Yo, a Bitcoin OG predicted $1 million Bitcoin by 2025.
No, this isn't, this isn't click bait whatsoever.
Something needs to happen in order for that to happen, and
we're going to talk about that today. 35% odds on the betting
market, Poly market that the United States makes Bitcoin a
strategic reserve asset. And this Bitcoin OG, also known
as Adam Back said that if that were to happen, Bitcoin will hit
seven figures, which is absolutely bonkers, but it makes
sense as well. States, according to Dennis
Porter, breaking news earlier on today, are racing to make
Bitcoin strategic reserve on a state level.
So it seems like there's like the game theory is playing out.
And by the way, this isn't just a theory.
This isn't just as a hypothesis. Pennsylvania State
representative already introduced a bill that said,
hey, listen, we should make Bitcoin a strategic reserve
asset on the state level in Pennsylvania.
And what we found out from Dennis at the adopting Bitcoin
conference, when we interviewed him for about a six to seven
minute interview, he said that 10 other states are considering
to follow suit. Also earlier today on Dennis's
tweets, Senator Cynthia Lummis confirmed that, hey, on the
federal level, you know, we shouldn't get left behind.
So it seems like all, you know, the, the states are FOMO ING in
on the federal level. They're FOMO ING in what happens
if a if a strategic reserve happens in the United States on
an international level, all these other countries are going
to look at the US and say, hey, listen, if we don't buy Bitcoin,
we're going to get left behind. And you think that Michael
Saylor buying $4.6 billion worth of Bitcoin is a lot?
I mean, imagine when the federal government steps in when they're
with with their unlimited money printer, it's going to be
absolute bananas. Anyways, guys, it's going to be
a great show. I want to introduce my legendary
Co host Optimus Fields and our guest for today, Seth for
privacy, Seth is with Cake wallet.
Seth, welcome back to the show. I want to get your thoughts on
this before I pull up the tweets and the articles.
The strategic reserve asset, I mean, you know, it's been going
up. Initially, the Poly market odds
when Trump announced it in Nashville was around 20%.
It's up to 35%. I mean, it's still not, you know
what, 50 or 60%, but it continues to grow up.
It continues to go up. And you know, thinking about
this two years ago when our industry was being attacked left
and right by the current administration that is going out
of power in on January 20th when Trump gets inaugurated, we would
have never have imagined this in a million years, right?
And then Fast forward two years later, you have the president
wishing a Satoshi happy birthday.
You know, on on tweets, he's saying, I'm going to free Ross.
And now he's floating this idea of a, a strategic Bitcoin
reserve. States are saying, no, we want
to make St. strategic Bitcoin reserves on a state level,
nation states are saying, you know what, if the US does it,
we're going to do it. Could you have ever have
imagined this, Seth? I feel like we've made a lot of
progress as an industry, at least on the price level.
I think from a revolutionary aspect, obviously we want
Bitcoin in the hands of individuals.
We don't want Bitcoin in the hands of government.
Yeah, I mean, that's the that's the tricky thing for me is
trying to like balance this with how how we view Bitcoin as
freedom money because like the financial sense for a government
to jump in on Bitcoin and use it as a strategic reserve.
It's pretty clear. I like, I don't think anyone
would argue that cypherpunk or kind of number go up normally.
There's no real argument there that Bitcoin has proven itself.
So the financial sense for governments to jump in and do
this are, are clear because the, the scarcity and the the
benefits of it being digital are huge for governments because
it's, it's much simpler than physical gold.
It it's proven itself as a story value.
So like, I think all of that makes sense.
I think just a thing that keeps coming back to my mind is like
his, how is this going to impact the freedom money side of
Bitcoin? And, and hopefully it doesn't
it, it doesn't necessarily have to.
And like you said, I mean, they, they have the money printer.
They don't need to necessarily resort to any more extravagant
means to to get the Bitcoin that they want for strategic reserve
down the line. But that's kind of the thing
that that is in the back of my mind is, is what will this mean
as far as the government's attacks or support of Bitcoin?
Like you said, these, these last four years have been rough, very
rough, especially the last like 18 months where it's been clear
that governments are trying to prevent self custody, prevent
privacy. But now we have the US
government leading the way and saying that at least as a
financial asset, Bitcoin is a valuable tool.
So I think it's the main thing is just keep keep trying to
think about what does this actually mean for the freedom
money sides of Bitcoin alongside the number go outside of
Bitcoin. 100% And that's the way that people should see it,
right? There is Bitcoin as an
investment and there is Bitcoin as the revolution.
I think, you know, as as millennials and Gen.
Z ers that really, really got the short end of the stick due
to 2008 financial crisis. You know, I mean, I think a lot
of us are here for the revolution, which is of course
the inevitable separation of money state.
Anyways, I do want to get to today's news.
So first what started all this commotion?
Adam back. Adam back was cited in the
original Satoshi Bitcoin white paper.
He tweeted this out yesterday at 11:58 AM.
He said if the US strategic Bitcoin reserve happens, prepare
for seven figure Bitcoin this cycle.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
He is saying that if the United States makes Bitcoin a reserve
asset, he's predicting that Bitcoin hit seven figures.
By the way, it doesn't sound too crazy.
We're almost at $100,000. That would be a 10X, right?
Essentially, I know the law, the law of large numbers comes into
play. It's a lot harder for Bitcoin to
10X at 100,000 than it was at 1000.
But still, the discussion changes when nation states
essentially legitimize Bitcoin by adopting it as a reserve
asset. This is something that's already
happened. El Salvador has a public
treasury. Anyone could see it.
They have their they post their address publicly.
I think they buy one Bitcoin a day or something like that.
So it's it's already happened. It just obviously it would be
much more significant if the United States did it because the
United States on an economical level and on a military level,
it's the most powerful country on the face of the planet,
right? And it would be insane.
It would be bonkers. So I completely agree with Adam
Back, This isn't bull juice. This isn't opium.
This this is something that could possibly happen and here's
more news. So here's Dennis Porter massive
breaking. I can confirm that BlackRock is
now endorsing a a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Now that makes sense. Why does that make sense?
Because this is what I I always talk about aligned incentives in
Bitcoin Bitcoin BlackRock is selling Bitcoin right that no,
they're not selling spot Bitcoin, they're selling ETF
Bitcoin right. We, you know, the revolution of
self custody after all, but still, you know, they're they're
incentivized for number go up because number go up means more
people buy the ETF, more people buy the ETF, more fees that they
collect, right? This is what we mean by aligned
incentives. Now it totally makes sense why
they would endorse a strategic Bitcoin reserve from a Black
Rock level. Also, another piece of breaking
news from Dennis, he says I am now in a race to pass strategic
Bitcoin reserve legislation into law before Donald Trump can sign
a strategic Bitcoin reserve executive order.
To be honest, I'll probably pass this law in multiple states
before Trump the states will lead.
Moving on to the next tweet. And then you guys are saying,
OK, maybe Dennis is, you know, like I don't believe him
personally. Guys.
Like I've seen Dennis's proof of work, you know however you feel
about him individually. I judge people based on their
proof of work, and his proof of work has shown me that on
multiple states he has successfully passed legislation
to protect the right to self custody and protect the right to
mine. Don't take my word for it,
verify it yourself. And I know that in Pennsylvania,
for example, he was a huge player in convincing the
legislate, the certain representatives over there to
introduce a bill for a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
This has never happened before. And this was Dennis's doing.
Dennis, you know, talk to a lot of these politicians and was
like saying like, look, you should definitely do this,
right? So this happened, I think it was
like last week when we broke this news.
We broke news on the Adopting Bitcoin live stream that we did
on Friday and Saturday. I had an interview with Dennis
and he confirmed that 10 other states, that's, that's right,
ten other states are looking to do the same as Pennsylvania.
Now, has this bill passed? No, but according to the
representative that introduced the bill, he said that there is
a high likelihood that it will pass because Pennsylvania is a
high energy state. We had the CEO of Bit Farms come
on the show last week and he said that they're expanding for
mining capability and capacity and Pennsylvania because of the
favorable regulatory environment.
He also emphasized that this bill by Pennsylvania is
bipartisan. So you have both Democrats and
Republicans supporting a bill that would make Bitcoin a
strategic reserve in the state of Pennsylvania.
And it looks like on the federal level there's a race.
Anyways, here's the next tweet by Dennis Porter.
He says breaking I'm now in a race to pass the strategic
Bitcoin reserve legislation to law before Donald Trump.
The states will leave lead. Most importantly, the signal
here is the Bitcoin senator, Senator Cynthia Lummus of
Wyoming responding to Dennis saying so great that we are
finally in a race to win the future instead of the race to
the bottom of the pile. It kind of confirms what Dennis
is saying. I mean, this is a US senator
responding to Dennis. This is not like, you know, just
a bunch of bitcoins on on on Twitter just talking shit.
This is real stuff. So, yeah, I mean, this is crazy.
I could never have imagined this.
This is a total 180 of where we were six months ago, where me
and Opti were really talking about it.
Like, yo, Opti, should we relocate to El Salvador?
Because I think there's a high possibility that they'll make
Bitcoin self custody illegal in the United States.
Complete 180, right? So, you know, the Trump
administration has yet to be sworn into office.
They're not in power yet. That happens on January 20th.
We'll see what happens. He has promised he's going to
free Ross on day one. And the last thing I'll share,
forgot to share this guy's because the pin the most
accurate when it came to predicting the 2024 United
States election. What happened there?
