, it's like, would it go up more if there's war or if there's peace? I think it goes up more if there's peace. So I still think that...

You know, people will try to paint Bitcoin as this Mad Max asset that only does well if there is chaos in the world and that if things go well in the world, then it does poorly. But I just don't think that's the case. I think that Bitcoin does better if people have confidence.

extra money to save, right? And that the economy is doing well. And so I don't buy that argument. Other than

the kind of third degree argument of, well, if there's a financial crisis, then they'll print lots of money and then that money will go into Bitcoin and people will try to avoid inflation because of it. And so there's certainly that, but

But as we saw with COVID, the COVID inflation, it did not cause Bitcoin to skyrocket beyond past cycles. It's not like it outperformed during that. If anything, it underperformed during that cycle because...

When you have the money printing followed up with tightening because of inflation, consumer price inflation specifically, then that's bad. Now, if you have money printing and the money printing does not go into consumer price inflation, if it only goes into financial asset inflation, then I think that's positive for Bitcoin. And where the money printing goes is

That's actually, that's a political question. So arguably under, you know, Obama, under Bush, under Trump, the money printing primarily went into financial assets. And then under Obama,

or sorry, under Biden, because the progressives were steering the ship, they were able to send money out as checks to normal, regular people. And that drove consumer price inflation. And then you have the Federal Reserve freaking out because their mandate is not to stabilize financial assets.

it is to target consumer price inflation and unemployment. And so that's kind of where it gets into a tug of war between the

legislative and executive branch trying to print money to create consumer price inflation, and then the Federal Reserve trying to tighten monetary policy to prevent consumer price inflation. And now, obviously, Biden did not want to create consumer price inflation

He just wanted to reward the progressives for having supported him in the election. And so they had to go and blame supply chain problems and greedy supermarkets for the inflation instead of blaming kind of buying votes with money. Wow. I kind of want to get into...

where you think we are in Bitcoin price adoption, maybe where we are in this cycle. Does it, does it feel or look like a normal cycle to you? Here we are a few months after the halving, you know, what, what did you make of sort of the ETFs rollout through the beginning of the year and, and sort of maybe the impact of ETFs on Bitcoin prices, Bitcoin adoption? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, yeah,

Bitcoin adoption is synonymous with Bitcoin education and that we with the ETFs, what the ETFs provide is a bigger top of the funnel. So if we think about the funnel, to me, like the bottom of the funnel, not to put it negatively, but, you know, the end state.

is somebody who is self-custodying in a multi-sig, verifying it with their own node, has a non-custodial Lightning wallet on their phone, and wants to use Bitcoin for payments and for long-term savings. And understands that Bitcoin is really the kind of asset that is just superior to all the other assets on their balance sheet.

So they might still own some real estate because they need a house to live in or, you know, they'll still own a car, chairs. But they recognize that there's an opportunity cost to these things and that they really are being very cautious about,

how they spend their money so that they can save as much in Bitcoin as possible. And they might even be skeptical of stocks and bonds and, you know, investments like that. And so they are trying to maximize their allocation to Bitcoin. So that is, I think that position requires understanding Bitcoin more

And a relatively deep level, you would have to be comfortable with Bitcoin's long-term trajectory as a system. You think that Bitcoin is sustainable, so you've got to get rid of some myths like the security budget and, oh, what about after the halving? Will Bitcoin still be secure?

So that's one, if you want to adopt Bitcoin as long-term savings, you're going to have to be able to understand why that's faulty. Now, furthermore, you're going to have to have a lot of faith in math. So if you're holding your Bitcoin on your private keys,

and you're going to put a lot of value on them, you have to be pretty confident about your ability to use those hardware wallets or the multi-sig setup you've got and that you're confident that it's going to continue to function.

