Final Settlement E001: The Power of Open Protocols with Matt Odell

Before we get into the episode, a quick reminder that this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Now for a word from on RAMP on RAMP is a Bitcoin asset management platform built on multi institution custody, leveraging our partnerships with industry veterans, Bit Go and Coin Cover on ramps. Multi Institution Custody is a segregated vault requiring two of three institutions at any point in time to sign once a client's unique permissions have been met. Our industry leading best in class approach to custody helps individuals and institutions secure new and existing Bitcoin positions. All keys are held in deep cold storage and kept 100% offline. Managed with institutional grade security best practices. The custody solution eliminates single points of failure and reduces counterparty risks. 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The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun The one thing that's missing that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. And we are live. Welcome to the first episode of Final Settlement. This is a new podcast coming from the On Ramp media umbrella. You might be familiar with the last Trade, the podcast that we started in May of last year. We are expanding the suite of podcasts here at On Ramp building some complimentary shows that will look at Bitcoin at you know from a bit of a different lens than what the last trade has has historically been, which is you know primarily the intersection of Bitcoin and traditional finance, the global macro context and and really Bitcoin as a financial instrument. The purpose of final Settlement is really to go beyond the digital gold thesis and really look at Bitcoin as a piece of technology and understand the protocol layer and the various forms of utility that that are being leveraged in the real world. People building on top of Bitcoin and using this open source protocol to better society in in various ways. And so this podcast is going to be every two weeks and you'll still get the last trade every Friday, so no worries there. But really just trying to build a more comprehensive approach to education generally and and really helping investors in our audience build their thesis on Bitcoin beyond just Bitcoin as a financial instrument or a number on a screen. There's a lot more meat to cover as you go down the rabbit hole. So that'll be that'll be sort of the goal of the show. My name is Brian Cabellos I'm the head of strategy and research here at on RAMP Co hosting final settlement with me will be Michael Tanguma, Co Founder and CEO of On RAMP and our first guest Mr. Matt O'dell. Super pumped to have you on. Could think of knowing better to to start this podcast then Matt. He's been you know, contributing to Bitcoin space for several years in a number of ways. Wears many hats. But Matt, thanks for coming. On Yeah, I literally wear many hats. Thanks for having me look at looking forward to it. It's it's almost become a joke like oh what do we need Another Bitcoin podcast. But the more education the better. It's an important topic. Absolutely. I'm just glad Matt's our first because we can say, you know, we were talking about when do we get them on the last trade and now we could say we started a whole podcast to have that. We were waiting. Invited me on the last trade. That's this is like the this is even better. It's a whole brand new pod. First episode we will find. I accidentally joined the tail end of one of them, but. That's right. That's true. I technically was not a guest. I thought about it around the ETF. When the ETF gets announced so you can scream at everyone about how it's not Bitcoin. But I don't know if that'd be appropriate for that audience. But maybe we'll. Well, it's funny on the ETF side, I mean, I know I we're, I, we're not supposed to talk about this is like a last trade topic. But I mean, it's just funny on the ETF side that my role has almost been the opposite. You know, the ETF is not Bitcoin, it's an IOU. You should learn how to hold your own Bitcoin. You should learn how to use it as freedom money. But the ETFs are incredibly bullish. Like they willing, they will increase the purchasing power of Bitcoin tremendously by exposing it to a new market. And also all these companies can do it without permission. That's the whole point of Bitcoin. So I think you know the ETFs aren't priced in. I think it's impossible for them to be priced in because the suits can't hold their own private keys. They lack the personal responsibility and the chops to do it. So they they need a new custodial wallet product in order to to get exposure to Bitcoin, and that's what the ETFs are. They're simply just a custodial wallet for suits. And it it also just sort of amplifies what we always think about, which is like education and and really awareness are what tips the scales of adoption over the long term, right. And so whether it's an inferior product or not like it'll force people to think about Bitcoin more so than they previously would have once these things exist but so have a bunch of things want to get to. But Matt I'm curious. You know I've, I personally have learned a ton from you over the years on RHR sealed dispatch thousands of hours of pods. But I don't think I can recall like your actual Bitcoin origin story. Like what did you what were you doing before Bitcoin? Did you have any sort of like predispositions or or past experiences that led you to to find Bitcoin and and dig deeper? I'm just curious, you know, what was that origin story like and what what stood out to you and and caused you to think more deeply about it? Yeah, I mean, I don't really talk about my previous professional Fiat life much, but the the TLDR, the quick summary is that I was a, you know, disenfranchised youth. I didn't have much hope. Like, I I grew up through the 2008 financial collapse. I saw that there were no adults in the room. No one had any idea what was going on. But everyone just acts super confident on CNBC while they're just fucking yoloing it and winging it. And then I was like, OK, so you can't trust the banks, but at least we got the, the tech companies. Like, you know, Google's don't do evil is their is is their slogan. Like of course they got our back. And then Snowden came out in 2013. And Snowden was like all the all the major tech companies are complicit in mass surveillance and control. And at that point, I I had, I discovered Bitcoin right right around. I discovered Bitcoin right before Snowden's leaks. So it was it was this culmination of you can't trust the financial system. You can't you can't trust big tech. So what it what is the solution? The solution is free in open source software. It's it's it's freedom tech and Bitcoin fits squarely in that, in that hole. Yeah, No, it's it's interesting because I think that's that's part of the reason I think you're the the perfect first guest for the show because you actually did come at it first from a technology perspective. Whereas I think, you know, there is a proclivity at least in sort of the institutional realm, the traditional finance world and even just sort of casual onlookers of Bitcoin to think of it first and foremost as just another asset, you know, similar to a stock or a bond or other precious metal and not really think of it as as a technology 1st. And so I think you know from a very high level, like you know, a fundamental perspective, you know, most people don't even know, you know, that there is a distinction between Bitcoin the asset and Bitcoin the network, right. And so it's, it's, it's fascinating that you came at it first from a network perspective. But I think the reality is most people are coming at it from an asset perspective, which is fine. You know, the digital gold thesis is important, but I think in order to sort of strengthen people's conviction over time, you need to understand this more fully in a in a more comprehensive level and and understand that this is an open source piece of software. And I think, you know, that's something that you've spent a lot of time thinking about. And and I'm curious your thoughts just around, you know, why is it so, why is it so important and critical that Bitcoin is built on this foundation of free and open source software? And how does that sort of what are the implications of that generally speaking? And and why does that make it very different? Why does that make the asset that is governed by the protocol much different than any other assets that someone could invest in? I mean, the open source software is a foundational building block that this is all built on top of. Because the the problem is the problem isn't a technical problem. The problem is a human problem. The the the the issue we face in society is that all of our institutions require insane amounts of trust in centralized entities. Individuals, companies, governments, and those entities inevitably get corrupted. It doesn't matter. You know how how good of a person you are or how well meaning you are at first. Like if you get big enough and you become, you know, you become the juggernaut that Google is, It doesn't even matter if you want to be evil. You have no choice. You get a gun pointed to your head and you're forced to do it. So the beauty of open source software is, as it is at its core, not controlled by an entity. It's not controlled by an individual. It's free and available to the public. They can modify it, they can ship it, they can monetize it, they can do whatever the hell they want to do with it without permission. So open source software is is absolutely beautiful in that regard. It's it's almost viral in nature where you don't you know, a person the person who created the software could die. I mean we have no idea who Satoshi is. He completely disappeared and people can take where where he left off and continue on. You know you can throw someone in jail for being an open source contributor, which is absolutely insane. Particularly in America where we have at least we're supposed to have constitutional protections on free speech. But it doesn't matter if you throw the lead developer in jail because the the software is is is code and it's available to everybody. So that that's that's key, that's key to this whole, this this whole mission, this whole movement. And it's key to every Bitcoin holder. Because at the end of the day, you can't have wealth without freedom. If if it requires someone's permission to spend your Bitcoin, then it's not your Bitcoin, because they can stop you from spending it at will. They can seize your money at will. It defeats the whole entire purpose of the thing. So I think there's a bit of a disconnect right now where where people think that they can be separated, that this idea of store of value or Bitcoin as a financial asset is different than Bitcoin as P2P cash. And it's just not the case, because it doesn't matter what price Bitcoin goes to, if you have to go ask Blackrock's permission to spend it, then you fucked up the whole thing like they they'll. And it it doesn't, BlackRock doesn't have to be evil. They can. They