Thank you, Opti, according to Polymarket.
Remember guys, the reason that the betting odds are so accurate
is because polls could be manipulated.
When it comes to putting, you know, money behind money behind
your idea, it's a totally different conversation.
And This is why betting odds historically have been more
accurate at predicting elections than the so-called polls, right?
So according to the betting odds by one of the largest, you know,
betting markets in the world, Poly market, Trump will create,
it gives it gives it a 34% chance that Trump creates a
national Bitcoin reserve. Now I know what a lot of you
guys are saying, Nico, that's a let down.
WTF. You know, that's not a good
number. I'm not happy.
I mean, if I told you four years ago there's a 34% chance that
the United States would create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, you
would have been like, I'll take that.
That sounds amazing, right? So, yeah, this is insane.
Reality is stranger than fiction.
And boy, has this been a complete 180 compared to the
current administration that has been relatively hostile.
One last little bit before I pass it on to Seth.
It seems like Howard Lupnik, again, according to the Poly
market odds, has a high probability of being appointed
to some, you know, position in the Trump administration.
Remember, Howard Lupnik, not only managers, the reserves for
Tether in their investments counter Fitzgerald, but also he
was on the Pompiano podcast not too long ago where Pomp was
asking him, so you're going to buy Bitcoin.
He's like, I'm going to buy 1010s of millions of Bitcoin,
then hundreds of millions of Bitcoin.
So could you imagine that the potential future U.S.
Treasury is a Bitcoiner that holds hundreds of millions of
Bitcoin? I mean, you can only kind of use
a little bit of common sense, Sofia, to have a idea, idea of
what the regulatory environment is going to be in the next four
years or so. Anyways, I'm going to pass it on
to Seth. Seth, I know we we got to
emphasize this right on the price level, this is extremely
bullish on the revolution level. It's a little bit dangerous
because people get comfortable with the Atfs.
People are like, why should I take self custody?
You know, there's a positive regulatory environment, but what
are your thoughts in terms of the the bullish aspect?
Yeah, I mean, the the most encouraging news out of all this
honestly is just that so far at least it seems that this new
administration will be at worst just not aggressively anti
crypto and anti Bitcoin. And I think that's the, the most
important thing that I'm excited about.
Like the, the national reserve, like we talked about, I think
it, it makes financial sense. And I'm not too surprised.
And I think that they, if they do follow through on that, they
line things up really well to make sure that they can keep
the, the onrush of funds within the legacy financial system.
I mean, I think the, I don't want to say it's a conspiracy
theory or that I'm a conspiracy theorist, but the timing of the
ETFs all happening before this change.
And I don't think anyone knew that Trump would be elected at
that point. But that all being in place,
that kind of traditional financial system infrastructure
to allow people to buy Bitcoin but not actually use or hold
Bitcoin themselves fits again, it fits well with what the US
government would want out of this because ultimately what
they want is they want to cement the supremacy of the dollar and
they want to ensure that they continue getting income from
anybody using Bitcoin as much as possible.
And so I don't see that changing.
And I think the ETF's are a good tool for them.
Unfortunately, like you mentioned, they're they're not a
tool for revolution in the sense of actually providing people
freedom to transact how they want.
They can provide financial freedom in the sense that they
can be a good investment tool that gets you more fee out at
the end of the day, but very different than what we're
talking about the the, the revolutionary aspects of Bitcoin
as you put it. So I think the most important
thing that I, I'm curious to see what happens with is is there
going to be any continued push back on self custody to try and
get more of the, the Bitcoin? If there's, if there is this
rush for Bitcoin. And as we all know, it's an
extremely scarce asset that seems to be getting more and
more scarce as more people are trying to buy large amounts of
it daily. And that's even before Federal
Reserve or something kicks in. Will they take any drastic steps
to increase their access to Bitcoin or to ensure that anyone
who uses Bitcoin does so in a way that continues to feedback
into the governmental system through simple ways like
taxation, which obviously that's not going away, unfortunately,
or through more advanced ways like confiscation or something
like that, which I don't think there's any signs that that will
be happening at this point. And even in like the, the early
legislature that I think Senator Loomis was involved in, it has
explicit protections around lawfully held Bitcoin.
But the US government has a lot of say in what is lawful and
what's not lawful. So again, I, I, I'm not going to
put my hope for Bitcoin as a revolutionary tool in what the
US is doing from a Federal Reserve standpoint or even what
policy makers are saying. But it is helpful to get a gauge
of kind of what's the environment going to be like.
And it seems like at least we've been bought four more years of
time to build, to improve Bitcoin, to improve the tools
that we built around it, to make wallets better, to make self
custody easier. And it seems like the this
administration will be much more friendly and at least be not
aggressively anti Bitcoin, which is a which is a huge win.
And that is a huge win for the revolutionary side of Bitcoin,
if that holds it, if that actually pans out.
Yeah, 100% and I I think that's you know, but I completely agree
with you, Seth. Like we just want to be left
alone. That's what it boils down to.
You know, I think for the last, what was it, you know, 3 1/2
years, you know, did an opti was like, like, I was like holding
him back, you know, but essentially, like we tried so
hard to just not get into the political discussion.
But I, I remember the episode that I broke essentially when
they arrested the samurai wallet developers.
I got so upset because it was like, wait a second, hold on.
Like all these banks, HSSBHSBCTD bank get fined for money
laundering. But you know, for someone that
writes open source software and he has no control over who uses
it, they, you know, someone uses that open source and it's a
small percentage to commit a crime.
Somehow he's held responsible. And I was like, you know what?
F that Trump 2024. And then he goes and he's like,
I'll protect the right to self custody.
I'll protect the right. I'm gonna free Ross and have fun
with your bitcoins and I'll stop to CDC's and I'm like, yeah, we
have no choice but to get behind the orange man because, you
know, it's like we were forced to throw our hat in the ring.
I don't think any Bitcoiner would have, you know, willingly
got into discussing politics or talking about because we weren't
interested about that. I think Bitcoiners inherently
want the separation of money and state, but we were kind of
forced into a corner to kind of speak up and to say something,
you know. So yeah, I agree.
I think this is very positive from an investment standpoint,
from number go up standpoint, from a revolutionary aspect, we
should be very, very cautious and we have to continue to
remind people not your keys, not your cheese, not your keys, not
your Bitcoin. Anyways, Opti, what's your take
on this before we get to the numbers?
Yeah, Well, first shout out to the chat because I, I did just
kind of verify this. It looks like Howard Lutnick is
being nominated for commerce Secretary.
So that just came out like, I don't know, right, Right.
When we started the show. That's nice.
So you know, not what's it treasurer, secretary or whatever
it was, he's commerce. But hey, there is the the very
same signal that there is actual bitcoiners in the Trump
administration. I think that kind of leads to
what Seth was saying that at the very least we're going to have
four years of having like a runway, some cover here versus
being fought for the last four years.
So obviously that's going to be great for the Bitcoin industry
at large. And then just kind of going back
to the Adam Back tweet. You know, as as a bitcoiner and
someone that is constantly bull tarted and I'm always you know,
I, I am like the most bullish person always and, and I do
always get cake on my face. You know, it does feel like
$1,000,000 Bitcoin in this bull run does seem a little
outlandish. But again, I know, I know, I
know, I know. Hold on hold.
On hold on, hold on. That's.
Where I was going, that's where I was going.
Like you know where things are right now.
It looking at the chart to like yeah $1,000,000 Bitcoin like
you, you guys are smoking the opium.
But if Bitcoin does get announced to be a Bitcoin
strategic stockpile or strategic reserve in America then it
really is the mean like this time is different.
And when you really look at this this leg up of the bull run and
compare it to the old Bitcoin bull runs, you know we have
three of them it is lining up very well with 2020 and the 2017
bull run and we all know what happened in 2021 with the last
bull run. So if we are entering, entering
kind of a 2017 S bull run like $1,000,000, Bitcoin really isn't
like that far fetched of a conversational starter here.
Like it, it's in the ballpark range of what we've seen Bitcoin
do in the past. Obviously big numbers.
Now we're all kind of thinking like, oh, it can't run that
fast. But that really goes into my
last point where, you know, we have the heuristic here in
Bitcoin and Bitcoin price movements and what happens in
Bitcoin that it usually does the exact opposite of what everyone
thinks it's going to do. And right now all of us
Bitcoiners are like, dude, it's going to hit like 100K200K and
that's it. And that's kind of the consensus
right now. So hey, I don't know, it does
feel like this time is different.
There's a lot of new things on the table.
The conversation around Bitcoin has fundamentally changed as far
as I'm concerned, since Larry Fink has came into Bitcoin.
You know, they're buying their own ETF, they don't just have it
ETF. And now Bitcoin is being looked
at as a legitimate thing to have in your portfolio.
And I think that does fundamentally change if the US
does add a strategic reserve of stockpile and then states either
follow suit or front run that like this.
This does feel different this time around.
And again, you know, $1,000,000 Bitcoin isn't really that far
out of the realm of possibility. But you know, what do we know
it? It's only like a 10X from here.
Bitcoin's done that before. So I think I'm going to
fundamentally publicly switch. I'm all for $1,000,000 Bitcoin
in 2025. Let's go.
Yeah, absolutely, 100%. All right, everybody, before we
get into the numbers, the news, we have so much content lined up
for you guys and we're going to talk about privacy during the
culture segment. I do want to give a very special
shout out to our lead sponsor. Of course, I'm talking about
Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin well is the best
place to build your automatic self custody Bitcoin stack.
Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to
buy Bitcoin on chain or via Lightning Network in Canada and
the USA. What makes Bitcoin well
different than all the other on ramps is that it's automatic
self custody. What does that mean?
That means that when you buy Bitcoin on Bitcoin well, as soon
as the funds clear, it goes straight to yourself.
Custody Bitcoin wallet address. They do not allow you to leave
your Bitcoin on the exchange, which perfectly aligned to the
simply Bitcoin ethos of the separation of money and state.
Head over to bitcoinwell.com to get started.
Also, if you're a higher net worth individual looking for
white glove service, check out Bitcoin Well Infinite.
This is tailored for people who want to buy $50,000 worth of
Bitcoin or more. It's a complete white glove
experience. What does that mean?
That means you'll have your own representative whenever you want
to call him, you want to text him or her and you want to say,
hey, I want to buy Bitcoin at this price or hey, I have some
questions about self custody. This is the service for you.
I highly, highly recommend it. Head over to Bitcoin Well dot
com slash OTC or you could personally e-mail me at
nico@bitcoinwell.com and I will personally take care of you and
hook you up with your own Bitcoin well infinite
representative so you can make large Bitcoin transactions.
Also, every time you buy Bitcoin on Bitcoin Well, you earn
something called Bitcoin well points and you could use those
points towards the wishing well contest, which will do live for
you guys right now, get your Lightning wallets.
It's ready. First person to scan the QR code
has won 500 SAT's. If you use promo code simply
BTC, again, simply BTC to sign up to bitcoinwell.com today, you
get 3 tosses into the wishing well for an opportunity to win
up to 1,000,000 SAT's. What are you waiting for?
Visit bitcoinwell.com today. All right everybody, let's hit
the numbers. Lots to talk about.
I want to tell you guys about our sponsor stamp seed.
Is your Bitcoin and cold storage really secure?
Are your seed words really secure?
Stamp Seeds Do it yourself kit has everything you'll need to
hammer your seed words into commercial grade titanium plates
instead of writing them down on paper.
Don't do that. Paper sucks.
You want to literally stamp your seed into to this plate of
titanium. Your words are actually stamped
into the metal plate with this hammer.
So once your words are in, they aren't going anywhere.
No risk of the plate breaking apart and your pieces falling
everywhere. Titanium stamp seeds will
survive nearly triple the heat produced by a house fire.
They are also crush proof, waterproof, non corrosive and
most importantly, because this is generational wealth time
proof, all things that paper is not allowing you to huddle your
Bitcoin for the long haul. I mean, here is the plate that
they crushed, they put in water, they put a blowtorch to it.
And as you can see, the words have survived.
Stamp your seed on stamp seed and you can use promo code
simply to get 15% off anything on their store.
Head over to stampse-ed.com today, everybody.
So you know, I'm assuming, you know, you're going to have
grandchildren or whatever. Eventually you're going to want
to pass on your Bitcoin to them, right?
You imagine that very uncomfortable conversation when
you're like 80 years old or 90 years old and your grandchildren
come up to you and they're like grandpapa, you know, I heard you
bought Bitcoin AT90K Like are you going to pass it on to me?
And you like tell them you're like no.
And then they're like, why? It's like because I wrote down
my seed words on paper and they're going to look at you and
they're going to be like you're an idiot.
Why didn't you get a stamp seed? Pay yourself a stamp seed today.
Use promo code simply to get 15% off.
Anyways, time of recording the Bitcoin price is $92,780.
Block height 871,066 sats per dollar 1078 Bitcoin market cap
We are sitting pretty at 1.84 trillion Bitcoin price and gold
35.1 oz Bitcoin verse gold market cap 10.012% percentage
issued 94.21% the client from all time high -.7% Damn whoa
whoa whoa we're sitting at 92,724 Bitcoin.
What I hope we break all time highs man we're so close I feel
it. We could touch it anyways,
realize monetary inflation continuing to take Fiat
currencies to absolute school 1.21% the grand scheme of
things. We're just getting started
anyways, guys, you guys know, I love talking about the over in
window and guys, we have not only broken the Overton window,
we've shattered the Overton window.
The only thing that's missing in this equation for the full
circle to complete is Michael Saylor joining Joe Rogan.
That's the only thing that's missing because he's men.
He's done the full circuit and he just recently joined PBD.
If you guys don't follow him, PBD is the guy, the entrepreneur
content creator behind the Value Tainment YouTube channel.
Great content. I love consuming it.
Very great, very good, amazing. But so he joins PBD and Sailor
said some pretty crazy things which are not crazy to us
bitcoiners, but I have the clip for you guys and then we'll
discuss it. Let's check it out.
Here we go. Was a $90 billion asset class in
March of 2000 when I was first looking at it and then by August
it was about $180 billion asset class.
And right now, four years later, it's $1.8 trillion asset class.
And I think it's going to 18 trillion, then 180 trillion,
then it's going to go beyond that.
So I, I think it's a very simple thing.
I think Bitcoin is going to grow from point 1% of the money in
the world to 7% of the money in the world over the next 21
years. And of course, you should just
go long and keep buying it. .1% to you said 7%.
Yeah, it'll, it'll go from like one in 1.8 trillion to $240
trillion and it'll go up 29% a year.
Arr That's that's that is my base case.
And and I've heard you say that in 21 years it's going to be at
$13 million. That takes you to 13 mana coin.
13 million a coin. 13 mana coin. At 29 percent.
Every Bitcoin you don't buy is going to cost you $13 million,
my friend. Every Bitcoin.
So let let me let me let me ask this question.
Your 4 Bitcoin Ferrari is going to be a six $55 million thing.
Let me, let me ask this question.
Let me ask this question. So right now your what's micro
strategy worth today? What's the #74 billion, whatever
the number was, right? Can you look up micro strategy
market cap? I'm just curious, OK, $73
billion today, if you're saying point 1% today, it's going to go
to 7%, that's 700X, right? So if it's 90,000 today, if I do
13,000,000 / 90,000, you're expecting to 144 X MicroStrategy
in 21 years. If I do 144 * 73 billion, you're
estimating to be a 10 1/2 trillion dollar company in 21
years. Is that correct?
Yeah, I guess with that math, yeah, Bitcoin goes from 90,000
to 13 million. So multiply 13 / 90,000, it gets
you to a big number. You you were given it, you
would. No, but Elon's forecasting 30
trillion so we're still chasing after the robots of the self
flying cars so. Dude, dude.
I mean, in wild, what is the $10 trillion company?
That's insane. I think the market cap of like
the biggest companies on Earth right now are like about a
trillion. So I mean, it doesn't sound too
unbelievable. I think it sounds unbelievable
for a company like MicroStrategy because before MicroStrategy
changed, you know, they, they really like started this kind of
Bitcoin strategy back in 2020. I never forget the 2021 Bitcoin
conference in Miami where Sailor made his announcement.
MicroStrategy was essentially was going sideways since the
90s. They peaked in the 90s and they
the stock has just been going sideways.
And then say they even said like, I was thinking about
retiring because there was just like no way of of it, like, you
know, whatever. And as soon as they adopted the
Bitcoin strategy, they have outperformed every company in
the S&P 500, including, I'm going to pronounce it
incorrectly because I'm from Miami.
I don't care, including NVIDIA right.
So like, I mean, bro, like, you know, the proof is in the work,
the proof is in the work. And you know, this is I think
Sailor is going to be one of the wealthiest men in the world and
I think Micro strategy is going to be one of the largest
companies in the world just because of the amount of Bitcoin
that they own. I think, you know, he wanted
that that 1% of the supply. Now he's at 330,000 Bitcoin.
I think he's aiming for a million Bitcoin.
I don't know if he'll get there, but with the current infinite
money glitch that he's using, he's accumulating an insane
amount of Bitcoin. He doesn't care that he's buying
at all time highs. The last 50,000 Bitcoin purchase
was around this level. He doesn't give a flying F.
He's like I just want more. Anyway, Seth, what's your take
on this? Do we do we know if
MicroStrategy actually does anything other than buy Bitcoin?
No one knows. Everyone talks about
MicroStrategy down like buying MicroStrategy stock.
And it's like all the all the rage in my my Twitter feed or
Twitter feed, whatever we call it these days.
I don't really know what they do.
So it's a fascinating case of this man found his his market
and influencer niche and he is he's leaned into it.
Yeah. I mean, as I've said before,
I've been on the show like I'm not the the price speculation
guy. So I don't know what to make of
their wild predictions of what's going to happen with the price.
But I think an interesting thing with Bitcoin is that you can
benefit from basically doing nothing and just buying Bitcoin,
which I don't think it's the right approach.
And I think that everyone out there watching this, there are
ways that you can actually contribute back to Bitcoin,
whether it's just through education or talking about the
benefits of Bitcoin as an investment, but also really is
free to money with the people around you.
And you don't just have to be that guy who who huddles and
talks about price publicly. But it's been fascinating to
watch him basically resurrect a zombie company purely by buying
Bitcoin and contributing nothing else, as far as I know, via his
company. So it's a, it's a weird setup.
He's not someone that I particularly admire, but he
makes some some bold claims. And financially he's made good
decisions so far. So it's interesting to follow.
Yeah, I know. And, and just kind of a like,
obviously we don't have the war chest and the means and the
resources that someone like Sailor has, right?
Where he, he, you know, he's able to get it.
