 Dan, welcome to the show, brother. How are you doing? Doing well. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Right before this, you and I were talking about the weather and the quarantine. I'm like, you guys, you know, at least in Toronto, it's like cold. And it was a little bit flurries of snow today. So for me, I'm like, fuck it. I'm staying inside, no matter what. But like, I would lose my mind if I'm staring outside. I'm like, God damn it's fucking 25 degrees. I got to get outside. Yeah. It's, you know, it's a little hard to work from home when you look out and I've got a view of the ocean and it's bright and sunny and you see sailboats in the bay. It's makes it a little tougher to stay inside. Yeah. I can kind of relate. I lived in the West Coast, British Columbia, Kelowna for a couple of years. And they have much more mild, warmer type of climate in Toronto. And you would see the Rockies on the outskirts and like emerald green lakes. And then like you're working inside, like, what the fuck am I doing inside? It's certainly a bit easier to work inside if you're snowed in or you get those. Yeah. Well, you heard the theory, right? They have like the whole productivity theory, like the latitudes, depending on where you are in the latitude, they have a different level of productivity. You know, that makes a lot of sense. My family is originally from Minnesota, so Minnesotans, you know, it's pretty close to Canada and it's quite cold up there as well. And Minnesotan people. Well, you know, the major thing I got you on the show is I want to talk about Bitcoin, obviously, and we have a big event coming up. When is it? It's like three weeks from now, something like that. And so the Bitcoin having, what's your thoughts on that? Do you have any predictions or this is just going to be a fly by and business as usual? Well, it was kind of funny. So me and some guys on Twitter were talking about, you know, what constitutes an OG? And a lot of people think like an OG could be represented by the number of boom bus cycles you've gone through. Through early 13, late 13 and 2017. But what's funny is I've only been through one happening. So even though I've been in Bitcoin a really long time, you know, I came in just after the 2012 happening. So, you know, it's kind of crazy that there's only been two before this. And Bitcoin is still very, very young and its journey to become a global money. You know, what's there was a lot of initial anxiety with the 2012 and 2016 happenings where people were worried about Bitcoin security and they're also worried about the mining death spiral. And we've largely seen those narratives debunked through 2012 and 20, primarily through 2016 and also through, you know, 18, 19, where we saw the market dip and 20, you know, we just had that dip to 3,800. We've seen the difficulty adjustment equilibrate. What that means is essentially the difficulty adjustment isn't this, you know, Bitcoin isn't this thing where miners can become overextended. And then all mining ceases to exist because it's unprofitable because the price drops. No, there's a mechanism that equilibrates the system and that's called the difficult error. As more and more miners leave, the difficulty to mine and Bitcoin block becomes less and less. And it also means that the block reward, which is the reward given to miners to mine Bitcoins or mine Bitcoin blocks, that is now distributed to less and less miners, which means that those miners can now be profitable. So Bitcoin are a built in mechanism to stabilize the system. Now, my question for that is this. So I agree with everything Bitcoin. I think that the difficulty score they have is one of the most ingenious things possible. And so to clarify, more miners come in, becomes much more difficult. Yeah, that's a great simple way to put it. All right, less miners left, less difficult. The question, the question I have though is there is a capital cost to run the mining rigs. So to buy the A6, to rent the space, to pay for electricity. So there's a big war and who can get the cheapest kilowatts per hour? Is I don't know the numbers on top of my head, but with the difficulties and with that being said, with the overhead capital cost, is there, is there a scenario where miners, do you think miners will be mining for a long time if they're in the red? Yeah, so what's nice is that we can look at equivalent industries like other commodities like gold and look at gold miners and their financials and how they operate through these, you know, boom bus cycles. And a lot of them operate at a loss for years. You know, you spend a ton of time sourcing the electricity, getting the long term contract for that. So many are willing to operate at a loss for a little while. You know, the duration of that I can't really speak to because I've never operated a Bitcoin mine. You know, there's different levels based on people's different. Is it fair to say, though, since they're doing proof of work for everything and they can just switch their hashing