Which, you know, that's not a given like that confidence. I mean, that is going to continue to function as long as you're doing everything correctly. That is a given. But that, you know, it takes time to really build up that conviction that, OK, this is more secure than my brokerage account or more secure than physical gold in a real

lockbox or in my safe. So I think that there's the question of how much value are people willing to put on private keys that is really just a function of time. And so because it takes time to build up that that

that, you know, education, but also that kind of like Lindy, like, okay, it's been working for 15 years. I think it's going to keep working for another 15 years. And there's no shortcuts there. So that is,

Plus, now we've got this much bigger top of the funnel with the ETFs providing marketing material of Larry Fink going on TV, them running advertisements. You know, they're advertising on TV. They're also advertising in like airports and whatnot. And not only that, it's not just the ETFs that are providing the top of the funnel.

I'm also seeing lots of ATMs, Bitcoin ATMs sprouting up around everywhere. So it's kind of like a barbell distribution of like on the low end, you have people accessing the ATM with their cash.

And then on the high end, you have people accessing ETFs with their brokerage account. And that I think is kind of driving this adoption of Bitcoin, even if it's just somebody saying, I'm going to have 2% of my portfolio in Bitcoin, or I'm going to buy $20 worth of Bitcoin today. And over time,

Those millions of people in the funnel work their way through it, and they might do so by listening to podcasts, they might do so by reading books or reading tweets, etc. And listening to their friends or family or their co-workers or their politicians, Trump speeches, etc.

where Trump's like, hey, rule number one, never sell your Bitcoin. Okay, so, you know, these are really meaningful steps that people take on their journey as, and as you get more people

holding more Bitcoin for longer periods of time, the price goes up just mechanically, right? It's just there's no other way for that to happen. I mean, obviously, other than the issuance of new Bitcoin, right, which is getting halved every four years. So,

I think that one of the thoughts that are narratives out there is that the cycles have diminishing marginal returns. So the first Bitcoin halving cycle, the price went up a lot.

The second, it went up a little bit less. And then the third, it went up a little bit less. And then as Bitcoin grows bigger and bigger, that we should expect with each cycle, the price will not appreciate as much as it has in the past. I don't think that there's enough data to come to that conclusion yet. You've got a sample size of three. And that when I think about the fundamentals that I just described,

I don't really see a reason why you would have that effect of diminishing marginal returns. I think that you'd have tremendous amount of variance between cycles where some cycles are, you know, going to have large whales come in. You know, we had Michael Saylor in the past cycle. What if it's Tim Cook and Apple, you know, it's like, yeah,

You're just talking about different orders of magnitude of whales coming in. And it's just almost an accident of history about who comes in when. So who really gets orange pill? Now, it's also the case that the bigger Bitcoin is, the bigger the whales can be. So Michael Saylor could not have entered in the first bull market, right? Bitcoin is way too small for him.

The Winklevoss twins entered during the second bear market in 2013. And they were, although actually, technically, we call that the first halving cycle because that was after the first halving.

But they had gotten their settlement money from Mark Zuckerberg and that was just millions of dollars, right? It was not billions of dollars. And so, Saylor was billions of dollars. We have yet to see like tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. And when those flows happen, the only way that, there's two ways that the market clears. Either the price goes up a lot,

And, you know, we end up at a million dollars of Bitcoin or the past generations of hodlers are like, yeah, I'm paying off my mortgage at 200 grand. I'm sending my kids or my nephews to college at 300 grand. You know, they've got this rebalancing happening. And so it might be the case that this past cycle, we saw more rebalancing than

at 60 grand than we saw at 20 grand in 2017. You know, for just purely, it might just be like coincidence, right? That there was like this many thousands of whales that are large Bitcoin holders that had projects that they wanted to, you know, fulfill or that they were just tired of the roller coaster ride.

And there's no guarantee that the current set of holders, the people who are holding at 60,000, that they're going to sell at 600,000. They might actually be the kind that are like, no, I'm waiting for 6 million. And so then you don't have that sell pressure and the price has to run and it will outperform past cycles.

