{ "episodeId": "SLP251", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "dan_held": { "name": "Dan Held", "role": "guest", "tag": "DAN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 9.15, "text": "Hi and welcome to the Stefan Livera podcast. This is episode two hundred and fifty-one. My friend Dan Held re-joins me on the show, and we're talking about hodl mindsets versus spending and mistakes made along the way. So there's a lot of value in this episode, both for new bitcoiners and experienced bitcoiners in terms of how to think about When you should spend, when you shouldn't, and Bitcoin finances. This show brought to you by swanbitcoin dot com. Swan is the fastest way from zero to Bitcoin. I've been friends with the guys for a while, they've created an excellent experience for new Bitcoiners. It's really easy sign up, there's no altcoins, it's really cheap, they're available in all states in the US, you can set up a recurring purchase plan, and Swan supports bank wires for larger amounts and ACH transfers for smaller one time buyers. Also, with Swan Bitcoin, there's definitely a focus on education, so make sure you send your new coiner friends there, or if you're new yourself, you can go there, send them to swanbitcoin dot com slash livera, and Swan will drop ten dollars of free Bitcoin in your account when you become a member. Unchained Capital are building Bitcoin native financial services, and we talk about this in the episode as well, so they're providing multi-signature vaults and also a loan product. So if you're thinking about your security, if the number of your coins is going- One up, start thinking about using multi-signature. So Unchained Capital offer a concierge service. So as part of the service, they ship you two hardware wallets, they answer your questions, they do Zoom calls with you, and they deposit one thousand dollars of Bitcoin in your vault. So normally it's fifteen hundred dollars, but if you use my code, Livera, you get fifty dollars off. So Unchained Capital are great if you're thinking about buying through OTC or using it for self-directed Bitcoin retirement accounts. They also offer advanced business accounts. So there's a whole range of- Of features and also educational content on their website also, so go to unchained dash capital dot com. Compos is an online marketplace which makes it easier for everyone to mine Bitcoin and enhance the Bitcoin network's security. They are the anti-cloud mining option. Compos helps you buy your own ASIC and secure hosting at great facilities around the world. For years we've all heard that mining is only profitable if you're investing tons of money, but now with Compos, everyone is able to tap into economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap energy. Industrial power rates. And if you're unsure about how to get started with mining Bitcoin, CompuS offers hardware and hosting bundles which eliminates the need for advanced technical knowledge and allows you to quickly get started mining Bitcoin with hardware that you own. Visit them at mine with compass dot com and start mining Bitcoin today. Here's the show. Dan, welcome back to the show. thanks for having me. It's been a, it's been a little while. Exactly, man. And it has been crazy the last few weeks. We've had Elon and Tesla buying one and a half- Billion dollars of Bitcoin, we had a price pump just to around forty-seven thousand USD as we speak right now, it's around forty-four thousand. What's your take just on the recent few weeks?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "03:11", "start": 190.63, "text": "Well, you know, I think it feels like it's been such a long time because in Bitcoin years, with all this price volatility, it, it definitely ages us, you know? It's, it's interesting, my, my girlfriend noticed some gray, gray hairs on my chin, and, I'm thirty-two years old, so that's a little bit disconcerting. It's, it's been, it's been wild. I mean, I've been in this space for years, seen institutions, seen big corporations coming and buy Bitcoin with their treasury. This is what I've been waiting for. This is incredible. I mean, this is validation that Bitcoin is a global store of value asset. It, it's w- honestly, it's mind-blowing. Like, it, it still really hasn't sunk in for me how big of a deal this is. I think like my brother and my parents and, and they, they're, they're not very into Bitcoin Bitcoin thing and, you know, as a Bitcoiner, it's kind of an isolating sort of feeling, right, of like you, you see this future and you're somewhat tortured by it as you're the only one who gets it. But now I'm seeing not only family members, but like old middle school, high school, college friends, they're all starting to come out of the woodwork and go like, \"Oh, it finally makes sense now.\" They're not just going, \"Hey, should I buy Bitcoin for like the speculative sort of reason?\" Like, \"Hey, should I buy" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:31", "start": 270.58, "text": "Of course, and I think this is one of those things when people are a little bit newer, they haven't had that time to build their conviction. So I think that's a really good theme and topic to discuss is just this whole hodl mindset, a hodl philosophy, whatever you wanna call it, how people, how do you think people should build their hodl conviction?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "04:52", "start": 291.83, "text": "That's a great question. So, first to clear things up, my last name is actually my real last name. I didn't make that up. I think a lot of people think Held is a made up last name. It, it is my real last" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:03", "start": 302.62, "text": "name. You were born to do this, Dan. I" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "05:04", "start": 304.06, "text": "think so. It's like blacksmith with the Smith last name. You know, it's like your, your last name is your profession. I think I was born to hodl, man. So, now it's my real last name, it's a German last name. You know, what's funny is I, no, no one's a perfect hodler. Like, I, I think a lot of people go in and they see, folks like myself Primecoin, you know, I explored around the alts a little bit, you know, this is back thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. So like no one's a perfect hodler, people typically go explore and try things and think they're smarter than the market, which you're not. And, you know, that, these, these experiences of, of pain and feeling, you know, making mistakes is how you learn. This is how you learn in your, in the traditional world with relationships, work, and, and just learning in general. So with Bitcoin and hodling, it's typically not Through some mistakes that you've made, but what's nice is that you can hear about my mistakes and Stefan's mistakes and other people's mistakes and take all those together and, and hopefully learn from it and, and hopefully avoid what we did. So, you know, when it comes to hodling, I think a really important mindset to have is a basic investing mindset of, you know, when you buy something, plan to hodle it for five to ten years. I don't care if you're buying a house or a car or, you know, stock or Bitcoin, that investment philosophy, and Hodling is a, is a philosophy, you know, this, these are, you know, these are important, this is an important mindset to have is, is you're convicted in the trade, you're convicted in utilizing the asset over a long period of time or investing in something for a long period of time, and when it comes to Bitcoin hodling, you really just have to divorce yourself from the emotion of those day-to-day swings. Am I mentally impacted by the day-to-day swings? Yes, but I'm so divorced from it by now to where it's numbers for me, right Or I could buy this or that, or, oh no, I lost this or that. I don't feel that way about it. For me, it's just more of like a scoreboard where I'm like, okay, I'm, I'm more right on my investment thesis. So I, I think that, you know, that's a very important element of, of a hodl mindset is the classic investor's mindset of long-term investing, I think is, is definitely a pillar of that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:19", "start": 438.97, "text": "Of course, and a common thing that I hear when I talk to more new Bitcoiners is they, they" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:30", "start": 450.02, "text": "Stock in this very, you know, short term sort of mindset, and I'm often having to coach them back in that, in that way of saying, \"No, think, this is a long term thing. Think of it as minimum, like absolute minimum is four years, and really you should be thinking even longer than that.