power to some other chain temporarily to get some type of rewards? With Bitcoin miners, they're only useful for Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and any other Shah 256 hash algorithms. So that's what protects Bitcoin, in essence, is the game theory behind these miners. So the miners purchase these these computers called A6 or these processors called ASICs are capable of doing which ASICs that name represents application specific integrated circuit. And what that means is that they can only be useful for mining Bitcoin. Now, some of the Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV, they also use the same mining algorithm. So technically, you could switch that equipment over to mine on those chains, but those chains are very, very tiny in comparison to Bitcoin. So, you know, these machines are really only useful for mining Bitcoin itself. If it's not profitable to do that, they're not really worth a lot. And historically, so you mentioned the two haveings that we had. And like you said, Bitcoin is I'm actually I always tell people this story. I I entered this space long time ago and I remember it was just Bitcoin before Ethereum and you would go to a meetup group and it's like, hey, here's seven weirdos. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we hit it on the head. Yeah. And here we are. I don't fucking know, seven, eight years later, and I'm looking the industry and I know people are saying we got a long way to go, but I'm fucking in on shock of where the industry is within seven years. I mean, it's incredible in San Francisco, January 2013, there was only a dozen people at the Bitcoin meetup. That's it in San Francisco is like the tech hub of the world and pretty incredible to see the growth out here. And I went to those meetups in January 2013. So I saw it for firsthand. I mean, it was just a cooler of PBRs and this kind of run down place called 20 Mission, which was an old kind of crack house converted into a hacker house. That's where Bitcoin started in San Francisco. It's a it's a wild it's wild to see the journey this far. And that's why I'm more bullish than ever about Bitcoin is you and I have been there when, you know, Gox collapsed or Silk Road collapsed. And all these sort of these different, like different, you know, each crisis brings about a different attack on your faith in Bitcoin. It's road collapsed is our dark markets. The only demand for Bitcoin. And we found out that it wasn't, you know, like store value gold 2.0 was it was a bigger demand for Bitcoin? Yeah. Well, I never understood the the dark markets like people forget like, especially it's a honeypot. If you raise your hand and use any on or off ramps is like, hi, here I am. You know, the coins are pretty traceable unless you use coin join or other mechanisms to obfuscate your trail. So yeah, you're right. You know, what's funny is that 80% of dark market transactions are still done in Bitcoin, which I found really surprising. I thought I'd check the numbers. It would have been more of a mixture of Monero and C-Cache. Monero is the second largest, but C-Cache didn't even register as 1%. Why is that liquidity? You think I'm not sure. I think it's maybe a network effect thing. You know, there's certain narratives that circulate around a coin and become kind of the standard. You know, it's a shelling point for transactions, right? Where people go, I want to do a dark market transaction. Well, if I want to go do that, I know Bitcoin is accepted by all the different participants in the ecosystem. Interesting. This is why I read it. But someone in the government in the U.S. they're charging somebody for creating the coin drawing software or like a mixer software? Well, he did an explicit coin, not coin drawing mechanism, but he did an obfuscation mechanism where he would essentially mix the coins manually like on his own servers. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think it was open source code. I might be wrong on that, but I think that was the difference between that and like coin drawing, which is a somewhat open source infrastructure and things like coin, like joint market is definitely a source. So I'm not exactly sure, but I believe that's why he got flagged and taken down. But yeah, definitely there's kind of an attack on privacy across the board. So that's a pretty scary thing to kind of see come to the ecosystem. Do we have any proposals? Because I know they were talking about, fuck, what's it called? Schnorr signatures to be implemented. But that eliminates the amount, correct me if I'm wrong, that eliminates the amount in the transaction, but that doesn't eliminate who you are. I believe Schnorr is more around signature and making the signature smaller or being able to take multiple signatures and it all look identical. You need Schnorr plus an implementation of a couple other mechanisms to really obfuscate coins well. So Schnorr in and of itself isn't a great isn't going to improve privacy that much, but combining that technology