Like the, the, I don't know if you guys know this, but the
interest rates that he's getting to, to borrow all this absurd
amount of money to buy Bitcoin. It's like near 0, right?
So like we don't have that as individuals.
MicroStrategy is getting these amazing deals.
He's like leveraging the debt Fiat system to, you know, just
to say it's to essentially attack it in a way kind of, you
know, but just a reminder everyone, MicroStrategy does not
custody their Bitcoin. They have their Bitcoin with
Coinbase, right? So, you know, in a lot, 8 out of
the 9 ETFs, that's the same story.
They all custody their Bitcoin with Coinbase.
That's not ideal. That is not a good situation.
A good situation would be not only individuals custodying
their Bitcoin, but also, you know, institutions and companies
custody their Bitcoin as well. That's what that's what
differentiates Bitcoin with, right?
The ability for you to custody very large amounts and the
ability for you to send very large amounts as well without
having to go through a third party.
Anyways, up to you. What's your take on this man?
I mean, this is absolutely bonkers.
And shout out to PBD for having him again.
Like a normie is hearing this and they're just like holy
effing, you know, like what the F is going on?
This is nuts. Or they think he's nuts, but you
know, a small percentage of them.
He's making Bitcoiners every time he goes on these mainstream
podcasters. Yeah, yeah, Well, shouts out to
PBD, 'cause I think this is what like the third time that
sailor's been on the pod and you can tell that he likes him and
that's why he's kind of bringing him back on.
But I do find it very interesting.
There's actually two points. The first one I, I found it
interesting in that podcast that PBD like instantly went to the
micro strategy stock and being like, wait, it's going to be how
much, you know, like doing the calculations like, wait, maybe I
should buy your stock, bro, Cuz like it's going to go up that
much. But like in that conversation,
he's kind of, I don't know if he's relegating.
I, I haven't watched all the sailor PBD podcast.
So I'm not really sure what PBD stocks are on Bitcoin.
And I think by that back and forth where sailors like, yeah,
you're, you know, 4 Bitcoin Ferrari is going to be $55
million one day. Like, you know, every Bitcoin
you don't buy is $13 million. So I think there's probably kind
of some pushback from PBD and he's not fully convinced on
Bitcoin and he's kind of more like, wait, maybe I just buy
micro strategy and then that's how I increase my purchasing
power. So I found that very
interesting. And then obviously kind of what
Seth was saying, like, and who knows where the price is
actually going and who knows where these numbers, whether
these numbers are correct. But it is very interesting that
sailors like, yeah, this is like my base bear case here and it
could blow right past that. And knowing that PBD is one of
the biggest content creators right now.
And so by bringing Sailor back, there has to be more people kind
of waking up to the Bitcoin thesis and being like, oh, maybe
I need to buy some Bitcoin and, you know, I need to have it as
part of my investment strategy. Obviously, we think of it more
than just an investment. We think it's the best money
ever. You know, it's the perfect money
as sailors constantly saying, and if things are getting as
worse as a lot of us speculate, it's going to be maybe the only
money if the Fiat currency start to actually blow up and the bond
markets blow up. And so by getting out there, you
know it, Nico hasn't said it yet, but by sailor going on PBD,
he is shifting the Overton window and you just love to see
it. And then I did see this clip
this morning just kind of scrolling Twitter.
And personally, when I, when I heard this, I'm like, man, I
could feel the bullish. I'm like, OK, like I like these
numbers. Like, OK, keep shilling these
big numbers out there, sailor. Who knows where the price is
going. But if that math does play out,
like that's absolutely insane numbers.
What, what was it, 144X or 700X? Like that's just mind blowing
numbers. And I don't think our brains can
fathom what that actually means, especially as Bitcoiners.
But I do like that sound bite of every Bitcoin you don't buy is
basically costing you $13 million.
That's a strong meme right there.
And I think we should push that a little harder on a lot of
people. It's like people don't
understand the opportunity cost of not buying Bitcoin right now.
They're kind of just looking at on like a year to year level.
It's like I could have gained 40% on My Portfolio if I just
bought Bitcoin. But in the long run, it's like,
wait, I am losing out on $13 million.
Like that's some, that's some incredible FOMO right there.
So you know, Sailor, hey, he's going out there again.
You know, as Seth said, and I've said this in the past and I did
kind of get some Flack who really knows what MicroStrategy
is doing, you know, and it it is kind of like MicroStrategy.
They're a software company. They are.
They're like a they're allegedly like a business.
Allegedly, Yeah, allegedly like an analytics business.
Analytics company here, but but it is interesting and I, I
tweeted this before and I think I've said it on the show and
either it just went under the radar and no one really caught
what I was saying. But Sess just said the same
thing where it's like it's almost like MicroStrategy was a
zombie company until they started to stack Bitcoin and now
they're what like outperforming the S&P 500.
And so that signal has to be spreading for a lot of people
and they have to at least be waking up to this idea that I
need to add Bitcoin to my company portfolio if I want to
maintain the lead that I currently have.
And you know, Sailor, I think is putting on a master class out
there. Obviously, there is other like
concerns maybe of just how much Bitcoin he is stacking and is it
a good thing that one person is stacking that much?
Obviously, I'm not one here to like to watch someone's pockets.
But like, I think that signal has to start to catch on.
And you know, if people want to compete, they have to be
stacking Bitcoin. And Sailor, his head and
shoulders above everyone else. He's just winning the game way
too hard. It seems way too easy for him.
And it's only a matter. Time personally that I think
other huge CEOs and you know trillion dollar companies start
to stack Bitcoin and so the game the game theory not only on a
nation state level, but a corporate level like it's
heating up and for us individuals for the retail out
there, it's like, hey, you know when the when the tide raises
all boats like it's good thing for us.
But This is why we have Seth on for the culture today, so we can
talk about other things besides the price and, you know, privacy
concerns and how we can ensure that Bitcoin becomes and
maintains change the freedom money aspects that we really
love. 100% All right, guys, We have tons of content left for
you guys, so let's get to the news.
We'll be right back. Very special shout out to our
sponsor Compass Mining. They make Bitcoin mining
accessible to everyone from beginners to experienced
investors. Their turnkey miners gets you
online and hashing within 48 hours, making it easier than
ever to start your mining journey.
Plus, with their active marketplace, you can resell your
miner at any time, adding flexibility and value to your
investment. Visit their website to access a
wealth of resources learning everything you need to know
about Bitcoin mining. Take your first.
Step into the world of Bitcoin mining with confidence.
Discover more at Compass Mining dot IO again Compass mining dot
IO and see how Compass Mining can power your success.
I want to give a shout out to our sponsor foundation.
It's self custody done right. They've built a premium grade
hardware wallet called. Passport.
Right here in the US and it integrates seamlessly with their
free app called Envoy. Passport is fully open source
and verifiable. It's the most intuitive Bitcoin
wallet design with a UX reminiscent of a classic feature
phone, so you'll know how to navigate it and use it the
moment you pick it up. It's also air gaps, meaning
Bitcoin stays offline, never touching an Internet connection.
It's Bitcoin only. Open source, verifiable air gap
security model, gorgeous design craft, premium grade materials.
Get your Bitcoin off exchanges and into your own hands in just
a few minutes. With passport at foundation dot
XYZ slash simply get Peace of Mind for your piece of Bitcoin.
All right, everybody, so it doesn't come with Opti, but if
you use the promo code simply you will get a discount to the
Passport by Foundation devices. This is the perfect device to
give to people that perhaps are a little bit intimidated by self
custody. Passport does not sacrifice
security for convenience. It makes cold storage Bitcoin
convenient but also not sacrificing security.
Again, does not come with Opti, but you will get a discount by
using promo code simply. Anyways, let's get to today's
news. So this is pretty crazy but
first I saw some people mentioning that they missed the
meme review in the chat. So before I get to that I found
this absolutely hilarious. Posted by Kraken and it says my
employment contract when Bitcoin hits 100K.
All right, Moon on. Wow, that was loud.
Isn't that hilarious? Here we go.
I'm. Glad I'm not wearing headphones.
Blowing out the audience. Ears.
I'm sorry guys. Anyway, shout out to the two.
We just broke 2000 live viewers. If you guys are enjoying the
show on YouTube on Rumble or X, make sure to smash the like
button. Consider sharing the video
really really helps in getting the message out there.
I found this really, really interesting and perhaps this
might not be very popular with our audience because our
audience is obviously we're obviously Bitcoiners, but I will
say that this is extremely, this is very good for the industry as
a whole, whether you like it or not.
Coin Base is by and large by far the largest, you know,
cryptocurrency exchange in the on the planet.
They contributed tremendously towards fighting off Elizabeth
Warren and her goons. Also Satoshi Action Fund by
Dennis Porter and the Bitcoin Policy Institute, shout out
David Zell. But Coinbase really, really led
the charge. You know, they spent a lot of
time and money in Washington really trying to educate
regulators and what not. So this is a really, really good
sign to what Seth was saying in the beginning of the show.
We don't want any kind of special favors.
We just want to be left the F alone.
That's all we're asking for because by just Bitcoin by
itself, its incentives are are just going to roll today.
Yes, we might make an all time high before the end of the show.
We just broke $93,035. You are listening to Simply
Bitcoin Live smash the like button.
Anyways, here's the Wall Street Journal article says Trump to
meet privately with Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong president-elect
Donald Trump is meeting with the CEO of cryptocurrency exchange
platform Coinbase Monday, according to people familiar
with the matter. The duo is expected to discuss
personal appointments for his second administration.
