{ "episodeId": "SLP715", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "peter_schiff": { "name": "Peter Schiff", "role": "guest", "tag": "PETER" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_3": { "name": "Guest 3", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_4": { "name": "Guest 4", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:01", "start": 0.6, "text": "Hi everyone, so my name is Stephan Livera. I'm gonna be your guest host of the Plan B podcast. We're streaming on Rumble, and of course, we are live here in the Mempoll tent. Joining me today is Peter Schiff. I'm sure many of you know Peter Schiff. He is the host of the Peter Schiff Show. He is the founder of Euro Pacific Capital, and, sorry, asset management, sorry, and, A well-known, Bitcoin bear. So," }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "00:26", "start": 26.06, "text": "let's see how this goes, hey? So, what's the point of having that table so far away from either of us? I guess for the look, I don't know." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:38", "start": 37.58, "text": "so, look, obviously Bitcoin and gold-- and we will be moderating, there'll be a debate tomorrow, so Peter will be debating safety and I'll be the moderator for that, so check that one out also. But, look, so let's talk a little bit about Bitcoin and gold. I know, obviously there's been a lot of price movements recently. oh, let's-- I mean, there's been a big drop" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "00:55", "start": 54.67, "text": "recently in gold and silver. What do you mean? Yeah, Well," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:04", "start": 63.9, "text": "silver's down basically thirty percent in two days. It, it-- silver got above a hundred. I got on my, the airplane to come to El Salvador, and when I got on the plane, silver was a hundred and twenty-one dollars. And here it is today, back below eighty-five. One, basically" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "01:21", "start": 81.21, "text": "one day. So is it a store of value then? Well, it o- over long term, I mean, nothing, nothing- Oh, okay. So now, so now we can use, let's talk about that. Well, it's hard to be a store of value" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:34", "start": 93.98, "text": "every single day. But what, what happened, what happened with gold and silver today is really unprecedented. It's not like, this has never happened before. in, in, in those metals. Now of course, the, the run up in the weeks before was also unprecedented. I, you know, you hadn't had gold move up, silver move up that much, that quickly. But there, there was something very suspicious about, about what happened today. And so I, I, I have a hard time believing it was just an independently occurring event. It seemed like- there was a concerted effort to take some of the wind out of the sail of the metals. I, I don't think that the sell-off, will last that long. I think that the metals will continue their uptrend, but I do think they, they probably succeeded in slowing it down a bit. Some people might have been scared out of the market. Some leverage speculators probably got- Stopped out of the market, and, and so they may have succeeded for a while, but the, the underlying demand for gold and silver that drove prices up isn't going away, and in fact, I'm quite happy with the decline. I mean, even though on a personal level, I said, \"This, you know, I've never lost this much money personally in such a short amount of time on paper.\" But You know, I, I, there's still a lot of people that need to buy gold and silver, and this makes it easier for them. They can get more gold and silver for their fiat currency, than they could. And so since my goal is to make sure that as many people as possible own gold and silver, I'm very happy to see, the decline. I was just surprised to see it, you know, so much, so quickly. Much. Right. But, you know, I'd rather buy- People gold for, you know, forty nine hundred, then fifty six hundred. I'd rather buy people silver at eighty five dollars than one hundred and twenty dollars. and so, you know, the fact that it's come down is good news for people. And, you know, my clients to me personally, I had no interest in selling my gold at fifty six hundred anyway, so it doesn't matter to me that it's lower now, when I wasn't gonna sell it either way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:08", "start": 248.19, "text": "Let's talk about the kinds of buyers and sellers here, because, I mean, you tell me, but here's how I'm reading it. It looks like a lot of the buying recently with gold was arguably central banks. Of course, I mean, there's a, there's a, there's a mix, but certainly central banks were a big part of buying, and I think on the silver side maybe it was like a bit of industrial use as well, and, and of course, people who are maybe getting exposed to the idea of sound money. What's your take on that? Who are" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "04:33", "start": 273.05, "text": "the buyers" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "04:37", "start": 277.01, "text": "It has industrial use. So there, there, there are industries that buy gold. Of course, the most, you know, common is the jewelry industry, right? And so that's real demand. I mean, there are people all around the world that buy jewelry, and a lot of it is, is made from gold. But consumer electronics, aerospace, you know, medicine, dentistry, you know, there are buyers of gold For the industrial uses. But because gold is so expensive, in many cases, they use other metals. But in some cases, they, they can't. They, they have to use gold. But I think the incremental buying over the last couple of years has been coming from central banks And there was a time not too long ago when central banks were net sellers of gold, and so that gold was getting absorbed into the market. but, but now they're, they're, they're net buyers And I think that the demand coming out of central banks is going to expand. And I think Donald Trump has now given the world even more reasons to get out of the dollar. Biden, you know, with the Russian sanctions, created political reasons, and Trump has, you know, given the world even more reasons. But the biggest reason of them all is our runaway debt That it should be obvious to everybody that regardless of which political party is in control, the debt train isn't gonna slow down. we're just gonna keep on running, ever increasing debt that we have no ability to repay, and we can't even really service it. and, and even yesterday, you know, Donald Trump mentioned that his main goal for housing is to keep prices rising, even though it's clearly a bubble because people can't afford to buy, he wants the prices to go up anyway. and the only way to do that is, is to keep creating inflation And, a-and so if we're going to continue to inflate the currency, it's gonna continue to depreciate, and it's not a viable reserve For other central banks. I mean, you can't back your fiat currency with another fiat currency that may have even, you know, bigger debt problems than you do. So I think you're gonna see a transition away from US dollar reserves to gold reserves. The world, in effect, is going back on the gold standard and off the dollar standard You know, when, when, the Bretton Woods agreement was first made and the world accepted the dollar as the reserve, it was on the condition that the dollar was not only backed by gold, but redeemable, on demand in gold And we broke that commitment in 1971, but the world continued to use the dollar anyway. The dollar's exchange rate, depreciated considerably in the '70s as a result of that, but the world continued holding dollars ever since. but now I think, they, they no longer see the viability of that arrangement, and I think the exorbitant privilege that America has enjoyed is in the process of being revoked. And, and so- As demand for dollars worldwide goes down, demand for gold is going to, going to rise." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:23", "start": 502.76, "text": "Curious to get your take on, so President Trump spoke recently about, Kevin Warsh as the new, proposed Federal Reserve, chair. Do you have, now, from what I've heard, people believe that he is- Trying to-- that he may try to lower the interest rates, sorry, yeah, lower the interest rates, but also reduce the size of the Federal Reserve balance sheet. What's your take on where things are gonna go there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:48", "start": 527.63, "text": "Well, I don't think there's any chance of that. Well, you know, first of all, Trump wouldn't have nominated him if that was gonna be the goal, right? He wants to get rid of Powell, you know, he calls him too late Powell because he wasn't dovish enough He wants even more interest rate cuts. He wants to expand the, the balance sheet more. So it wouldn't make any sense that he would try to appoint a new Fed chairman who would be Less dovish than Powell or a hawk, that's the last thing he wants on the Fed. Now maybe he wants to create the false impression in the bond market that he's got a real independent guy, at the Fed but I don't think he's gonna fool them for long. I mean, everything that he is saying, everything he wants to do would be inconsistent with that, but also politically The reason that all these Fed chairman have been so dovish and all the board members is because they really have no viable political alternative. Because if you actually do what needs to be done There's gonna be a massive financial crisis, that's what much worse than two thousand and eight, and there can't be any bailouts. And so there's just, it's politically a non-starter that this is gonna happen. So, you know, I, I, I, I think all this speculation that now we've got, you know, a gold bug, you know, like a real Austrian economist, you know Fed chairman, like in a maybe another vault, Paul Volcker or something. That's just, it's just, that's just ridiculous. but they may have spread those rumors as a way to fuel, the organized sell-off in gold and silver. That was part of the story behind it, is that, oh, the markets are going down on this new hawkish Fed chair, where, you know, he was a front runner, the odds were, you know, close to Even money that he was gonna get the job anyway for the last few weeks, and gold and silver kept rising anyway. It wasn't like they were, the markets were fearful that Trump would go in this direction. but yeah, I mean, he could have picked bigger doves that were more well known, but he chose, the one who has a reputation, potentially for being the least dovish But, you know, I'm sure that Trump had plenty of meetings with Walsh, and, you know, is pretty confident that he's going to deliver the, you know, what he wants, which is to keep inflating the bubble. His main goal is so that it doesn't pop until he finishes his term. So he wants to keep the phony economy going, he wants to keep the party going, and he wants the Fed chairman, and that's gonna keep that punch ball spiked." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:52", "start": 712.29, "text": "On the whole, AI and productivity, robotics, obviously this is a very hot topic, there's so much investment in this. How much productivity gain do you really think there is, if any, in AI? Where are you at on AI and robotics? I'm sure there's" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:07", "start": 727.12, "text": "already some productivity gain. I mean, I'm a little bit more productive myself, right? I use it, so, you know, and, and I can see the incredible potential of the technology as it ultimately gets developed and becomes more integrated into businesses in ways, that it can save on, on labor, make things more efficient and, and hopefully, the AI, you know, can advance the whole evolution of human progress. You know, if They're that smart, and we basically increase our collective intelligence. Things that might have taken us, you know, a hundred years to invent, maybe we can invent them in one year. You know, we have a lot more really smart people. They're not people, they're artificial, but they're thinking, they're trying to solve problems in ways that, that, that, that we can't. You know, it's like having, you know, millions and millions of i- you know, people smarter than Einstein trying to, trying to figure out how to make our lives better, you know? and so yeah, there's a lot of potential. The question is, you know, how long is it gonna take to really realize it? How large an upfront capital investment is required to make that possible? And, you know- What is the short term sacrifice to fund the investment? Because if we're going to have to build out all this infrastructure and utilize, devote all this energy to AI, it's got to come from something. We don't start off with an infinite amount of resources. So if we're, you know, diverting them to build out AI, where is it gonna come from? You know, where's the short term sacrifice gonna be? I don't think anybody is prepared for that. And And I still think we have a major, a day of reckoning coming for the debt bubble and, and, and, and all those things that is probably gonna blow up before AI, you know, gives us a get out of jail free card from our, our past sins." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:24", "start": 863.77, "text": "So basically, you think it will help us product-- in productivity terms, but not enough to, with all-- to deal with all the, obviously, the massive debt," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:32", "start": 872.16, "text": "that- Yeah. I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:33", "start": 872.54, "text": "mean, the hope" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "14:33", "start": 873.12, "text": "is that maybe it will. that it'll just make us so productive and the GDP will grow so much that the debt in relation to that GDP will become manageable and also, you know, that people won't need as much, you know, money because everything will be so abundant and so inexpensive you know, that, that we'll be able to service all these obligations, you know, people, you know, because, because of the sheer abundance that will come from this horn of plenty, of AI. And, and, and I think again, ultimately, sure, you know, that's probably man's future if we don't end up destroying ourselves first, is to live in that kind of a world, where we don't have to work, where we-- all of our needs are met, by- Computers and buy machines, and man could just, you know, live a life of leisure, maybe indefinitely. I mean, you know, maybe AI will figure out why we age and how to stop it or how to reverse it. I, you know, hopefully I make it long enough for that, but we'll see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:47", "start": 946.57, "text": "So let's get some of your updated thoughts on Bitcoin. Obviously, over the years, you know, you've really been, against it, let's say, ever since it was like seventeen dollars. more than that. Yeah, probably. so, I mean, it's now four thousand eight hundred x up from that. Is there a point at which you would say, okay, like maybe there is a use to Bitcoin? I was wrong about it. Is there something that would change your mind or no?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:12", "start": 971.63, "text": "I mean, I was wrong not to buy it when Learned about it, because I could have obviously sold it and, and made a lot of money. And I assume that had I bought it a long time ago, I would have sold it, but, I mean Who the hell knows, right? 'Cause I, I didn't buy it, and I still haven't bought it. I've never bought any Bitcoin in, in my life." }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "16:34", "start": 994.1, "text": "You've only been gifted some from your- I've been gifted some," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:36", "start": 996.49, "text": "but" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "16:37", "start": 996.69, "text": "not, not, not a significant amount that it," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:39", "start": 999.09, "text": "it, it, it, it matters. but no, my, my overall assessment of it hasn't changed since I, I first dismissed it. Right? I underestimated The appeal that it would have for other people, I mean, obviously look at all the people that are here, that, that see value in it. And I think one day they, they, they, they won't see value in it. I, I think, you know, it's a mass, you know, delusion. It's a very cultish, you know, What's even the word I'm looking for? but, you know, people, people have, have been seduced by it and, they've kind of, you know, drank the Kool-Aid and, and, and, and legitimately believe in it. I mean, I, I, I accept the fact that the people who believe in it, believe in it. I mean, they don't, you know, it, they, you know, they're not just trying to con people, you know, some people probably" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:43", "start": 1063.02, "text": "are. But it's been around for now sixteen, seventeen years. Like, how long would it take for you to then say, \"Okay, like, it's a real thing and it's actually sustainable\"?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:54", "start": 1073.6, "text": "just because a bubble- gets bigger doesn't change the nature of what it is, right? Or just because a pyramid scheme manages to rise to a large level But I think what's really kept it going over the last few years was first Wall Street getting in on the action. Once, I guess, there was enough demand cultivated that Wall Street thought they could make money off of Bitcoin, then they got into it. Not because they really believed in it, they just thought they could make money off of it, and they didn't really care, right? If everybody ends up losing losing all their money, like casinos, you know, you go into a casino, you know, they don't care if you lose your money. I mean, you know, they're, they're, they're making money because you're gambling and, and so Wall Street people wanted to gamble in crypto, and they're happy to book the bets and, you know, take a piece of the action, right? So it was Wall Street getting in with the ETFs and, you know, and then they made a lot of money in banking fees, you know, from guys like Michael Saylor and all these copycat companies, you know, Wall Street made a lot of money servicing the crypto industry. And then the politicians got in on the game because once you had enough money in crypto, the guys that got in early had accumulated so much wealth based on all the people who bought in later at higher prices, they can afford to pay off the politicians. They had money. That's what politicians want. They want two things. They want money and they want votes. And they normally want money to get votes. But the Bitcoin Bitcoin community had both, had the money and the votes, because you had a lot of people that own Bitcoin who also vote. And so they became a special interest group that really was a single issue voting group, promised to make the Bitcoin they own go up, and you get their vote. Right? And so some politicians realized, if I'm pro Bitcoin, I get all the votes of the Bitcoiners, but I don't lose any votes, because the people who don't own Bitcoin don't really give a damn what I'm saying about Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:20", "start": 1219.77, "text": "Yeah, but Peter, aren't you being a little inconsistent here? Because I presume you wouldn't make that same argument about gold. You wouldn't say, \"Oh, there's this, community of gold investors who, you know, you would say...\" No, because- Oh, that doesn't count in that case. Only Bitcoin. Why" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "20:34", "start": 1234.36, "text": "The US government buying gold, you know, a, they're not gonna buy gold. They're-- that's the last thing they wanna do. But Bitcoin needs more buyers by its very nature of it being a pyramid And if you're running out of private buyers who will buy with their own money, you gotta get politicians to use the public's money. And so the whole idea of getting the government behind Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin. But not only did the, Bitcoin, you know, promoters want the government to buy Bitcoin, they wanted the government to legitimize Bitcoin. They wanted to be able to use the government's good housekeeping seal of approval to market- Bitcoin to get people who might have otherwise not bought Bitcoin to say, \"Look, you gotta buy Bitcoin. The, the, the US government is behind it. Donald Trump wants to make America the Bitcoin capital of the world. Bitcoin's going to ten million dollars of Bitcoin. All you gotta do is buy it and you'll be rich. But if you don't buy it, we'll have fun staying poor.\" So the politicians were really needed to pump Bitcoin Gold doesn't need to be pumped, you know, and it can't be pumped. It's too big a market, there's too many people in there, and it actually has use, you know. So Bitcoin needed the politicians, you know, gold didn't. a-and-and the, the people that bribed the politicians to promote Bitcoin, they also needed a way out of their tokens. They own the whales, these OGs, they have a lot of Bitcoin, they need buyers. That's where- Where all the Bitcoin came from to fill up the ETFs, it was the, the OGs that had a bunch of Bitcoin that sold their Bitcoin into the demand that was created through the ETFs. That's why Bitcoin hasn't gone up. That's why Bitcoin is down, you know, about fifty percent priced in gold since the November twenty twenty-one high, you know, because a lot of the people that got in early have been selling." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:44", "start": 1363.86, "text": "Alright, so let me respond on a few points. I'd say, it's, it's kind of a cyclical thing. There are times when, you know, gold moves first and Bitcoin moves later. in terms of government advocacy, yes, there are some people who want the government to buy Bitcoin, but there are others who just say, \"No, what we just want is a level playing field, \"as in, \"Don't penalize us like, you know, Bitcoin miners were being punished by the Biden administration during the Biden era, \"as you well know." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:13", "start": 1393.38, "text": "At which Bitcoin could become a bigger market than gold, like as an example, I checked the numbers, the 10-year CAGR compound annual growth rate for Bitcoin as we speak right now, it's about 70, 72%, and that number for gold is something like maybe 15, 16%. So, a Bitcoin is gonna taper down over time, but it, it could eventually become bigger than the gold market. What would happen" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:36", "start": 1415.79, "text": "then? I, most of the big growth in Bitcoin happened in the earlier years before anybody really owned it. Like everybody always wants to talk about, you know, how great an investment Bitcoin has been From the very beginning. But it hasn't been a good investment during the years where most people have been active. I mean, the perfect example or the best example is Strategy and Michael Saylor. He's Strategy has spent fifty-five billion dollars buying Bitcoin over the past five years. And his average price is seventy-six thousand dollars. The current price, as everybody well knows here, is about eighty-four thousand dollars. He barely has a gain, barely, and that's only because he hasn't tried to sell. If Sailor tried to liquidate his Bitcoin, the price would crash and he would lose money. But had Sailor bought just about anything else other than Bitcoin, he would be in much better financial position today. It has been a lousy investment over recent years. Yes, if you got, if you got into Bitcoin in 2011, 2012, 13 13, 14, 15. Yes, it's been a great investment for you. But most people either didn't own it back then or just had a little bit of money in it back then. But ever since it really came on the scene in a big way, right, since they started advertising in the Super Bowl and they had all these ETFs and you had all the politicians, you know, promoting it, it hasn't been a good investment because all the people who got in early have been selling. Well, I think you're cherry picking" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:24", "start": 1524.06, "text": "the time frames a bit here, but" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "25:26", "start": 1525.62, "text": "I'm not cherry picking" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:26", "start": 1526.38, "text": "anything. Well, you are saying that it's only, people from, you know, twenty fifteen or, or prior, but, if you were regularly buying, and I think even with MSER, why is Michael" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:37", "start": 1537.11, "text": "Saylor, who's been regularly buying more than anybody else, why does he have such a lousy return on the Bitcoin he bought? The" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:46", "start": 1545.97, "text": "equity is up like multiple. I'm" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:48", "start": 1548.49, "text": "not talking about MicroStrategy stock, which by the way is down about 70% from the highs. So, you know, people who bought MicroStrategy stock in recent years are losing a lot of money. But I'm talking about the, the money that he has spent buying Bitcoin. That was the core of the strategy. He was buying Bitcoin. You're fundamentally being" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:10", "start": 1569.51, "text": "fiat-denominated here. You're not thinking about the longer term. No, no, no. It'd be like saying, in those years that Amazon wasn't making a lot of profit, that they went on later to make all this profit." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "26:19", "start": 1579.39, "text": "You're saying that Bitcoin is a great investment. I'm Saying that the biggest Bitcoin investor in the world strategy and Michael Saylor over the past five years, buying Bitcoin every week Is barely ahead, barely ahead. He might-- He would have been better off just buying treasury bills. He would have made more money over the last five years if he collected interest and he wouldn't have had" }, { "speaker": "peter_schiff", "time": "26:49", "start": 1608.52, "text": "access to that level of capital if he was just" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:51", "start": 1610.92, "text": "buying treasuries." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "26:52", "start": 1611.86, "text": "I know, but he got the capital. It's not quite apples to apples here. Wait, I'm not saying he got the capital and then he squandered it on Bitcoin, but he's not getting the capital anymore because strategy now trades at a discount to its NAV. So the game is over, right? Strategy is just the Walking Dead now. It's like a zombie, he's walking around waiting to die. The company is going to go bankrupt, and eventually when it goes bankrupt, all those Bitcoin are gonna get sold. Who knows what he's gonna get for him, but they're all gonna get sold." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:26", "start": 1646.21, "text": "Well, I think we're just gonna have to agree to disagree here. I think it's a bit of cherry picking, but alright. I think if you, if you compare the, you know, the top to kind of a dip-- I'm not picking cherries. You're, you're, you know, you're-- Well, I, I think you're comparing the top to a dip, and if you waited another five or ten" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:40", "start": 1659.7, "text": "years, it's gonna be a very different story. No, but, but Which is a pretty long time period for Bitcoin, 'cause Bitcoin's only been around for about fifteen or sixteen. So for a third of Bitcoin's history, Michael's strategy has been-- or Michael Saylor has been the biggest Bitcoin buyer there is, and it's been an awful investment. Anyway, I think-- Terrible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:11", "start": 1690.56, "text": "Well, look, we're just gonna have to leave it there. I think we're out of time, but, everyone, please, put your hands together for Peter Schiff. thank you for, for an entertaining discussion and check out the debate tomorrow And safety, and I'll be moderating that, so thank you. Oh, an unbiased moderator, that's great. I promise I'll be neutral for that. All right. And, joining me now is Piara Cohen from the startup called Osmo. So, Piara, first of all, thanks, thanks for joining me, and, let's just give us a quick background on yourself and, you know, how you got into this whole Bitcoin thing." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "28:45", "start": 1724.75, "text": "Thanks for having me. it's gonna be a tough act to follow. but as I was telling to Peter backstage, I actually became a Bitcoin Maxi because of Peter. I heard, I had bought Bitcoin before and a bunch of other shit coins, and then in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, I heard Peter speak on his podcast, and he was saying how it's totally unsustainable what the US is doing, issuing so much debt, printing so many dollars, and that people needed to buy gold. And I thought, oh my God, this guy is totally right, but I'm not gonna buy gold, I'm gonna buy Bitcoin. but it's funny that here we are. Six years later, and it's because of him that, that I became a Bitcoin maxi." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:33", "start": 1772.85, "text": "Isn't that interesting that, the people sometimes think Bitcoin and gold are totally competing, and in one sense, yes, they are, but in another sense, as people learn about gold, and yes, okay, bit-- gold is a bigger market than Bitcoin, obviously, sometimes people then come down further and learn about the limitations of gold, and then they come into Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "29:54", "start": 1793.74, "text": "For me, the, the biggest limitation is moving the gold around." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "30:01", "start": 1800.81, "text": "I'm originally from Nicaragua, and Nicaragua has had a, a, a rocky democracy over the past forty plus years. And in 1979, my grandfather had to leave Nicaragua, from one day to the next, and he left with five thousand bucks in his pocket, but he couldn't take jewelry, he and five kids and my grandma and but he couldn't He couldn't take jewelry, he couldn't take bars of gold, he couldn't take anything else. So I understand the need for a censorship resistant money and store of value, but it's only as good as Its portability. If you can't take it with you or you can't pay across borders, then you could have a million dollars in gold somewhere, but if you have to leave your country from one day to the next, or even if you can't pay somebody in, in gold, h-h-how do you do that? You know? So I understood gold, and what Peter said really resonated with me, but I thought, well, I think gold is the past, and there's clearly a, a winner." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:04", "start": 1864.34, "text": "Interesting. And, tell us a little bit about leaving, because of, you know, political issues. Like, talk to us a little bit about what, you know, what that experience was like for you." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "31:19", "start": 1878.58, "text": "Well, definitely" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "31:22", "start": 1882.32, "text": "not being able to speak freely in your country, is tough, and feeling more comfortable somewhere else, is, is tough, but is a reality for many people all over the world throughout history And that's another reason why I became a Bitcoin Maxi, because this isn't the first time my family has had to flee a country. So the idea of losing everything was something that was already ingrained, since I was a child, and when I realized I can store my wealth in an asset that grows in value in comparison to the dollar, and I can pay anybody and move anywhere with it Again, it just made it a no-brainer, and, and the fact that nobody can confiscate it from you, whether maybe you can be debanked, and a lot of companies in the Bitcoin space are, are familiar with this concept of being debanked, but this happens to people as well. In authoritarian regimes, people that did something that the bank didn't, didn't like, even in free countries, and nobody can take your Bitcoin away, right? So So again, another reason why, like, it totally made sense to have Bitcoin, something nobody can debase, nobody can devalue, nobody can take away, nobody can freeze, nobody can tell you what you can and what you can't do with your money, because, you know Trying to understand what it's like to have to leave from one day to the next, it's hard to, to wrap your mind around this. But I'm sure a lot of people here have had the situation where you wanna pay something with your debit card or your credit card, and the transaction is declined, and then if you're lucky, the bank calls you to say, \"Hey, we flagged this transaction.\" In my part of the world, the banks aren't super tech, tech savvy, so you have to get in touch with the bank and spend three hours on the phone just to say, \"Hey, what happened with my transaction? I wanna pay. I should be able to do whatever I wanna do with my own...\" Money. so again, b-bitcoin solves a lot of these problems. Monetary" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:41", "start": 2021.03, "text": "freedom concepts and having, you know, the freedom to obviously store your value and send value as you choose, but of course We still live in a fiat standard, of course. I'm a Bitcoin Maxi. I wish we could be living in the hyper Bitcoinized world today. But, the challenge a lot of people face now is still needing to interface with the fiat system, unless you're gonna go live in a Bitcoin circular economy. So, talk to us a little bit about that, this challenge of- Managing this transition from the fiat standard to the Bitcoin standard." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "34:14", "start": 2054.25, "text": "Well, back in 2020, when I decided I'm gonna go all, all in on Bitcoin, I started calling all my family and I'm like, \"Guys, everybody has to buy Bitcoin.\" And everybody said, \"Alright, it sounds good, but how do we buy it?