So, I mean, I'm not saying that that's what will happen, but it's just that we can't take it for granted that this diminishing marginal returns theory is correct because there's lots of other confounding variables. Yeah, I don't have anything else to add on. Well, that gave me FOMO. And I try never to have FOMO, but I would have thought the market would have had more FOMO after the one run we've had with the rollout with ETS. But you kind of answered that. And it's interesting from the perspective of rebalancing and

all different aspects that drive that and how that happens in the market. Yeah, I think that where we're at right now is at this tipping point between the rate tightening for the dollar, that cycle has reached its top

And now we're in this pocket between, okay, is there going to be a financial crisis and people are going to be panic selling their Bitcoin? Or are we going to roll over straight into the Fed cutting rates and they're signaling that they're going to do this in September and then printing money and then Bitcoin makes a run? And so...

I think that that's where we're at, is we're kind of in between these two phenomena on top of the uncertainty of the election. So I think that when those things clear up, then Bitcoin will have the runway ready. Right. That makes sense. What is the intrinsic value to holding your own keys and or running your own node?

Yeah, so I think that first of all, there's the issue of trust. So when you are having a third party hold your keys for you, you've got to trust a much greater attack surface area than if you're holding your own keys. Because not only does the third party have to still secure private keys, right? That problem never goes away.

Now, on top of that, they have to secure your account with them and you have to secure your login credentials to that account. So in a way, you're still holding private keys, right? Now you're just holding it in the form of a username and password and a two-factor authentication.

So you never escape having to hold private key material. You're just trying to make life maybe a little bit more understandable and convenient because we're all used to, you know, from AOL days of, you know, log in with your username and password. And that's just, you know, and then being able to recover that when needed. So, yeah.

the attack surface area is far greater. And then on top of that, you have the problem of the government seizing those Bitcoin and that being a lot easier when it's with a third party custodian. I was having this thought experiment of, okay, well, if you always, you know, if you're holding your Bitcoin at Coinbase and there's always this threat of the US government seizing the Bitcoin, why wouldn't you just hold your Bitcoin with the government? Because

It's like with Coinbase, there's the threat of the government seizing it or Coinbase seizing it.

So then if you hold it directly with the government, then the only threat is the government seizing the Bitcoin. So in a way, it's more secure to hold your Bitcoin directly with the government than with Coinbase, unless you think that Coinbase would ignore the government and somehow send you the Bitcoin before the government can seize it, which seems far-fetched.

And I was thinking about this in the context of the strategic Bitcoin reserve, because in that bill, Lummis says states can use it. So the government would hold its own keys, the federal government, and then states could use this Fort Knox, this Fort Nakamoto of decentralized custodians. And I was thinking, well, why wouldn't you just let anyone use it? Which is hilarious because now...

You know, people's accusation of Bitcoin being a CBDC would be like very adjacent to this reality. So, you know, who knows what the future holds? So the reason why you don't want the government holding your own keys is obviously because overnight, in a second, they could decide that they are not your Bitcoin and that they are theirs. Now,

That's kind of the trust aspect of it. And then there's kind of the practical matter of it's not so much do you think that they're going to do something nefarious with it as do you think that they're going to over time, somehow you're going to lose access to it.

So if you have a bank account and you just leave it alone, eventually the bank just says, okay, you have abandoned this and it's ours now. Or you might actually like lose your login for that bank account or the bank

there might be a new government, right? And they misplace their private keys out of incompetence. Imagine that, the government being incompetent, right? It might happen. And so there's all sorts of these things where it's like, okay, it's not so much that I think anybody's going to be malicious. It's that all these systems are designed to kind of have an expiration date,

And Bitcoin private keys don't have an expiration date, which is really, to me, something fascinating about the Bitcoin system, because it really lends itself to this concept of long term savings. And that if you if you set this up correctly and you remove any single point of failure,

that it really is a kind of asset that can exist through time in a way that no other asset can exist through time. I mean, even a house, you know, a house is constantly falling apart and you're constantly having to reinvest in it to just keep it the same of doing all this maintenance and all that. So, yeah,

When you compare it to Bitcoin, it really, and specifically with holding your own keys, because I mean, if somebody else is holding your keys, then you kind of have the same problems as with a house. It's like that asset is depreciating that business that you're trusting or whatever it is like.