The meeting between Trump and Brian Armstrong would mark the
first time the two have met since Election Day and comes as
Trump continues to fill out his Cabinet and other senior posts.
Trump, formerly a crypto skeptic, has turned into a vocal
supporter of the industry. And then there's a paywall, but
you guys get the general gist of it.
Send me the link. Send me the link.
Maybe I can bypass it? Yeah, here we go.
Boom. But yeah, I mean, this is kind
of like a continuation on the trend.
And then the other topic that I want to bring up on the news
segment is this one, which I find absolutely effing hilarious
because if we did this, but we would go to jail.
So the Pentagon fails 7th audit in a row.
And let's get some more of the details.
The Pentagon on Friday failed its 7th audit in a row, with the
nation's largest government agency still unable to fully
account for its more than $824 billion budget, though officials
stress they're making good progress towards a clean audit
in 2020. Hey, could you imagine
responding to the IRS with that response?
Just like, hey, you know what? But we messed up.
It's an $824,000,000 audit. But we promise on the 7th year
we'll get that right, right. Like this isn't, it's rules for
thee but not for me, right? So anyways, you know, this is
supposedly what Elon and Vivec are going in there to fix.
We shall see. They are taking on the
administrative state, which is fueled by the Fiat money
printer. Let's see if they're successful.
But I mean, again, it's kind of like a double standard.
And it feels honestly, you know, as long as governments have the
money printer it it's like they've taken their populist
hostage. And I'll quote the book to
sovereign individual because I think it's very applicable to
this specifically the Internet. So the the government sees their
citizens as tax cattle. The Internet has given them
wings, right? And essentially I think that's
what's happening. We've seen the disintermediation
of information over the last, you know, five years or so.
It's been bonkers, right? And look at how much they've
done to try to fight it. Look at how much they've tried
to censor platforms like X, platforms like YouTube
platforms. They've tried to stifle speech,
which again, you know, according to the First Amendment is
illegal, right? But look at what happened with
the Twitter Files. It became public that the that
elements of the US government were colluding with private
companies to censor certain types of political speech.
Right now, imagine if they imagine if they get their hands
on central bank digital currencies, are you saying that
they're not gonna use that same power against their citizens?
And then at the same time, they want us to report every $600.00
transaction, but the Pentagon is failing $800 million worth of
audits for seven years in a row. And their response is we'll try
better next year. We're getting close to figuring
it out. Like, that's a double standard.
That isn't a government represented by the people for
the people. That's a government by the
government for the government, which I would say is the
definition of tyranny. Anyways, I want to get Seth's
opinion on this and then Opti. Yeah.
I mean, it's, it's just a ridiculous example of how the
military industrial complex that unfortunately we built in the US
and offloaded to so many other countries around the world has a
massive, a massive amount of control around the government
and around the the political system as well.
Because so much money gets poured into that military
industrial complex that they, they can just have revolving
door policies where they keep moving politicians into their,
into their, their businesses. They're the defense companies
that are making hundreds of billions of dollars every year.
And that, that report was $824 billion budget that they haven't
been able to find for seven straight audits.
And it's, it, it is wild because especially into this last
administration, there was a huge push to grow the IRS because
they weren't happy that they were getting enough taxes from,
from US average individuals with things like the ridiculous
$600.00 limit. And, and when we're sending
money on Venmo or PayPal and they're wanting to control every
last dollar and sent that we are, we are moving that we are
sending back and forth that we are using to buy used stuff off
of other people on Facebook marketplace or whatever.
Like these these ridiculous platforms where they understand
that while the Internet is supposed to give us wings when
it doesn't have proper privacy guarantees, it actually just
ends up giving the government better, better chains to put
around us if we don't push back. And that's one of the one of the
reasons why I think Bitcoin as freedom money is so important
because it it should give us that freedom back.
It should give us freedom from really tyrannical oppression
that we we have right now, even though in the US we're
politically quite free. And I, I know that I'm very
blessed to be in the US because we do have a lot of protections
that other countries don't and a lot of financial privilege that
other countries don't. But the, the government is
starting to use more and more of the tools that they have to, to
repress dissent and to to get tighter control of the financial
system. So Bitcoin as freedom money is
more vital than ever. And these kind of tax insanity
show that because we just, we don't have control over the
government, the control the government generally has control
over us, unfortunately. 100% I think that will always be the
case. As long as governments have the
money printer, the incentive isn't there.
The incentive for a lot of these bureaucrats and politicians is
to get as close as humanly possible to the money printer.
They don't need to do good by their constituents, right?
But if you separate money from state, their only form of
raising revenue is via direct taxation, right?
And that changes the conversation.
You're going to be a lot nicer to, you know, the the asks of
your constituents versus kind of finding this sly roundabout way
to tax them via currency debasement, right?
So very, very kind of interesting conversation.
Anyways, I do want to pass it on to Opti guys.
By the way, we are on the verge of making an all time high.
I have Satoshi the Bitcoin Chicken ready to clock he's.
Right next to Miko, I think at least Trading View is telling me
we did. Just break it.
We did. Is it confirmed?
It's running. I can see it right here.
It's running. It's.
Right, we're at 93,500. 93638 So that's all we have.
Broken all time. We have broken all time highs.
I'm going to put it on the on the ticker.
Congratulations everybody. You've you've earned your
stripes. Anyways, Opti, what's your take
on this? Yeah.
Well, First off, I'm going to start with the audit.
Obviously they don't want to audit that balance because you
know, they they do well with the lack of transparency.
But when you do compare it to kind of what El Salvador is
doing and you know, you can see at least on the blockchain,
yeah, there there's some, some some trust, I guess there that
they are actually stacking all that Bitcoin, etcetera, that
it's a totally different paradigm.
You know, if America was as transparent as the Bitcoin
blockchain, I think it would be a totally different
conversation. And you know, personally, as the
reigning tinfoil hat guy on the show, I don't think they want us
to be transparent with their, with their audit books.
And, and there's that, but the first, the first kind of story
about Trump meeting Brian Armstrong.
Like, look, guys, I am not a fan of Coinbase.
I, I think Brian Armstrong has been actively fighting Bitcoin,
you know, the, the real Bitcoin here for a lot of years.
And so personally, I'm not a fan of Brian Armstrong.
But with that being said, I think those conversations are a
good thing. And, and Trump talking to people
within the industry is a good thing, though I am a little
concerned that, you know, Trump's probably going to get a
shit coin shell from Brian Armstrong.
But I mean, hey, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe Trump's just
asking Brian Armstrong to to put what's a world liberty coin on
on. You imagine that conversation
like. All right, Brian, listen, it's
gonna be amazing. Pump my bags.
Rock coin, trump coin, It's gonna be amazing, right?
Like like for sure that, but like I would say this is this is
what I would say like I'm, I'm personally a free market
maximalist and I and I don't because I've seen this with a
lot of the the Bitcoin community, which is kind of like
this idea of like thinking that the government is going to step
in and hoping that they're going to choose what the winners and
losers are in terms of cryptos. Like no, no, no, no, like let
the free market do what the free market does best.
We don't need government intervention.
That's my take. And perhaps that's an unpopular
take and also another unpopular take with some bitcoiners that I
have too, is like, yes, we are Bitcoin only.
That's what we we are simply Bitcoin.
However, if you want to buy whatever you want to buy, go so
be it. That's all you like.
That is completely your decision.
You're an adult and you have every right to do so.
That's another kind of like, you know, cuz I've seen a lot of
Maxis on Twitter. It's like you are, you know,
stupid if you buy this cryptocurrency.
Like let people decide what they want to do.
It's their money, right? Like that's totally your
prerogative. So you know, I would say let's
let the free market do what the free market does best.
We believe that Bitcoin has the best incentives as the best.
You know you know, it's just the best 1.
So let's let the free market decide and we'll see what
happens. Let's see, let's see where the
dust settles, right? Anyways, guys before.
Before you move on, take off the ticket because we're not at all
time high anymore all. Right, I'm going to put away
it's. At 93.3 now so hey it was good,
well allowed. It was a nice little Wick.
Anyways, guys, before we move on
to culture segment, I do want to give a shout out to our
sponsors. Guys.
Simply, Bitcoin is powered by our sponsors.
So the best way to support them, support, support us is check out
our partners. We're very, very careful on who
we choose to partner with. So first up, I want to give a
very special shout out to Hive Digital Technologies.
As the first ever public miner, Hive's been battle tested
through every possible market. And as the 1st with an AI
strategy, Hive continues to redefine the future of
sustainable computing. Got to also casually drop this
in here. Hive consistently tops the
industry in Bitcoin mined per EXA hash.
They're lean and mean, they're green and clean, and they're
changing the game. Learn more by following them at
Dive at Hive Digital Tech or at hivedigital.com.
Also check them out. They're a publicly traded
company on NASDAQ. Check out their ticker HI VE so
hive anyways guys moving on to our next sponsor bit block boom
guys. This is going to be one of the
best Bitcoin conferences of 2025.
It's a pure Bitcoin conference. It's going to be April 3rd,
April 4th, April 5th, and April 6th in Dallas, TX.
The entire Simply Bitcoin crew and team will be there.
Dante, Rustin, Nico, Opti, Sophie.
It's going to be at a Jacob. It's going to be absolutely
epic. It's going to be 4 days of pure
Bitcoin signal by pure Bitcoiners is going to be
incredible. You guys don't want to miss
this. We're going to be live streaming
it from the Simply Bitcoin channel, and we really, really
hope to see you guys in person in Dallas, TX at Bit Block Boom.