\" And- In Central America, Mexico has a big exchange called Bitso, but in Central America, there is no Bitso, no Coinbase, no Binance, and six years ago, there was nothing. Now in El Salvador, there are local exchanges, but no regional big exchange. So when I saw the need, and I also wanted to buy Bitcoin, and I couldn't buy Bitcoin, I figured, \"Alright, well, I'm gonna start a Bitcoin exchange,\" and that's how Osmo was born. Now Osmo is more of a global account, focused on Latinos that allows you to receive Anywhere as if you were a local, something like TransferWise, now called Wise, or something like Revolut, but built on top of Bitcoin, so all of the cross border payments occur on Bitcoin, but you can have a fiat balance in a Guatemalan local currency, in Mexican pesos, in US dollars, and you can send and receive. So we built a lot more, but we started as a Bitcoin exchange. And To answer your question, I think it's key to have the on and off ramps because moving to or living in the future where Bitcoin is the asset everybody pays in and prices are set in Bitcoin, I think we're very far away from that. And I think a lot more money needs to come into Bitcoin for it to be less volatile. Obviously, the larger an asset is, well, it's just less volatile, it needs a lot more money to come in or a lot more, more money to come out. for the price to fluctuate a lot. In the meantime, we need to be able to swap fiat to Bitcoin and Bitcoin to fiat very easily. and to be honest with you, I started doing it, like I, I got into the crypto space and into buying Bitcoin 12 years ago through Coinbase because it was the only way for me to buy Bitcoin at the time when I lived in the UK and again, there was no option here. but I think it's just As important as it was 12 years ago in the US and in the first world, in the global South, we don't have the Binance's and the Coinbase's of the world with local on and off ramps. And I think it's our duty as locals to build these on and off ramps to allow people to swap between local currency and Bitcoin and, and vice versa." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:39", "start": 2198.75, "text": "It's interesting you point that out as well, because yeah, a lot of people do have a similar journey where they kind of start with kind of shit coins and this and that, and then later they have a sort of come to And they, they become more of a Bitcoin Maxi, right? so I presume then that was kind of like your journey in twenty twenty was when you sort of really like, were like, \"No, Bitcoin is the thing that we need to do.\" And to your point about, fiat on and off ramps. Can you talk to us a little bit about that? So are you doing like Tether, or are you just doing like actual just fiat wires? Like how does that part of it work?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "37:12", "start": 2232.26, "text": "So you can deposit money into your Osmo account by depositing Bitcoin, and you have a Bitcoin wallet in, in your account. You can deposit stablecoins as well, but you can deposit fiat through credit or debit card in every Latin American country, except for a couple sanctioned countries. You can deposit fiat in cash at thirty-eight thousand physical retail locations participating locations, because we, we're still a cash society, seventy percent of the GDP moves in physical bills still, so if you don't You, you can't get to the masses if you don't actually accept physical bills. and you can top up your balance with a local bank transfer in a myriad of countries where we operate. So, yeah, you just go to your bank, you make a transfer, and the money's there in, in your Osmo account pretty much instantly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:01", "start": 2281.36, "text": "Now, I'm curious, because, again, I'm a libertarian, I'm against AML and sanctions laws, I think that, but- And KYC and all this stuff, but it, it's a reality of our world today, and obviously I don't fault entrepreneurs for having to obviously do all this 'cause, you know, it's not there, it's not, they're not trying, they're not, they don't want to do it, but many times they're forced to do it. But The risk that I've understood is that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:28", "start": 2308.12, "text": "you have to do all this compliance and oftentimes there's like a risk that you can get shut down or that even the state that you're in can get in trouble with FATF, they can go on the gray list or the blacklist if they're not doing enough, you know, KYC, AML compliance, whatever. How do you kind of deal with that? Is it just a transition period of dealing with kind of this difficulty of FATF and AML?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "38:51", "start": 2331.28, "text": "I think it's super important, and it's obviously a hot take, but again, first step is let's make it really easy for people to swap Fiat to Bitcoin. and if you wanna work with the banks and, and you need to, because otherwise you don't have an on-ramp, you need to be able to know who your customer is, because the banks need to be able to know who their customer is and what they're doing with money. I hope in the future, once we all live off of Bitcoin and on Bitcoin, then it'll be like cash, there won't be KYC needed. But right now, I think it's, it's necessary. From my point of view, and, and everything comes in steps, like I first used Coinbase, and we see a lot of users that use Osmo first to get into Bitcoin, and then they learn about self custody, and they're like, \"Oh, okay,\" but speaking to somebody about self custody from day one, you lose them Most, cold storages, the seed phrases are in English. We don't speak English, so asking people to memorize twelve words in a language that you don't understand is like Just a bunch of letters all together, so you can't expect everybody to do self custody from day one. It's a long process where people are learning. So first, you usually do it through a KYC Via Onramp, and then you learn. But from a business standpoint, and as a business owner, I didn't build all of this tech for bad actors to use this tech. I don't want bad actors. I don't want people that are laundering money to use my service. I don't want people that are extorting others or, or doing scams to use my service. And the only way to know who's using my service is to do KYC. So not only do I do I do it because we're a regulated financial institution here in El Salvador, and because I work with banks, and that's opened up the doors to working with a bunch of banks. But I also do it because I don't want bad actors to take advantage of my tech. If they wanna go do bad actions, they should have a harder time and go find somewhere else to do it, but not, not in, in, within my walls." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:01", "start": 2461.02, "text": "I see. So, I mean, for me, I don't confl- I, I think it's, I think it's sort of conflating a bit the fraud protection and scam side of it with the KYC side of it. Like, I think they can be Separated, it may be in the future, like, and I understand right now it's a bit theoretical, but I, I, I would like to see some kind of world where that's possible, where, people, don't-- because I think the, the truth of the matter is, and sure, I, I grant you that, you know, there are bad actors on Earth and there are scammers and all that, of course, that should all-- that's all still, should, absolutely should still be illegal. I just think the," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:39", "start": 2499.43, "text": "the KY A lot more damage than what it's saved. It's kind of my broader view. But okay, let's talk a little bit about, the different services that you have on, on Osmo. So is it mainly like on and off ramp and transfer or what's the main-- Like, are you gonna have like lending and other aspects, on the platform over time?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "42:01", "start": 2520.87, "text": "So really the idea is to build a bank on top of Bitcoin. And in the US, Revolut isn't really present and some people use Wise, but the closest thing in the- In the US is Cash App. the difference between Cash App and Osmo is that because we operate in a bunch of countries, you can have a bunch of different currencies. So you can have a balance in Guatemalan currency and in dollars and in Brazilian reals and Mexican pesos, and you can convert between these currencies. You can send money abroad, obviously to any Bitcoin wallet, but you can send money abroad to a bank account. So if you're in the US and I'm in Guatemala, I can send money from my Osmo account to your bank account. And the- The way it works behind the scenes is that Osmo, you choose what balance of what account you wanna spend from. So if I wanted to send you from my Guatemalan local currency, Osmo grabs those quetzales, converts it to Bitcoin, sends it to the US over Lightning, then it's converted to dollars, and then it's dispersed to your bank account. You receive dollars in your bank account. You never knew that I had Osmo or that Bitcoin was in the middle. and the beauty of using Bitcoin as this bridge is that, I, I think- I think it's ridiculous that in the year 2026, if you've got PayPal and I've got Venmo, we can't pay each other, and PayPal owns Venmo They're the same company, but they're incompatible. It's two different closed loops. But the beauty of Bitcoin is that it becomes this bridge, and if you've got Binance and I've got Osmo, I can pay you. If you've got Coinbase and I've got Binance, we can pay each other over Bitcoin, right? So the idea was to build a bank that does everything that a bank does, loans in the future. Today, you can have a Visa or Mastercard debit card, and you can spend from your balance. You can go at one of the thirty-eight thousand physical physical bills if you want to, or at the ATM, you can pay your friends on Osmo or on any other wallet or straight to their bank account. You can receive payments as if you were a local. So today we've got Osmo users can open a US virtual account, meaning we create a unique identifier number that looks like a bank account, and even if you're not from the US, in fact, we don't serve US persons, so if you're not from the US and you have a client or you have a family member that has a US bank account that wants to pay you, you just share your US virtual account number and they make a local ACH, and whenever they send dollars over the ACH local banking system in the United States, it lands into your Osmo US account And then it's converted to Bitcoin, and we do all the magic behind the scenes. So really, it's a tool that allows you to have essentially bank accounts in every country in one app. But, the idea is to add as many other financial services as possible that you would otherwise only be able to get at a traditional bank." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:55", "start": 2694.84, "text": "I see. And so, how long has Osmo been around and, h-h-how much, countries are you biggest in and, you know, give us a bit of an overview on that side?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "45:05", "start": 2705.15, "text": "We launched July 2022, so it's been three and a half years. our strongest market is Guatemala. I would say we're the largest Bitcoin exchange in Central America, definitely in Guatemala, and I would dare to say in Central America as well. We operate, and when I say we operate, is that we have our own proprietary on and off ramps, in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, but through partners Users can on and off ramp in Mexico, Europe, the US, Brazil, the countries I previously mentioned. Colombia's coming up next. So, but as I mentioned earlier, we started as a Bitcoin only exchange, and funny, the idea originally was to be a crypto exchange, and I thought, well, it's gonna be a quick- Turn around, I work on this for six years, Finance wants to launch operations in Central America, and I just sell it to them. And I read a book called, Rework, and one of the things the book says is it doesn't matter what you do in life About fifty percent of people are gonna like what you do, and about fifty percent of people aren't gonna like what you do. So you have to be a little radical to get the fifty percent of people that like what you do to really love what you do and become diehard fans. And in order to do that, you have to have a clear line in the sand, and it uses Whole Foods as an example, the, the grocery store in, in the US, their clear line in the sand is they only sell health products. You wanna buy Doritos, you don't find it at Whole Foods. You wanna buy Coke, you don't find it at Whole Foods. But what do you get with Whole-- Like, what has this gotten Whole Foods? Well, you go to New York and you go to a yoga class and women are wearing a Whole Foods tote bag. And you go play golf and older men have a baseball cap. With Whole Foods mer- you know, merch. You don't see that happening with Walmart. The only people that wear Walmart merch are the executives of Walmart But why does this happen? 