{ "episodeId": "SLP613", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "eric_yakes": { "name": "Eric Yakes", "role": "guest", "tag": "ERIC" }, "tyler_stevens": { "name": "Tyler Stevens", "role": "guest", "tag": "TYLER" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.16, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast, brought to you by Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and store your Bitcoin. You can go to getbold.io, that's for American listeners. Now, joining me on the show today, Eric Yakes, listeners, you know him, and Tyler Stevens. Welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "00:29", "start": 28.53, "text": "Thanks for having us. We're excited to be here, man." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:32", "start": 32.31, "text": "Great. So yeah, we're gonna chat about a few things. Obviously, I know you guys are setting up a Bitcoin space. so listeners already know you, Eric, but Tyler, do you want to just, you know, take a few, take a minute and tell us a little bit about your background?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "00:44", "start": 44.0, "text": "Sure. Yeah. I, moved to Denver, Colorado, three or four years ago, immediately found the Bitcoin community out here, going to BitDevs and whatnot, met Eric and a bunch of the other guys, and I just kept going down the rabbit hole, ended up leaving that job and wanted to work on Bitcoin full time and helped, put together this Bitcoin community hub and, working on some Bitcoin mining stuff as well. So just a guy in Colorado hanging out with all the Bitcoiners." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13", "start": 72.98, "text": "Nice. Okay, yeah. And, tell us a little bit on what the scene is like in Denver. How many people do you normally get to your Bitcoin meetups and things?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "01:21", "start": 81.02, "text": "Yeah, when we-- So, you know, i-it's pretty big. We have, I think our bid-our bid size is getting really big. So I think it, like, once this- Now bull market started to turn, I think our Bitdevs, I mean, we had like, what, like sixty, seventy people start showing up to some of our Bitdevs, this was last year. almost" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "01:44", "start": 103.66, "text": "two hundred at the having party." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "01:45", "start": 105.24, "text": "Yeah, our having party got pretty big. the, you know, we have like a, we have a pretty large technical community. Also, it's notable, like, Denver is also a huge ETH hub, right? They have ETH Denver every year. There's a ton of, like, Ethereum Foundation is out here giving a ton of So we have like a broader crypto community and there's a lot of people kinda like towing the line, and, and that, that was one of the biggest things that, we wanted to be selling on, like I think that they, you know, they have some sort of a common area, working space and, And when we're talking to potential, you know, partners with us, I'm just like, \"Look, there's, there's this huge valuable, whether they're in crypto, whether in something completely different. Denver is one of the most valuable developer communities in the country, and, and we wanted to be the hub of Bitcoin and education resource for that type of community, and to those who are, you know, in broader crypto, we wanna show them that coming over to our side of the world is a much better place to be.\" And, and yes, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:47", "start": 167.48, "text": "Yeah, and then, your just your normal Bitcoin meetups, what kind of, you know, attendance do you get there? And tell us a little bit about what the community is like. I think the biggest one's like Bitcoin and beer." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "02:57", "start": 176.75, "text": "Yeah, Bitcoin and beer. We tend to have like a more social one where it's, you know, at a brewery, you can bring anyone. And then, the technical BitDev's meetups as well. But what we notice, and one of the reasons we wanna get a spot, is, you know, those are kind of the opposite You know, on the other end of the spectrum, one is highly technical and it's equally as, hard to approach for a novice. So we wanted something in the middle. You know, if, if we have our own building, we can have events on absolutely anything from Bitcoin one-on-one, kind of going through Eric's book. Maybe there's stuff just focused on mining, some stuff for the ladies, a Bitcoin book club. We've got, we can really do it all. So we're" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:40", "start": 219.86, "text": "hoping to do all of that. Yeah. And for, listen, is this for, you know Technically focused meetup, so that is more developer focused, but at the same time, people can go and actually it's a great place to go if you're just observing and just trying to learn and trying to ask questions. it's a great thing to go and do, but obviously it's, it requires a bit of work. Like the person who's organizing that bit devs has to put in some groundwork to set up some of the topics and do some ground level research, and then hopefully there's other technical people as part of that community who are there to share their views on technical issues of the day Developer issues that are coming up, whether that's in Bitcoin or Lightning or other layer twos and things like this. So that's kind of what BitDev's is, and then usually a lot of what I've noticed around the world is, you know- There might be a more social meetup, whether that's just more like a drinks thing or maybe they have like a panel every now and again or they, if there's like a speaker coming to town, they come and do a talk and then, you know, people have a chance to meet and greet, you know, some person who's talking about Bitcoin or has some interesting story to share. so, yeah, so tell us a little bit about, this idea of Bitcoin Space Denver, why you're starting this?