So get your tickets now because the prices do go up as time goes
by. Scan the QR code today, and if
you use promo code BBB 21, you got $100 off your tickets.
All right, everybody, let's hit the culture.
All right everybody, I do want to give a shout out to our
sponsor, the Orange Pull app, the Bitcoin social layer Stack
friends who stack SAT join the 13,629 bitcoiners that are
currently on the app. So what is the Orange Pull app?
The Orange Pull app is the perfect resource for when you're
on the go or perhaps you're in your city and you don't know any
bitcoiners around you. You pull up.
The Orange Pull app has a really clever geographical feature and
it will show you the Bitcoiners that are geographically close,
close to you, allowing you to send them a message and to make
that connection. So if you're traveling to a
conference and perhaps you don't know anything, you don't know
what to do that night you pull up the Orange pull up, it'll
give you the ability to not only message the Bitcoiners that are
around you, but also to see what Bitcoin only events are
happening as well. Check out the orange pull up
today by scanning the QR code on your screen or checking the link
in the video description. Anyways, opening up the
conversation. Want to take advantage of Seth
for privacy being on the show today, Seth has contributed a
enormous amount of not only content, but also just work for
advocating for privacy in Bitcoin.
He's also a supporter of Monero as well, which is like the
quintessential privacy cryptocurrency also.
So Seth, welcome to the show. Happy to have you on today.
And you're currently with Cakewallet.
So guys, if you want to check out Cakewallet, go to
cakewallet.com today. Yeah, man, thank y'all, thank
y'all so much for having me on. It's been fun.
I I, I always just love the the light hearted approach here on
simply Bitcoin. So it's just always an absolute
blast to be able to, to stay with you all through this.
I got to be here for all time high.
So it's a good, a good day to be jumping in, but they're really
excited to chat more about privacy as always.
I know it's it's kind of a meme. It's at this point that whenever
I'm on something I'm either talking about privacy or now,
since silent payments have been the big thing for me over the
past couple of years. Everyone just assumes that I'm
going to talk about silent payments, which I will a little
bit, yeah. Absolutely.
I want to hear about that. That sounds like a great idea.
So where should we start this off?
Opti, I'm going to pass it on to you.
Yeah, I mean, Seth just brought up privacy.
We do have, you know, Seth has a podcast as well.
And there's, you know, a new kind of conversation.
It's an old conversation that is starting to rear its head again.
But let's start with privacy first and foremost, since it's
already been brought up. Seth, as someone that works in
privacy, it's literally in your name.
You know, Seth, for privacy. What is the current state for
privacy and what and what are you concerned?
Like what are you watching and and where is your head at in
regards to privacy on Bitcoin? Yeah.
I mean, when we when we talk about privacy on Bitcoin, I
think there's a lot of reasons for hope and optimism and a lot
of reasons for concern as well. So this is, I feel like kind of
always where we've been in the, in the Bitcoin ecosystem,
because there's a broad set of people deciding what should and
should not be included in Bitcoin, A broad set of people
developing around Bitcoin, researching new approaches that
can be taken. And so we always get a a lot of
different routes that can happen, a lot of different
paths. And we've come to a lot of no
pun intended kind of forks in the road on what what path we're
going to take forward for Bitcoin, especially when it
comes to whether or not it can be free to money for the
individual. And I think when we're when
we're talking privacy, the the most exciting thing that's been
happening recently, Nico hit on the samurai wallet shut down in
April. And, and that we've covered
quite a bit today already that there's been just kind of a
broad crackdown on privacy in Bitcoin and the broader
cryptocurrency space over the last really 12 months.
But in the wake of that, people have been trying to figure out
where, where do we go next? And thankfully one of the cool
tools that has has happened, it was introduced into the into the
space as a proposal a couple of years ago, but it has finally
become a reality actually in Cakewallet.
It's one of the reasons why I was so excited to jump in and
and join the Cakewallet team a couple months ago was that
silent payments is here. And silent payments is one of
these beautiful things because it doesn't require any changes
to Bitcoin. And I know we're going to talk a
little bit about like this concept of ossification or
potential upgrades to Bitcoin later on in the segment.
But what's really amazing about silent payments is that they're
really a user experience improvement.
They're a, a Bitcoin address type that you can use, you can
share with anybody. You can post on your Twitter
bio, you can post in the GitHub, read me, and anyone can pay you
using a Bitcoin wallet. And when they pay you, they
can't see anything but other other payments you've received
in the past. Contrary to like if you just
paste a normal Bitcoin address into your Twitter bio, yeah,
maybe people can send you some Bitcoin, but they also can just
copy and paste that into them and pulled out space and see all
of the funds you've received in the past.
Silent payments work differently.
So you can have one address. You don't have to change it.
You don't have to be worried about address reuse.
You can use that broadly and still have good privacy because
it makes sure that no one can reuse addresses and no one can
just quickly copy and paste that address into a blockchain
explorer and see what transactions you received in the
past. It doesn't fix all Bitcoin
privacy issues, but it's one of those rare things that actually
is a user experience improvement as well.
Because for those of us who who have been in the space for a
long time, we're used to the weirdness of when you hit
receive in your Bitcoin wallet, you get a new address every
time. Or maybe when you actually
receive a transaction, you get a new address the next time you
hit receive. And that becomes normal for us.
But if you hand someone a Bitcoin wallet today, what are
they used to? They're used to PayPal, to cash
app, to Venmo, where they have this, the static address or
username, and they can receive funds there if they don't have
to worry about it doesn't change.
It all goes in the same place. And this, this user experience
hurdle of not raising addresses is definitely a big one to get
over and one of the ways that silent payments really helps.
So that's been a blast at Cakewallet.
They were the first to implement silent payments and it's right
now the only, the only Bitcoin wallet that has silent payment
support for both sending and receiving.
So it's a really, really great way to try out what is kind of
the the latest and greatest tech in privacy on Bitcoin.
As for kind of like that's kind of the optimism right now.
That's one of the really cool tools that's available at the
moment. But when we talk about kind of
where am I more kind of hesitant or concerned is something that I
think will segue well into another topic of right now
there's a lot of hesitancy in the Bitcoin space to make any
changes to Bitcoin, whether those are for self custody,
whether those are for privacy, There's a, a broad narrative, I
wouldn't say prevailing narrative, but there's at least
a vocal minority that are firmly against any changes happening to
Bitcoin and want to say that Bitcoin is perfect right now as
it is. But the the concern for me is
that we're really at kind of a fork in the road right now.
Bitcoin can support the self custody of everyone who uses
Bitcoin today and probably a lot more people if we're honest.
Most people who buy Bitcoin aren't actually using Bitcoin
anyways. They're using an ETF, they're
using an exchange. But what what will happen
eventually is if enough people do come to Bitcoin and they want
to take self custody, that's going to be pretty much
impossible because of the way that that Bitcoin handles
scaling right now. Limited block size, which has
benefits for fees, which we need long term for security,
ultimately limits what we can do with scaling.
And lightning has not proved to be the the self sovereign
scaling solution that we initially thought it was.
And so we're we're coming up against this idea of that, that
not too far in the future, if people actually come to Bitcoin
and use Bitcoin not too far in the future, it's going to be
very difficult to self custody and actually hold their own
coins. Maybe they can hold keys to E
cash or something and then trust a custodian.
Maybe they just use a Coinbase account, but that's not actually
using Bitcoin and that's not going to enable the censorship
resistance and the privacy and that the freedom money aspects
that people can have. So we're we're coming to a fork
in the road where self custody is something that we need to
find ways to improve. And it's not clear how to do
that without improving the Bitcoin protocol itself.
And we're also coming to a fork in the road where privacy in
Bitcoin is extremely difficult today, almost impossible.
And this has gotten much harder in the crackdown on privacy
since April of this year, where we saw Samurai Wallet get
arrested and indicted and all of their servers shut down.
South. Samurai Wallet's approach to
privacy doesn't work anymore. We saw Tornado Cash developers
on Etherium who are building a very powerful privacy tool on
the Etherium blockchain. Whatever you think of Etherium,
you can set that aside. But just think about this was a
privacy tool that was actually very decentralized and useful.
And the developers behind that have been arrested.
Case still ongoing in the US in the Netherlands, one of the
developers for Tornado Cash got sentenced to a 12 years in jail
basically another premise that because he knew bad people could
use the tool at some point he was liable for that and so that
crackdown has driven people in Ethereum to look for better
privacy. Samurai wallet being shut down,
Wasabi wallet shutting down their own services as kind of
part of the the ripple effects of the Samurai Wallet
indictment. Lightning wallet providers
leaving the US, Lightning service providers leaving the
US. Like Phoenix.
There's been a big shift that made it far more difficult to
achieve privacy in Bitcoin. And that's been hard for me as
someone who deeply loves privacy and wants to onboard people to
privacy tools in Bitcoin as I don't have a great
recommendation right now. And a lot of the solutions to
improve privacy on Bitcoin would require an openness to changing
the Bitcoin protocol. Now I'm not advocating that we
make Bitcoin Monero because a lot of the trade-offs that
happened with Manero would be very hard for a lot of people in
the Bitcoin space to stomach. But there are clear ways that we
can improve privacy on Bitcoin using things like covenants that
are broad proposal for fixing self custody as well.