can literally just have a gun pointed to their head and say, you know, Michael can't spend his Bitcoin, stop him from spending it, He's on the terrorist watch list. So I'm done. Yeah, that's a really good point because I think you know from that perspective it's like that is that's really the core value prop of this thing, right. Like yes, the, the scarcity, the immutability are important, but it is the fact that it is this open network that is accessible to everyone and uncensorable. And I think we need to get to the point where people are are building a more comprehensive thesis on this thing outside of number go up. This is a, you know, I have exposure to this this thing that is you know going up in value. It's much more than that. And I'm curious, you know, I think there's also some issue related to sort of, you know, the the notion of something being truly open source and permission less that sort of lends lends itself not only to a system being more robust and resilient, but also, you know, maintaining some elements of of true decentralization. And I sort of hate the word decentralization because it's wildly overused and particularly in the crypto space where it's or the, you know, the broader digital asset space where you know it's really, you know, decentralized in name and marketing only. So I'm curious your thoughts around, you know, what about Bitcoin and its foundations from a network perspective make it truly decentralized and allow it to remain so over time versus you know, some of these other quote UN quote protocols that market themselves as decentralized but may not be so. Well, personally I like the term distributed protocol, but either way we're talking about the same thing. The idea that the idea that no individual or entity has control over Bitcoin and can change Bitcoin, which ironically has has been considered by the quote UN quote crypto people and the overwhelming majority part of this industry has has considered it a negative with Bitcoin that it's that it's hard to change by default, that there's not a centralized entity in control, but that is the key value prop. The key value prop is that it's incredibly difficult to change and that is very rare in terms of digital tools, digital services usually it's it's it's the opposite right where Tim Apple can just issue an update and everyone just updates. So it's it's fundamentally different in that respect that it's not controlled. But but yeah I I it's it's a little bit interesting because it's hard to objectively measure distribution or decentralization. You really don't know until it's too late. Like it it it's very easy to tell when something is too centralized because it it gets stomped on, right. A gun gets put to someone's head and something gets changed, something gets robbed. But usually you don't. You don't the the majority of people don't realize that till after the fact. So one of the things I always say to Bitcoin particularly less technical people, right? Like if you're technical you can look at the code you can look at all the different get commits and and see how the the project has changed over time and and do your own verification and analysis. And that's one of the beauties of open source software is that you can see everything that's happening and you can verify it yourself. But if you're not technical the single easiest way to to solve this problem is is time right? And the number one thing you'll hear a non-technical person say is, Oh well, you say there's only 21 million Bitcoin, but humans always make promises they don't keep. There's no way they're going to keep the 21 million cap. OK, well, I'm pretty sure the way Bitcoin is set up that that 21 million cap will never get fucking changed. It is not going to fucking happen. But if if if you don't have the capability of doing that, then time time solves that for you. With time comes the ability to assess this in a more personal way, right? If if if you're watching Bitcoin for five years, six years, and the 21 million cap doesn't change, it's way less likely that it'll change in the next five years. You watch it for 10 years. It's way less likely it's going to change in the next 10 years. So for most people, it's going to take time to realize that that the way the way the system was designed, it was, it was designed to be incredibly resistant to change. But the the core thing that I would like listeners to take away from this is that that is the value prop. Because if you can change something easily, you can change it for the worst easily. And it's important that if we are building the bedrock of a global censorship resistant, permissionless financial system that it has the stability of not being manipulated super easily and that most people that flies right over their head. That's the key, the the the key value prop is, it is the the thing that holds it all together is that you would you essentially need a overwhelming majority of individual stakeholders of Bitcoin. This is not a vote. This isn't no votes happening to to agree with any kind of substantial change, and that just doesn't happen in practice unless there's massive motivation for something to happen. And something like the 21 million cap is a perfect example of the stakeholders have. It's against their financial interests to dilute the supply of their own, of their own asset that they just potentially own significant, that they own significant amounts of. I find I find the technology aspect interesting because it it keeps people away from the asset in two different completely opposite spectrums like and. We can start with either one first, like for the gold, for gold individuals or individuals that need to touch things. The technical aspect, you have all the concepts or primitives of gold without the physical nature and then on the other side of it you have all the aspects of gold except for it's not fast enough or it doesn't do what it is for the tech side. So both sides of the camps are the ones that like you never look at it and they're like this is too slow or this is this isn't fast enough versus like it has this like natural sweet spot. And and it's just like continues and I don't know what that lens of the world is that somebody looks at it and they look and they're like OK this makes sense. But we all see this and we have discussions and it's like every whether it's the touch points or the adoption phases. Everybody slowly starts to realize, oh, this was exactly how it was supposed to be. Not. It's just, they're just enough, right? These keys, these private keys live in the real world, so you can actually make a tangible aspect to it. And it also has speed. And you can talk about multiple layers that start to play into how you can compete with all the other cryptocurrencies. But at the same time, it it doesn't fit in the bucket that everybody naturally wanted to fit in. And that's why it's so hard for individuals to accept or like wrap their heads around it because it just doesn't map to the real world all the way down to like what Matt alluded to in the like natural order of Facebook. And Google doesn't wrap in a bow of like, you have an owner, you have somebody that can just turn it off and like, you can call. And so people are, we're still trying to figure out how do we actually, like, get these primitives to individuals. And that's where, like pods like this exist to be able to, like, figure out what are the mental models to get people to understand it, figure out how to build and invest. Yeah. And it's a good point around, you know, this sort of extreme resistance to change is very unique in the broader technology space, software space. And I think that's part of the disconnect between Bitcoin and all these other altcoin protocols is that they're one, they're optimizing for different things, right? Like if you're building a new form of money, it should be resistant to change, right? You want to have a, you know, transparent and knowable monetary policy for that new form of money, all these other things, you know, sometimes they they market themselves as ultrasound money, but like the reality is that they're they're optimizing for other things right on the base layer in most, in most instances. And so you can optimize for those things in Bitcoin as Michael alluded to. But it happens above the base layer and we can get into that more later in the convo. But I guess one sort of more high level question, we don't have to get too in the weeds of it. But you sort of alluded to this, Matt, in terms of like how things actually do change on Bitcoin. Because I think that generally speaking that's like again such a foreign concept of people. It's like oh, you're telling me this thing that is super scarce will never change, but actually technically anyone can change it. So it's it's it is it is hard for people to grasp, but that can be the reality. So maybe just some color on like how do changes actually get made in Bitcoin, what are some things that you know past examples that everyone was on board with that we're we're able to get through and some some opposite examples as well. So I mean, when you're talking about Bitcoin changes, right, Bitcoin, you know at at the core, Bitcoin is a is is a piece of software that people are running on their computers, right? First things first, there's no auto updates. So auto updates are a security hole. If if a single developer somewhere has access to the ability to auto update people, they can auto update them to a a a malicious piece of software. So the number one core protection is if you want to change, like if you want to run a change to Bitcoin, you have to go manually install the new version of the software and install it on your computer. The second thing to keep in mind is there's two different baskets of of changes, right? One is is consensus level code. So this is the rules that each Bitcoin node, when you're running the Bitcoin a Bitcoin node is simply just running Bitcoin software on your computer. These Bitcoin nodes, their their main role is to enforce the rules of the network. Any of those rules we consider those consensus rules, those are consensus changes. So what does that mean? So, so your node is by running your own node, you're verifying the rules of the network on your own and you're also able to broadcast the network without permission and you're able to verify all receipts, right? So you if you're running a Bitcoin node, it's it's almost like you're running a a gold bar verification service right? Where every time you receive gold it's automatically verified that that gold is not counterfeit. Which is why it's incredibly important that people can easily run their own nodes and and people should use their own nodes if if they are technically capable of it. It's way easier than people think it is. But the most important thing is that it's easy and accessible for people to do it. Not necessarily that everyone does it. We're realistic, everyone's not going to do it but if enough people are doing it then it makes it resistant. So on the consensus change side, anyone can take Bitcoin code, they can take the Bitcoin software, they can change it however the hell