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "04:52", "start": 292.48, "text": "It was, you know, it kind of just happened because we had, you know, the bit tabs was getting very large and we were looking into different places. That we wanted to move it to, we were kinda working out of Casa's office and one of their locations here for, for a lot of it, and then the Liberty Institute, which is a local nonprofit out here, was allowing us to use their building for a period of time. They're kind of, you know, supporting like the Libertarian Party locally in the state, and, We're like, well, that, that inspired the conversations, and, so I, I started talking with the guy who runs our Bitdevs, and I was just like, let's, let's see if we can get our own physical space, and, you know, we could either-- and, you know, at that point in time, we're just like, we're brainstorming ways of doing it, and I was like, we just want-- let's do it as cool as we can. I think, like, you know, I don't, I don't really wanna run Let's see if we can do something that's a little bit more bottom up, and that was kind of how it started. So we organized all the guys, we started marketing a bit dev, so like, hey, anybody who wants to see this happen, like, let's have an initial meeting. We did that initial meeting and, and, and a lot of people got really excited. So that, that's kind of how it got started, and then we all just started organizing and doing weekly calls and we're like, okay, the more people that start giving us money upfront as a membership in advance, eventually we're gonna get to a point where it, it, we can actually afford to get something, and our, our original plan was, we're like, look, we're probably gonna get- You know, a few thousand square foot warehouse, it's gonna take us probably like five, six years for us to get to something that's even remotely close to like a Bitcoin park or a Bitcoin commons doing it this way. And then we started to get a ton of traction. We had like an opening night, and Tyler can probably tell you a little bit more about our opening night and how that all went. Yeah, sure." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "06:50", "start": 409.89, "text": "Yeah. So Eric teed it up nicely, like we, we just found all the people that really wanted to make this happen, and we kept meeting with them. This was maybe, you know, September, August, September of twenty twenty-three, and eventually we were like, okay, let's try and do this. We don't really have anybody who can buy a building themselves. We weren It's really like a bunch of people that just wanted to make it happen, that had to build together the talent to, to get it to work. And we were like, okay, how do we do this? We got our governance structure all set up, and then we realized, come like, this was March of twenty twenty-four, we were saying to ourselves, \"Well, we don't want to, like, how do we run this thing? 'Cause there's no shot caller, it's kind of a community effort. We don't wanna elect ourselves to leadership positions, that'd be pretty" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "07:41", "start": 461.41, "text": "Everyone about our plan, we walked through the governance structure, how we think, you know, we need people to focus on X and Y and Z. And then we had everyone, everyone was invited to basically make like a donation, a contribution dona-donation, which allowed them to vote on the election process. So we had our first board of directors elected by people that donated. I think we had over forty people there on that founding night. And then with more formal roles defined, I mean, we have a board of nine people, three of them are member representatives, so they just kind of are members that come and advocate for their interests on the board. The other six have, have more re-responsibilities as officers, be it business development or, CFO, et cetera. And, we just kept building that out, asking for money, raising money, trying to, to offer the members the best value proposition we could when we had no building. We were selling vaporware for a little bit. We were, we were building the treasury, but we needed to do it such that we could showcase to, you know, a potential, property owner that we could lease, lease it out. And so that, that just continued for, the most of twenty twenty-four until this fall when we, we signed a lease." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "08:46", "start": 525.99, "text": "Yeah, yeah, and, yeah, and I think that like a, a lot of it was just when we were kind of, a, a big part of it was us selling this vision of what we wanted it to be the whole time. Of, \"Here, here's what this could be. It could be something that's totally, you know, governed through this board system, and, and we can make this a nonprofit organization, and we can make it different.\" you know, w- a lot of how we thought about the vision for it is, if you've ever philosophy. Yeah, yeah. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:18", "start": 557.59, "text": "maybe you explain the third place idea and what we know why it's" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "09:20", "start": 559.85, "text": "important. Yeah, I don't know, I'm probably gonna butcher it, but it's basically just like you have your home, you have your work, and then you have a third place that you go to, and like that's a very, I think the argument for the third place is that it's a very healthy structure and natural phenomenon in people's lives, and, there's a lot of value to that. And we kind of thought about it from that perspective. We" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "09:46", "start": 585.63, "text": "We don't want it just to be co-working, we don't want it to also just be some sort of social club. We also don't want it to be just purely about Bitcoin, we want it to be about lifestyle in general. and a lot of the ideals of what people who are involved in this community believe in. So that's what we did, is like one of the first steps when we were forming the whole thing is I mean, we spent a lot of time like working on a charter and put together like, here's the values we adhere to, and, you know, we believe Bitcoin, we believe open source technologies in general. And just general values and philosophies of types of people that we think it would be good to have involved in this organization. and, and that's kind of how we structured- structured the whole vision around it. And I think that that's what made it a, a bit different to us, and it made it different to other people. And, and the vision that I've been telling people is, you know, I grew up in Denver. This is my home. I've been here for so long. I love this city. I think that one of the things that's paid me- Over the past decade, is, has become a very, you know, we have this Californian diaspora that's been coming out here, and while that's helped, you know, with some of the more, educated and more technical jobs, it's also, you know- created this very leftist, leaning type of state, and, and I think that that's been to the detriment of Denver in a lot of different ways, and there's been a lot of decline. I've always had the vision like, I wanna influence that at some point. I want us to be able to improve this, and, and like one, one of the big things to me, and I, I, I made a speech kind of about this at our opening night, was, You know, I, I joined a nonprofit board at one point when I was, after I graduated college, I was in my professional life, but it was about education in the city, and I really quickly realized that a lot of nonprofits in the country are kind of more just like fraternities for, Adults and, and they're not necessarily always structured around the true vision. I don't know how many people involved really care about the true vision. And, and I always kind of had in the back of my mind, at some point, I want to start my own thing that actually, you know- We're doing things that matter to me. And, and we kind of view, I, I, I viewed my involvement in this kind of from that perspective, like this is, this is an organization that I think we can make very influential in the local community over the long term and influence this state For the better, and so like that's kind of the approach that we're taking. We think Bitcoin is our superpower on kind of, you know, getting to an influential organization out here." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:15", "start": 735.13, "text": "Yeah. and then so maybe you just wanna clarify as well, like I, I presume this is you were talking about this being like a community-driven thing. I'm curious what the view was on whether, you know, Should this have been done as a commercial venture for profit or why is it being done as a community venture? What's the, what was the main, decision or discussion around that?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "12:37", "start": 756.78, "text": "Yeah, I think it was kind of a combination of like us not having the resources to do it ourselves to have kind of a top-down approach or a capital venture that not that we immediately knew of, maybe in our contact list. So we, we immediately said, okay, we have to do it differently, but also, you know, maybe this is a cool thing to do differently, to kind of crack this. How We all thought it'd be very helpful for other people in a similar position, maybe they've got a strong community, a strong Bitcoin, turn-out, high ratio to NPCs in their area, and, and they wanna be able to, to create a Bitcoin hub, I think it'd be very helpful. We all thought it'd be very helpful if there was someone that had done it before, maybe documented the process. That's kind of how we leaned into this, you know, nonprofit, member-run, elected, structure, I think, right?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "13:23", "start": 802.9, "text": "Yeah, yeah. I, I, I You know, I, I think one of the rationales for it is, it, it would be-- I, I don't know, I just, I always thought in my head it was kind of, it'd just be cooler. I think it's cooler if, like, it's something where P- if, like, I would wanna join an organization where I truly felt that if I joined this and I, you know, wanted to commit my time and energy to it, I can have influence over it, and not-- to the point to where I can have a significant degree of influence over it. Like Tyler's our general manager right now, and we're gonna have another board election come April, and if somebody else wanted to run for that position come April, then they're more than capable of doing it. Whether or not, you know, they're gonna get elected in is a separate question, but that's something that I thought was-- I, I think that's one of the coolest dynamics. It's like if you wanted to become a part of this and you wanted to influence this organization, and you successfully advocated on your own behalf and got involved in this and supported the people and earned trust and recognition from your peers involved, then it's totally possible that you could be leading this organization at some point. And like, that's, that's really cool, and I think that kind of changes the incentive structure The organization of it. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:42", "start": 881.78, "text": "Yeah. And, you touched on it before, but maybe just you could spell out similarities, differences with, let's say, Bitcoin Park in Nashville. Like, what are, are you trying to do something similar or something different? What's the goal here?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "14:57", "start": 896.55, "text": "I think it's similar in the sense that we're focused on, you know, education and events. We have some co-working during the day, but we're really trying to build a community together. We all, know each other pretty well. We're at sixty members or so right now. That is kind of the main focus, a lot of education, bringing people over to Bitcoin, tapping into that, that ETH talent out here. there are a lot of talented developers that are just on the wrong project, in my opinion, so need to bring them over to, to Bitcoin. Just to have a hub out west for people to, to come to as your source of truth for, for Bitcoin information, whatever's going on in the space, you come check it out here. And obviously, we, we have this unique aspect where, you know, we could all get fired every April, so you can get a total different governance structure, and we've, we've tried to set up the organization that'll live on without us, moving forward into the future." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:48", "start": 947.57, "text": "Great, and, so- I guess in terms of, you know, building up the community, what's, what's that been like, in the recent, you know, time that you guys have been there in Denver and, yeah, what's, what's it looking like now?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "16:04", "start": 963.86, "text": "Surprisingly, we've had, 'cause we basically asked for money for nine months without a building. We, we start-- and we, we structured it formally too. We were like, \"We're charging membership dues, right? \" But we didn't have a building. We were-- and it was all to build this treasury. It was a little bit of a chicken and egg situation. I mean, surprisingly, we had like no attrition, so it was constantly just ticking upwards. People would figure out what we're working towards. You know, they'd sit in on a couple calls that we do" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "16:34", "start": 993.64, "text": "This is an awesome effort, it's worth a hundred fifty bucks a month or whatever what it was to support, and, you know, and to their benefit, nine months later, there's a beautiful five thousand square foot building that they have access to. So, the community's been great. I think a lot of people in the Rocky Mountain area have recognized that this is open and, it's growing. What about you? What do you think?