They're having employee turnover. They're having to constantly retrain their employees. And you're trusting that the chain of custody is going to work out okay. It's not a good boat to put your life savings in. So there's that aspect of it. Then there's also the kind of extreme ownership part of it. Do you want to go through life

having others take responsibility for your wealth, or do you want to hold yourself responsible and hold yourself accountable and have no one else to blame but yourself? And, you know, in a way, it's like, yeah, it's just you and God, because God does know your private keys. You know, he's omniscient. So

I think about that sometimes. I'm like, Hey, you know, if God doesn't want you to have your Bitcoin, he absolutely can take them away from you in the blink of an eye. Uh, and, uh, that, um, you know, it, it's, he's done far greater, uh, divine interventions than, uh, flipping a zero to a one. So there's, there's that part of it. Um,

As far as running a node, to me, the thing about running a Bitcoin node is really about the auditor side of me of, okay, I want to know that if I have one Bitcoin, I have one out of a possible 21 million Bitcoin. And I have a fixed percentage of the total supply. And that is the brilliance of Bitcoin monetary policy is that you can't get diluted out of the one Bitcoin that you hold.

And that it doesn't matter how much Larry Fink holds. It doesn't matter how much the US government buys. It's always going to be 21 million Bitcoin. And the only way for you to verify that yourself is to run your own Bitcoin node. And that when you're running your own Bitcoin node, that you're not running it as like, oh, this is a mirror of Bitcoin.

some authorities node, right? Like it's not like you're a second class citizen. No, you're running the same node that everyone else is running. And even if you're not, if you coded it yourself, you're running the same protocol as everyone else. And that you're not somehow depending or relying on a third party to know the monetary policy of the asset.

Because if we look at the history of monetary economics, that's where the rubber hits the road is that they'll say, oh, yeah, we've got to sound money, fully backed by gold. And then they rug you. So then they dilute you out of your gold by shaving pieces of gold off the coins or by changing the ratio of dollars to gold.

or removing it entirely, that monetary policy aspect of it to me is the other piece of, okay, this is long-term savings, is that it's always going to be a fixed percentage of the supply and that I can also run this Bitcoin node until, at least until the end of my life. You know, if you just get a big enough hard drive or you turn on pruning, pruning, you

I think this gets into the ordinals debate because the real security budget of Bitcoin is what is the cost of doing a secure multi-sig with hardware wallets combined with the cost of operating your own node? And so that is the security budget. That's how much it costs for you to secure Bitcoin.

And then you can also add the cost of sending and receiving the transaction. But take that cost whenever it is convenient, right? If you're sending Bitcoin to cold storage, you don't need to do it when the mempool is clogged with spam. So when we think about ordinals, to me, it's, okay, what is the negative impact on the security budget of Bitcoin?

And I did the math on, like, even if they stuff blocks with other ordinals, it doesn't materially increase the cost of running a Bitcoin node. I think that the challenge is that it does remove it from an entry-level PC to a mid-level PC, which

It's terrible if you're very focused on stacking sense and that your life was fine with a low-end PC running a Bitcoin node. And now because of these wizard clowns, you're having to get a mid-level PC and you've got to fork out $1,000 for your mid-level PC or even $600. I think you could probably swing it. But, you know...

Some personal financial advice, I'd say maybe ask for a raise. Find ways to earn more income so that you can afford running your own Bitcoin debt and stacking sats as well. But I understand that from kind of the...

the perspective of keeping Bitcoin as accessible to as many people as possible, that on one hand, the inscriptions that are taking up all this space or whatever other quote unquote layer two, you know,

BRC 20 runes, all this stuff, stamps that they are increasing the security budget of Bitcoin for the people using it. And simultaneously, you're not getting the benefit of, OK, now you've got more people using it as a monetary transactional network.