they want without permission. No one can stop them. If they change something on the consensus level and then they run that software, the other Bitcoin nodes will reject them. They're they're essentially on a different version of Bitcoin. So consensus level changes are incredibly difficult to to implement that scale because you need buy in from the other people that are running notes. The thousands of people around the world running notes all need to update to the new software. Otherwise you're running on your own essentially counterfeit Bitcoin network right where no one's deeming those Bitcoin valid Bitcoin because they're it, it does not agree with their notes rules. And then you have non consensus changes, and non consensus changes can deal with stuff like mem pool policy in terms of Bitcoin waiting, like the the waiting list to get into Bitcoin block, stuff like that. Those changes you can just implement on the fly, you can run it on your own node and the other nodes will still communicate with you, but you might have a slightly different view of the network. Or maybe you have a different interface on how you, how you interact with the network, different kind of user facing things that don't affect the rest of the network. But if they affect the rest of the network, we consider those consensus changes and those are way, way, way, way more difficult to get through. And the activation method for those kind of things is not very clear cut. They've been activated in many different ways. Sometimes, you know, in the early days, a lot of times it was like, oh, if the miners hit a certain threshold, then we'll do it. And it's gotten significantly harder over time. In 2017, a large portion of the miners decided they wanted to to attack the network and and try and push forward their own consensus change. And as a result, a lot of those activation methods have changed. And the only real major activation on the consensus level we've had since then is Taproot, and it happened to be relatively uncontroversial and it kind of just got pushed through. But I don't expect other activations to happen that way. It's more of an art than a science. Also, you don't really on the consensus level, you don't really know if if you've you've hit the, you know this ridiculous threshold of like 95% plus you don't really know until afterwards if you hit it. So everything is is about trying to reduce any kind of user risk. In that scenario if you have a consensus change that like let's say half the network decides to go one way and half the network doesn't, you have something called a fork. And what that means is your blockchain, right? The Bitcoin blockchain that holds all the record of of all of our transactions publicly forever, right? It'll have a shared history but when that consensus change happens, the the history will fork and and from that point forward it will have a different Ledger, right, a different path forward. So if a fork does happen which we we had one that was a minor fork in 2017 Bitcoin Cash that that relatively quickly resolved itself because most of the market was was on on on the main chain of Bitcoin and and a subset of the market was on Bitcoin Cash. But if you have a fork in that situation an existing holder essentially has the equivalent amount of Bitcoin on both sides. So the beauty of that and I think not enough people appreciate that. The beauty of that is if someone were to trying a malicious actor was going to try and force through some kind of consensus change and got like 40% of the network or 60% of the network to go along with it, the average person could do nothing. And whichever whichever chain turned out to dominate, they would still have the equivalent amount on it. Now if you want to be a gambler, you can go on to the markets and you can sell one side for the other side. And you know, that's the beauty of free markets, right, And the markets kind of pricing, which side is better or which side has more market demand, I guess, and it kind of just works itself out. But if you're the average user, you can just sit there and do nothing and you get equivalent. Now this is really important though in the age of ETFs is if you're using a custodial wallet or an ETF, which is just a fancy custodial wallet for suits, you are trusting the custodian with that decision. You, you have no choice on the matter. But if you're holding self custody Bitcoin, you're holding your keys yourself. Maybe you're using a hardware wallet, you know, maybe using collaborative multi sig you at that point you're getting equivalent to both sides and you can choose now because of the messiness of of of consensus change, potential consensus change forks. What we've normally see in Bitcoin in terms of these changes is something called a soft fork versus a hard fork. And with a soft fork, what happens is new clients might see the new thing. If you're running a new version of Bitcoin, you might see the new thing. But if you're running an old version of Bitcoin, it still works, it's still compatible with everything else, and it just is missing a subset of of transactions. It doesn't doesn't doesn't see the new shit, but you can still run the old one and be completely fine, and everything will still work together. And then the hard fork is everyone actually needs to update to the newest software. So hard forks are incredibly unlikely. Soft forks are a lot more likely. But both types of changes when it comes to changing actual consensus rules of the network. The rules that these nodes enforce are very, very rare and very, very difficult. And it's a combination of like art, politics, and just like sheer momentum like I, I. The only way you really have these changes, especially going forward, is if there is incredibly strong motivation among participants to enact this change. And that is basically this beautiful check we have on changes on Bitcoin is that it? It needs to have like an absolute massive amount of demand for that change, for that change to actually have. So that was an incredible recap. I think, one, appreciate you running through that because I think that's going to go down as we push people back to listening to understanding the fork. But so to go a little deeper on that going backwards for anybody that's not familiar, this is really where credible monetary policy comes into play. And Etherium had the Was it parody hack in Was it 1414? Something like that. 14 or 15 where they rolled back the chain and forked to roll back from the hack versus. Well, it wasn't just the parody. They had the Dow hack. To the Dow, yeah. It's the Dow, yeah. I think parody. They said fuck you to parody and didn't rollback. Parody, but they. Rolled back. It was a Dow hack that they rolled back effectively, you know, moving the coins back into the existing wallet. Which hacker? The hacker stole Ethereum and then they forked it. They did a hard fork, so consensus breaking change. Everyone had an update to the new software and the new software stated that the hacker did not actually own own the Ethereum and and it returned it back to the previous owners. And then at that point there was another the existing chain over the hackers still had it. They they called it Ethereum Classic. And you had like this little glimpse into how you would market a malicious fork, right where you you have the fork retain the name Ethereum and then you have the one that wasn't a fork, that was the existing chain. You call that classic and you kind of just throw it under the bus. And I think that's important to point out one because of monetary policy, it's not just a name only. When you think about decentralization that was obviously not decentralized or distributed even properly if you can roll that back. And it reminds me of whatever happened with CZ initially with the safe SAFU and he like referenced that he could roll back the chain and they're like, Oh yeah, try it. It's like this idea, you can say it, but to be able to effectively do it on the Bitcoin. Protocol CZ of Binance had some Bitcoin hacked and he like tried to play games and he couldn't get it back right. Final settlement, final name of the podcast you like. It comes down to the fact that a centralized centralized entity does not have control, right. All this stuff comes back to that. And I, Brian mentioned earlier, I think a better, more recent example because it's easy for people. The old examples, people always just brush under, right? Like I was telling people to don't like custodial risk is a real thing. Not your keys, not your coins. And people are calling me a fudder right? They were like Mount Cox was 10 years ago. That's ridiculous. Why do you hate people like my, my my family relies on the yield I get from Block Fi and FTX and Celsius and they all got fucking rugged right? And now they have a new lesson on why they should hold self custody and learn how to hold Bitcoin themselves. But in 10 years, like, if there's not another major rug, like people are going to say in the same thing like, oh, FTX was a decade ago, like BlackRock is responsible now. And then BlackRock rocks and then people will realize again. So the older examples are a little unfortunate, a little bit less effective. But we have a new example with Ethereum, which is this idea of ultrasound money that they like, like 10 people in the room decided they were going to change the inflation rate of Ethereum and then they changed it to be less than Bitcoin. And they were like, oh, we're a better store of value in the Bitcoin. But they don't realize the cell phone that if they can change the the they can change the the monetary supply at a whim, they can change it in the opposite direction. And that's why it's not ultrasound, right, that you can't you can't have a you can't have a sound protocol. You can't have a hard protocol. You can't have a protocol that is censorship resistant and permission list if there are centralized entities in control because they can change it at will. So real quick because I know Brown's the transition, but it's an important facet that I kind of want to put you on the spot Matt on to be most relevant the ETF. So if we if we're realistic, I think like you know we look at 3510 year time frame that is a realistic like vector where we can think about forks and what happens. I think there's two components Matt alluded to. One, most investors coming in don't necessarily know Bitcoin is is a digital bare asset at the end of the day. And then you can actually take delivery of that. And independent if you're not ready to take delivery right off the bat, you always want that optionality. And we've seen that with GBTC and that's effectively what we. I think all agree here is going to happen where somebody wakes up, gets educated and they're like hey I want my Bitcoin, like Oh yeah, you know screw off. You can maybe get your dollars at best. Yeah. And pay cap gains. So then taking that to the dominant chain and working out like because I'm actually generally curious on like and I know it's more of science than art or more of arts and science. But with the B cash fork, was the general consensus that most that were forking for B cash like