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "16:53", "start": 1013.16, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think, I, I think that it's, it's kind of, it's brought a lot of people out of the woodwork. there, there's some people, there's a good amount of people who are members of ours who are like, haven't been involved in a long time. True. I've been watching from the sidelines, but, you know, very, very smart people, very influential people. you know, like, so for example, somebody, somebody who reached out who hadn't been involved in the community for a little while, like the CTO, former CTO" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "17:27", "start": 1046.61, "text": "And like he just can, he's like, \"Yeah, I, I live an hour away, like, I, I wanna be a part of this.\" And, you know, there's all these people kind of like that that have joined, and that's been really cool. I feel like we're at a little bit of this intersection, with membership. Where those people that-- we have a few members that I think are just, they're, they're from the broader community and they didn't really come in as much through Bitcoin and, and now they're getting a lot more exposure to this community. And that's been cool as well. We've had some, I guess, maybe, maybe more unique marketing angles for how that's occurred. I'm really not really sure, but, but yeah, it's, every, every-- There, there's a very diverse group of people. Enjoy this so far." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "18:10", "start": 1090.11, "text": "It's actually one of the coolest things too, when you think about, okay, getting a bunch of people together to build a grassroots Bitcoin community hub, so to speak, really a physical place for them to congregate. All the people interested, we've just been using their talents so much because they're such awesome people. Like we have a member who, you know, worked at IBM for twenty years doing, you know, automation and integration for setting up, infrastructure, networking infrastructure and IT and everything like that. So we're running our own server in-house and we, we're automating everything and every-- we're trying to keep everything as free and open source as possible, staying away from big tech. And it's like, oh, we have the guy for that. Oh, you need to build a website? Seeing their talents and, and letting them help each other out, it's been really cool to be a part of. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:58", "start": 1137.53, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKites dot com, the creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices, such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. 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They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty-five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now, back to the show. Yeah. And so, how long has the space been open for, or is it open yet? Or I, I saw on the website there was like a launch event, maybe you just wanna clarify a bit there, yeah?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "21:20", "start": 1280.31, "text": "We're in it This is, this is my company Epoch's office that we're in, and, yeah, so we're up and running, and we're open for membership." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "21:29", "start": 1289.08, "text": "We're doing launch week activities kinda just to celebrate more formally, mid-November." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:35", "start": 1294.79, "text": "Great. Okay, yeah, so yeah, listeners, if you're in the area, you know, go and check them out. but yeah, let's talk a little bit about, some of the different, yeah, what you're planning to achieve in the different areas, whether it's, you know, events or co-working or these other aspects. maybe you wanna touch on the co-working as well. So as I understand, you can, you know, you can pay, a flat fee per month and then you can have access to co-working in the, in the" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "21:59", "start": 1319.28, "text": "Yeah, we, we kinda lucked out with this beautiful building that we're in because there's kind of an event side, you know, there's a lounge area, and then up top there's also some private offices that can be rented out, kind of separate from our membership, it's more just through the building owner. But, whatever you're looking for, it's what I'm trying to get at, you know, it's available. If you want, you know, a private office to close the door, that is an option. i-it's mostly just guys setting up laptops Still get work done, although it's hard for me, I'm too excited. I just wanna chat with everybody, but maybe that'll fizzle out. so that, yeah, that's, that's the, that's the vibe in here. It's in a quiet part of Denver, it's like a residential area, we're not in the thick of downtown, it's not loud and noisy and busy, it's easy to get to. we're just a couple blocks from the train station, from the airport too, so super quick for like hit it and quit it trips" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "22:59", "start": 1379.44, "text": "There's a lot of cool features of the amenities of this building, we really lucked out. It's not like a three thousand, we were literally looking at an old mining warehouse, before we, we, we had more super-support early on, we were touring warehouses. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "23:13", "start": 1393.39, "text": "Yeah, where we're at now, I'm, I'm, I'm blown away. Like, I thought, I thought it was gonna take us so long to get to something like this, and then, yeah, we ended up getting a bunch of members, and we ended up being able to actually afford a spot Kind of like the up and coming tech community area. Eric lives" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "23:34", "start": 1413.64, "text": "ten minutes away, that's why he's saying that. Yeah, and it's, and it's close to where" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "23:37", "start": 1416.81, "text": "I live, so that was very convenient for me as well. but that, it's funny because like from people who've come out here, that's been a consistent point of feedback is everybody's like, \"Oh, I can just take the light rail from the Denver airport directly here.\" And, and that makes it, if, if like speakers ever wanna come out or anything, it's like, \"You" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "23:59", "start": 1439.02, "text": "You can just jet back directly on that too. And that's like from a commute perspective, a lot of members have really liked that, and, and yeah, it's, it's just basically ideal. And, and, and from like the building perspective, we're, we're kind of like one half of the Bitcoin Park buildings, in terms of size and quality, maybe, maybe a little bit bigger than one of those, but we're not like both of the buildings combined." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:24", "start": 1464.0, "text": "Yeah. I, I actually haven't been to Bitcoin Park myself. last time I was 21, but, yeah, I hope to get there at some point and visit, I hope to visit you guys as well, but, yeah, my trips into the US aren't that common, every now and then, you know, if there's a conference or something. But speaking of, let's talk a little bit about events then. So, what's the plan there? Are you hoping to host some, you know, Bitcoin events or mini conferences or what's the plan?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "24:51", "start": 1490.53, "text": "Yeah, most definitely. We just had our first use of the event space" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "24:59", "start": 1499.1, "text": "We literally had to build a stage. We learned in, in short order that we need to upgrade some lighting and get some actual audio visual setup, which is the fun slash hard part, at least for me. but moving forward, I know Eric's part of an, an education committee, so really trying to curate that like introduction to Bitcoin, material based off of his book, The Seventh Property. DJ Valerie, b love, shout out to her and her podcast, she's one of our local members and she is setting up a, a Women in Bitcoin night, so just more We'll, I think, gather around the fireplace, place type setting, chat about Bitcoin. There's some, you know, low effort events like that, Bitcoin book club, maybe we meet once a month and just talk about whatever book we read, and then all the way on the other end of the spectrum, we'd love to do like a ton of Bitcoin focused events around East Denver like all week long." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "25:47", "start": 1547.35, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So, one thing that we're planning is like a build on Bitcoin event here during East Denver. And, and we're working with a lot of the companies in the industry, so like Fedi, Fedi was our first sponsor, so like we're gonna be working with them on that kind of an event as well as some of the other companies. And, and I think that that's one of the key things that we'll be leaning into over time is trying to find ways to reach out to that community and show them what types of tools they have to start building on top of Bitcoin today." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "26:16", "start": 1576.07, "text": "And then lastly here, like just Bitcoin adjacent, I'd categorize them as like not purely Bitcoin events, but maybe it's, you know, how to, how to run your own server at home. We have the System 76 Linux based machines and Start9 guys out here, Matt Hill and those guys. So there's awesome, yeah, talent around us. one of our board members is Jason Rick, he's a co-founder of the Beef Initiative. So maybe it's sovereign health and, and, you know, natural foods. So we're, we're really hoping to A wide range of, of areas." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:49", "start": 1608.91, "text": "Great. And then, yeah, so I guess it's sort of, you know, there's this community feel to it, it's not for profit, everyone's sort of trying to chip in where they can." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:59", "start": 1619.3, "text": "W-what about, you know, if, if you, or if people need to move on, right? Like over time, you might be like, you know, I need to work on something else. Like, I guess your hope is that you've built up the community enough that there's somebody else who can kind of come in and be the next GM or the, or kind of, people who are managing the space, right?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "27:17", "start": 1636.71, "text": "Yeah, it's a good question, Stephane. We are, we are currently building the plane as it flies, and, I think that, we'll be able to have a soft landing at some point, but, yeah. You know," }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "27:28", "start": 1648.48, "text": "the key probably, and we, we need to work a lot more on this, is documenting everything. You know, it's, it's putting out fires as they, as they come o- come up right now, but we need all this documentation because if we do have, you know, turnover or we end up, you know, Just having all that documentation, and this is what we really want too, is we want all that to be, you know, free and open source on our website, everything on the website, like kind of a Bitcoin citadel blueprint, so to speak. And it's like, okay, I can just kind of copy and paste, maybe I'll make some minor tweaks, but this is how you set up a really good nonprofit governance structure. This is how you do board elections. This is how you keep it in the spirit and ethos of Bitcoin. this is how you run a home server. Really cool to have all that, and it should also help facilitate, you know, switching leadership, within our own organization." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:23", "start": 1703.46, "text": "Right. And then, yeah, I guess the plan as well is obviously you, you wanna make sure you get enough sponsors and members to sort of make, make it sustainable. So are you on the, are you well on the way there, or, you know, you still need some more support to get there? Like, where are we? We're close, we're" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "28:40", "start": 1719.63, "text": "close to breaking even. Yeah, yeah, which has also happened quicker than I would have thought" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "28:47", "start": 1726.53, "text": "Our fiscal worries have been alleviated pretty significantly over the past few months since we officially launched it, and, I think we're basically a few members away from being, Technically break even, but, but then there's break even in terms of like, you know, if you become a board member, you should be able to get some sort of compensation and things like that. So we'll probably find a new break even to get to at a certain point, 'cause right now there's been quite a bit of altruism that's gone into creating this, and we don't wanna be dependent upon that over the long term. but we got a little bit more juice left in our GM, we can keep squeezing some free labor hours out of 'em." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:24", "start": 1763.61, "text": "Yeah Just, hopefully, and, maybe that kinda helps draw in some members, but, but then, you know, after every bull run, you get a bear cycle, so you gotta, you know, gotta be ready for that on the other side of it." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "29:38", "start": 1778.38, "text": "That's funny that you bring that up too, because, you know, we have a treasury policy where it's what, we keep like one month's, like the next month's worth of, you know, operating expenses, insurance, rent, yeah, whatever, are- Consumables budgets, et cetera, in, in fiat, and the rest is all in Bitcoin. You know, maybe we need to be calculated about that moving forward, or we need to stack a lot more Bitcoin to get ready for the next bear market. This, this" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "30:00", "start": 1799.74, "text": "has been one of the interesting points of debate within the organization, and it's funny because I was an advocate for the alternative, when this was all starting a year ago, and then now- That I'm getting really bullish right now. I've been slowly advocating for adjustments to our treasury policy. For the," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:17", "start": 1817.21, "text": "the get on zero. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I, I, I think you gotta, what, what, 'cause what naturally happens, right, is as the number goes up, everyone kind of naturally starts feeling more bullish and everyone feels like a genius, but you sort of have to Temper that back and make sure you're, you know, you're okay, as time goes on. Yeah. Not that, not that the dollar is safe, but, you know," }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "30:40", "start": 1840.27, "text": "one thing I'll just add onto that too is It was one of the challenges we really faced, we were like, okay, we wanna keep as much Bitcoin as possible, we wanna hold as little fiat as possible, we gotta, you know, hold the, the purchasing power and the value of, of everyone's donations. We're building a treasury, this is a Bitcoin focused organization. Then you realize no property owner will rent to you if you s-own a Bitcoin treasury. They say, \"Show me twelve months rent in your bank account,\" and we go, \"We don't have a bank account.\"" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "31:09", "start": 1869.07, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, that, and that, that was one of the-- When we were starting this, and I was like, \"Okay, so people need to think we're adults here, and like, we, we need to show that, you know, this is-- We're well capitalized, we're well managed, and there's not a ton of risk. We're thinking in terms of we need to find somebody who gives us a building that we can lease from that, You know, is gonna give us some leeway, obviously, but is at least we need to be able to show them something. And, and then once we were able to find a property owner who was totally aligned with us and is a big corner, that's when everything else changed. It's like, oh, okay, cool. There's- They're, they're willing to work with us throughout some of this, and, it's like, well, how much can we realistically put in? And w- you know, we have this like one month policy to be adjusted to a, a, a three month runway, and I think over the long run, We could, we, we, we should adjust that out to be even further, just based from like my background on like cash flow analysis for companies that probably want to apply something similar to that. But, it's something where now it's like I, I've been making the argument internally, I'm like, \"We're a startup, and we need to assume a little bit more risk right now in the earlier years, and we'll, we'll- Well capitalized for that, and I, I'm making the argument that basically we keep our treasury policy open to adjustment for at least another six months. Yeah, I see. And, and then we can really just like set it in stone And adhere to it and subject it to like annual revisions." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:35", "start": 1955.02, "text": "Yeah. anything on the Nostra side, are you looking to do any events there or any- Do you have any connection with that or" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "32:45", "start": 1965.35, "text": "Noster? That's, that's a good point. I haven't really mentioned anything to the Noster community yet about- That's a good idea, 'cause" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "32:52", "start": 1971.84, "text": "we are really focused on like open source technology as well, using Flockster, using Noster, that's a good idea." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "32:58", "start": 1977.6, "text": "Yeah, we, we, we do need to do that. We should probably talk to, like Derek or somebody about it. but yeah, yeah, that's a great idea. We should do a little, oh, I guess that's not true. Tatum, Tatum, turn up, has been, talking about doing Nostro Radio out here for some time." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:18", "start": 1998.15, "text": "Oh, okay, well there you go, so you guys could host. Yeah, yeah," }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "33:21", "start": 2001.06, "text": "yeah, we could host Nostro Radio out here. So I guess there is some rumblings about that. Yeah, so that's another point about us, there might be some answers to your question that are very different from other members that we're not even aware of. That are going on right now. but, yeah," }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "33:34", "start": 2013.77, "text": "yeah. I, I love having those little niche summits or conferences as well, where you get high signal, people are there focused on, you know, one thing. I think we can really specialize in that. That's kind of the goal." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:45", "start": 2025.46, "text": "This show brought to you by mempool.space, the world's leading Bitcoin visualizer, and now they've got an accelerator program. So if you have a transaction that you sent at a fee that was too low to get confirmed, now you can fix this at, with the mempool accelerator. The way it works, you can go and search your transaction, scroll down, click accelerator, and you don't need an account, you can pay with Lightning, and then it'll show you it's now in the process of being accelerated, and then after a few minutes, it's confirmed. And so this is a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:15", "start": 2055.24, "text": "And this can happen where maybe your wallet doesn't have RBF or CPFP, or it might help you in situations where it's impractical to go and re-sign, so for example, multisig with keys in different locations. And thirdly, even in some Lightning scenarios, perhaps a force close, you might not be able to use RBF, and so in this case, the Mempool Accelerator can help you out. So keep it in mind, and you can find out more over at mempool.space/accelerator. And now, back to the show. Fantastic. Yeah, so I guess Do you guys have any, I guess, you, you guys have both been in Denver for a while, right?