\" but it's a common thing, and I can understand when people are a little bit new and maybe they get a bit shaken and let's say they hear some bad news. So, you know, was it easy for you and me, Dan? Did we just" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "08:00", "start": 480.1, "text": "I mean, I went through, okay, first of all, there's the Silk Road bust, that was a big deal. I mean, Bitcoin, I remember seeing that happen and seein' Bitcoin's price plummet. We had Mt. Gox shut down, and Mt. Gox was ninety percent of trading volume. Put this in context, this would be like Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp all going down at the same time. You know, so I don't think people really, you know, when, when you look back, you're like, \"Oh" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "08:30", "start": 510.0, "text": "Channels, there were a few articles, so there wasn't really a good way to reinforce the faith and belief in Bitcoin. Now we've got so much great content like this podcast and, and other friends I've got in the space, you know, as just on Peter Mcormick and, and we all, I think you guys produce such great content now, and you've got, there's so many great thinkers, you know, what's kinda funny, it's kinda funny is I didn't consider myself a public speaker or a writer until two years ago, and I've, so this our own way, whether it be creating art, talking about it on podcast, creating a podcast or anything else. So, you know, for me, I, I just, it's been a wonderful explosion to see this, this content created to reinforce the belief of the hodlers. Before it was such a lonely experience where like, there weren't that many of us, there weren't very many physical meetups, and I lived in San Francisco, and there wasn't a lot of great content. So when these traumatic or negative incidents occurred, there just wasn't a lot of like sounding board other than the pure" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "09:30", "start": 570.0, "text": "Bitcoin was gonna bounce back. So we've never been in a better spot. I mean, fundamentally, like all the on-chain data looks phenomenal, trading volume looks great, public narrative is phenomenal, and then of course, the alignment of, you know, all of the content to reinforce the hodler belief, you know, it's never been a better time to be a hodler." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:45", "start": 585.21, "text": "Right. And I think that's one of the interesting points that you mentioned is sometimes bad news would happen, but then if you were following the space closely enough and maybe you knew some insiders, people would look at things like, Coiling up of long term demand or long term hodlers, and, you know, what, what might, what might superficially seem like, \"Oh no, it's all over,\" if you talk to the insiders, they're all running to buy more. Like, I think a good example of this is March twenty twenty, when Bitcoin crashed from whatever it was, nine, eight or nine thousand or something, down to maybe at the absolute bottom around three or four thousand. All the hardcore inside people I knew were running to buy more at that time, but if you looked at an outsider, what were they" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "10:30", "start": 630.0, "text": "I have memes like stacking, stack sats and DCA, like those weren't even means, memes, it was mainly just hodl because it was so, because it was so volatile and there wasn't enough content to like help reinforce that faith, hodl was just like, you're, you're sort of like, just, just hold the line, we're just gonna hold the line and survive. and now it's just, I think it's a much more positive, much more, I think, proactive narrative of DCA, buy the dip, you know, all those, all those sort This is the modern day equivalent of like a battle cry, right? Is, is hodl or, or buy the dip or, stack sats. It's, it's really fun." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:07", "start": 667.16, "text": "Of course. And I think the other element that can come, and many listeners may, may be in this position now, obviously, as we are now, you know, current price around forty-four thousand as we speak, many of them would have bought far cheaper than this. What's the incentive now, and why should they continue hodling rather than spending some of that down?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "11:26", "start": 686.34, "text": "Yeah, great question. So," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "11:30", "start": 690.04, "text": "How I approach my own Bitcoin hodl. There, there's no right or right-wrong way to do it. I think a wrong way would be to actively day trade, but there's no like, if you, if you hodl for a long time, you know, and, and I'm a very vocal anti-spend your Bitcoin sort of person, I think, got quite the reputation around me being vehemently against spending your coin. What I'm vehemently against is you spending your coin on something trivial, like a Spotify per-subscription just because you can. If you wanna use Bitcoin's Relations, you've used Bitcoin as it's intended. Or if you wanna store value in it, take it and then have your purchasing power increase and then take some of that out later, that's fine too, but do it for something important. Look, I wanna hodl my coins as for, as long as I can and never sell any, that's, that's my objective. However, I am a human being after all, and, and I will need to eventually, you know, eat and sleep somewhere, so I have to come up with some method, and we'll cover that a little bit later" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:30", "start": 750.0, "text": "Blockchain." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "12:31", "start": 750.52, "text": "I live inside the blockchain. so yeah, you know, when there's life events, everyone's got partners that may or may not be as invested as they are in Bitcoin. You, you know, you can die a lonely existence with all your coins, but eventually you probably need to spend them on something important, son or daughter's wedding, a, house, a car, wh-whatever it may be. And that's what I meant by, there's no wrong or right way to do it. Everyone has a life event where they might need to take some money off" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "13:00", "start": 780.0, "text": "I think it's always measured, right? There's no, there's no black and white version of this. No, would I ever sell anything close to like half or anything close to a majority of my coins? Never. I would never, I could never ever live with that. and to be, to be frank, by the way, I, for me, like taking money off the table, on a personal level, like I've been in eight years, right? So for me, my investment thesis was Bitcoin is gold two point o, and we are just now touching upon" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "13:31", "start": 810.66, "text": "That objective. and for me, I'm not going to look at taking money off the table necessarily, it's more of like, and that's why, you know, and that's why I'm so into lending and borrowing. I currently have an Unchained Capital loan where I borrow dollars against my Bitcoin as collateral. I do expect those interest rates to go down over time, 'cause it's a bit high to service, and that's not any fault on their part. But then on the lending side, I get, I've gotten a lot of criticism for that too, but I'm like But that's the reason why I do it, is I huddled a long time and I'd rather not sell 'em and I'm willing to take the risk. And my dream is, what if I'd never had to sell my Bitcoin ever, and I could just live off of the interest or borrow against it? And as I borrow against it, the dollars I borrowed, those drop in value, and my Bitcoin increases in value, which makes the loan very serviceable. So, to each their own. I don't think there's any shame in a Bitcoiner selling their coin at some moment. Again," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "14:30", "start": 870.02, "text": "Obsessed as you are in Bitcoin, and, you, you know, that's just a fact of life, and, and that's gonna be a fact for a lot of things. You may not be into what they're into as well. So, there's, there's-- don't feel ashamed if you have to. I think there's a lot of ways that I've been thinking through to mitigate the moment when I have to sell my coin for a life event where I can be a little bit more creative. So that's why I've been really obsessed on the yield side, the borrowing side" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:00", "start": 900.0, "text": "You know, hodling as hard and long as you possibly can so that you can accumulate wealth and pass that on to your children and so on. but then also, you know, you, you have to live and you have to live somewhere and you have to, you know, a-and you also don't wanna go the other way of sometimes you hear those stories of people, and this is in the more normal, you know, personal finance world, you hear these stories of people who worked so hard and they saved their whole lives and then they retire at, you know, sixty or sixty-five or whatever Wealth, and so, you know, it, it's, it's ultimately, it is a balance, but as you rightly point out, I think there are ways that you can minimize the impact and try to push off the, you know, selling down of coins or the use of those, spending of those coins, into the future. And I think that whole loan idea, now, disclosure, Unchain Capital and also HODL HODL Lend are, you know, the sponsors of my show, but I think it is interesting and important to discuss those You wanna talk a little bit about, you know, how did you go about researching that idea of using the Unchained loan and, you know, why was that, an option you pursued?