sold their Bitcoin or did they hedge? And then how would that, like how did that chain work out from like hash rate like help us walk through that And then what that would potentially look, if you can with like the ETF because that would be a similar format for like green coin or whatever that would look like from a just game theory perspective of you have enough, you have enough ETFs that are all saying, hey this isn't like you know conducive to ESG anymore that that's been discussed. It's part of these, you know, S1 docs when it comes to like chains and consensus and who ultimately bears a responsibility or or ability to determine which chain is dominant. So just like help us walk through what happened with B cash and then where you could see that or how it would play out. Not how it would play out, but effectively like what the vector would be with an ETF like this. I believe there was a book, yeah, there was a book by the guy behind Bit Mix Research, Block Size, the block size Ward, which everyone. If you're new to Bitcoin, you should read 'cause it was crazy time and it goes into, it goes into everything, and he does a really good job of of capturing all the different perspectives. And it's it's important because humans, it's a human thing, right? Winners write history. I think he did a very ethical job of being a winner writing that history and I think it it it does capture as much of the other perspective as possible in an objective way. But anyway with with B cash it was a very interesting scenario. First of all we were very immature in terms of Bitcoin as a as a network we were very very early on and and and what was the result of that. The result was bit main Chinese mining ASIC manufacturer. They make the mining computers #1 manufacturer in the world had almost no competition at the time. They were making you know 80% plus of of mining ASICS. Also a lot of those ASICS were then were were mining in China and they had the largest pool Ant pool, the largest mining pool. So when you're a miner, if you mine by yourself it there's a lot of variants. You might not get paid for months, days, years, a long period of time. So. So people pool their mining resources together and they get paid way more frequently. So a lot of people use mining pools, but the mining pool operator has a lot of control. They can choose which transactions get mined and in the case of a fork, they can choose which fork they want to mine. So and Poole had a lot of power and Jihan Wu the the founder of of Bit main Co founder of bit Main had a lot of indirect power. It was like hard to measure, but you know, like his buddies in the room who were all buying ASICS from him probably accounted for 75% of the global hash rate or something crazy like that, right? 75% of miners were like on a first name basis with Dionne and if he wanted something done, he could be like if you don't do it, I'm not going to give you any more miners, right? He was their sugar daddy. He was the godfather and he was pro this change called SegWit 2X which was this idea of we package a a soft fork consensus changed a segue and we and we package it with a hard fork increase of of the amount of of block space that you could have in Bitcoin. So 2X the, you have the segue part and the 2X part was like, let's double the size of of a Bitcoin block and a whole consortium of suits in in Bitcoin at the time. And they were immature suits, right? Like they were mostly led by Barry Silbert who owes billions of dollars to people right now. These these aren't like your classic Wall Street suits. They were like orange suits. They were like Bitcoin suits. They were like we own all the companies in Bitcoin. We also want segment 2X. So there was like some kind of like loose agreement that happened. Most of most of the independent community did not want to increase the block size. And there was like kind of like this handshake agreement that SegWit 2X will implement in the fall. But in the meantime, we'll add SegWit. Now this is great. The grand compromise, we'll add SegWit now we'll add, that's a soft fork. It doesn't, it's not going to, you know, break, break the consensus rules of the chain. If you're running an older client, you're still fine it it adds like a de facto block size increase because it discounts The Witness. So you can have blocks up to 4 megabytes instead of the one MB. But it's a soft fork. And then in the fall you know we'll we'll we'll do the 2X part. Gian was like, these guys are just fucking with the suits. There's no shot in hell they're going to do this. So at the same time that Segway got implemented he for did a hard fork for be cash and I think it was like 8X to block size or something. It was like his hedge and he just really never had the balls to put the majority of hash on to be cash. Like he I think he could have made a couple calls and and done it but the like the actual game theory incentives of Bitcoin worked like his whole livelihood was based on Bitcoin. Like if he killed the golden goose he would have been absolutely fucked so he never did it. Like if you go back and you look at the hash rate differences and there's a big issue like if you have for a long extended period of time 2 chains using the same hashing algorithm shot 256, the miners on the the majority side can go and attack the other side and just do utter mayhem right? Like if you have like 10% of the mining hash, so really you you, you, you don't, you don't want to be in a situation where you have a chain that is secured by the same hashing algorithm as another chain that has significantly more hash than you. So yeah, I'm getting a little bit lost in the weeds, but B, cash never really had any kind of critical support. Now, I know of a lot of bitcoiners that sold their Bitcoin cash early on and throughout the whole process four more Bitcoin and had conviction in it. I assume a lot of the B cashers did the same thing in the opposite way. Some of the more notable ones clearly didn't because they're still financially solvent now because B cash is worth fucking nothing and a lot of participants just completely sat it out. Like if you were an uneducated participant, that was probably the safest decision for you to make. It's just completely stood it out. Now the interesting thing on the ETF side is in the beginning Coinbase who is pro Bitcoin 2X refused to give people their B cash. They hesitated for a while and there was a bunch of other custodians that did similar and I think it was a learning experience for a lot of people on on not your keys, not your coins. And I I could 100% see similarities happen in, in ETF world where a Black Rock is like we're not going to honor this fork and we're not going to give you the equivalent amount of Bitcoin for like on this port. And there is an argument on the custodian side that it can be a little bit ridiculous like me, you and Brian can go fork Bitcoin and call it, you know, Bitcoin on RAMP or Bitcoin Brian, right. We can like create it. We can create a chain called Bitcoin Brian. Like, it's ridiculous for BlackRock to redeem to 10 million people Bitcoin Brian, just because the three of us decided to fork. Like, there should be like from a custodian side, right? There should be some kind of, like critical mass where like then they'd decide, like, OK, like this thing actually has market value. Like I should give you, I should give you, you know, your equivalent amount of money that you're due. But the way all these ETFs are written, it's just like completely up to their discretion, which makes sense, like if they had lawyers write it like it doesn't make sense. Like I would like. There's no objective measurement where a fork has merit and a fork doesn't because we can make Bitcoin, Brian and then Michael can buy like one SAT for me for a billion dollars and then the things got like a ridiculous market cap. So like you can't use that market cap as the obviously I'm being extreme there, right. But you can't use market cap as the as the rule there. So all these ETFs have it written that they can just decide which is real Bitcoin to which is not. And I think that would just be part of the learning experience. Like people will get rugged. People like the the history of Bitcoin custodians is them either getting pressured by governments and rugging people fucking something else, fucking something up and people getting rugged unintentionally, or a government pointing a gun to their head and people getting rugged. And in every situation there are thousands, hundreds of thousands, 10s of thousands. I don't know how many people that learn their lesson and they're like, OK, I need to learn how to hold this thing securely myself because I trusted third parties or security holes and if I have to trust someone else to hold my Bitcoin, they will probably fuck me over eventually. Yep, there will be many more learnings going forward because the take away most likely one thing. I wonder how many go ahead, Brian. Like I wonder how many participants like are in Bitcoin. How many people hold Bitcoin right now that just didn't exist during the 2017 Ford. It's a lot of people. It's a lot of people and you know, I think these, in a lot of ways like Bitcoin is just going to be. I've been active in this space for over a decade now. It's just eternal September. Like it's just going to be over and over again. We're just going to learn the same lessons, but it's going to be new people learning the lessons and it's going to be a slight twist, right? Like the difference between FTX and Gox isn't really that much. It's it's like different aspects of a Ponzi scheme. It's fun. People learn it in their own way, at their own time. It's funny you bring up that question about how many people are in that weren't around in 17, because I I think the other side of that is how many people were around in 17 that aren't around now? And this idea behind a lot of the stuff we work on and cumulatively as a group in own respects of like there's this idea. I don't obviously have hard numbers, but I feel like over 50% of people that have come into Bitcoin since its inception do not hold any Bitcoin anymore. And whether it's because they got shaken out, you know they sold too early, they were hacked, they left it on FTX or block fired Genesis. It's like this idea that this thing is so foreign to everyone that they can't unless they go down and really understand what they're doing and how they think about it. They just ultimately, and to your point like last year it seems already, you know FTX was only 1212 months ago and people don't even talk about it. Seems like it's all it's good. And like that was a scary part of a lot of what we're doing here is my concern. I don't know if I share this with you. That was the behind a lot of this stuff was seeing Wall Street come in and realizing that they were using the same stuff that existed in 2022 and everything blew up and then we're going to get orders of magnitude more carnage in like 2028 in my mind was 2026 or 2028. They were just going to blow it all up again and it was like shit, well, these guys weren't the smartest guys in the room. When we think about you know