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "34:48", "start": 2087.83, "text": "Yeah, just a few years myself, but yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:50", "start": 2090.33, "text": "Okay, gotcha. But at least Eric, you might have, I guess, you've, you've seen cycles come and go in, in Denver, right, in terms of Bitcoin cycles, and so I'm curious if you have any thoughts on what that might look like, what that could portend, maybe more developer interest, let's say, so maybe you kind of get a round of more developer interest and then" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "35:14", "start": 2113.78, "text": "Like I wasn't, I wasn't- Maybe you weren't as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:17", "start": 2117.33, "text": "connected into it at that point, you know? Yeah, yeah." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "35:20", "start": 2120.25, "text": "You know, it's funny 'cause like when I, I really didn't get, start getting involved in the local community until when I first, Released my book, a lot of my interaction was more just in the Twitterverse, yeah. And then I started to get more involved in the local community, so that was back in, that was basically last cycle 'cause I released my book in twenty twenty-one. and I feel like during that period in terms of interest, you know, I guess at our, at our meetups it was probably a lot more," }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "35:52", "start": 2151.91, "text": "I, I don't know if they were, 'cause I was going to a lot more Bitcoin and beers back then, and I, you know, we didn't really have as many developers, I think the developer community You know, personally, my, my take is I feel like there's been a bit of a shift in the zeitgeist. I think that there's a lot more, crypto developers that are starting to come to our BitDev's and are starting to have the perspective of, okay, Bitcoin is pretty cool And, and they're starting to think a lot more that direction. I feel like a lot of that's happened too, like, I don't know what you call this current market that we're in right now. I think we're in kind of a bull market, but- A lot of that's basically happened over the past year is that we, we've seen a lot of that. And, and I kind of am really curious how that's gonna structurally shift over time, and whether or not we're kind of witnessing this inflection point of like, quote unquote, like Bitcoin developer dominance or something that's gonna start turning our direction out here. but it, it, it seems like there is a bit of more of a, more of a shift that direction happening, and, and that's one of our intentions is really to try to like influence That as much as we can, because we have a lot of tailwinds that are starting to support us this direction. I think if we can lean into that, and put together some events where we can just educate, like the other day I was in a coffee shop and I, what, what was it? I, I heard, I heard the term Merkle root get thrown around by some guys next to me, and I'm like, \"Oh boy, what are they talking about?\" And, and I started chatting with these two devs who were just guys working on a grant from the ETH Foundation, and, And I was just describing them some of the protocol layers that are emerging upon Bitcoin right now that already exist on Bitcoin, and they're just totally unfamiliar. And, and I think that with recent developments that are emerging, maybe it's in the rollup space, maybe it's somewhere else, It's really going to bring the tools that these guys are looking for, and, and I think that just general education is what's gonna be convincing a lot of them. Right now, it's like, a, a lot of the community out here when I, when I kinda lean into this community, it's-- the personality types are less long-term strategic focused thinkers on why they're involved in this industry, and they're more just tinkers who are really interested in the ability to build effectively technologies, That can do things that no re- there, there's no other industry that allows them to really like move economic value in more complex ways. and, and like that's generally more what their focus is, and I think, you know, maybe that's more like, \"Ooh, something shiny,\" and that's the reason they're attracted to it, but, I, I don't find that incentive that much different from other people who've gotten involved because number go up and then stayed for the movement after. And I, and I think like that's kind of the approach that we wanna take is, you know Get, get involved because of the ability to like tinker, you know, suit whatever those more short-term focused interests are within your mind, and then stay because they actually learn about the culture and see the value and understand that, you know, this is much more than just being able to create financial technologies, and there's a societal movement happening." }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "39:14", "start": 2354.12, "text": "Yeah, the tinkerers are more fun to talk to, and we, we have like, we're fortunate, but we also set this up well, like, there's just a lot of technical people in our area. You know, the Bitcoin research Research Institute at the University of Wyoming, it's what, like an hour north of us. there's the national labs in Boulder and Golden, there's college campuses, Space Force, all the defense contractor companies are here. I mean, there's a talented just community of people in Denver, Bitcoin or not, and so we hope to, you know, bring all those people in and, and help educate them as Eric said." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:44", "start": 2384.29, "text": "Yeah. And I presume, you know, every now and again, you're gonna get speakers coming through town for some other event or whatever, and then you can kind of grab them and say, \"Hey, come and do a talk with us, or come and do a, you know, meet and greet or something,\" and that can be an event at, you know, at Denver Space, right?" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "39:59", "start": 2399.1, "text": "Right, right. Yeah. So earlier this week, we had a event, \"The Financialization of Bitcoin.\" Matt Dines from Build Asset, yeah, Matt Dines from Build Asset Management came out here and gave a talk, and, and, and that was great. And it, you know, I don't-- some of the people that were at that seemed like- They weren't even people involved in Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "40:20", "start": 2419.71, "text": "No, it was targeted for your RIAs, your financial advisors, those type of people. we had Unchain folks in the room too, kind of answering questions about custody. It was really well done, yeah." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "40:31", "start": 2431.08, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So that, that was a big boy event, and we definitely had a lot more from like the broader financial community with the- Denver involved. And, and yeah, I think, as, as we progress, it's more like we identify experts that are involved within our community, yeah, and, or contacts of experts that are involved, and then, you know, they come in, they give, and they, they can kind of like bring in And, you know, who's involved in their networks as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:58", "start": 2458.15, "text": "Yeah. And so then, in terms of free and paid events, do you wanna just outline, you know, what's, what that's looking like?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "41:05", "start": 2464.8, "text": "Because we're focused on education, I mean, mainly we wanna make everything as open to the public as possible. We try to do- When we were keeping our members, excited with monthly events before we had a building, we would do these, you know, more community focused member exch- exclusive tight knit events. Maybe we'd go camping, maybe we'd go to a, a Rockies game or something like that or do a cookout. And so we still like to do some of that member exclusive stuff, just get to know each other better, get to know each other's family, support one another. We've even got like a skill share list going around. It's like, okay, I need, anybody got the mechanic that" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "41:41", "start": 2500.59, "text": "Distinguishing of maybe what you get from being a member versus just being someone who attends events at the space in Denver publicly, and then, you know, if it's bigger ticket items, maybe we'll have to do ticketed events for certain things, conferences, summits, et cetera. But ideally, we'd like to, if you're paying for membership, you're already supporting us. We'd like to keep, you know, kind of access to everything open for you, and then just for the broader community, we'd love to do a lot of public free events and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:08", "start": 2528.19, "text": "Excellent. Okay, well, I think those are most of the questions I had. anything else, anything else you wanna mention?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "42:16", "start": 2536.27, "text": "I'll just say I think one of the coolest things that I've really enjoyed building, 'cause I'm not like a software guy, I was a mechanical engineer, was, the tech infrastructure, like building it from scratch. You know, I worked at a big W2 job, at a Department of Defense job, and whenever my laptop broke, I'm staring at Eric's right now. You go to the IT department, they're like, \"Okay, there's all these systems, all this stuff you gotta build, all the automation.\" I was-- it was all way over my head, but now I'm like on the other end of that, and I get to help build it with our server, you know, our public calendar, everything's hosted. We've got our own mempool instance, we've got our own node I just think that's so fascinating, and, and you really get the, the satisfaction of saying, okay, everything I do with the space, you can store some files, you can do anything, you can route, you can use it as your Bitcoin node, your Electrum server. I just think it's so cool to have something like that fully integrated for our members, all documented on our site, built in-house. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:16", "start": 2595.96, "text": "Yeah, actually, one, one other topic that might be interesting, if anyone around the world is listening and thinking about doing something similar, do you have any advice on how they should set up their own kind of space or, you know, something like what you guys are doing?" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "43:30", "start": 2610.03, "text": "That's the goal. Everything we've kind of chatted through today, we're hoping to have some form of compiled documentation about it, even just like our learning do's and don'ts, you know, it's like do's and don'ts or the, the, the pain points that we felt, and then Into a nice clean like step-by-step process, or we use this tool for that. We'd love to have all that mapped out, for other people." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "43:52", "start": 2632.11, "text": "Yeah, I think so there's like the operational execution side of it, and while that-- there's, well, that's like a heavy lift, I, I don't think that's like the hardest part. I think the most important part, if you wanna go do this in your local community right now, is you, you need to motivate Your local community. You need to be, you know, have an ability to persuade people and to set a vision and help them understand what this could be and align that with their own interests. And I think that, you know, that's kind of how we started and took that kind of an approach with this, It's, you know, when, when we had like our first meeting, there were certain people involved that, we set the vision with, and they, they were backing out. We had a lot of people that kind of like dropped out of wanting to support or provide their time in the first few months, and then there were the people that stayed motivated and kept participating. And I, I, I think that that's natural. The question's like, how many people are ultimately going to stay and support something if you want to do it bottom up like this? And, and that-" }, { "speaker": "tyler_stevens", "time": "44:58", "start": 2698.09, "text": "You" }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "45:01", "start": 2700.89, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, so the, like, the onus is on you to really, if you, if you wanna start this thing, then the onus is on you to really sell that vision, define that vision, organize people around it, 'cause that's, that's our most powerful tool, is that we have a bunch of people who are motivated to support this. And if you can get that, you can make anything possible. And that's kind of how we were selling this initial vision, and here we are. It ended up becoming much more powerful than we would have Totally." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:29", "start": 2728.51, "text": "Fantastic. Well, I think that's a good spot to finish it. The website is denver dot space. So listeners, if you're in the area, check out, check them out for membership and events and everything. And, if you're elsewhere around the world, maybe, you've been inspired to, try and do something similar or contribute, at your local meetup or something similar. but yeah, Eric and Tyler, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "eric_yakes", "time": "45:50", "start": 2750.04, "text": "Thanks, Stephane. Thank you." } ] }