with coin, plus one or two other things makes it more private. And they're planning to put this in the actual within the protocol itself. That's right. It would be, I believe, a soft fork upgrade. But I think the main value right now is just more the more capabilities, bringing more capabilities to the Bitcoin blockchain in terms of what it can do, signature types. It adds privacy in terms of the types of signatures. So all the signatures evidently look very similar. And then I believe it makes them much smaller. So you would essentially be able to have more transactions per block. What's your take on the whole narrative of store value digital gold when it comes to Bitcoin? Right. Well, that's where we see, you know, we can look back at Satoshi's intentions. We can look at how the protocol was constructed and we can look at how it's used now. You know, Bitcoin is planted in the in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis weeks after Lehman Brothers collapsed and Satoshi in the first block in the blockchain blockchain wrote a UK Chancellor on the verge of second bailout for banks. I mean, Bitcoin wasn't here to replace visa to like have cheaper credit card payments. Bitcoin is here to like fucking take down governments. I mean, that's that's incredible. Like this is this is a revolutionary idea that will have monumental change for humankind. So with that, money is one of the most important things in the world. It's a store value, unit of account and medium of exchange. And whenever a new money comes about, you know, you had shells, beads, then you had gold and fiat money, and now you have Bitcoin. Each one has a curve of adoption because humans are animals. After all, we don't immediately recognize a new idea as valid and totally open to it. One of my favorite account, the pessimist archive, pessimist archives. Yeah. And so what they do is they scan, they look through old newspapers from like 1850 to like 1920 and they pull out really hilarious takes on bicycles and radios and everything else because people innately are afraid of new technology. It's just a human nature. So so with Bitcoin becoming a new money wasn't going to happen overnight. And the first stage of it becoming a new money is people recognizing it as somewhere they want to store value. Bitcoin has very good characteristics as a store value asset. Similarly, like gold is very hard to seize, you know, for example, you know, seizing all of our bank accounts can be done at the snap of someone's fingers. But going through and going door to door and knocking down each door and trying to find where someone hit their gold or their Bitcoin is extremely difficult. And so it's got those those feet. It's extremely hard to seize. It's can it's immutable in terms of transacting with it. It has a finite amount or a and then the production curve of it is costly. That's why it's called proof of, you know, essentially the proof of work of the costiness of production. Gold as gold is demanded, more and more of the supply is sourced through an extremely costly method. If gold could just be found in infinite quality, infinite amounts and very easily, then it wouldn't be very valuable. So Bitcoin mimics that same functionality with the proof of work algorithm. And so all these other characteristics essentially make Bitcoin a good store value asset. It is a gold 2.0 and it was planted in the middle of 2008 financial crisis because at that time we lost faith in the institutions that surrounded us like our central banks or governments and our banks. And Bitcoin gives everyone the option to store their value into something that can't be seized very easily. It can be transferred anywhere. And that is a huge monumental change. And it's the first step in becoming a money later down the road. It will eventually be widely held enough that we might then transact with other people for everyday goods and services. And then maybe those items will finally be priced in Bitcoin. But that takes decades. Doesn't happen overnight. Certainly the movement from shells to gold probably took hundreds of years. Gold to fiat took decades and Bitcoin is essentially doing it in the same amount. You know, a few decades, I think we'll see if Bitcoin will have succeeded or failed. I think if anything, what we're seeing right now, we thought we thought that 08 was fucked. Oh, it was it. Oh, it's nothing compared to this. I mean, not in my wild. I wouldn't say dreams because I don't dream for these moments to happen. I just predicted that they would. It's we Bitcoin is built to give us another option. And and we thought that there's something like this might happen, but not at this magnitude. I mean, I never would have believed ever that this sort of magnitude that this occur, just the infinite amount of money, literally infinite amount of money printing, the bailing out of every single industry. It's like we forgot what capitalism was. Yeah. So I couldn't be more excited for Bitcoin, Bitcoin's performance in this environment, because this is