'Cause they've got a clear line in the sand. So I scratched my head and I thought to myself, \"Well, what's gonna be our clear line in the sand?\" And that's when I realized actually we're gonna be a Bitcoin only exchange and we're gonna build financial services on top of Bitcoin only, 'cause if you consider seventy percent of the population in Central America is still unbanked or underbanked. A lot of people don't even speak Spanish, mainly in Guatemala, there's a lot of Mayan languages. How do you explain to them the difference between Bitcoin and ETH, never mind the other hundreds of thousands of shit coins? So I thought to myself, it's ridiculous, like we should only explain to people what Bitcoin is. That's really The only thing they should ever focus on. So let's just build a, a Bitcoin only exchange and, and build a bunch of other financial services on top of that. So Bitcoin is, has been, and will be our, our line in the sand." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:10", "start": 2889.96, "text": "Excellent. And so, yeah, I think it's, been an interesting evolution. I think especially in twenty twenty-two, like, sort of, I would say there was like this era of like just full-on, you know, shitcoin casino sort of thing from like twenty seventeen, like ICO kind of time, and then around sort of twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, we started to have more of a Bitcoin-only message of like, \"Hey, there's too many shitcoins, let's have like Bitcoin only.\" And so, yeah, certainly in like- That sort of twenty-one, twenty-two cycle, there was a lot of, and are a lot of Bitcoin only companies around the world, but, I think the, let's say the, some of the biggest are kind of people who have also have shitcoins as well, and that's just kind of the way the cookie has crumbled for better or worse with some of these different exchanges and products, But," }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "49:00", "start": 2940.26, "text": "I-- And yeah, go ahead. Just, just to add to that, it's been a blessing to be Bitcoin only. We have saved our ass so many times because we're Bitcoin only. It's opened up relationships with regulators and banks because we're not offering all sorts of casino stuff. But Mind you, when we were launching, Terra Luna was the third biggest cryptocurrency in the world, and of course, in our original crypto exchange idea, we were going to offer Terra Luna. And I don't know what I would have done if suddenly my users would have lost all of their savings and we were-- we would have told them like, \"Oh, invest in Terra Luna, it's the third biggest asset in, in the crypto space.\" So, and I mean, then FTX, and I can go on and on, on, on how we've been really- She protected by Satoshi for, for being Bitcoin only." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:54", "start": 2993.85, "text": "I'm curious, how do most of your users currently find you? Is it sort of marketing? Is it like word of mouth? Is it, you know, online searching? Like, w-where, where do they find you?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "50:04", "start": 3003.55, "text": "there's a big word of mouth component, Central America has historically been underserved by these big companies, so if you've got a PayPal balance, you can't take it out in Guatemala or El Salvador. Airbnb, you know, I'm currently staying here in an Airbnb, and the owner of the Airbnb has a really hard time getting the money from Airbnb to a local account. so because we offer our users this virtual bank account in the US, now they can link this account to their PayPal balance, to their Airbnb balance, to their TikTok balance, and all these other global platforms and take money out. And once you have an Airbnb owner or a PayPal user take money out to the local currency through us, they become evangelists. The other thing is influencer marketing. Influencers do influence their community quite a lot, and that has helped. and then just traditional targeting ads on Facebook. Facebook works a lot in Latin America still, and Instagram. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:06", "start": 3065.7, "text": "Interesting. And I'm curious with your users, do you get some users who like didn't even care about the Bitcoin side of things? They just came because they wanted the fiat processing, the wi-- basically the wise part of it, but then later they learned, \"Oh, they've got Bitcoin, I should get that.\"" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "51:19", "start": 3078.93, "text": "We, we see it so much from, so we categorize our users by cohorts and we categorize you based off of your first transaction. So if your first transaction ever in Osmo was to receive money to your US virtual account, then we catalog you as a money receiver. But we see that all these money receivers, and we've had users send us messages saying, \"Well, I'm saving a hundred bucks on every transfer now, taking money out from Airbnb, and now what I'm doing is put...\" Putting that hundred, I'm actually putting fifty bucks, half of what I save, into Bitcoin 'cause why not, and I still have a fifty dollars saving. So actually that cohort of money receivers that came in first to use the money transfer aspect and didn't care about the Bitcoin aspect, is becoming bigger, the money receivers that are also become Bitcoiners. So it's pretty neat to see that indirectly we're orange-pilling all these, users that wouldn't have cared, and if we, if they had- seen an ad from us talking about Bitcoin, they would have just kept scrolling, but because we solved a real world problem from them, they trust us. The fact that we're not a casino and we make it really easy, like, \"Oh, you wanna invest your money? Well, Bitcoin is the only investment vehicle we've got in Osmo.\" We see more and more normies getting into Bitcoin through that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:41", "start": 3160.8, "text": "That's cool to see and to hear. and, on the Lightning side of things, I'm curious, do you have like, are you, do you doing much Lightning stuff or not really? Like, is it mainly just on-chain in and out?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "52:53", "start": 3173.06, "text": "We do Lightning. We actually started with Lightning first. There's another Guatemalan company, they're badasses. We've worked with them since day one. they're a, a Lightning infrastructure provider called Ibecks. And at the beginning, they only had Lightning. So we be-- we were born as a Bitcoin only, Lightning only exchange." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:14", "start": 3194.49, "text": "Even more restrictive, yeah. Yes." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "53:16", "start": 3196.19, "text": "And then we-- they added on-chain, so we had our users had the, capacity To send and receive on-chain payments, definitely on-chain still dominates, but we've seen crazy growth. I haven't, I, I don't have the number top of mind of the, of this past year, year-over-year growth, but twenty twenty-three to twenty twenty-four, if I'm not mistaken, it was about fourteen thousand seven hundred percent growth on Lightning from our users. so Lightning is growing. We do push Lightning. We teach people that Lightning is faster and cheaper, although network fees right now are pretty- Pretty cheap. But obviously, if you wanna send to your cold storage or if you wanna pay to a big exchange that has an integrated lightning, then you have to do it over on chain and, and still on chain is the majority, but lightning has been growing like crazy. And all of the money transfers we do behind the scenes are over lightning. Why? Because one, it's a lot cheaper, and two, on average, the payment settles in about sixty-four milliseconds, so there is no price volatility. And we've had VCs that aren't Bitcoiners tell us, \"Uh, you should use stable coins.\" Well, we've tried, and we've tried Base and Solana and Polygon. None of them are as fast as 64 milliseconds. So if I want to pay In Costa Rica, there's a, a real time payment system, local real time payment system, that doesn't exist, something like that doesn't exist in the US, but in Costa Rica and in Mexico and Brazil, they've got their own local payment systems, and if I wanna buy a pupusa from the street or a coconut at the beach in Costa Rica, I can pay From my balance, it converts the Bitcoin, it is then converted back to local currency and dispersed in real-- in less than three seconds, the guy has the money, the coconut seller has the money in his bank account, and based Polygon, Solana, they all take more than three seconds. So if I'm buying something at-- on the street, I want the payment to be as fast as possible. Obviously, if I'm paying rent and I need to make a five thousand dollar transfer, because Lightning gets a little tricky with really- Large volumes and per transaction, we just route that over stable coins because if you're paying five thousand dollars or three thousand dollars in rent, you don't need it to land in sixty-four milliseconds. It can take ten minutes, and it's still a lot faster than a wire transfer. but most of the transfers we do behind the scenes, especially for real-time payments, happen fiat lightning fiat, and the whole process is less than fifteen seconds, and the guy has it in, in, in his bank account in fiat, and, you know, he- I never knew that Lightning was behind that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:57", "start": 3356.58, "text": "That's fantastic, because I think it's really interesting to hear you explain this as well, because it's-- Lightning is real, right? And I think for a long time, a lot of the critics of Lightning and oftentimes like shitcoiners or just kind of Lightning haters are just sort of saying, \"Oh, no one's using that, it's a ghost town, whatever.\" I, I mean, yes, maybe it's not as much as what we kind of thought in the early days, but now there is real secular growth in Lightning volume, Users, it's actually there, there are real business uses of this, and it's, it is genuinely just growing over time because look, look at all these big exchanges who have now turned on Lightning support, and we're now seeing it actually act as this interoperability layer, coming to what you were saying about the Cash App and Venmo point as well. It's, it's a genuine interoperability layer, whether you're using ARK, Spark, Liquid, you know, just Lightning itself, and eCash, and on-chain, like, exchange to exchange, there's all these people who Because it is just the fastest choice." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "56:57", "start": 3417.36, "text": "And w-we've spoken about, you know, fiat over Lightning for fiat to fiat transactions. But whenever I can pay with Bitcoin anywhere in the world, and I just had a, a drink here and I paid obviously in Bitcoin I do so, but as a Maxi, I don't like spending my Bitcoin, and I have this dilemma of, well, if we don't spend it, then there's no adoption, but I don't wanna spend my Sats, and of course, I can spend and replace, but it's just cumbersome. So, you know, a big inspiration has been, Jack Maillard and Jack Dorsey, and when I saw Jack Maillard speak at a conference a while ago in Miami, and he explained how you can have a cash balance In strike and pay, and strike grabs that cash and converts it to Bitcoin and settles the transaction in Bitcoin. I said, \"Well, aha, we need to integrate this.