We can build really cool privacy tools like coin pools with
covenants where you can essentially share UTX OS with
other people but have full ownership of your amount of that
UTXO, where you can always exit on chain if you want.
But all the payments that you make are impossible for anyone
to know about except you and the person you're paying because
they're happening within this pool or you're paying them.
Using this kind of virtual UTXO covenants also would improve
technologies like Arc and Spark, which also have some better
privacy guarantees. So there's there's a lot that
can be done, but right now in the Bitcoin community, we have
to decide what is our end goal. Is our end goal to keep Bitcoin
as it is because numbers going up to focus on institutional
investors, federal reserves to focus on these number go up
aspects or while that's happening, I don't think the
changes to Bitcoin are going to stop that from happening.
While that's happening, keeping our eye on what do we need to
do, whether it's just education or whether it's changes to the
Bitcoin protocol or whether it's funding development of better
privacy tools around Bitcoin, What do we need to do to keep
the freedom money angle open for Bitcoin?
And I think that that has to be top of mind and we can't let
what seems like a more favorable administration in the US, which
usually trickles down into other countries as well.
We can't let that disguise the need for freedom money or to to
hide the the fact that nation states are going to want to
prevent self custody and financial privacy long term
because those two things are the antithesis to their control.
They shut down the levers that governments have and they give
power back to the individual. So I think we need to expect
that there will be pushed back even if this administration is
good. Maybe that buys us four years,
but we need to be thinking far into the future and thinking
about how we can make Bitcoin better today.
And thankfully there are some really cool tools like I talked
about like silent payments, which are invaluable for the on
chain side. They're up a piece.
They don't fix privacy in Bitcoin, but they're an
important piece of privacy. That's something you can try out
and take wallet today and then things on the Lightning
ecosystem like Bolt 12, which are really, really valuable
privacy improvement as well. So there are some ways we can
improve privacy today and broader adoption of those is
critical. But we also need to be thinking,
how do we make these privacy tools accessible to the average
person and how do we build better privacy tools that give
us better on chain privacy, better privacy and Lightning, an
easier point of access to the Lightning network for the
average individual without getting up custody.
All these things are really top of mind.
So there's there's a lot of different things to break into
there. But that's kind of the the
thought process that that I've been going through lately and
interviewing Lop on the Opt out podcast was really fascinating
to get his perspective on how he views this kind of like ossify
or don't ossify view. But yeah, those are the kind of
top of mind things for me right now, guys.
Incredible, man, it's bro that wow, that was that had so many
questions, man. So and it's all this in the in
the chat. First of all, all right, Seth, I
apologize because just ask to do it.
He did break another all time high while Seth was doing his
thing. Satoshi's knocking things over
Satoshi the Bitcoin chicken. But OK, so Seth, this is this is
very, very important, right? And in terms of scaling all the
aspects, what are the what's the counter argument to this?
Like the ossification camp? Why are they not on board with
what you suggested? I think generally the the
thought process there, and I know you were in the Ghana and
you saw you saw Jimmy Song and Jameson Lop debate this.
So that's a really good video to go look back on.
I don't know if it's on YouTube. I know that they posted on
Twitter at least, but he gave a lot of kind of the arguments
that are common in the the ossification camp.
And just as a primer ossifies a really weird word.
I kind of hate that it's kind of the term that we use around this
concept, but basically all that means is naturally long term,
things like Bitcoin that are technologies, and especially
things like Bitcoin that are technologies that are also money
are going to get harder and harder to change.
So there will be this natural ossification or this natural
hardening of the protocol where it's going to get more and more
difficult to make changes as we go along.
We've already seen that in massive ways since I got into
the space in 2017. There seem to be a real appetite
for making improvements and Taproot was one of those, even
though it hasn't panned out to be quite as much as I think it
was initially promised. But there was this appetite for
changes. But even without a prevailing
narrative of we should not change Bitcoin, it's gotten
harder and harder to change Bitcoin because it's just so
many more people participating in the network, participating in
the ecosystem. And so when we look at like,
what's the, the main idea behind the, the Ossify Now camp, it's
really that Bitcoin is serving this serving this goal of
digital gold, which has become, I think the prevailing
narrative, especially in the West around Bitcoin, not
globally, but especially in the West around Bitcoin has been
that digital gold is the key use for Bitcoin and that it's
serving that purpose. And that nation state adoption
is, is evidence of that. And that if it's already serving
that purpose, we don't want to introduce anything that might
affect that, that might harm that use case as digital gold.
And so most of the argument that I see is essentially unknown
unknowns. We don't want to introduce
anything that might do something that we don't know about.
And so it's this, this concept of if there are unknown
unknowns, if we can't be 100% sure that nobody can use this to
do something that we don't like or that this couldn't affect
Bitcoin as digital gold in subway, we should never make any
changes. And that's the crux of the
argument. Obviously that's a little bit of
an oversimplification, but that's the crux of the argument
is that we don't want to harm this digital gold narrative that
we have going right now. And we want to make sure that if
we're going to change anything in Bitcoin, it's just to
preserve that. Things like fixing bugs that
that are inevitably going to need to be fixed in Bitcoin.
Things like quantum resistant cryptography that we would need
to protect the the idea of self custody.
Those things are the only things that are usually kind of seen
within the realm of like, yeah, we should do those because
obviously we want Bitcoin to continue to exist in a, a post
quantum world or in a world past 2140 when this time spent time
stamp bug would break Bitcoin. But that's the that's the
prevailing view. And that's kind of the the view
to to straw man and the view that that I push back against.
And I agree with Jameson Lopp on pushing back against because I
think when we just look at Bitcoin as digital gold, to me
that's not freedom money. That's another equity.
That's another thing that I can invest in.
That's another thing for my 4O1K.
And that's great. That is a great fitting use
case, especially for me as a financially privileged Westerner
where I am, I have spare capital that I can put into Bitcoin and
that I can benefit from. But when we look at the scope of
what Bitcoin can be, I think digital gold is this tiny piece.
When it comes to actual human freedom, yes, that's a big piece
financially, But when it comes to actual human freedom, that's
a tiny piece. And the need much more broadly
is not something to put my money into and hope that it
appreciates versus Fiat over time.
But the need for those people is that they need money that they
can actually use today, that their governments can't control,
that their governments can't inflate away.
But I would argue that's different than digital gold and
money that they can use peer-to-peer to transact, to
build circular economies and escape the broken Fiat system
around them. But escaping the Fiat system is
not putting money into a four O 1K that's in a Bitcoin ETF and
having more Fiat at the end of the day that feeds the Fiat
system. So to me that the critical thing
is making sure that when we're talking about like adoption in
Africa, we're talking about adoption in South America, that
these people are actually able to use Bitcoin and not just use
a custodian, not just use the wallet of Satoshi, not just use
an E cash where someone that they don't know around the world
is holding their Bitcoin for them.
But actually be able to use Bitcoin day-to-day and use it as
an escape from, from Fiat slavery, from governmental
oppression, to use it to fund journalists and dissidents to
push back on corrupt governments.
That's the huge thing for me. And that's why if we get stuck
in this, this digital gold narrative, we lose sight of the,
the human freedom aspects of this and to add one more thing
and then, and then we can, we can move on.
It's been fascinating to see as I've gotten more and more
involved in the Human Rights Foundation and talking to far
more journalists and dissidents, talking to more people around
the globe on how they're actually using cryptocurrency
for freedom. They're not using Bitcoin,
they're not using Bitcoin, they're using Tether.
They're using things that are centralized and controlled
because what they need is low transaction fees and they need
stability. And I'm not saying Bitcoin needs
to be a stable coin or anything like that, but just that when we
talk about freedom money, a lot of the things that people need
are not being served by Bitcoin. And I think we're we're in
danger of freezing Bitcoin as it is today, of not making any
changes, not making it easier to self custody, not making it
easier to gain privacy. And we're opting in by doing
that to this future where giving up custody is the only path to
using Bitcoin in many scenarios. Yeah, and, and, and firstly,
that's an incredible kind of summary of, of the situation
because that is what you're seeing in developing countries,
right? The theory of Bitcoiners was
like, Oh no, like, you know, no, no, no, you're seeing Tether
adoption right there. There's a percentage of Bitcoin
adoption, but you're seeing Tether adoption.
And I think it, it's an educational aspect and it's also
a volatility conversation as well.
Now I think my question to you, Seth, before we talk about the
Cake wallet, because I do want to highlight that is how, how
would that be possible? Because essentially, like the
like the the Tucam, the the discussion is basically like,
how do we, how do we implement, how do we scale Bitcoin without
introducing a trade off that potentially exposes Bitcoin?
It it essentially it threatens bitcoins decentralization and
security, right? Like, how do you introduce that?
And I think, you know, lightning has tried to do that, Fetty has
tried to do that, E cash has tried to do that liquid has
tried to do that. But as you say, right, you know,
I don't know if I don't know about you guys, but like self
custodial lightning is not a great experience.
And I'm a I'm a I'm a experienced maxi, right?
So you know, it's not a great experience and shout out to the
Albie guys because they've done a great job and it is getting
there. But most people when they're
using lightning, whether it's the primal or wallet of Satoshi,
that is non custodial lighting, which is a great experience.
But as Seth has said, because it's non custodial, I mean,
because it is custodial lighting, there's a rug pole,
right? And if you live in a hostile
jurisdiction, you know, for example, the United States is a
great example. Wall of Satoshi in Phoenix at
peace. I'm out, right?
So yeah, I completely agree. So Seth, that's my question to
you. How do you propose and perhaps
it's there isn't an answer to this yet, right.