exactly what Bitcoin is built for. I have a couple of follow up with two follow up questions. So the two two two mediums of exchange right now for liquidity is OTC and centralized exchanges. They come with their pros and cons. Obviously, it's a weird gray area because they've got to be within the regulated space, but they're dealing with global customers, but they got to figure out on ramps, which is dealing with the banks and off ramps. Yeah, you know it very well. Both of them, like I have cognitive distance at the same time. I think what they're doing is great, but there's a dark side to that, because also that is a center point of failure to control a bunch of Bitcoin. That's where all the flow goes to. So I'm trying to figure out like the vision that Bitcoiners have, where it's like peer to peer, which is great. I can meet up with Den in person and we can transact. We can transact wallet to wallet, you know, globally around the world. But I still need to take some form of value outside of the crypto ecosystem to onboard within the ecosystem. Do you see in the future, do you see trends that we are going more and more towards maybe a non-custodial decentralized exchange versus centralized exchange? Yeah, that's a good question. And I know that Jesse, you know, the CEO of Kraken, it's funny because we're one of the largest exchanges out there. So we're custodial, you know, we custody people's assets for them. But Jesse pushes our users to be self-custodied. He actually encourages people to take their coins off Kraken and go store them themselves. Kraken is a very like core crypto ethos company where we do believe those fundamental values of not your keys, not your coins. And we were the only exchange effort to do an audit, the proof of keys. We did that a few years back, but we're the only exchange effort to prove that we had the amount of coins that we had on our exchange at a moment in time. So very much myself and Kraken very much feel the same way. When it comes to the actual numbers, I haven't looked at them myself, but I heard that they're pretty decent. I haven't heard like there's an overwhelming trend of coins moving from non-custodial to custodial, so that's good. Again, I haven't looked at the data, but I haven't heard that propagated as a narrative. So to me, that would seem that maybe it's remaining static or it's going the other way very slightly. So that's a good trend, knowing that like more and more people aren't just doing custody. They're eventually learning about self-custody and moving their coins off of these centralized venues because certainly Kraken, Coinbase, you know, we're companies that exist in the real world. We have bank accounts and we're that physicality and that attachment to the real world does make us a point where, you know, a government could come and ask for certain things. So, you know, I think in the future, you touched on a good point where like Bitcoin's weak point right now is that a large amount of volume is in these centralized entities where governments could come try to seize it. Now, what's interesting about Bitcoin is this isn't like the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq or there's one venue where all the trading happens. There's many different venues. There's Kraken, Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, and these are all over the world. And so for Bitcoin to be really, you know, taken down or for Bitcoin to be attacked, you would have to go after all of these venues simultaneously, which would require all the governments across the world working together. But what do you say, would you say the OTC, though, is greater volume than the retail on the actual exchange order books? That's a good question. You know, back in 2017 and 2019, I think the narrative of like OTC was like this huge sort of a shadow market or shadow volume was kind of a big narrative. I think as, you know, OTC provides you separate. So OTC is great to use, for example, if you're worried about slippage, like, let's say I want to sell $10 million right now, but I don't want to go out across five different exchanges, open up five different windows and slowly bleed my order into the market. I just want to call up Kraken OTC. It's just easier for me, man. Honestly, it's like email, phone, hey, sell, buy, buy. That's it. Exactly. They bake in a small spread, you know, especially for really gigantic orders as well. Like you could be getting the billions or hundreds of millions of dollar size. And so that's a very attractive option for large sizes. Also, if you don't want to telegraph your position, kind of want to go through an intermediary and disguise it in a way. Let's say you don't want an exchange to know you're moving X amount of volume. So it's a little bit of a privacy thing. I mean, the OTC desk will know who you are, but five different exchanges won't know who you are. And probably see more go to the lit order book side. Just as, you know, working with APIs is easier in the spreads on OTC might still be larger