Silver, I was like why couldn't we have a lot of learning based on all the things we've done And I know it's not full you know obviously the self custody. But there's this idea of like you mentioned it earlier and I think it's key is distributed like there is no pure or perfect you know decentralization but there's enough where and we don't know what it is yet but of distribution where the game theory starts to shift. I'm like a, does it make sense where if you don't have to trust a single entity, how many can you trust? Where it kind of starts to look more like a traditional firm that you're used to, that we've historically used for thousands of years while you can also still bet. And then it comes more to like trust in people, get rugged and then you don't trust them to sign or trust them to be your partner. Because I think that's more of like what we've seen over time, you know? So yeah, the distribution I think is key because and that's another part of kind of joke around with like the difference between Bitcoin and gold is not the like digital nature of it. It's the, it's multi sig. It's the fact that like you can actually put it in in multiple locations or you can have multiple entities participate and it's transparent because that's ultimately where gold really failed was the centralization of like entities and all the like, you know, good. I mean, try and take custody of gold. Like what? You're going to just take 2 tons of gold custody. Like, how the hell are you going to handle that? You're going to put it on a plane. Is it going to be like vans with guys with fucking guns like bringing it over to you and then when when you get it where do you put it? With Bitcoin you can just it's it's so easy to take self custody and that's what people don't realize the the like the games will still be played. We don't we haven't solved that like there will be paper Bitcoin games. There'll be Ponzi schemes. There'll be blow UPS. There'll be leverage. There'll be degens. Everyone's a humans are degens. They're inherently degens. It's the reality of the situation. There's a reason why the government and the US government has maintained A legalized monopoly on lotteries just because they make a shit ton of fucking money. Because people just want to scratch off a fucking card for $5 and potentially win 10,000 a week for life. You know people are are degens and as a result free markets are naturally volatile short term and and and for people that can that can scare the shit out of them with Bitcoin. Because it if if you've been coddled in your pretend free markets that are the US financial system that aren't actually free, that have circuit Breakers that have all these different centralized manipulations that are that are designed to try and stop downward volatility specifically people quote UN quote losing money. It is hard for people to fathom. But in a proper free market what happens is D genes will get wiped out. They will get wrecked. There'll be some short term pain for people that rely on Bitcoin as as their main asset that you know that their main savings that they're spending from when necessary but ultimately the market will market demand will will bring it back to its to its fair purchasing power right. Like the fair purchasing power price and and and the way I look at Bitcoin is it's a it's it's the most scarce asset we've ever seen. And so with adoption purchasing power should naturally increase and you can measure that purchasing power in dollars right. Like I'm a weird person right? Because there's there's like a whole subset of bitcoins that are like I'm in it for the tech and there's a whole subset of bitcoins and I'm I'm in it for the riches. I'm in it for both. Like I'm in it for the freedom. But I like to get wealthy along the way. Like I'm not going to keep my savings in something I think is going to erode value over time. And and Bitcoin is this beautiful free market where it just because it doesn't require permission, because it doesn't have centralized entities in control that just that works itself out. But humans are the market participants. So it will be volatile. You know it, it it it will take those tendencies from its participants and reflect them in the market. Yeah I think that's good. That's a key part of this pod and and specifically around why like the volatility scares so many people. So will they start looking at the technology. It's like well what can the technology because I don't want nothing to do with the volatility. You met your final settlement. It it made me think of a try to final settle a billion dollars worth of gold across the Red Sea right now and you're you're just like does not work. I mean, Russia, I forget when it happened. It was like within the last two years or whatever, it was like super memorable. But like Russia had like a plane full of gold that, like, the gold fell out of the plane midway. And like, people just have like gold bars, like falling on their heads. Like it's a real problem. It's it's it's a real fucking thing. And that's why we have so much paper gold, because it's way easier to buy GLD on TD Ameritrade or Charles Schwab than it is to take substantial custody of gold. And it doesn't count if your uncle has, you know, 5 Krugerrands like it just doesn't move the market in the way that someone can take easy self custody of a billion dollars with Bitcoin. It's just a whole different ball game. Thanks for tuning in. If you're interested in exploring any of these topics further, or want to learn more about how we can help you secure a new or existing Bitcoin allocation, get in touch with our team at on rampbitcoin.com. We look forward to supporting you on your Bitcoin journey. Yep, you mentioned digens and that reminded me of what I wanted to go back to was when you were talking earlier, you mentioned one of the more recent meaningful upgrades to Bitcoin was Taproot a few years back. And years later. There are some basically externalities, positive negative of that upgrade that are now being leveraged for people to basically at a very high level, somewhat somewhat bring NFTS. So you know, something that was originated on Bitcoin back in the day, but then really gained a lot of hype on all these other crypto networks. But bring NFTS to Bitcoin again in a way that basically, you know there's arguments. There's different cohorts of bitcoiners that that view this topic from different perspectives and I'm curious to get your thoughts on it. Generally speaking, you know are ordinals and inscriptions an attack on Bitcoin? I I don't see it that way. I think generally they these represent valid transactions that will ultimately be priced out in the future. But there is, you know there's past 12 months have been sort of this has been the topic du jour of sort of Bitcoin development, Bitcoin community in terms of, you know in some ways it's it's the argument is really it's related to sort of like the ossification versus innovation camps generally speaking, right. Like do we want to try to bring all these other things and and forms of functionality to the base layer in a way that could you know basically clog the chain or or compromise in other ways. And it also come back to like assessing trade-offs, right, generally speaking, which is something you talk a lot about Matt, and trying to think about, you know from a very adversarial perspective like what are the possible externalities of any change that you make to Bitcoin. So what are your thoughts generally on all of that? You know, this change that occurred years ago but is now sort of come back up as a topic of discussion because of how people are leveraging it? So first of all, it's a misconception that taproot enables all this stuff. You can do different, a little bit more efficient from a cost perspective things with Taproot, but you can do these things regardless. There's also a misconception that NFTS are the main the main driver of these things. It's it's mostly been these like SCAM tokens, like these MEME tokens. I think the biggest one is called Orti, which are like they. Have are functionless tokens. They have zero utility. They're basically the NFTS without art. Like they're collectible, right? Like, yeah, exactly. They're text NFTS. Look, if you have a Bitcoin transaction and it's valid by the rules of the network of the nodes that are running and you pay a a market rate transaction fee, it will get confirmed by the network. It is a valid transaction as far as the network's concerned. Now people that are smarter than me, specifically Andrew Polstra who's a fucking legend I was he was my guest for the single best interview I ever did in Austin at Bitcoin Commons where we had 1/2 an hour on his history and open source and I asked him what is your history and open source? And then he talked for 1/2 an hour and gave us a perfect like rundown of everything then turned back to me. I was like, we're done. It's like it's over. Like that's the interview. I literally just asked one question, but the guy's a fucking legend. He does not think there's a way to stop people on a technical level for making these transactions. So I think that whole argument, this whole idea that like we should even be wasting time thinking about it is, is from the incorrect premise. Because if poster doesn't think it's possible to do it, then I'm like, I'm going to defer to him on that. But regardless, we have Mononat from mempool space. He's one of the main guys on the team over there and he did an analysis of this year. This year there was so. So Bitcoin miners get paid a subsidy and that subsidy has halvings Every four years it splits in half, right? Right now they get paid 6.25 Bitcoin per block and then somewhere in the spring. It's based on blocks, not on actual like Gregorian calendar or whatever. It's made-up bullshit. It's based on blocks. It's somewhere in the spring, right? And then it's going to drop to 3.125 subsidies. So this is this is bitcoins built in system to regulate monetary supply, right? So new Bitcoin that get issued get HAP. But Bitcoin miners also receive fees and the fees are a pure free market without permission. And they are they are simply handled on a supply demand basis. You have a fixed supply of block space available and as more Bitcoin transactions are being sent you have to pay a higher fee. Otherwise miners will be unlikely to confirm that. Miners can confirm whatever transactions they want to confirm, but usually they confirm the highest fee transactions first because they make more money. So we had 23,431 Bitcoin were paid in minor fees this year. Fucking massive number. And according to his analysis, 63.8% were quote, UN quote normal Bitcoin transactions, just regular Bitcoin transactions. The NFTS were 2.4% and these scam tokens were 27.9%. So the majority is these scam tokens. Now, when you're thinking about inscriptions, inscriptions are are real. They're real. Like you can do a valid Bitcoin transaction and you can inscribe data along with it in the blockchain that is there for everyone who's running Bitcoin software, it's in their Ledger. Those could be jpegs, those could be texts, whatever. Now they've