And, you know, essentially increasing the value of Bitcoin. So it is definitely I understand the annoyance with it. But from the materiality perspective, it doesn't materially increase the cost of securing your Bitcoin. You know, open to debate there. The.

The nice thing, though, on the horizon is that a lot of this data ends up in the witness. So this witness data, this is what was created by Segwit. And technically, we could just delete it. We could just delete that data after 100 blocks or whatever it is. If it's old, we can just delete it. And no harm, no foul. It doesn't affect anything.

the fundamentals of, okay, are we able to independently audit the monetary supply of Bitcoin? Because the witness data doesn't have the amounts in it. It only has the signatures and kind of the way of unlocking the Bitcoin. But the accounting of the numbers

That is not in the witness data. And so if we delete the witness data, we can still audit the ledger. There's no, you know, and in fact, by default, a Bitcoin node will assume valid, meaning that it won't even verify that data, the signature data before a certain point in order to make the initial block download faster.

And so I think that if we get a lot more aggressive about deleting witness data, now we're making gains on the security budget. And you can go back to your low-level PC.

On top of that, you've got really interesting innovations like UTREXO, I believe is the name of it, where they're able to have a lot of the same security assurances as a full node in a kind of a very compressed way where you can actually verify

not everything, but a lot of, you know, essentially the block header using a Raspberry Pi Nano. So it's even like, it's like $50 computer. And so,

You know, the the ability to run your own node, it is, from my perspective, the same as it was in 2013 due to advances in hardware and also due to advances in the actual Bitcoin node software where they've made it more and more efficient. And so they've basically, from my perspective, kept the security budget the same, but

over the past decade when you would have expected it to actually increase. So I actually think that we're in a really good spot there and that more people today have the option, the ability to run a Bitcoin node than ever. And that in addition to that, the wallet software that sits on top of the node

has never had more functionality. And so I think that the full stack continues to improve. The last leg that really would, I think,

put a button on it would be to really have fantastic hardware wallet integration between the Bitcoin Core wallet and the devices, these USB devices or however you connect it, in order to make sure that it's as convenient as possible for people to run their own Bitcoin. Rather than having to use third party software,

like Trezor or Ledger that is, you know, saying, hey, invest in Solana and Polkadot when you're just trying to use a hardware wallet. Rather than that, you know, it'd be really nice to just be able to open up Bitcoin Core. You plug in three hardware wallets or you, if it's air gapped, you put in the SD cards or whatever, whatever,

you know, approach you have and that it's plug and play and that you're able to set up the, not only set up the multi-sig, but then also set it up with a timeline. And this is something that is in the works with the Bitcoin Core developers, but basically where you can start out as a three of five

And then after a certain number of blocks, it would turn into a two of three. And then eventually it can turn into a one of one. That way, if you've lost access to keys, you still have eventually the opportunity to recover your funds. So anyway, yeah, that's, you know, the kind of the full stack and where hopefully I see it going. Yeah, I love that. I also love what Ocean's doing to decentralize mining.

i think it really brings the ethos back to the miners themselves pushing the templates back down to the hashers so the miners can take that initiative and i think it also is just going to pay out better for miners so i think it's going to push decentralization in a positive direction that way my final question for you is uh you know it's a 10-year anniversary of of your amazing piece speculative attack

You know, it's a fantastic piece. I definitely recommend people go back to our show where we talked about it and go back and read it themselves. I think you have an updated version out with Alan Farrington. And I think that I'd love, I mean, do you have any maybe bold predictions for 2024 as we round out here? Yeah, so that piece was...

The intent was to answer, I think, one of the key questions, which is what is the overarching adoption mechanism for Bitcoin? And when I wrote it, a lot of the narratives, and they still exist today. I mean, it's crazy, but they'll be like, oh, it's about the technology, right? That, yeah.