for some of these large volume institutions. So if you're a market maker and you're trading 10 million dollars plus a month, Kraken, your, your maker fee is zero percent and your taker is 10 bits. 10 bits. Yeah. You'd be hard, you'd be hard pressed to find an OTC desk that'll quote you to 10 bits spread. That's pretty tight. Yeah, it is really tight. Yeah. Yeah. Back in, you know, back in 17, 18, I think the spreads, especially with some of the alts were like one or two points, a hundred, 200 bits. And that was pretty amazing because anyone can do, you know, anyone can run an OTC desk then. And so that we saw a lot of the OTC desk consolidate over time to where you only really have like the big ones now are Kraken OTC, Cumberland, you know, Kraken OTC, Bot Circle OTC. Yeah. Um, and let's see, uh, you've got like OSL and a few others left that are really the genesis, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Genesis would be a big one. Um, so there's a handful of big ones. And then one of those bigger ones told me a stat that, you know, there's around 30 total that are still operating. But I think at the peak, there was like over a hundred. So the very, the industry has become very consolidated. Your operations as an OTC desk have to be very, very tight. You have to have X Wall Street types. You have to be really focused on scraping every bit you can and executing that order properly. So I was talking to the OTC desk, those doing stuff with Genesis. Um, it was interesting. I don't know if you heard this as well, but they were miners, some institutions were buying the miners, the institutions were paying a premium on virgin bitcoins from the miners directly. Yeah. So this is a widely popularized story that I still haven't really seen a lot of. I haven't seen the data, but I've heard this firsthand from people in the industry. We've all heard the story, right? So, um, so two things, you know, this kind of goes back to our privacy argument where some people argue that bitcoins fungibility or the ability to, you know, transact one Bitcoin for one Bitcoin. Yeah. Has been broken. Um, which it hasn't because there is no secondary market for tainted bitcoins. Correct. They can't log into Bitfinex and trade tainted bitcoins versus clean bitcoins. What the fucks a tainted Bitcoin? Exactly. Every point. Yeah. I mean, and there's almost every Bitcoin out there. If the Bitcoins tainted, I don't know what about the US dollar? Yeah. I think like, was it some X percentage? Okay. Lot of them. Yeah. There's still, you know, one unit is the one unit. And so Bitcoin, we haven't seen the fungibility broken on that side. Now, some people like to quote this stator on virgin coins selling for like, you know, I've heard 50 to 100 bits over spot. But I believe that this isn't necessarily representative of them being clean or not. If you're paying 50 to 100 bits for clean bitcoins and you're overpaying, it's really stupid to do that. There's no logical reason to do that. It's more of like, if you want to, if for a vanity thing, sure. So it's either vanity or if I want a steady supply of Bitcoins contractually, the best like, I can enter into a contract with a miner to distantly get X amount of Bitcoins every, you know, let's say hour. And so with that, like, I will know I'll get X amount of coins. I don't have to worry about slippage or anything else. I know exactly how many coins I'll get. I don't have to worry about different venue risk. I can just get it directly from the miner. So you're kind of tapping straight into the source. And I think people do pay a small premium to be able to tap right into those fresh coins. Guarantee. Yeah. Yeah. My final question. So we saw the explosion in Ethereum for DeFi. Composability and their experimenting crazy shit they're doing. I sit back and I fuck I've been in space forever. I know them and I don't know what the fuck half this shit is hurts my head. But let them experiment. I'm actually my my question I'm more curious for is like you have places like more companies like fuck, what are they called? They're New York, the lending company. Block five. Block five. Then in Toronto, you have lead in. And so you put up collateral. But once again, it's Fiat. So you still got to go through a regulatory process as a pain in the ass. One thing I give credit with least in Ethereum is OK, I can put my ETH get died or put my ETH and gets easy as fuck. Like really, really, really easy. Question is like, well, why hasn't someone built something like that on Bitcoin? I do believe that there is someone working on that. I think it came out yesterday. The atomic loans. I know the guys in Toronto. I know them well. Yeah, I actually had a conversation with them a few weeks back where they were they just looking to see how Bitcoiners felt about different DeFi sort of products, if those DeFi products were brought to Bitcoin. So from the best of my understanding, they're kind of a bridge between Bitcoin and Ethereum and using smart contracts with both to enable this. You know, there's a very, I think like the decentralized lending or I think that's a very interesting kind of first you know, for DeFi, like a lot of people see me as a Bitcoin maximalist and they don't really realize like I've mined prime coin, I've day traded litecoin, I know you're making money. Right. I'm getting cryo preserved when I die. I fly drill and trip on not like a conservative individual. You know, it's mainly because I'm very skeptical about new technology. You should be. Right. And the people that I've seen that are really exceptional in Silicon Valley are always inquisitive but skeptical. And so, you know, with like Maker, we saw Maker break during that dip. Now they have a lawsuit against them for that. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, people are like, oh, you're just a Bitcoin maximalist for not like, you know, wholeheartedly jumping in on the idea. And I'm like, well, we saw that it broke like and they'll be like, oh, the code didn't break. I'm like, yeah, but your game theory did, which is even worse than your code because the code just enables the game theory to work because all these this code eventually touches humans make these things work. You know, so with DeFi products with Bitcoin, you know, one, I think Bitcoin by itself, just being a gold 2.0 is hugely successful. It's the largest TAM of any protocol or product ever created in humankind history. Hundreds of trillions of dollars of value exist in this world and they may want to be stored in a place that's hard to seize and immutable, which is Bitcoin. And so that by itself is a success metric. Now there's these other ones where we can add like different DeFi products like decentralized lending. It's a very narrow window of like their total addressable market for those users. For example, I can get an underclutter. I can get a no collateral loan from my bank. Yes. Right. You know, I can lend my Bitcoin out using centralized lenders in a really nice return. If you look at Compound, I believe the yield on six percent, I think. Yeah, it depends on the lender, but typically centralized products give you a higher a higher rate of return than these DeFi products. What's the margin? What's cracking? You guys have you guys have lending on cracking, no? We have a margin pool. You know, I think there's obvious reasons why we might want to explore some products around lending and borrowing because, you know, that's a really popular thing nowadays. So I don't think it'd be a surprise if something that some day down the road, we have something like that. But yeah, we currently have a margin pool. And so those that requires the margin traders to borrow coin, which we currently do ourselves. But with, you know, with these centralized lending solutions, they typically have a higher yield. So for DeFi products, it's tough to convince someone to get a lower yield. Now, some will say, oh, that's my point there, though. Sorry to interject. I always tell them, like, guys, like, if you're going to be competitive, I need to get at least like a three X alpha for this, like, why the fuck would I put so much counterparty risk? Yeah. Well, it's funny, it's like a lot of the DeFi people go, oh, well, there's no counterparty risk for their protocol. And I'm like, there is your code. Yeah. My risk. Yeah. And if you look at like the if you look at compounds yield for Ethereum, that is lent, if you lend Ethereum on compound, it'll take you 3,600 years to double your money. Awesome. You're telling me that there will be no protocol flaw that there won't be a zero day in 3,000 years. Yeah. Doubt it, right? So, you know, DeFi products have a lot of risk. It's just not as explicit because it's a zero day or some unexpected event that occurs, like the MakerDAO event with the price crash. And so, you know, I think there I think some of these DeFi products are a little bit disingenuous with about the with the risk that they're taking. I believe that's part of the lawsuit with Maker, right? Is that they believe that Maker was an upfront with the fail states of the protocol. And then you also look at like Maker has quite a few points of centralization, like their oracles are 12 unknown individuals. I never understood the idea or the terminology of decentralized governance because I'm like it's it's a group of people that have skin in the game. What's like, I don't understand what you mean decentralized. No different to my company. I have people around the world to make decisions. Like what's what's the difference? It's a little bit of complexity theater to make it seem exotic, cool. You know, it's like you and I started business today. We get an LLC and we have we have an owner in Russia and Turkey and one in in Buenos Aires. And here we are with the centralized making fucking decisions as a board. Right. Well, yeah, but you can't go raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a token that way. Yeah, now it's, you know, and then you look at like the emergency sort of measures that Maker and