married them with something called ordinals, which is a separate from the chain theory. And that's how they say you can transfer the inscriptions, but inscriptions are real. You can't transfer the inscriptions like the. The Bitcoin protocol doesn't let you transfer the JPEG from 1 address to another address. It's just in the fucking Ledger, right? Or the text of the token, right? It says the already token. You own #2 of 1000 or whatever. It's just like a little simple Jason text. There's no way to actually transfer them in the mechanism. So I think this will become, I mean, first of all, besides the fact that I don't think these things really have collectible value, I think the fact that you can't transfer them will become apparent to people. Because look, at the end of the day, people, humans like collectibles, especially bit corners, most bit corners. Like if you go back, we had some like ridiculous collectibles that we were like obsessed with before Bitcoin existed. I know my family, my family got wrecked on Beanie Babies. I was like a big baseball cards guy, all centralized bullshit collectibles. I have like all I have like a sign shack, you know, basketball. I got, you know, I got Pete Rose. I got David Cohn. Like I got all I got all my like baseball collectibles, basketball collectibles. It's all bullshit compared to Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin is, is, is just what I should have the entire my entire net worth in. And I have the majority of my net worth in. But anyway, my point is I'm, I'm, I'm going. I'm going past the point People like collectibles. I'm not saying, you know, you could do whatever collectibles you want. I don't think they compete with Bitcoin. But I think the market will start to realize eventually that you can't transfer these things between each other. And that's all bullshit. It's just a centralized system that's bolted on top that they're just assuming like, oh, I transferred this, I transferred that. But the actual inscription part is kind of interesting because you can, you can do things like inscribe banned books, right? You can inscribe. And and that might actually have like a significant financial worth in the future, like someone just just to get the information out there might be willing to pay for it even though they don't think it has any kind of collectible value or something like that. But regardless, we can't stop it. You can't transfer them. And as a result, the Bitcoin fee market is working as designed. So, like when you're when you're, when when, when you, when you do e-mail, right. The big issue with all these things, all kind of communication networks are spam, right? So it's what is spam. Spam is something you don't want, right? It's, it's, it's there's no objective definition of spam. But spam is something that you as an individual subjectively do not appreciate getting right. And with e-mail, the way we handle spam is we have centralized services like Google and their cohort decide what they're blacklisting and what they're not, and they're making decisions based on it. And obviously that's inherently able to corrupt, right? We can inherently corrupt that. So we can get a gun to their head and say this mail registrar should always be declared as spam. And then it doesn't matter how much you care about freedom. If you're trying to e-mail someone on Gmail, it's going to go straight to the spam folder on on websites, we have something called deny distributed denial of service attacks, DDDOSS. And that's like you just hit a website from a bunch of different computers. Often times bot Nets and you, you bring it to its knees. And how do they handle that? A lot of times through centralized services like Cloudflare that are sitting in the middle and they're saying that IP address is a bad IP address, That IP address is a bad address. We're not going to give them the website, but we'll give this other guy the website because he's KYC on Comcast and we know he's a good dude. Can't have that in Bitcoin either. So what does Bitcoin do? We have this scarce block space. And why is the block space scarce? Because every node needs to store and validate that information, and so it adds real cost to running a node. And it's important that everyone can run their own node. So what do we do? We have a dynamic free market where if you send a Bitcoin transaction, it has to be valid by the consensus rules #1. That's what inscriptions are. It's a fact, regardless of how you feel about them, Valid by Bitcoin consensus rules and a fee that is acceptable to a minor to to mine that transaction. So you end up in a situation where the real argument is if someone I don't like is flooding the Bitcoin network with transactions and it's crowding out people I like from sending Bitcoin transactions, is that a problem? Yeah, it is a problem. And and Bitcoin transaction fees are designed to mitigate that problem. Because if you if, if if we forget about inscriptions altogether, let's pretend the US government decides they don't want us to use Bitcoin. They're not using inscriptions. They're just sending Bitcoin transactions back and forth between each other at a high fee to try and stop Bitcoiners from transacting. That's a real attack method, right? That's a that's a potential attack vector that Bitcoiners have talked about in the past. They would have to spend billions of dollars in Bitcoin mining fees to miners. They would have to buy the Bitcoin. They would have to spend it to minors. They would have to essentially take existing supply off the market when they bought it, increasing the purchasing power of Bitcoin. And then they'd have to repeat that year after year after year for increasingly larger amounts of Fiat. Because it's all denominated in Bitcoin. It is the best incentive mechanism ever. It's like, literally to attack it. They have to feed the Ponzi. It is the most insane fucking system. And it works. So the result is at the end of the day, right now, maybe you're crowded out, you know, maybe fees are too high for you and you're an African and you know you're making $5 a day and it's just too expensive for you. But ultimately, and that sucks, and hopefully we'll have tools available to people that they'll be able to efficiently use Bitcoin at smaller amounts and different trade off balances like all this different stuff, collaborative multi sig, vitamin, stuff like that. Maybe responsible custodial solutions like these. These tools don't get built out unless there's fee pressure. But ultimately the malicious entity will run out of money eventually. And in the meantime, they increase the purchasing power of Bitcoin and they provide direct funding to mining infrastructure. And that's how the whole system is designed and how it works. And it's it's working fucking beautifully right now. It's a it's funny, you tied it back all the way to the game theory and the incentive working how it's supposed to because it was something I was going to reference. You like tied it. Exactly. It's different camps, but same argument around ETF and is it good or bad for Bitcoin or inscription? Is it good or bad? It's literally the same thing. It's like they're valid transactions and you have to participate in the network. And then on the other side of that everybody benefits. Even though a short term certain people think, you know may get rugged and all the things associated they need to buy the Bitcoin, they have to take it off the market. It's the exact same conversation. It's fucking beautiful. Beautiful. Incentives. And it's just like, yeah, there's just like this like non practical sense of an individual that is like it's like the same thought of like coming in, I'm here to fix Bitcoin. It's like this isn't a fair transaction or this isn't a fairway to custody the Bitcoin. It's like there isn't, there's a sub like your version of spam being subjective. Like it is subjective. It's like what is the subjective, the objective way to use Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean like if you look at the math right now today, the math is if the US government or anyone else wanted to like peg fee rates at 200 stats per byte, right? Like if you go to mempool dot space right now, the next block fee is like probably like 7080 cents per byte, maybe $0.90 per byte. If the US government wanted to peg it at 200 cents per byte, it's like 8 to $12 billion because it's in Bitcoin terms. So it it depends where Bitcoin's moving and and whatnot and they have to actually buy the Bitcoin and that's just one year. And by buying the Bitcoin, it's increasing the purchasing power of Bitcoin. So my answer to them is attack us. That would be wonderful. I can, you know, I'll, I'll, I'll stop making the Bitcoin transactions that I don't absolutely need to make. I'll continue to make the ones that I absolutely need to make and I'll wait you out. Beautiful, beautiful incentives. We've talked a lot about development, how it works, consensus. I think what I'd be curious to hear from you, Matt, is what sort of what you know, what excites you going forward in the development space, certain projects, whether it be related to the build out of the Lightning Network, things like Noster, different initiatives like fediments. What are you most excited about sort of heading into the New Year from a development perspective and and why? Well, I mean, I'm, I'm really incredible. I'm really excited about Noster. It's not Bitcoin specific. The idea of of Noster is a a censorship resistant, permissionless, interoperable communication protocol. And it's just really complimentary to Bitcoin because you have a censorship resistant, permissionless, interoperable money and then you have the equivalent on communications and then all of a sudden wallets can communicate with each other. You can have freedom aspects, like a freedom Venmo, you know, you can have a freedom Twitter that has Bitcoin integrated. Like there's all these different cool, complementary aspects of it. And it's also based on this idea of freedom tech. And it's completely open source. Yep. Markings back to what what we started the conversation with in terms of like the actual advantages of building things that are open source and interoperable and also is a perfect example of that. Maybe you could go into a bit more detail in terms of like how it actually works, how some of the sort of fundamental architecture is similar to Bitcoin with, you know, public and private keys and you know, maybe some some applications that you think have gotten some decent traction thus far and where you think things are headed. Well, The thing is, Nasser's incredibly early and like I said, it's not necessarily Bitcoin specific. I think it's just it's it's to me it's this compelling freedom tech stack that I haven't, I haven't been this excited about since I discovered Bitcoin. And so it it has all these similarities to Bitcoin. It is also very different from Bitcoin. The whole idea of the consensus rules and stuff that we're talking about bit with Bitcoin doesn't exist with Noster because you don't have this you know, omnibus financial Ledger like a blockchain. It's like different