We've got to continue to improve Bitcoin's technology so that we don't fall behind these other cryptocurrencies for adoption. Or that people are adopting Bitcoin because it has better technology than the US dollar. And now with Tethers, it's like, hey, look, from a technology perspective, it's the same. Yeah.

But from a monetary economics perspective, it couldn't be more different. And that's really what we get at with or what I got out of speculative attack in the first season. And then with Alan Farrington in the second edition, the second season that we released very recently. So the the term speculative attack was one coined by Paul Krugman.

interestingly enough, who is a notorious Bitcoin skeptic. Paul Krugman has been skeptical about Bitcoin since 2011 when he wrote that Bitcoin is a bad money because it increases in value.

which is hilarious because he wrote that when it was at like $11 per Bitcoin. And so you would think that he would be like giga rich by now, but I don't know that he actually bought any despite his insight that increases in value. And so speculative attack, he used it to describe how one currency attacks another currency.

And that the only way to defend yourself against a speculative attack is either by tightening monetary policy, increasing interest rates, or by imposing capital controls and essentially trying to stop people from trading between these currencies.

And the specific mechanism is really about people leveraging up. And so they'll borrow the weak currency at a low interest rate, and they will sell that weak currency and trading for a strong currency. And then they'll wait for the strong currency to appreciate in value. And then they'll go back and repay their loan by unwinding the trade. And so increasing the interest rate

To do that effectively with Bitcoin, you'd have to increase the interest rate like over 30% because that historically has been the rate of return on Bitcoin, annualized rate of return on average. Who knows what it'll be in the future? But just looking at past history, that's probably where you would want the interest rate to be to compete against Bitcoin.

Or you impose capital controls, which is what Operation Chokepoint 2.0 is. Okay, let's limit people's ability to trade dollars for Bitcoin. And that way we can put a lid on this speculative tech. Now, what I think is a third option that I didn't mention in that piece was to acquire Bitcoin. And so, you know, this should have been obvious in hindsight because Bitcoin

it's actually something that traditional currencies do and traditional central banks do is that they'll acquire a forex reserve, a reserve of foreign exchange, which will usually be a mix of like dollars, dollar denominated assets, treasuries, euros, gold, and that they'll use this to stabilize quote unquote their exchange rate and to essentially kind of put off, ward off speculative attacks.

And quite often they don't even need to use it because all they have to do is they just have to have the threat of it. So they just hang this over people's heads and say, hey, look, we will sell these assets and be able to stabilize our currency if you try to attack us. So don't even bother. It gets into the game theory of it. And so...

Obviously, these forex reserves, they could hold Bitcoin. And the more Bitcoin they hold, the greater threat they have vis-a-vis the speculators of, if you guys mess around, we will be able to liquidate these Bitcoin and destroy your speculative attack. And that, you know, will push the price of Bitcoin. Because they have the threat, they don't ever actually need to do it.

And so that would be one way to ward off speculative attacks would be to back indirectly, not directly, you know, not like with a direct fixed ratio, but with a strategic reserve, a fiat currency. And, you know, the nice thing is that even with they still have to manage the currency responsibly, because ultimately it doesn't matter how much you have in Forex reserves.

If you don't have a sound monetary policy, you will deplete your forex reserves defending your currency. And so it has to be credible. It can't just be like we're going to print lots of money and also we're going to have these Bitcoin that we could hypothetically sell. It goes hand in hand. OK, we're going to have

a strong dollar policy and also we're gonna have a strategic reserve and uh that's you know this the uh speculative defense uh that they could put forward uh whether they'll do it or not i don't know uh to me bitcoin wins either way and it's just a matter of do they want to do it the easy way or their hard way awesome stuff pierre's always it's been so dope i'll leave it to you to let people know any parting words and let people know where they can find you and your work

Yeah, thanks, Seth. So I'm on Twitter at Bitcoin Pierre. I'm also on LinkedIn. If you're into LinkedIn, find me at Pierre Richard. And yeah, thanks for having me on. And congratulations again on the 200th episode. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. That's your thing. Have a great day.