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "16:08", "start": 967.79, "text": "Yeah. So, and yeah, so with Unchained, what you can do is you can borrow dollars against your Bitcoin as collateral. And, I began my journey, I think around October-November 2019 with this loan. So I'll give you the, the, the emotional swings of it. So for those who are thinking about doing it, it's" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "16:30", "start": 990.1, "text": "And there's certain moments when you feel like you're a genius. So, okay, you wanna borrow dollars against your Bitcoin for two reasons. One is you need the dollars to fund something in the real world, buy a home, buy a car, pay for groceries, or you wanna go levered with your coin. Well, that's what I did. I took the dollars and I bought more Bitcoin, so I'm actually over a hundred percent of my net worth in Bitcoin. which I, I've been a little bit reluctant to mention, just 'cause it, people already think I'm" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "17:00", "start": 1020.0, "text": "A lot more Bitcoin with it, so I took out an untrained capital loan. Bitcoin price at the time was around seven thousand dollars a coin, so I took out this loan, very over collateralized. I looked at the NeverLook back price, it was built, I forget who built it, I used that as a rough approximation for my max LTV calculation. So I'm like, okay, what's, like, based on historical drawdowns, what's the max pain I can endure before I get margin called? What a margin call is, is if the loan's value becomes" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "17:30", "start": 1050.0, "text": "And that's why they have the collateral, so they have to sell part of your collateral to pay down that, pay down that loan balance to make, to put your, loan back in a, at a better LTV ratio. So, everything was fine and dandy for a while until March twelfth. Yeah. March twelfth twenty twenty, we had the liquidity crunch and Bitcoin went down to thirty-eight hundred. I had, I had over-collateralized my loan in such a way that I was safe, but I know a couple other friends that day that called me" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "17:59", "start": 1078.54, "text": "and The value of my collateral keeps dropping and I can't wire in money to pay off the loan 'cause I'd rather just do that at that point. and if, you know, if it whips down to like a thousand dollars just for a minute, I could be liquidated even if it bounces back in just a minute. so that was a really scary moment, a moment that I'll never forget. it's a moment I don't think anyone else is probably gonna experience something like that again. I doubt we see that ag-again happen in Bitcoin, but, moment happen again. But certainly it, it speaks to the fact that like you should appropriately structure your l-loan to value ratio. So for example, you can post like, you know, I think at a minimum it's like two x the amount of collateral versus the loan's value, you might wanna do three x or four x. I even went higher than that, you know? So it was, you know, it was a moment where like, it, it gets pretty scary when that, that happens. So I think like structuring the LTV is critical when you're thinking about borrowing. The second Interest, how much are you paying to service this loan? With Unchain Capital and most other lenders in the space, it's quite high, between five and ten percent. I believe long term, these rates will likely go down to be, be between one to two percent. If we look at, if you look at like margin on traditional brokerages, interactive brokers, you can get seventy five bips if you borrow over, I think, a quarter million dollars against your equities as collateral. So I don't see why Bitcoin wouldn't have the same sort of structure, especially given that Bitcoin is a" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "19:30", "start": 1170.04, "text": "down significantly, which will, I think, fuel this, you know, fuel what Pierre Rochard has been saying all along, the speculative attack against the dollar and other fiats, as we just all borrow fiat and we have Bitcoin as our asset and collateral. so interest rates are important one. It's, it's really hard to get a really, a lower interest rate. Places that offer you a lower interest rate, and this goes into my third pillar, if they offer you a lower interest rate, what they're doing is they're rehypothecating the collateral. So, for That collateral out. Now, this is advantageous for the borrower because now you pay five percent interest rate instead of ten. I'm not necessarily recommending that, I personally don't do that. That's why I went with Unchained and I pay basically double the interest rate. Unchained Capital doesn't rehypothecate your Bitcoin, and you can actually see the address where your Bitcoin are stored, which is really cool. It is way more expensive, it's basically double the servicing rate. Again, I do that because I understand the risk I'm taking there," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "20:30", "start": 1230.34, "text": "Where, they're taking out the collateral and lending it, and I don't know who they're lending it to. I'm not saying that like, you know, one, that one company is better than another, it's just a different type of risk. So when it comes to borrowing against your coin, keep in mind you've got LTV, so make sure it's well collateralized. The, the servicing of the debt isn't, you know, depends on your loan size, but it could be pretty material, so make sure you can pay that interest rate. And then finally, you need" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:00", "start": 1260.2, "text": "You want to, obviously, it depends how many coins you've got and so on, but I think an important consideration also is that you wanna try, if you can, you wanna do it only with a small percentage of your stack rather than like trying to lever up with a huge amount of your stack. So that way, if you needed to re-- you know, put additional Bitcoin in to not get liquidated, then you can more easily do that and you're not risking like a big part of your stack, if you will, and also I understan-- I understand that, Now, if you start up alone, I think it'll be at a two hundred and fifty percent, I think partly spurred by what happened in March. So there are a few, things around that. And then I guess you've also generally, you would need to have income to be able to service that interest. So I guess those are probably some of the main considerations, right?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "21:46", "start": 1306.31, "text": "Totally. And, you know, think about it too, like if you don't structure this, this properly, they, they will have to sell your Bitcoin to pay the loan, and that could be a very Right? They hold your Bitcoin as collateral, but what if they have an issue or what if the government seizes the coin? There can still be issues with, the non-rehypothecated method. For any of these, whether you lend or borrow, never, ever, ever use your whole stack. I think that's just really risky. You should always have some portion of your coin, of course, you know, given that you understand private key management correctly, almost all of your coin should be self-custodied at all times. when you do lending or borrowing, you are giving" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "22:30", "start": 1350.04, "text": "This, that I wouldn't ever risk anything to, you know, I wouldn't do half or, I wouldn't do anything, I wouldn't even do half, I, I wouldn't do a majority of your coins, I'd do it with something, you know, this is the, this is also the way I think about my own privacy management, have a blend of, of custodial and non-custodial enough to where it's a trust gradient of yourself. If you are completely trusting in your own self-custody method, fantastic, then you should do full self-custody. So that you're not going to jump off a bridge if one or the other, messes up. I have been around for eight years, most Bitcoiners' coins I know that have been, lost or due to poor private key management on a s-custodial, on a self-custody basis. Now, I very much encourage people to do self-custody, I'm just saying it's not necessarily a binary thing where we, we wanna push people to do it until they're ready. Just make sure whatever sort of lending, borrowing private key management structure you have, I would" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "23:30", "start": 1410.04, "text": "Management setup. I would never put all my coins in one private key management setup, so I think that applies as well to the custodial arrangements too. You'd never put all of your coins into, Unchain Capital or, or all into Blockfi Lending, you know, be smart about it. Like, do whatever you need to do to make sure that if something tr- like catastrophic happens, you're gonna be, you know, in a survivable mental state." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:52", "start": 1432.29, "text": "Yeah, of course. And I think someone thinking might, someone listening might be thinking, \"Oh Benefit in this case is you are pushing off the actual moment in which you have to spend those coins down or sell those coins down, and if you do that, you can maintain your exposure to Bitcoin, right? So ultimately, you know, historically, Bitcoin is doing, you know, over two hundred percent per year on a, like a cag-cumul-cumulative, you know, annualized growth rate basis, like if you talk about like the last ten years or so, so I think it's, depending on the maths and how it would otherwise work out if you had to sell" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:30", "start": 1470.0, "text": "Operations, that's where, I guess, the benefit comes in, because you're pushing off the spending of coin into, you know, one year, two years, three years into the future, and then potentially there's also that option around rolling that loan forward. And so, you know, if you were to do it now, and then the price has gone up, and then you roll the loan, that's another whole way of pushing off the loan, pushing off the sale, so long as you can fund the interest and you're comfortable with the percentage that you're, putting in" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "24:56", "start": 1496.0, "text": "there" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "25:00", "start": 1500.0, "text": "Forward, you don't have to necessarily close them out or not. for example, like I have a two year term, let's say at the end of two years I wanted to do another two years, they would just roll that into another two year loan. yeah, it, it's, you know, yeah, you're right. So the, the primary function here is either to borrow dollars to utilize it for some pressing need or to go levered to, buy more coin. either way is a good way to do this, and we're, what we're avoiding" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "25:30", "start": 1530.04, "text": "If the price continued to go up, and also where, where it's a tax advantageous structure where when you borrow against your coin, there's not a taxable gains event, so the IRS isn't like, \"Oh, you sold your coin, you owe us taxes.\" This is a loan. There's actually something really interesting too, now you need to consult a, a tax, attorney or CPA on this, as I am not a reg- as I am not a financial advisor, but in the US, if you borrow against an asset and then use those proceeds to go invest in tax deductible, which means that you can deduct the interest that you pay on the loan against your income, which is really cool." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:06", "start": 1565.52, "text": "Right, so it's like a double whammy benefit then? Yeah, so there's a lot of, I guess, interesting considerations there, because I guess it, it is coming back to that idea of, well, if you have a life event and maybe you need to, I guess, buy a car to get around or maybe you wanna buy a house to, you know, raise your family and things like that. But I guess even there, there are I don't know what you think, Dan, but, I'm curious actually, because in Australia, it's like this huge property cult. It's a massive, like, oh, everyone's gotta buy property, and it just to me seems like a huge, huge bubble, and everyone just kind of pumps their bags onto the next generation. And so it just feels like, as a millennial, as you and I are, it's like we're being very much encouraged to buy the property bags of, people in the generations above us, when that's not necessarily the most efficient way to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:00", "start": 1620.12, "text": "It's better to be exposed to Bitcoin and if you can, to rent. Oh," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "27:05", "start": 1624.84, "text": "yeah. Oh, man, I, I struggle with this a lot. you know, for me, like every, like, like the home as an investment is such a classic idea, both in Australia and the US. It's just, it's like a given. People go, \"You grow up, you find someone you love, you have kids, and then you buy a house. \" That's just like, it's like a, it's like a part of life almost. and, and Money, everything, right? And then when it comes to homes, I'm like, \"Well, shit, you know, why would I buy a home? \" We've got, also, you've got some like population structural problems that I think indicate that, you know, I think like the period for buying a home might have been the peak periods where in the higher growth population areas, where like now population growth is very much slowing across the world, which means that, you know, if you've got a fixed supply of homes or an increasing supply of homes and demand stays the same or slightly decreases, that" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "28:00", "start": 1680.0, "text": "We've got, with Bitcoin, we've got twenty-one million and a massive amount of folks of demand that it hasn't come in yet. With property, we've got a ton of supply that people already live in, and more supply coming, and if populations go flat, then that's not a great, great, future for that. Now, so we've got that more negative side of the equation, you also have a lot of expenses with homes. You've got maintenance costs, insurance, you wanna go refinish the kitchen because you want new cabinets or something. Homes aren't cheap, That mortgage cost to the original home purchaser. So you're paying a little extra spread to live there, and not be mentally invested in owning it and paying the mortgage and whatnot. So you're, you're not-- there's no, there's no free lunch, you're still paying rents and you're still having to pay for it, and then also, the, a property is typically a good inflation hedge. So, you know, in a higher inflationary environment, gold, Bitcoin, and property would likely go up. So it's not exactly like, but the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:00", "start": 1740.34, "text": "Exactly." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "29:01", "start": 1740.8, "text": "And it, it's just this perpetual-- I, I just can't get it out of my head, and it drives me nuts because I just can't, I can't think of any other way to do it other than just to keep hodling Bitcoin and borrow and lend against it, right? Like, I, I just don't see an alternative. you know, it's something too to where like, you know, when I was younger, when I was thirteen, fourteen, that was like my dream, right? Buy, buy an apartment, especially, I mean, out Like they've made it, it's like the home, right? The apartment, the home, the beautiful home. so I get it, it's something I mentally struggle with. I, I rent, by the way, I rent in San Francisco, and I will be, by the way, I'm moving to Austin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:42", "start": 1781.51, "text": "Nice." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "29:42", "start": 1781.89, "text": "moving to Austin in a couple months and we'll be renting there. So I haven't made up my mind yet. I don't wanna sell my coins also, but the idea of servicing like a, an interest-only loan against my Bitcoin The interest you pay on your mortgage is tax deductible, typically depends on the geo that you're in, again, consult a tax professional. that and the interest rates are super low, it's like two or three percent or something now, it's insane. So properties have been like artificially pumped up as this investment because governments have given crazy sort of awesome incentive packages to buy homes. They, they allow the like deductible interest payments, they allow, the rates are really low, and then there's other crazy shit where like, I think in the US it depends on, I think this is a federal Like IRS guidance, I think a certain amount of capital gains appreciation in your home is tax-free, so they've, they've essentially created a massive bubble in the home market by having these crazy tax advantage structures for homebuyers. Because, you know, after the nineteen, after the nineteen forties, now after World War II, it was like, \"Well, let's go, let's go build America, get a home, have babies, and go work nine to five.