\" So we were the first in Latin America to integrate Fiat to Lightning or Fiat payments over Lightning. And whenever I pay, as I did right now, I paid with my local Guatemalan Qatza balance because that's what I have in, in Osmo besides the Bitcoin, but I don't wanna spend Bitcoin, and Osmo grabs the Qatzales, converts it to Bitcoin, and I pay Paid in sixty-four milliseconds, fiat to Bitcoin. I don't know what they do on the other side. I don't know, I don't know if the terminals on the other side, yeah, they keep the Bitcoin, who knows, or they keep the Bitcoin, but it's really neat to be able to pay in Bitcoin without spending my Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:24", "start": 3503.93, "text": "Right, yeah, and that's interesting to see as all we're seeing that, I think, Cash App and Strike are kind of, as you mentioned, they're kind of doing that too. Anyway, we've only got 20 seconds left, so, where can people find you online?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "58:35", "start": 3515.14, "text": "osmomonney dot com is the website, and on Twitter it's osmo underscore money. and then on Twitter, I'm with my, with my name, piero underscore cohen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:45", "start": 3525.14, "text": "Excellent. Well, that's, that's it, that's all we have time for. So everyone, please put your hands together for Piero Cohen. Thank you. Joining me today is Scott, and you might know him online as Scott nine thousand. He's the instigator of the BitX project and also recently joined the board of the two five six Foundation. So we're gonna get into a bunch of things around Bitcoin mining, mining decentralization, open source, open source hardware and software, but give us a quick overview background on yourself, Scott. what's your background And, how did you kind of fall down this Bitcoin mining and open source rabbit" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "59:19", "start": 3559.11, "text": "hole? Hey, thanks. It's great to be here, Stephan. Super excited to be chatting with you about this. I'm very passionate about it. But, yeah, like you said, my name is is Scott. I go by Scott9000 on the internets. I, I'm an electrical engineer, electronics engineer, designer by training and, also by passion. So I have been involved in electronics for a long time, heard about Bitcoin, was like, \"Well, that's pretty cool, but not super, money focused myself.\" But it was when I kind of learned about mining, I was like, \"Oh my gosh, this is my two favorite things combined together,\" you know, working on hardware, designing hardware And Bitcoin. So I kind of screwed around with mining early on, back before ASICs, with FPGAs, I was downloading stuff from the internet, running it on, on, FPGA hardware that I had, GPUs, CPU mining, that kind of thing, and that was That was really fun, and then, ASICs came along, and I was like, \"Man, I, I wanna build one of those machines. Like, you know, I, I feel like I know how to do this.\" And I kind of set upon myself to see if I could build an ASIC miner myself, something that I could just learn how to do it, how to control it, and I was immediately struck with how few people are doing this. It was very, it was very closed off, proprietary, companies who were making miners weren't sharing what they were doing. So I just got one of those miners and took it apart and started reverse engineering it, digging into how it works, learning a ton in the process about how How mining works, how, how mining ASICs work, and just set about doing it myself. It was, it was just kind of a hobby project where I was screwing around, you know, like nights and weekends as an aside from my day job, but, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it. I, it started taking up more and more of my time away from my day job, and out of that, experimentation came the BitX, and, you know, for those who don't know, the BitX is a, is a small open source miner that people can run themselves. everything's published online, so if you wanna build it, you just do that. And initially, I, I kind of put out my designs out there and, I don't know, it was like crickets, like no one, no one was getting involved, and so I was very desperate for, for people who were excited about this and wanting to work on it And slowly but surely, people started coming along, lots of help, lots of extremely talented people who also wanted to kind of get into this. And that's, yeah, that's how the BidX was born. And that's what I've been working on basically full time for the last, couple years now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:57", "start": 3717.54, "text": "Yeah, and as you said, I think, for people who don't know, the BidX has become quite a popular, let's say, community project, whether you're focused on the educational side of things or whether you just wanna like play around and understand a bit" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:10", "start": 3730.77, "text": "Lightning and play around with it. like," }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:02:13", "start": 3733.17, "text": "I like to say it's a, it's a gateway drug, right? It's, it's a toy, but it's, it's a real miner. So, you know, it's low barrier to entry, right? You can just get one and start messing around and, you know, hopefully takes you down that rabbit hole. Right. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:26", "start": 3746.98, "text": "now probably a lot of people will be thinking, or if they're kind of familiar with the Bitcoin mining industry, they'll know, look, a lot of the, the industry fundamentally is closed source, right? It's just kind of closed source competition between large, you know, big providers in terms of Bitcoin mining hardware. Why, why, why is it important to you? Why does it matter that you want it to be open source in terms of hardware and software?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:02:52", "start": 3772.18, "text": "Bitcoin itself is, is fundamentally open source. When Satoshi first announced Bitcoin, you know, being open source was an important part of those announcements, and I think that We, I mean, we wouldn't be here today talking about Bitcoin had it not been an, an open source project. Had it been proprietary, it, it just, it wouldn't have made it, especially when Satoshi left the project. So that's, that's an important part of Bitcoin. it also is, is fundamentally decentralized. So open source development isn't driven by, you know, any one, organization or company or anything like that. And that's, that's very important part of decentralization, which is obviously a core part of Bitcoin. Bitcoin, it, it eliminates central points of control, in how Bitcoin works, who can do it, things like that. And mining itself was originally open source. people increment-- you know, incrementally built upon, what Satoshi released in the original, Bitcoin implementation, which had mining as a part of it But then when, ASICs came along, ASIC Bitcoin mining came along, it, I think that open source ethos just sort of fell by the wayside, and I think that that's too bad. I think in order for Bitcoin to be robust and, and resilient to control by whoever, you know, seeks to control it, it needs to have that open source component. So I think that's, you know, obviously Bitcoin mining is a very important part of Bitcoin. It's, you know, what secures the network. So We want to reject those centralized, you know, single points of failure, and so I really want to strive to, to keep these things open, to keep them open source so anyone who wants to can get involved. And, you know, do what they want." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:36", "start": 3876.71, "text": "Now, I'm curious your thought on the, let's say, the funding, the business model side of things that, I guess- Even, even like with AI now, we're starting to see examples where there are people who are kind of maintaining like open source projects, and then like it's just kind of getting read by an AI and kind of being implemented, and then the people who are maintaining that open source project, it's kind of difficult to get funding unless they are able to get patronage, right? Some kind of, you know, maybe this is where the foundation comes in. maybe you could explain for us a little bit about what, how you see the nature of competition in a fully open source, you know, environment" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:05:15", "start": 3915.33, "text": "Yeah, I think, I think obviously, Bitcoin mining is a very big business, right? We have companies, publicly traded companies with market caps in the like tens of billions of dollars. And right now, I think that there is kind of, there's a, a vulnerable spot that these companies have where they don't fully control the machines that are making them all their revenue, right? These, they're just- Kind of at the whim of current ASIC machine manufacturers, and, you know, in, in talks with some of these big miners, they, they don't like that either, right? They would like to have more control I liken it kind of to, the sort of birth of the web, right? Microsoft used to make a web server, and then once, Linux and the open source tools, like Apache, nginx came on, it's known as" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:04", "start": 3964.92, "text": "the Lamp Stack, right? That became a popular thing. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:06:07", "start": 3967.04, "text": "Yes. Exactly. Right. I, I feel like those proprietary tools just got dropped really quickly. And those companies now are, you know, they're making quite a bit of money on top of this open source stack, and I think that they correctly realize that the developers working on this are worth supporting. So that's sort of that funding model, that I think we can see in Bitcoin mining, where we can, you know, the open source stack on top of mining can provide real value to people that are making real money, and my hope is that, they'll want to see that kind of development continue and we'll support it. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06:42", "start": 4002.89, "text": "So, yeah, and obviously you're touching on a little bit there, we might as well go to the two five six Foundation. So explain for us a little bit about the goal there. As I understand, the idea is you're gonna have Who focus, who, who want mining decentralization and open source, they can contribute funds there, and then what is the foundation gonna do with that? And talk to us a bit about that." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:07:06", "start": 4026.06, "text": "Yeah, the, the 256 Foundation is a, it's a US nonprofit, it's a 501C3, and it's entirely pass-through, so companies can make tax-deductible, or anyone can make tax-deductible donations to the foundation, and we pass that through to developers directly. I think, I hope to set this up as kind of a, a sustainable model for, people that wanna be developing on this, and then, again, people who want to, you know, benefit from that, who want to use it. Obviously, it's not a requirement, right? This is open source, it's permissionless. You can just take these things and go. But I really do think we can provide some real value with this open source stuff to large miners who are making lots of money. I think we can help them make more money by giving them increased control equipment, reducing the risk that they might have with a, you know, essentially a sketchy Chinese company controlling everything. So that, that's the idea with the two fifty-six Foundation. We've actually, it's been around for about a year now. We received some initial funding from the industry And have put together, the beginnings of a fully open source mining stack, right? So we have, an open source, mining hash board we have an open source mining control board, we have an open source mining firmware, and then open source mining pool. So these, these are the beginnings of the complete stack. Obviously, it's very early it's probably not production ready, but I see really good potential there with that, with that project and providing some real value towards the industry. And then I guess the obvious question" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:38", "start": 4118.89, "text": "people might have is Could, could that open source stack be competitive with the closed source, you know, machines and models and, you know, how, how would," }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:08:48", "start": 4128.96, "text": "how, how would that, how would that work? It's absolutely going to crush it, hundred percent. Not just be competitive, it's going to obsolete the proprietary model I'm pretty confident. That's," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:59", "start": 4139.93, "text": "well, that's, that's good news. so let's talk a little bit about some of the components there. So you mentioned the, mining board, you said a con-- it was a control board? Yes, that's right. And then firmware, and then, like, let's say management software, like fleet management and this kind of thing. Talk to us a little bit about the, the different elements there, the components?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:09:18", "start": 4158.43, "text": "Yeah, you know, a miner is basically a collection of chips on a hash board. That's what does the actual work, and then the mining firmware runs on a control board and that controls it. So the firmware, control board, and hash board, that's like the key components of a miner. Right now, they're completely proprietary. if you wanted to change something in order to make more money or just have, you know, deeper, like, lower level control over your operation, it's incredibly difficult to do. So we, we at the, at Two Fifty Six Foundation saw those kind of as the, the initial sort of lowest hanging fruit where we can provide some real value. And then When we're, when actually when we're testing these things, it's important to do real mining, so the mining pool kind of came out of that, so we can, i-it's the whole stack, like top to bottom. We actually ran an event, last week in Nashville, called the Telehash. It was, it's a fundraiser where we invite people to point hash rate to us in hopes of solo mining a block to, to fund, these projects. But the cool thing was we ran it on this complete stack, and so we had, thousands of, Workers, people pointing hash rate to the pool from all around, we had our, our own equipment running, pointing hash rate to it, and it really came through. I mean, it's, it's performant. This is actually real production-grade stuff, even though it's so early. So I see a lot of potential there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:10:45", "start": 4245.37, "text": "And sorry, one other thing I probably missed there is I was talking about like kind of software for managing your, your mining, and I think, Give just announced, Tether are doing something there. Maybe you wanna touch on that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:10:59", "start": 4259.76, "text": "one of the things that's really important is if you have a large fleet of miners, it's an incredibly complex system, right? There's lots of moving pieces here, there's lots of things you need to get control over. And so a, a miner management platform makes a lot of sense, right? You, you can't have people running around to each machine and, you know, adjusting it or restarting it, and so that's what Tether's working on with the mining OS. is providing, a platform to do that. And this isn't just managing miners, it's managing all the equipment that goes along with it, whether you have transformers or you have cooling equipment, and then the other side taking advantage of pricing signals and sort of controlling that whole system based on it. And then of course, just give, just announced, that that whole stack is gonna be open source, which to me is a huge win, a huge win, because if we were relying on one centralized- entity to provide all the functionality for all these esoteric, you know, pieces of equipment that people might be using, i-it's just an impossible task. So I really think that, that adds a lot of, potential to this stack And we're going to be working on incorporating the, the tools that the 256, foundation is making, those four projects that I mentioned, making sure that they have first class support in mining OS." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:12:20", "start": 4340.2, "text": "And then I guess another element, and I, I believe 256 Foundation might have been, contributing on this even at the pool level, right? So as an example, I know Jungly, I did a podcast with Jungly, and he was talking, and his work is now P to pool V2, so that's kind of like even above or another level, maybe at the pool level. Do you wanna touch on" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:12:39", "start": 4359.03, "text": "that? Yeah, sure. Jungly, shout out to Jungly, man. That guy is a giga brain. He does such good work. He's been working on, he was working on Braid Pool for a while, and he's been working on, sort of the reboot of P2Pool, which is a decentralized pool. And we basically roped him in and we're like, \"Hey, you wanna work on this pool software called Hydrapool for Two Fifty Six Foundation?\" And so that's not like a competitor towards Raid Pool or P2Pool. It, it actually is a, we're, we're, we're taking it down. It's a really simple mining pool, right? And the idea with Hydrapool is it's something that people can take and try out these new, share accounting or payment schemes, and I think that that's really important. So I imagine this future where we have hash rate miners, we have them in everything, right? They're, they're perfectly, they're very well suited towards heat reuse, towards stranded energy And these are new applications that aren't really, they're not really targeted by existing miner manufacturers, but this, this market is gonna be huge. And so when we have that, I have absolutely no doubts that we are gonna be moving that way. When we have that, you know The existing pool structures that we have, the, the very centralized pool structures that we have, isn't going to cut it, right? Just if, if we've, if we've decentralized all the, the physical hash rate, all the machines, got them spread out into every corner of the world, but they're all still pointed to centralized pools We haven't won, we haven't solved the problem. So that's where I'm very excited about these different, strategies people are trying with mining pools, and I think we really need to encourage that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:21", "start": 4461.56, "text": "Interesting. And so I suppose we can talk through, get this kind of a spectrum there of like decentralization at the pool level as well, because you can have- People just point their hash rate to the pool and just, you know, trust me, bro. And then you can have, I guess like SV2 or Dartum sort of style where you're pointing your hash rate to the pool, but the-- there's an element of you get to choose your block template, and then maybe Peterpool V2 and Braidpool are kind of in the next category where it's like you're mining, but there's not kind of one centralized pool, it's kind of decentralized in terms of payouts, and block template selection, and then Wave or on the You know, so like solo mining if you're like a hardcore, but obviously that has its own challenges. Do you wanna just comment a little bit on, on that and, you agree or disagree or how do you see it?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:15:10", "start": 4510.93, "text": "Yeah. Solar mining is, is the original mining, right? This is where you are creating your own block templates and you are, mining directly to your own node. And the, the-- That was how it originally was. The, the downside there is that you don't get any incremental payouts, right? It's, it's all or nothing. Like, and the variability you have to deal with, like that-- Yeah. You don't get a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15:33", "start": 4533.66, "text": "smooth" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:15:34", "start": 4534.06, "text": "payout. Yeah, yeah. They call it the mining variance. And so if you have high electricity costs, obviously you're- The bill, your electricity bill is gonna come every month, and if you're, if you've hit a period of bad luck, where you're, you're just not getting paid out, that can be really difficult 'cause the bill's gonna come either way. And so a lot of miners seek to reduce their variance in payouts by joining pools and kind of all collectively aggregating their hash rate together and then splitting the rewards amongst them to, to kind of smooth out those periods of variance. It makes a lot of sense, it makes a lot of sense. But the problem is when you start pooling together, that's just a natural centralization, right? It's like someone needs to be running that pool, and they need to basically orchestrate the payouts, right? They need to say, \"Okay, you contributed this much, you contributed this much, well, now we need to divide the payouts amongst you.\" And then on the other side, they need to construct, well, traditionally they need to construct the block templates, right? So they need to, they need to decide what the miners are actually mining, and then they need to decide how much they get paid out. That's a great model for reducing variance, making sure that it's fair for everyone who's contributing to this pool. But it is a, it is an avenue for control. It starts to reduce the number of points of control and, and a number of, potential points for censorship, for failure, it's It's tough. It's a tough problem to solve. Now, this is what, things like, Ocean, P2Pool v2, BraidPool are attempting to solve. It's like, how can we have this, this collaborative pool where people are working together, but it's, it's not under a single point of control? You know what I mean? And I don't know if we have the ideal solution yet. I'm not quite sure how, what that ideal solution is, but we definitely need to move in that direction, and that's kind of what, the goal is with, with Hydrapool and the 256 Foundation initiatives. It's like, look There's lots of smart people out there. Let's give them the tools so they don't have to recreate from ground zero just to try out a new idea. you, you actually talked to VNPRC, a friend of mine who's working on a, a really interesting-- Hashpool, right? Yeah. Yeah. Hashpool. So it's, it's obviously, it's a brand new idea. We don't know how this works, but, you know, his thought was like, \"Hey, what if instead of, you know, for every share that the miner has mined" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:18:06", "start": 4686.11, "text": "Your, your shares. It's, it's a, seems like a brilliant idea to me. We wanna lower the, difficulty to actually get a working example that people can try on and, and iterate on that type of thing" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:18:19", "start": 4699.72, "text": "Yeah. let's talk a little bit about kind of broader what's going on. Obviously, AI is a massive thing nowadays, the last few years, and historically in Bitcoin, we've seen this, the rise of the public mining companies or so-called mega miners And what we've seen actually is that a lot of these mega miners have been rotating either partially or fully out of Bitcoin mining to doing AI or hyperscaler or kind of, HPC, high-powered compute, uses. What does that mean for the Bitcoin industry if some of these mega miners are shifting and rotating to do more AI work?