But can you ever see a situation where you know, Bitcoin can
potentially scale to allow this new influx of of people,
especially from the global S coming in getting the benefits
of of of of custody of custodying their own Bitcoin
without sacrificing the decentralization and security of
the network? Yes, and we have the technical
tools today. That's the that's the crazy part
here. It's like when we're talking
about making self custody more approachable or even talking
specifically about making lightning more useful.
The thing that we need to do to make those two things happen has
been around for years. OPCAT is one of the tools that
would allow us to essentially think of covenants as building
blocks that enable wallet developers to build better tools
that allow you to hold on to your funds without having to
actually own a single UTXO on chain.
You can share that UTXO with other people in a way that is
entirely self custodial, does not have the risk of you not
being able to get those funds out.
You can always exit back on chain with the amount of that
UTXOU control. But we have really I would, I
would kind of narrow it down. There's a lot of different
proposals, a lot of different routes that can be taken here.
But I would narrow it down to to two things that would allow us
wallet developers like Cakewallet to build solutions
that allow people to take self custody in a way that is
resistant to fee spikes. That gives a much better user
experience in the Lightning Network and that gives a much
better user experience when we're talking long term storage
of Bitcoin. And those things generally are
called covenants. They've been proposed for years.
OP CTV, which is another really important one, I believe was
proposed in 2020 and it's been thoroughly vetted since then.
OPCAT was created by Satoshi and was only disabled because he
didn't have a, he didn't understand how to fix a denial
of service attack that was possible with OPCAT at the time,
so he disabled it. But the functionality of OPCAT
is very simple, very well understood, and a combination of
something like OPCAT and something OPCTV, which again,
you don't need to memorize the names, but it just allows wallet
developers or people building protocols like the ARC Network,
which I'm sure many people have heard of recently, or Spark,
which is another kind of layer 2 approach.
With these covenants, these tools get immensely easier to
use. They get much cheaper to use.
The user experience of developers building on these
would be drastically better. And the self sovereignty
guarantees get better as well. We can build things like
trustless bridges where when you're bridging into and out of
something like Arc or Spark or more complex things even like
thinking Liquid, you're bridging into and out of these.
You can do it in a completely trustless way rather than having
to trust that one out of a set of operators are legitimate or
that a threshold of operators legitimate.
And these two things are very simple, very well understood,
possible to today, completely achievable and fix some of the
critical issues that I see us coming to a crossroads in
Bitcoin. The only issue right now is just
a social issue. We just need people to
understand that the self custodial approach to lightning
is very painful right now and covenants like OPCAT and OPCTV
would make that drastically easier.
We need to understand that actually holding your own UTX OS
on chain is not something that's going to happen forever because
fees naturally have to increase for Bitcoin to remain secure.
And we can fix these two things today.
We have the tools, the code is there if they're well
understood. We just have to get people to
agree that we need these improvements and then find
exactly the path towards actually activating something
like that on Bitcoin. We're not talking about hard
fork. We're not talking about some
extremely complex thing on Bitcoin.
We're not talking about making Bitcoin Etherium.
These are just very simple building blocks that allow
people like Cakebot, allow people like Arc, that a lot of
people like Spark, that all people like Lightning,
Developers, Phoenix, etcetera. Your favorite Lightning wallet,
all of those get better with these building blocks and they
don't open up risk to Bitcoin. They're extremely simple,
they're extremely well understood and the the downsides
are not really existent at this point because these things are
so simple and so specific. They're to do very specific
things and have very specific, well understood trade-offs.
Beautiful man that's you guys go go check out Seth for privacy
stay on top of this. He has a podcast.
It's called the opt out pod. I'm going to drop a link for it
for you guys, a chat. So you guys could stay basically
in the vanguard of this discussion, right?
Because I think it's incredibly important the topics that Seth
is bringing up in terms of yes, Bitcoin is for everyone.
How do we do this? Seth is making the case that it
is possible. We hear a lot on Bitcoin Twitter
that it isn't possible without breaking Bitcoin.
Seth is making the case that that isn't the case.
So stay, stay up to date with Seth.
Go give him a follow on Twitter. Go check out his podcast.
I'm sure he's having these discussions.
His latest episode I believe is with LOP.
So I'm I'm going to go hear that after this.
Anyways, I do want to talk about the Cake wallet.
Seth, this is the recent company that you joined.
You're the VP of operations. What is the Cake wallet?
Who's it for? Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for thanks for giving me a little bit of time to
highlight this. So, yeah, I jumped over to
Cakewell a couple of months ago as VP of Operations like you
mentioned, because really I wanted the opportunity to be on
the cutting edge of privacy in Bitcoin, to be on the cutting
edge of user experience in Bitcoin.
And I have long been a passionate Monero user.
Monero, I think is an invaluable tool, especially when we're
talking payments that you can make payments very cheaply with
fantastic privacy, the best in the space.
And so I've been a user of Monero actually longer than I've
been a user of Bitcoin. And it's, it's really the Monero
community that got me interested in understanding of personal
privacy. So Cakewala, our, our core focus
is really bringing privacy to the, the average individual.
We want to try to make it as easy and approachable as
possible. Monero is a huge part of that
where it's, it's simplest in Monero because the the protocol
in Monero enforces default privacy for every transaction.
But we're talking about Bitcoin as well.
Like I said earlier on, we were the first to implement silent
payments and still the only one that allows you to receive
silent payment transactions directly into Cake.
And that ability to be on the the cutting edge and to build
stuff that I see is immensely important to human freedom has
been really awesome. So Cake wallet to, to give the
TLDR, it is a multi cryptocurrency wallet.
We have things other than Bitcoin in there.
It started as a Monero wallet, but our heavy focus lately has
been Bitcoin and will always continue to be Monero as well.
And we have exciting things that we're working on right now.
We're working on the the new Bitcoin usernames proposal bit
353. I have some exciting ideas on
how we can use that within Cakewallet to let you do things
like send money to Seth at Seth for privacy.com using Bitcoin,
using silent payments under the hood and Bolt 12 under the hood.
And then we also are working on pay join support within
Cakewallet, which is essentially a way where when you send or
receive payments, you can work together with the person that
you're paying or receiving funds from to make the transaction
together. You can think of it kind of like
a coin join, but it's not, it's not the same.
But what it does is it is it breaks this concept of if these
two inputs are spent on the same transaction, they must be owned
by the same person. And instead it hides the amount,
it hides what the true input is. And it provides another bump to
Bitcoin privacy without actually looking like a privacy tool on
chain at Bitcoin. So I'm just looking at the
transaction. Can't tell that you were
choosing to gain more privacy it just looks like a standard
payment and it breaks all of the heuristics people or a chain
surveillance companies are used to for very simple things like
the common input ownership heuristic.
So those are the things we're working on right now.
We try to make it as simple as possible, like I said, to to
gain privacy on these chains like Bitcoin, like Monero, as
well as swapping back and forth. Kind of my, my thesis for a very
long time on how Bitcoin and Manera would be symbiotic is
that Bitcoin has proven itself as a store of value.
We've talked all episode about that today that it's proven that
that is happening. It is a fantastic place to store
wealth, but the it's not the perfect tool for payments right
now, especially with self custodial lightning being very
difficult with on chain payments having no privacy by default and
they're not being clear privacy tools to gain that.
Monero is a fantastic tool for spending.
And so a lot of the thesis that I've always had is that people
would store value in Bitcoin and that they would spend Monero.
And that has been playing out in real time, especially over the
last 12 months, we've seen a massive growth in Bitcoiners
starting to use Monero, swapping from Bitcoin into Monero just a
little bit, like enough for a month spending and then spending
from there. And that's a A use case that we
explicitly work to serve within Cakewallet to make it as easy as
possible for you to do that. So that's the TLDR. Fully open
source, of course, I wouldn't touch anything that was a 100%
open source that didn't have permissive licenses that anyone
can clone it, can build whatever they want on it, can open pool
requests for features that they want.
But fully open source privacy at the core of everything we do.
No analytics, no ability for us to see what you do in your
wallet. We try to provide ways for you
to easily add your own nodes, like when you're using Bitcoin
or Manera or other cryptocurrencies, you can just
scan AQR in your Umbrel or something like that to connect
directly to your own Bitcoin nodes.
So the Cake wallet doesn't learn anything about your Bitcoin
wallets. That's at the, the, the core of
everything we do is financial privacy and user privacy.
So you can be sure that everything that we do is going
to be focused heavily on making sure that we learn as little
about you as possible and that you reveal as little about
yourself to the world as possible.
Unless you opt to reveal more, which is really the crux of
privacy. Awesome.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, this was simply Bitcoin Live for
November 19, 2024. I'm your host, Nico, as my
legendary Co host, Optimus Fields and our guest today,
Steph for privacy with cakewallet.com and you can go
follow his podcast Opt out pod. You recently just had Jameson
lop on, so highly recommend checking out that episode.
Anyways, guys, if you enjoyed the show, you know to do smash
the like button, consider subscribing if you feel like
we've provided you value, but the number one thing you could
do to help push the peaceful Bitcoin revolution forward is
share this content. In fact, share all Bitcoin
content. Remember, we got to take over
the culture and the way that we do that is one step at a time.
All right guys, love you all. We'll be back tomorrow for
another episode of Simply Bitcoin Live.
Brought to you by bitcoinwell.com, a Bitcoin only
platform on a mission to enable financial independence.