\" And, yeah, I, I definitely feel like Bitcoin has made me deeply question the idea of ever owning a home." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "31:00", "start": 1860.1, "text": "As, you know, I'm in my thirties and eventually wanna start a family and stuff, and I'm like, \"Well, a home, you know, seems like a good idea, \"but then I'm like, \"Well, I, I don't know if I wanna borrow that much against my Bitcoin as collateral, \"and then I'm also like, \"I don't know if I, I don't wanna sell any of my coin, \"so I struggle with it quite a bit." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:14", "start": 1874.22, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. CoinKite dot com are the creators of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard. So if you are thinking about your Bitcoin security, check this wallet out. You can use it in an airgapped way, meaning you never plug it to a computer. You can plug it to the wall or to one of those phone power banks, or you can use the cold power. So then you initialize it and then you move that wallet over into Specter Desktop or Electrum or BlueWallet to do airgapped transactions. So this is a very commonly recommended hardware wallet by Two Bitcoiners. It's got an address explorer on the device, you can use passphrases, there's anti-fishing words, there's all kinds of features. Go to coinkite dot com and use the code livera to order yours. As number is going up, think about your security and backups with ciphersafe dot io producing metal backup seed products like the cipher wheel. They've also got a new product called the Bitcoin Recovery Tag. It specifically helps with recovery, so this is an extra stainless steel tag with info just like the original wallet, gap limit. Derivation types and the scripts used, and there's, there's one for each of the major hardware wallet types, and you attach this to your seed word backup with a stainless steel cable, and it's also got a website for recovery to help you or your heirs with recovering the coins on Elektra. So it actually adds that value of helping you or your heirs recover in practice. So go and check them out at cyphersafe dot io and use the code livera for a discount. Lend at hodl-hodl is a global Bitcoin backed lending platform, and you can lend and borrow anonymously on your own terms. Now, this is a peer-to-peer solution using a unique multi-signature escrow for each deal. So if you have stablecoins, you can put up offers and loan those out and earn interest on your stablecoins. On the other hand, if you have Bitcoin and you need liquidity, either, you know, for a life event or you want to lever up and buy more Bitcoin, you can now borrow stablecoins and keep on hodling in the sense that you didn't sell bitcoins. So with HoddleHoddle's lend platform, you set the terms, you set the offers, you can go and check them out at lend dot hodl hoddle dot com. Now, back to the show. Yeah, I think these are questions that probably many Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoiners are thinking about, and I would say we have to also consider what's capital efficient, right? So if you wanna tie up a lot of your capital into homes, then you're less exposed to Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is just going up so much faster. It's like, you know, you don't, you wanna, you wanna minimize, holding that property shitcoin. Nah, look I mean, yeah," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "33:45", "start": 2024.74, "text": "it's a, it's a property shitcoin. And well, Bitcoin is like the only asset you really own, Bitcoin and gold, because it's an asset that you-- like, custody of the asset gives you ownership. Like, when you own your home, you don't really own the home, you own the title to the home that the local government enforces that can take it away from you at a whim. So that's, I think, particularly scary as well. Like, after having held Bitcoin, I'm like, \"I love this thing, this thing is incredible.\" The brokerage owns the stock, you just have a claim over it with your brokerage, you know? So it's a, homes are kind of the same thing, you, you technically own the home and you have title to the home, but that title is enforced by the local region, and that's kind of a scary proposition too. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:27", "start": 2067.06, "text": "and I think the other thing that really comes to my mind is the sovereign individual thesis, right? It's like, you know, people, if people try and look for a better deal, whether that's in another state or in another country even," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:43", "start": 2083.18, "text": "and try Anyway, so why not, you know, try and, get a better deal for yourselves and for your family if you can, if it's available to you. that's also something that plays on my mind as well. I mean, a-and look, in fairness, it's not like we can all just live in a cardboard box, like you have to live somewhere, and one of the main, I guess, concerns would also be around, well, okay, if I rent, I can't do as much with the property, and maybe t-there's the risk of being" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:14", "start": 2113.98, "text": "You to maximize your exposure to Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "35:16", "start": 2116.4, "text": "Totally. Yeah, it's very case dependent. You know, I hope the takeaway here isn't that like I'm saying never buy a home, I'm saying I don't know if I want to or not, and I still haven't made up my mind. It's, it, it's really tough. I mean, look, the perfect, the perfect scenario, here's the perfect scenario. Bitcoin keeps going up for forever, I borrow dollars against it, and I buy all sorts of real world assets that I need for various things, buy a home, But there's a lot of price volatility in between, and that's where it all comes back to the LTV ratios. If you don't have that properly structured, you could have a really catastrophic event where you got to part with your precious Bitcoin at a price a lot lower than you were willing to sell them at." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:56", "start": 2156.34, "text": "Yeah, I think those, that's a really nice way to summarize it. And I think just more broadly, as our Bitcoin, thesis is essentially that many other assets are very overvalued, and so it's kind of like, why do you wanna buy the asset that's over" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:14", "start": 2174.0, "text": "Kind of brought back to, brought back to earth in some sense. And then that is what enables you to then, you know, like theoretically after most of the gains have come, let's say post hyperbitcoinization. Now, I don't know, people can't necessarily wait that long, but, you know, you've got, you've just got to manage that process as best you can and push it off, because you really don't wanna miss out on those gains. and I think it might be a good point to talk a little bit about, you know, The mistakes that you saw around spending early." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "36:47", "start": 2206.82, "text": "Yeah, I mean, so I was around during the time of the payments narrative that was really persistent and, and pervasive due to the amount of fundraising on the Silicon Valley side, to, you know, you couldn't raise money to be like, \"Yeah, we're gonna overthrow, glo-global store of wealth of gold and big-- of golden dollars,\" and, and VCs are like, \"What the fuck are you talking about? You know, like that's, that wasn't gonna-- that, that, that pitch doesn't fly,\" but disrupting PayPal The space fundraised on, and we were out trying to like make that work right at like Blockchain dot com. I built the first merchant app, the kind of like a merchant payment like a POS terminal, and we would go, you know, try to get people to use it. I mean, I was there with Roger at different dinners, man. I mean, yeah, I was there for a lot of dinners out in York where the headquarters is at, and trying to see him convince different merchants to accept Bitcoin. And yeah, I mean, look, the whole payments thing, like, Its most, its highest utility is in a very hard to seize store of value asset and in its immutability. Immutability means sending a, or doing a transaction that would otherwise be prohibited. That's why it's useful. Use it for those two things. using it for like a trivial payment, I think just kind of like, it, it's just a, a really great way to literally throw your coins away. And the folks that go, say, \"Oh, well, just spend and replace,\" \"Cool, well now you've just incurred capital gains, so you've actually, You have to pay bips on the exchange to buy it, and you've also paid a transaction fee, so you're like, you're like, it's like little razor blade cuts to your stack, just to support some trivial idea of like, this is using Bitcoin. if you need to use Bitcoin for large values that you need to send to pay contractors or pay business deals or move money or buy big assets, that makes sense. If that's the only way that you can, you can do that versus using fiat. Again, Bitcoin's value prop is store of value and immutable," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "38:44", "start": 2324.22, "text": "Look, I did a bunch of trivial stuff, like, oh man, I mean, all sorts of things. I bought certain things that, you know, cost like a dozen coins, sort of, sort of costs, where I'm just like, there was even a hundred Bitcoin transaction one time where I'm like, oh man. I found an old wallet.dat file. Every Bitcoiner does this in the bull run, they go, they start going through all their old, computers trying to find like an old wallet.dat file or, or an old, an old password or This, this could get interesting. And I opened it, and I, somehow I guessed the password, and I was like, \"Oh, alright, this is getting really fun.\" And then I saw the transaction log, and I was like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:24", "start": 2363.7, "text": "\"No, oh" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "39:24", "start": 2364.46, "text": "man, oh man, brutal.\" Yeah. So, you know, look, like every Bitcoiner I know has always regretted spending their coin. Always. I, I, you know, you'll find a couple people on Twitter that go, \"Oh, I thought it was fun,\" nah, dude, they're definitely cringing in the closet" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "39:44", "start": 2383.94, "text": "Investment ever in human history in terms of price appreciation. Of course you're gonna live with regret when you spend it. So look, if you need to spend it on the car, the home you've always wanted, again, those are big lifestyle sort of changes that I encourage you to just explore deeply while you're doing it, but don't feel guilty doing that. Just don't spend it on like a Starbucks or spend it on a Spotify, it just doesn't make any sense to do that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:04", "start": 2403.53, "text": "Yeah, yeah. And a common thing that I notice in some people is, what's that saying When, when the simplest, and it's like, it's like in their minds, they, they think, \"Can it really be that simple? Like literally, just buy it and secure it and hoddle it, and that-- Can it really be that simple?\"" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "40:24", "start": 2424.02, "text": "Don't touch it. It's, that's actually really fricking hard to do, is not touch it. 'Cause there's always things you wanna go buy with it, there's always reasons why you might wanna panic sell or FOMO buy or trade or there's a new crypto asset that you became enamored with and you wanna" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "40:44", "start": 2444.06, "text": "There's a, I think, I forget what the exact story is, but there's a story about how what the end of the, kind of like the end of work will be. And the end of work, what it'll be is there's a computer and a machine or machines that do everything, and then there's a, there's a human sitting there to fix the machines, but then there's also a dog, and the dog is there to keep the human from touching the machine. That's the end of work, you know, once we automate everything with robots, that's the end of work." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "41:14", "start": 2473.94, "text": "Tensions away from the Bitcoin. As long as you can do that, as long as you can divorce your human emotions away from the Bitcoin, the larger your stack will be, the more, the more purchasing power you're going to have, and the better, you know, potential future lifestyle you might be able to live." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:27", "start": 2487.16, "text": "Right. And one more tip that I can think of now is if you make-- if you can, this is, James Clear Atomic Habits inspired idea, but it's if you want to discourage a behavior in advance, why don't you make it hard for yourself to do that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:44", "start": 2503.96, "text": "For example, if you have a multisig setup and you've got the keys distributed in, you know, different locations where if you were to spend a large amount of coin, you would have to go to those locations and make it hard for yourself to spend. So that is another example where you can, you know, make it easy to hoddle by making it hard to spend." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "41:59", "start": 2519.03, "text": "I think that's a, that's a great idea. I love James Clear, by the way, his, Atomic Habits, Habits is a great book for folks who haven't heard about it, I recommend Those and you need a plan around them. I think that's the TL;DR of, of these hab-habit building formulas, is you're like, okay, I know it's just like you want that, that cupcake or that cake, right? It's bad for you, but you're like, well, maybe if I work out and then I reward myself with it, that's a better way than just like saying no cake at all. you know, so all sorts of ways to deal with these urges that we have. I definitely think making it an onerous process" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "42:39", "start": 2558.89, "text": "is key. You know, you're at the, you know, you're at the place where you can go trade it to anything else you'd like, including fiat, and that's a, that's a temptation that you probably don't wanna have. So definitely private key management in terms of like having a rigorous setup makes it, makes the process a little bit more onerous to where you, you know, it's, it's a, it's just gonna be a lot more difficult for you to, to, to give into those urges." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:04", "start": 2584.21, "text": "Right, and, an example is maybe you're regularly Like you might, as an example, have a warm wallet that you receive coins into, because maybe you get paid in Bitcoin or whatever, and then you need to periodically flush that out into your cold storage, which is the one where it's hard to spend from." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "43:26", "start": 2606.4, "text": "Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, I think that's a great way to think about it too. I definitely think about it from like a savings and checking account perspective or hot and cold wallet, kind of the same thing. Cold wallet is like your checking, your, savings account. Hot wallet's kind of The hot wallet's a little bit more flexible for you to be able to, to, send coins out of there, and be able to access those coins in a timely fashion. yeah, I definitely think like privacy management is both like a combination of like resisting your temptations, structuring it to where you don't have catastrophic risk either by yourself or by a third party custodian, and as well just like having like a sliding scale of like accessibility. you know, for example, with my unchecked capital loan, I wouldn't be able to ac-- based on my privacy management" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "44:14", "start": 2654.38, "text": "So that was, right, so that's a scary moment when you go, okay, well, my private key management also needs to take into effect of accessibility if I've got a situation where I need liquidity immediately. I mean, that situation I hadn't planned for. Now, granted, I think it's a very rare situation, but that's something to think about if you've got like one of these collateralized loans, is, well, you've got this cold storage set up, you know, you've got extra coins sitting aside just in case, you know, because you like to do self, To deposit more Bitcoin as collateral, if that's in a really remote spot that's hard to get to, you could be in a, in a rough situation, which I faced in that moment. so yeah, it, it, private key management and, and hodling coins is a simple function of just hodling, but the, the method of doing it is a, quite a bit more complicated." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:01", "start": 2700.83, "text": "Right. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very good point you made there that if you are going to enter into a, loan arrangement, now you have to think about being able to There, whereas if the person is just doing a very simple, like no leverage, no loans, no nothing, literally just hodling, just, you know, that's where they, it makes sense to make it really inaccessible, in some sense, right? Obviously, you still wanna spend them someday, you still wanna have them available to you, right? You don't wanna like, you know, not think about it at all and like never even check the, check the storage and check things, but I, I guess, yeah, that's, that's an, interesting and Narratives and like how, what's the, what's going on in the media, what's going on in the world, so as we speak today, it's February twenty twenty-one, and it looks like, you know, we're on top of the world, and all these companies are running in to buy Bitcoin, and probably there's gonna be a whole bunch more coming in, but what are some of the narratives that you see coming over the next, call it, you know, one year or so that might cause people to dis-hodl? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "46:05", "start": 2765.47, "text": "well, let's talk about some" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "46:14", "start": 2773.94, "text": "And that's where I view, I view my role. I actually started writing, by the way, because I got so annoyed with the fud around that Bitcoin, that Bitcoin hodlers weren't hav-- like, that only devs mattered and that hodlers didn't matter. Naval Ravikant said that back in twenty eighteen, and I got so triggered by it, that's what started me to write. That, that's what-- that was the moment. That's where the first article I ever wrote was \"HodlHodlers of the Revolutionaries,\" because I was like, \"This" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "46:44", "start": 2804.02, "text": "Because I just got so triggered by these narratives where I'm like, \"These are ridiculous,\" where I'm like, \"I, I view myself as a fudbuster, is kind of a fun way to do it.\" There's a bunch of us, we all, we all do it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:53", "start": 2812.86, "text": "Yeah, of course. And" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "46:54", "start": 2813.76, "text": "I know Nick, Nick Carter's a legendary fudbuster." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:57", "start": 2816.6, "text": "Haha, yeah. He's," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "46:57", "start": 2817.4, "text": "a very, a very eloquent one too. and yeah, so we've seen over the last month," }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "47:07", "start": 2826.93, "text": "the tether fud and proof of It's important to fight FUD and bust FUD because if you let FUD spiral out of control and if people's aggregate opinion about Bitcoin changes, it, it's reflexive. So like, Bitcoin's price goes up and people have more faith in it and people trust in it and people don't believe in the FUD, if the FUD leads to a downward spiral in price and downward spiral and everything else, then if you-- the only way to kill Bitcoin is if you make everyone stop believing in it, right? And FUD is a, is not an additive function to the belief, it's" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "47:44", "start": 2864.44, "text": "So it's kind of fun. and, so yeah, when it comes to those two pieces of fud, you know, I put out some content with my newsletter to cover some of those. The Tether one was something I hadn't tackled previously, so I, I just wanted to go about that one comprehensively. The future fud that we're gonna hear about, one will be, which is silly to see this one, but like Janet Yellen said, like, \"Oh, we need to look at cryptocurrencies 'cause they're used in money laundering and drugs,\" and" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "48:14", "start": 2894.02, "text": "We, in, in tons of huge, macro traders on our side this time, so it should be a lot easier versus us niche group of nerds, you know, was, which is what we were. So Bitcoin's FUD fighters or FUD busters are, it's a much louder voice, much more pedigreed voice this time around. But I would, I would suspect that one we have to fight again. We're gonna have to fight around Bitcoin's fairness. I'm assuming that narrative will kind of-- That one's pretty quiet, almost no one ever brings it up, but I" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "48:44", "start": 2923.94, "text": "That's gonna start to creep up a little bit, that typically happens at the peak of the cycles, people get, kind of, jealous of Bitcoin hodlers' returns. That one, one will probably need to touch, I would say the money laundering and drugs falls under control as well. Control will be a big narrative, and that's, I guess you'd la-label that as like regulation. Bitcoin's already highly regulated, it's one of the most regulated assets out there. on chain, of course, it's not, but the on and off Imagine. So Bitcoin, you know, people, I think the regulatory side were fine there, but if they tried to increase regulations there, I think that's a narrative we'll have to fight of like, \"Oh, is will Bitcoin be choked to death?\" sort of narrative. and then I think the big one that is more protocol based is privacy, and I see this one looming on, on the horizon. I, I view it as somewhat already, it's already a kind of a done deal. I don't really see the, the, rationality of the other side's opinion in And the pro privacy, but not as pro privacy as the most private, private folks. The super private folks might wanna add things like confidential transactions on layer one or things that would obfuscate, greatly obfuscate transactions on layer one. The problem with that is that, that there's a trade-off between the auditability of Bitcoin's monetary, policy, so the twenty-one million hard cap, and the privacy. So there's, there's, it, it, it's not a-- you can't have both. So you can either be fully private and not as auditable or audit With, we'll have auditable because the twenty-one million hard cap is, is entirely how this, entirely the value prop and how this all works, and then we will push privacy to either like layer two or improvements with like coinjoins and Schnorr and, and incremental improvements on layer one. So I see the privacy battle coming up. I don't think it's gonna be like the B-Cash hard fork one, it's not nearly as contentious, it's not nearly as divided. I think there's some folks who kind of reminisce or wax poetically as to what they wish Wanted to be their private e-cash, which is also what the cypherpunks really felt about cryptocurrency, what it should be, hence why some of these folks built Zcash and Monero and whatnot. There's not really, I don't really see a reason why Bitcoin would change anything on layer one to accommodate this application type, as Bitcoin using CoinJoin plus layer two tech is private enough." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:03", "start": 3062.99, "text": "Right, and I think it's, it remains to be seen. Maybe there's some advance in technology coming over the next five to ten years, and maybe it's a longer term We don't know it yet or we don't have that technology available to us, and the current technology gives, you know, doesn't have the right trade-offs that we would accept, and maybe in, in that time, maybe there would be something that does give better privacy without the risk of inflation and, you know, without, you know, risking the auditability, who knows? but yeah, I guess the other point there is that there, there may exist to be these two different worlds, right? The kind of regulated world and the kind of more gray market, non-regulated world Or worse, they'll just coexist, and, it seems to me that like that's the likely outcome at least for now, and it seems that the borders between those two worlds are quite porous, right? That you can just-- people can buy coins on a regulated exchange, run 'em through a coin join, and send 'em out, and now they're out into the gray market world." }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "52:02", "start": 3122.45, "text": "Yep. Yeah, I mean, look, coin joins work so well that most dark net markets, most merchants and, and transactors use Bitcoin. I mean, that's, that It's gonna be really tricky once Layer one fees start to get pretty high. I would estimate Layer one fees probably between fifty and a hundred dollars, by the peak of this cycle, which, isn't a bad