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:18:58", "start": 4738.76, "text": "The, these miners are amazing, right? They're, they're so, you know, brave really to, to ape into these kind of things, right? To get into Bitcoin mining, to, to create billion-dollar companies that are spending millions of dollars a month on electricity and make it work. Their, their fiduciary duty to their investors is to essentially make as much money, with these power purchase agreements that they have, as far as I understand it. So it, it does make sense that when they see, sort of greener pastures in, in some sort of related field, that they would shift over to that. I can totally understand that. As far as what does this mean for Bitcoin mining, I'm, I'm very bullish on it. I'm very bullish on it, right? The, the mining industry has been very focused on that paradigm, which is the large companies who are essentially plugging into the grid. It makes sense, that's where all the money is currently And as a result, all of the machines, all the infrastructure, all the development has gone in that direction. As we start to see that change, I think people are gonna get more miners, you know, and miner developers are gonna get more creative, right? There's other avenues we can go after. I think the, the sort of alternative mining, industry has had trouble getting started because of this chicken and the egg problem where, you know, manufacturers are like, \"Well, there's no money there, no one's doing it,\" and these alternative miners are like, \"We don't have the money to do it.\" It's, it's tough to get off the ground. So I hope that this, I don't, not breaking apart, but sort of, you know, fracturing of that industry will create people who now have an interest, in, in going after these other avenues, whether it be selling chips or raising money to do these things, I, I generally think it's a good thing for Bitcoin. And," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:20:45", "start": 4845.79, "text": "speaking to that, it's also- Because think about it, these, a lot of these mining machines aren't just gonna disappear, it's that they are going to, let's say the mega miners who are rotating to AI, they're gonna sell those machines, and likely at a discount to what they paid, obviously, 'cause they've been used, and then some small or medium-sized miner might be buying those machines and plugging them in. So it's sort of, it's rotating the hand-- the ownership of those mining machines is gonna rotate." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:21:15", "start": 4875.45, "text": "Absolutely, absolutely. And then, you know, there's, there's large mining manufacturers, right? And they, they have a pipeline going forward, right? They have invested tons of money in the infrastructure to build these machines, research and design, contracts at TSMC and things like that. So they have a long pipeline. They need to sell these things, and so it's, you know, there's the huge market for used machines, and then I think going forward, like these chips, which can be used in a wide variety of applications, I, I think will become available available for the kinds of stuff that we're working on, which to me is very exciting." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:21:49", "start": 4909.94, "text": "Yeah, so I think there's new possibilities there, and I guess interesting is we've seen, I believe in the US there was some weather, like, you know, some weather events happening, and as a result, we saw curtailment, right? So the hash rate of the network dropped. And so some people who weren't aware, they were like, \"Oh, well, is that like a problem for me?\" It's like, \"No, actually, some of these Bitcoin mining" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:22:16", "start": 4936.67, "text": "Those mining companies make a ton of money by curtailing, right? They, they get paid to turn off by their, their particular, grid. You know, I guess generally the way it works is the, the grid says like, \"Oh, hey, we have a weather event coming, everyone in their mom is gonna wanna turn on their heater, so we could really use that electricity.\" So rather than, you know, firing up another power plant, which you can't do, on a short notice, they'd say, \"Hey, miners, we'll pay you to turn off.\"" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:22:45", "start": 4965.31, "text": "That has been a, a strategy for large miners for a long time. They call it demand response, and I think they see significant revenue from that, so they're, they're very dialed in to do that. I think that will continue it, it makes" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:22:59", "start": 4979.01, "text": "a lot of sense, and maybe even small and medium miners might start to tap into these kinds of things also. I don't know, but I guess maybe there's an academic conversation to be had of, is that a good thing for Bitcoin or is that like people getting, miners are getting an outside incentive from outside of the Bitcoin system? I don't know, it's hard to say." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:23:16", "start": 4996.32, "text": "I do know that, yeah, if you wanna be a part of these demand response programs, like, you know, you agree to shut off in times of, of need from the" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:23:27", "start": 5007.85, "text": "Many megawatts, and I'm currently using this many megawatts, and I promise I will shut it off, right? They don't, they don't want, like rando in his backyard kind of thing. Yeah, they don't necessarily want small players, rando players, because they actually need you to reduce your load. So if you don't have the load to begin with, it's a little bit dicey." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:23:46", "start": 5026.34, "text": "I see. So maybe it's more like medium private miners could maybe get into that game. But the other topic that might be interesting is this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:23:57", "start": 5037.49, "text": "heat It's fun to see, interest in this. So tell us, what is that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:24:03", "start": 5043.21, "text": "Yeah, the HeatPunk movement. Fantastic name. started by Tyler Stevens, out of the space in Denver. he's, he's really going after this heat reuse market, which to me is obvious. It's been, it's been sort of nascent, up until this point, just because there haven't been anyone really working on it. I think we've known for a long time that heat reuse is a Fantastic idea. It makes a ton of sense. A Bitcoin miner is a hundred percent efficient heater, right? All the power that goes into a Bitcoin miner comes out as heat, but you also get what Tyler calls waste Bitcoin. So the benefit over a regular, you know, space heater or hot water heater or anything like that, right, is it takes the same amount of power, you get the same amount of heat, but then if it's a miner, you get this waste Bitcoin. So it, it essentially, pays you to heat whatever it is you're heating. So the, the HeatPunk movement is a, it's a movement of Bitcoiners, of Bitcoin miner developers, and people from the industry, like think people that install hot water heaters, people that design systems for larger buildings. Tyler has some insane statistic that I can't remember right now, but like something like half of the world's energy goes towards heat, right? The half of the world's electrical energy goes towards heat, and like half of that is comfort heat, meaning like I just want it to be a little bit warmer in my house. Those are like Perfect, perfect examples for Bitcoin mining heat reuse. it's, it's slow getting it started because we don't have the equipment to build this. There are, there are companies that are working on it, right? Heatbit has come out with a fantastic space heater. There's a couple other people that have come out with hot water heaters. Those manufacturers right now have a very, difficult task ahead of them, which is making a consumer product Where you can't actually get a hold of the ASICs, right? You, you can't go to market, you can't realistically go to market by taking old Bitmain machines and putting the hashboards into it, right? You can't, you know, make a, a retail consumer product with sort of e-waste in it. so they need to be, they need to get first class support from miner manufacturers, and that's, that's a really big thing that we are pushing for with the two five six Foundation. Tyler has joined the board of the two five six Foundation, as long, with me, and I think I, I see really, really awesome things to come. We have a, Tyler is throwing, the Heatpunk Summit at the end of February at the space in, Denver, and it's, it's really cool. Lots of Bitcoiners are gonna be there, lots Workers are gonna be there and like, you know, plumbers and people in the industry, right? It's like, how can we, how can we make this work?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:26:51", "start": 5211.99, "text": "Interesting. So it's like maybe longer term, we might start to see just normal everyday heaters and water heaters integrate this kind of Bitcoin mining technology to be either, to either make the heater cost less, or even pay you out something, a small amount." }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:27:09", "start": 5229.14, "text": "Yeah, absolutely. I mean that If you, if you look at it for a second, it's a totally obvious application for Bitcoin mining, and it's not that hard to do. at, the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit last week, Schnitzel set up a hot tub. We had a hot tub. It was kinda cool. It was super cold out, and we had a bunch of people sitting in this bubbling hot tub, entirely heated by Bitcoin miners." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:27:31", "start": 5251.85, "text": "And then what do they do about the, the noise? Like they must have ways to minimize the noise, from the mining, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:27:38", "start": 5258.46, "text": "Yeah, in the, in the, they call it the hash tub. he was using a off-the-shelf, what's miner, it's a hydro miner. And, you know, it, right now it's a little bit hacky, right? It's a bunch of things cobbled together 'cause there isn't really the, parts to, to do this properly, but it's, it's hacked together and the miner isn't really that loud when you don't have fans on it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:28:01", "start": 5281.12, "text": "Gotcha. Okay. So yeah, but it's certainly an interesting direction that we might see things go. we've got about, you know, thirty seconds left. Any last comment you wanna make about the future of Bitcoin mining and open source?" }, { "speaker": "guest_4", "time": "01:28:11", "start": 5291.5, "text": "Yeah, the, the, the message here is demand open source. It makes perfect sense for the entire mining stack, top to bottom. Get more control over your machines. Don't be, sort of a victim to what miner manufacturers want you to do. Demand open source. We can make this happen." } ] }