those and those types of DeFi products can do. And then you're like, wait a second, if there's like a backdoor or like an emergency thing that they can do, then that sounds pretty pretty not decentralized. That sounds pretty centralized. Yeah. So, you know, I think first and foremost, every product or protocol must must solve a problem for a customer. Right. I mean, that's that's it. And so we have to look at these DeFi products and that while they seem very interesting again, all of these seem really cool and I'm a fan of some of these could work. You get under the hood and you take a look at how it's all working. And you're like, wait a second, they made they made huge compromises in security for to build this product. And, you know, is it really solving a problem like how many people need over collateralized loans? Like most loans in the world are not collateralized. And if they're collateralized, they're partially collateralized. Yeah. So, you know, there's a very small while it's impressive and it's interesting. It's a very small customer segment for them to go after over collateralized lending. Also, all of your data is on chain. So some of these DeFi lenders and, you know, you can borrow against your Bitcoin or Ethereum as collateral and borrow a die or some other stable coin. They're like, oh, but you don't have to go through KYC and ML. And I'm like, that's great from a UX perspective in terms of onboarding because it's very fast. Like, yeah, then it's a privacy angle too. And I'm like, but no, all my shit's on chain. So, like, it's not that much more private. But it is it might be fast or it might be easier. But then again, you still have to buy crypto, hold crypto, understand crypto and then use the product which, you know, might take a decade for people to get used to versus their existing solutions. And even then I can go get a loan, you know, with my credit card every time I make a purchase or I can get a personal loan or I can get a mortgage. You know what's going to be an interesting event in the whole world, both finances and crypto is I'm making the assumption that Libra is going to launch regardless in some kind of shape or form it's going to launch. I don't know how it's going to look like it's going to be their stablecoin. That's going to open up a whole Pandora's box of brand new users and very interesting use cases and kind of like antagonist within the crypto space. Yeah, I think stablecoins are great products. A lot of people want to move digital versions of the dollar around. They're sort of permissionless. You know, we do have to constantly remind ourselves around the edge case scenarios just like how Naseem Talab puts it the turkey when it gets its head cut off for Thanksgiving up until that moment felt everything was OK. Yeah, so stablecoins like USDC, GUSD and Tether are centrally controlled. So what happens when a government finally cares enough to go? Hey, wait a second, we don't like that. We'd like you to freeze that amount. You know, we'll see what happens to the amount of money in that protocol when that happens, which we haven't really seen a lot of that happened so far. Not yet, but I think it will happen actually. Right, right. But I do think stablecoins are really interesting. You know, dye was an interesting product because it's, you know, as decentralized as possible to where you didn't have like a central issue or kind of dictating and being able to freeze funds individually. And Tether, I believe, hasn't done any of that, even though they are centrally controlled. I'm surprised no one has come created a token without any governance. Like here is just a stable token. Yeah, I believe the mechanism required to keep it stable requires governance structure. Gotcha. It's kind of funny because a lot of people, when they look at the volatility of Bitcoin, often question, is this a good store value? And I like to go and look at gold, which gold is the quintessential store value. It's the gold standard. And the gold fluctuates quite a bit. And the reason why a store value asset cannot have a stable purchasing power is because it would require an entity to completely control it to keep it stable. And so with stable coins, it's the same sort of problem. You have to have stability mechanisms built in. And some of that requires external data. So I need to know what the real world price of things are and pipe that into my blockchain. So you have the oracle problem with that. You also have to have some sort of stability instruments on the other side, you know, maker does that in a sophisticated manner where they've got a bunch of stability mechanisms, they have a stability fee. So these can all be somewhat self-adjusting. But since it pipes in real world data onto the Bitcoin blockchain or onto other blockchains, it requires a choir store requires humans in the loop. And when that occurs, it adds all sorts of complexities in different game theoretic attack vectors. Yeah, I always tell people who are entering the space just buy some Bitcoin, play