thing. It's what we've all been predicting and is inherent with how Bitcoin's been architected. and it's definitely not a bad thing given it's a store of value protocol where the value's being moved over very large cargo ships, not containers, as Nick Carter puts it. So, but with coinjoins that might be a little bit cost prohibitive. That are a lot smarter than I am, like Matt O'Dell and those guys, to, to jam on, on how Bitcoin works with coin joins in a high fee environment. but yeah, I, I think like Bitcoin has great privacy already. It's got pretty good privacy, all puns intended. You know, it's, it's not perfect. I think like, and that's where I pushed back on, I wrote a, a piece on privacy, I pushed back on the idea that, you know, that perfect privacy is possible. I've seen the internal mechanisms Phone and you live off the grid in an internet connection. And so if you've got a cell phone, you're registering tons of metadata with the cell phone towers, the GPS, like you've got all sorts of apps that have SDKs that are recording this data. So the idea that like you can have a perfectly private transactional protocol, like let's say, let's say hypothetically Monero, Zcash is that which they're not, you still have a huge amount of exposure with all the metadata you're throwing off. Have you ever checked the price of Monero on your phone? Boom, logged" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "53:44", "start": 3224.12, "text": "Coin to private, buy it privately. Well, if that person's been flagged as a dealer, then they're, they're checking all of the text messages and, and metadata messages. Like people forget, like, they're like, \"Oh, well, you might have encrypted messages, but the metadata actually gives more information than the messages themselves. In fact, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US government drops bombs on SIM cards, not people. It looks at the connectivity between that SIM card and other SIM cards, and doesn't even need to know the message, it just needs to know that this SIM card is" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "54:14", "start": 3253.98, "text": "is not possible on a practical level for ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of people. So having a perfectly private protocol is a bit of a pipe dream because even if you could accomplish that, which can't, you still wouldn't be able to preserve the other privacy measures which would leak a bunch of data too." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:28", "start": 3268.13, "text": "Right. So there's a lot of difficulty around achieving that, that dream of, you know, fully open source and, secure and more private. But I guess, it's not stopping people taking certain incremental steps, right? They can take little incremental steps, things can be built out that, for example, alternative phone operating systems or things that are, you know, like graphene and so on and Copperhead and Calyx and things like that on the phone, and then, you know, potentially over time, that is an option for people, but certainly for now, it's, it's very, very difficult and just not feasible for the, for the app, not at all feasible for the average person. but, you know, hopefully as number goes up, we can, see funding into some of these projects that help" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "55:14", "start": 3313.94, "text": "I'm a huge fan of these projects. I love stuff that's like really out there, like using ham radio, to transmit a Bitcoin transaction. That shit's cool. I mean, I'm, I'm down to like be as As, you know, resilient as possible. I, I just zoom out to like the, you know, I'm-- my, my content is typically more geared towards the, the average person, so I'm just thinking more of the average person's vibe, but I very much encourage and would encourage everyone to go down the rabbit hole of, of increasing their privacy as much as they can. let's put it this way though, like, are you running a mobile VPN on your phone right now?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:45", "start": 3345.04, "text": "Yeah, so I normally run-- Well, I, I often have Tor running, but no" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "55:54", "start": 3354.13, "text": "I turn it off once in a while because it slows down my internet speed." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:57", "start": 3357.21, "text": "Yeah, it might slow things down or the battery, and again, there's always trade-offs with these things, right? Because you can say, \"Yeah, just use these things,\" but then it might burn your battery faster or you might have connectivity issues when you're trying to connect into things. And, but I mean, it, I guess it depends what you-- what we're talking about, because if I'm using Samurai Wallet, that is using Tor, so it's kind of-- it really depends on what, That, but, look, Dan, it's been great chatting with you. Of course, we've gotta, get the listeners to subscribe to you. So where can they find you online?" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "56:32", "start": 3392.27, "text": "Yeah, well, I had a blast. I think we need to do this more often. I, I feel like we could've talked for a couple more hours. There's a lot of things to cover when it comes to a Bitcoin hodler, and there's so much things, so many things happening that, I mean, it's just, it's just wild to live in this time" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "56:54", "start": 3413.97, "text": "Just kind of take a moment to reflect on it. you know, for myself, if you really liked what you heard today and you wanna follow me, I'm Dan Held on Twitter. I've also started a newsletter called The Held Report, and so if you search for, it's on my, it's on the bio on my Twitter account or just Google search Dan Held Substack, that's where I cover kind of my latest more long-form thoughts on Twitter. I'm a growth guy, so I optimize my tweet for maximum propa-uh, propagation, which means I gotta make" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "57:19", "start": 3439.22, "text": "it" }, { "speaker": "dan_held", "time": "57:24", "start": 3443.97, "text": "That's what I do, and then my longer form newsletter comes out weekly, and I write about longer form topics. For example, like, last week or a couple weeks ago, I wrote about the, the rebellion begins, which is about, how Wall Street bets is more of like a mindset and how that, you know, is accretive to Bitcoin's narrative of, of being this rebellion against the existing financial system. You know, how longer, longer term, there's a shelling point behind Bitcoin rebellious narrative. And then this week, I'm writing about, Bitcoin For like the, you know, for those who've read, some of like William Gibson's books and, you've seen movies like, Aliens or, you know, some of these, these different movies that kind of talk about mega corporations, I weave that into this where I weave in what is the future of Bitcoin and how it enables a mega corporation. A mega corporation is a corporation that's like larger than governments, and so I think, Tesla buying Bitcoin kind of signaled that, which is really cool. so Like this, that people and companies start to be able to shop and go around different, jurisdictions. So that, these are the type of topics that I cover. so yeah, check it out. I mentioned it a little bit earlier, if you wanna rewind, where you can go find that. You know, thanks, Stephan, for having me on. had a blast and looking forward to the next time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:40", "start": 3519.6, "text": "Excellent. Thanks very much, Dan. Alright, I hope you found that useful in terms of Bitcoin HODL mindset and Bitcoin finances. Of course, if you are" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:54", "start": 3533.97, "text": "themselves definitely don't wanna get wrecked on any of those kinds of things. And lastly, before we finish up, you might have seen on Twitter The Sailer Academy, which is a not-for-profit free education initiative. By Michael Sailor, has created a Bitcoin for Everybody course. So Michael asked me to create that course, and it's a twelve hour course that is curated with nice materials from, you know, well-known people like Vijay, Boyapati, and Parker Lewis, and all, all kinds of people, and Dan Held as well. So make sure you go and check that out. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's great for if you are a newbie yourself, or you wanna go and tell your new coiner friends, this is a nice curated course course that will take them through and teach them the basics on Bitcoin. So get the show notes at stephanelivera dot com slash two five one, and I will see you in the citadels." } ] }