clients can implement what they want to implement and like worst comes to worst they can't communicate with each other and like the world doesn't end. You don't like lose your life savings. You know, like a government doesn't lose their entire central bank treasury because you like did a consensus change so. So you're able to, you know, iterate and and innovate quicker. But at the same time, to me it feels like maybe what Bitcoin probably felt like in the early days of Bitcoin, but I didn't get to be there for that and I get to be there for Noster and it's super fucking cool. And the potential is really huge. And I think basically every Bitcoin company becomes a Noster company. Every Noster company has a Bitcoin. I think every company becomes a Bitcoin company, period. And I think they also probably become noster companies, just like every company has an e-mail strategy because you just can't run a business without an e-mail strategy. It's like you don't, it's not like, oh, this is a credit card business. And it's like they accept credit cards, they have to accept credit cards, they have to accept Bitcoin, they have to communicate via Noster. Like it'll just be the standard protocols on the Bitcoin side. I don't want to get too far into Noster because it's it's a little bit of a a rabbit hole. But on the Bitcoin? Yeah, go on. I think an important part about Noster, independent of Noster, what Matt's alluding to is I I think and this is a different conversation, like Noster really can exist from a long term perspective without Bitcoin from like a censorship from like running relays and the ability like to run certain servers. That potentially could. Because at the end of the day, like there's economics tied to it and to be able to pay somebody for it if you get shut off via like your credit card. How do you? The only thing is the only thing is yes, I, I on a technical basis, yes Noster could exist without Bitcoin. But we are living in a new paradigm now where open source software is much easier to monetize. If you have a programmable money that that has final settlement without a trusted third party like Bitcoin changes the whole dynamic not just for Noster, but any freedom software. Because historically, if you were running an open source project and you wanted to try and ethically monetize it, you had to. You had to get a credit card processor, you had to bring trusted third parties into it. Maybe you're doing some KYC elements, you have to collect billing addresses, you have this whole fucking burden. Maybe you have to start a company, do all this other stuff. The perfect example is something like Sparrow wallet, right? Doesn't have any Noster integration. Completely separate Noster. It's a Bitcoin wallet Best Bitcoin wallet available and and the lead developer is this guy called Craig Raw. He's from South Africa, doesn't have a company, did not you know did not create a corporate entity, does not integrate with Square or any kind of payment processors and he just he has reoccurring Bitcoin revenue that supports the project right and people are able to just pay him Bitcoin. As for coin join fees in his particular situation, but they're able to pay him Bitcoin for a service they want and he's able to monetize that across the entire globe for his open source software. And if you want to fork his software and do whatever you want because it's open source, you can do that but but you won't be able to collect the fees that he collects, right, because the fees are attached to to a network effect in terms of liquidity of users. So, so this is something specifically that we've been watching very closely at 10:31 and open SAS is this idea of monetizable open source projects and they're monetized with Bitcoin. And I think Noster greatly benefits from that aspect. Things like relays, things like clients, they can monetize using Bitcoin and and and they don't have to integrate with the traditional financial system and all the trusted third parties that come with it, if that makes sense. No, it makes complete sense and that's kind of where I wanted just at least a tie back. Well, we before we go directly to Bitcoin and and Matt's thoughts there, you alluded to very beginning like your journey and the the loss of trust in financial institutions and intermediaries, which I think most that have like looked at Bitcoin can understand why there's value. But then you reference post that looking at like the conglomerates that require trust and centralization and there's this realization that exists for a reason and we all know of like up or we may have know like operation choke point. In these like aspects of like the central points, whether it's a tech stack or financial service stack where the money starts to like, well you can't stop certain aspects, you can stop the money flows which effectively second, third order effects stop the actual actions. And it kind of dawned on me and so and this is part of like what we want to do here in the pod. And like hopefully we get, you know, you back on and other individuals where it's like when you start to squint and you look at the disruptive technologies, you can start to realize that it's not the incumbents like they will be left completely behind because these are meant to like fundamentally disrupt their models. And so Bitcoin's an easy example of that. But then Bitcoin actually under like pins everything else that disrupts everything past that because you can't stop it. And so like, NOSTER is just this first example and you need like speech to be able to like actually do these things. And that's why I fall in this like middle camp versus some of our other friends that may not find it valuable. It's like, you know, you actually have to be able to coordinate in in like discuss. But this is like where the AI thing comes into play, too, because these things are so disruptive that you'll ultimately try to stop them. But then you need the money to keep the juice running, whether it's the power or the servers or all the other things associated. And that's how this whole thing, you know, when we come down to final Storm is like, how do we actually ideate and see the reality of how this thing changes almost everything? And then what are the practical use cases? Because we're not even, like, we're not even at the ball game yet. We're like, showing up. We're still like, if you're in Texas, you know, you have your roadie and you're driving to the Cowboy Stadium just to start. Like, the national anthem hasn't even begun. Matt Odell still singing in the back of the truck with his shirt off. And it's it's. Just tailgating. We're still tailgating. We haven't gotten. No, I mean, you're absolutely correct. I mean Noster is particularly a special beast because like it's the brainchild of Bitcoin developers like Bitcoin developers like Fiat Jaffe, Willis, Cesarean, like Kooks. Like they they like set up the basis of of like Fiat Jaffe published the original spec like it's it was bit corners that created it. But yeah I mean IA 100% agree and I would just say to people like look noster's really early. I think it's something you should pay attention to. You know the the the the main product that exists right now that uses Noster is is basically a censorship resistant alternative to Twitter where where or Facebook where like Elon can't stop you. Zuck can't stop you. Anyone holding a gun to either of their heads can't stop you. The easiest way to interact with that is an app called Primal. You can search it on your your App Store PRIMAL primal and yeah it it'll look it looks like Twitter it's just hard to censor and you can just post whatever the fuck you want and no one can stop you. And I I I think I think people will start to realize the implications there. I mean I'm also like I think Mutiny wallet is like way on the forefront of it. Mutiny wallet. Right now you can run a you essentially have a full Lightning node in your browser of any phone you just type in munitywallet.com. They didn't have to integrate with the traditional financial system because it's a Bitcoin wallet, and they didn't have to integrate with a social network graph like the Venmo API or the Twitter API or the Facebook API because they just integrated with Noster. So they're essentially building freedom Venmo, and they're building it on two open source stacks, Bitcoin and Noster. And so for the average person, like, it won't hit them until like V5, right where it's like super polished. Everything seems exactly the same as their their surveilled and controlled alternatives, but it's actually based on freedom technology and they get all the benefits of that. And they don't even necessarily, for a lot of people in the beginning won't realize the freedom benefits. They just realize the lack of friction where they don't have to through the KYC process. They don't have to confirm 2 deposits in their bank account. They don't have to, you know, like, oh, you deposited $0.23 in my bank account on whatever, you know, like all that friction that comes with the traditional financial system, they just won't have to deal with and the traditional communication networks. And that's where it all starts to come together. And like you said, we're we're tailgating like it's it is so fucking it's it's a meme because it's based in reality. Like good memes are based in reality. And like, I cannot, I cannot overstate how early we are in both Bitcoin Noster. Like all this shit. Like people are are sleeping on it and we can just scream it from the rooftops. All this alpha, I can just scream it from the rooftops. No one executes, no one pays attention. I'm going to be screaming it for like, next. Four years. Five years, 10 years. I've this joke I've been saying and it's just been like I'm sure you know this. You just been looking at you yourself know this and anybody that's on the space. If you generally have a good idea in the real world it's probably a bad idea. Like it's already been thought of and it just wasn't good. Like it just actually wasn't a good idea. Couldn't make money couldn't do it. But in Bitcoin, like if you look at something you're like it should exist or why isn't this exist? It's probably or most likely is a good idea and just somebody hasn't done it yet because they just. Haven't executed. We're still so early yet. And this idea of like the guys that know Bitcoin developing Noster, you can actually start to see like there's a certain lens and has nothing to do with ideology, has to do with like understanding and practice how systems need to be built from a resiliency standpoint. Where then you start in like a redundancy standpoint where you start to think about like, you know, you reference Noster and is it just, you know, distributed enough? It's like, no, it's just distributed enough to do what it needs to do. And then the game theory around if you take something around, it doesn't kill it. It's just the next thing that can exist. And that's the whole idea doesn't like everybody's mental model starts to map to like Bitcoin or other things. It's just, it's just maps to the use case that's needed. You also, you also mentioned AI and so I I don't want to