around, get a wallet, get the feel for it, you know, just get your feet wet. I mean, that's the best way to do it for anything in life. Well, learn how to play golf, go get some golf clubs and go to different golf balls in the driving range. Same with woodworking or anything else and same with Bitcoin or crypto. Got to go take it. You got to got to play around with it, get a good feel for it, really understand, you know, the nuances of, oh, if I send it to the wrong address, my money's gone forever. Yeah, that's a mine for people. Yeah, the phrase is like, what do you mean, my seed phrase? That's where I'm a little controversial with the Bitcoiners where I don't agree that not your keys, not your coins is the first thing we should teach them. I think it's like that's a good ethos to tell them about and go, hey, in a couple months, when you're comfortable playing around with a wallet, we'll move over a little bit of your funds to your non custodial solution. And then over time we'll move more over. No reason to put all of your money on your own self custodied treasure, you know, your grandma to put it on her treasure day one, she's going to, she's going to, there's a higher chance she's going to lose her money that it's going to be, you know, seized from her by her government. As we wrap this up, and do you have any final thoughts or questions or anything you want to leave our audience with? Well, I mean, you know, the having is coming up in a few weeks here, I think May 11 through 12th, Bitcoin Clark Moody is a really great Bitcoin. Bitcoin.Clark Moody. Yeah. He's a, him and I have worked together at a couple of different companies in the space over eight years. So he's a really brilliant guy. He built a dashboard to monitor this. So he built kind of a Bitcoin dashboard, you can you can look at all Bitcoin dashboard metrics. And one of them is his having calculator. And he has a very, very good calculator in terms. So it looks like May 11th is the date. But, you know, Bitcoin since when you and I have been in, I've waited my entire time in this space to wait for a moment like this. All that is required is that other people believe what we believe in. And that there will be a price spike and that will draw awareness to Bitcoin. Some of those people will tell their friends about it and it increases the price going up, which increases awareness, which increases more people believing in what we believe in. Feedback loop, yeah. Exactly. It's a viral loop. So I think I've never been more excited than in this moment because of the amount of people interested in Bitcoin, liquidity in this space, the infrastructure. It survived this long. It survived a civil war with B-cash. It's incredible. Incredible to see how far it's come. And we have the macro backdrop of the biggest money printing operation in human history. I, you know, huddle on. It's sure people are thinking about the price when you have a thousand bucks here or there. It's, you know, Bitcoin really forces you to have strong, strong hands. Yeah. Tell me about it, man. Fuck. Yeah. You've been in just as long as I have. So you get it. And look, I've been in a long time. We've seen a lot of shit. It's going to get a little choppy here. Yeah. No, my biggest, my biggest, funniest thing, though, is like, I remember when I was giving out Bitcoin and Ethereum, like a long time ago for everybody, like, and then I was like, like a year ago, I was calculating roughly how much I'm like, motherfucker. You talking like for burgers or for like personal just giving out, I was giving out people 10 bucks back in the day. And like, here's 10 bucks, here's 10 bucks, here's 10 bucks. And it's like, ETH was like a buck or something. And Bitcoin was at like double digits. Like, wow. But he's just onboarding people like, never in my fucking wildest dream would I think, hey, Bitcoin's going to hit 10,000 one day. I know. Yeah. I mean, back in January, 10,000 was our moon. Yeah. Like we're like, can you imagine Bitcoin at 10,000? And so we're on the verge of, you know, we're on the verge of Bitcoin finally achieving its purpose, which I bought Bitcoin and the investment thesis that it will be Gold 2.0. Yeah. Gold 2.0, Bitcoin's market cap or Bitcoin's price per coin has to be between, you know, 100,000 and 10 million dollars a coin. Like that is like the applicable range for Bitcoin to be considered a Gold 2.0. And we are on the verge of the next cycle touching upon that, which is incredible. I mean, that's what I've waited for this whole time. So I couldn't be more bullish. You know, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But I don't see it having a better shot than it has now. Well, Dan, thank you so much. If people want to get a hold of you and read or watch or listen to what you do, what's the best resource? If you'd like long form content, you can go to danheld.com and check out my blog. If you'd like more, you know, quick takes on Twitter, I'm twitter.com slash Dan Held. Dan, thank you, brother. Thanks for having me.