miss the opportunity to say 3 buzzwords together. I believe the future is Noster AI and Bitcoin combined where the AI communicates with people and other AI bots using Noster and all the payments are handled with Bitcoin and I think people will start to realize the issues, it'll become overly apparent, the issues with centralized entities running these AI models because of how crippled they will become due to regulations and and if you use a freedom focused one, you're not necessarily doing it for the freedom, you're just doing it because you get better results that are not biased because they don't have a bunch of woke regulators that are deciding what your results are on your AI search. Can you actually plug MV KS deal just because they just launched and just a breakdown like what that's a visa? I feel like that's partially an example of it. Yeah, so MVK has a service called Unleashed dot Chat which runs open source AI models in your browser locally. Well, the models are run on a, you know like a cloud server, but but all your history is is held locally. So it's it's designed to be more private than like the chat, GP, TS and stuff like that and you simply pay Bitcoin to use it. I would call that you know MVP one a minimum viable product, one of of what we could see here at the basis, like it's centralized, obviously it's just completely centralized, but centralized things are easier to use. So if regulators don't come in and say like you can't do this, like it makes sense and it feels a very easy niche. And it's a perfect example of Bitcoin allowing people to monetize ethically because they don't have to take private information, right? Like if you use something like ChatGPT, even if they're not surveilling all of your searches and everything which they are in, like building their models against it, at the very least they have your credit card and billing information attached to you, right? Because you can't just pay in Bitcoin now on the Noster side. And and so he does have some Noster integration where he takes every single Noster post that has ever existed and he put it into the into his AI model. So you can search through the history of Noster, right. And this is another situation where like open systems win, right? Because all these all these big tech companies are doing the opposite. They're closing the silos. I don't know if you've realized, like if you try and click a Reddit link they like almost always ask you to sign in if it's anything good, if they rate it like over 18. Plus you have to sign it. If you click a Twitter link, you can't see any of the replies or anything unless you sign in, right? LinkedIn has been doing it for ages. Instagram has been doing it for a long time. They're all closing up their ship because they know that the users are their product, even though the users think they're their customer and they want to protect the product at all costs and they want to charge you for API access if you want to use it. Noster is not that case. You don't have to pay for an API. So everyone who's using Noster is contributing to this global open database of signed cryptographic posts. And he just uploaded it all without permission to his to his open source large language model LLM. And as a result you can search through all the Noster posts. But when I say Noster AI and Bitcoin, what I imagine, and this is what Pablo's been working on. Pablo is this Pablo 7 ZS like this ridiculous prolific Bitcoin and Noster developer is this idea he calls it DVMS data vending machines. And it's like this idea of a marketplace of AI boss right, that are competing on a free market in terms of price, reliability, output. Like how how good the results are and they can work together communicating via Noster and they can bid against each other via Noster and you pay them with Bitcoin. So like there's a situation where instead of paying one large model to do the whole thing you need to do. Let's say you need to look at a picture, you need to figure out who the people are in the picture, then you need to write a bio about them and then you need to submit the bio as a noster post. You could have three different AIS do that and they can all pay each other in between with Bitcoin. All communicate with Noster and you can get the best price and the best output and it for the user. We're still a ways off from this, but from the user it should be a nice clean flow right? Where they don't realize they're like, I just need this thing and I need it to be the best it can possibly be and I'm willing to pay market rate and the whole thing just happens and that's fucking crazy, right Then. Then we're in a whole new ball game and it's it's reliant on these open systems all being able to interact with each other, if that makes any sense. Yeah it makes sense. One thing just Brian knew about a transition is what's exciting about this. And it it just dawned on me, Matt, like this is really inevitable. And while it sounds crazy, it's like it's just as inevitable as we feel about Bitcoin. And like it's essentially because of the alternative. It has to be inevitable basically, because the alternative is like the systems you reference closing like that's the nice version of like systems starting to close and and it really hit me with. Digital slavery as the alternative? Yeah, yeah, I mean it's exactly right. And like this, this AI like large the LLMS along with the neural Nets, when they get like good enough people and like nation states are going to freak out just like they're gonna freak out about like censorship resistant money. It's it's a very similar concept And and then they have to and so then you need something to have to like coat inside together and start to move together the same way. Like to be able to speak freely you're going to need a version of that. And so it's just a natural order of how like we move into a transition to a new age. And it's just a weird thing, because I hadn't thought about it in that same way of like Bitcoin the past six years is felt inevitable, but this all feels inevitable as like this starts to interweave with each other. There's no alternative because there just can't be another alternative. Yeah no it's super fascinating and and open systems win. I, I, I, I totally agree with that. But I, Matt can you elaborate on because I think we need to be wary of you know basically the there's going to be other attempts at doing these types of things with the the broader crypto space, right. And we've already seen some of this to to some extent. But why elaborate for for the listeners on why again building on open interoperable systems that are you know based on a solid foundation of a monetary unit that that can be ubiquitous within these connected protocols. Why is that the better route than having these disparate systems of crypto tokens which may garner more attention early? Because it's like just greed and grift of people thinking that they can be early to these things and and be profitable. By participating in these quote UN quote open systems that are enabling different things with AI or or decentralized communications, whatever it may be elaborate on why it it has to be built on something like Bitcoin. Yeah, so I mean look if the open systems that will win, they win because they they win. They win because humans can't help themselves and they they destroy the the systems that require trust. Like if if you can, if you can make a payment on PayPal around the world. Let's forget the debasement aspect of the dollar and that, like you can't really self custody a dollar because they can just debase you at will. We'll just forget about that for a second. But let's say you can just send money around the world with PayPal without KYC. They can't block you, they don't seize your money. You never get rugged. The value prop of Bitcoin goes down because a centralized alternative that is cheaper and faster works and gets the job done well enough that you you don't need something like that. If Elon for some reason is like a God among men and doesn't censor anybody and is able to stop, you know regulators with guns telling him that he needs to ban Alex Jones, then Noster has less use cases, right? Because you can just use the centralized alternative that is cheaper and faster and prettier and you don't have to use, you don't have to use the freedom alternative. But the reality is humans can't help themselves. Like if you have a centralized third party, they will either get greedy or someone who has power over them will get greedy and it destroys those systems. And I think they get out competed by the systems that don't require permission. And I I see that with Noster and I see that with Bitcoin and I would push back against the idea of inevitably, inevitably, inevitably, inevitably I would push back on that idea because it it does create complacency to a degree. And at the end of the day these things are easy to think of as tech projects but they're movements of individuals. It's it's it's individuals deciding that that they wanted to better their lives and push this thing forward and and we need people to stand up like people need to stand up and push forward. Now I think we have the momentum on the Bitcoin side. I'm pretty sure like I'm I have incredible conviction on Bitcoin on the Noster side. It's still very nascent and early and I have less so conviction on that regard. But I I think people shouldn't get complacent. And in both of these cases, when you have open systems and I'll bring it back to the original question, which was like one of my most excited about in Bitcoin is when you have these open permission list systems. Which by the way, two of the things that make Noster and Bitcoin similar is they had a benevolent, benevolent creator that didn't want fame and control. And I I think that is underrated and it's very uncommon. I I don't think America would be in the place it was in today if if George Washington decided that he wanted to do 3 terms or four terms or five terms and become king. Right? Like it actually. Like the history of America comes down to like one dude sitting in his parlor like drinking tea and like talking to his boys and was like, I probably shouldn't do that, right? Like I could do it. Like I, you know, like if Dan Held was in charge at that point, like we might be in a completely different situation. So like, I think people discount that, right? And Fiat Jaf deserves a lot of credit in that regard. Like he never wanted personal fame, he never wanted personal control. Same with Satoshi. And that's very hard to recreate. Like you need, you need people that are willing to do that. The original creator needs to do that. And it goes against natural human desires and wills like emotion to to control things. But when you're talking about these open, permissionless networks that are not controlled by people, the only way they improve and innovate is with pressure with market pressure with. With with like iron sharpens iron. Like you need pain before there's actually market demand to improve things in these open systems, nonstar, super nascent, there's going to be all these different pain points. And as we hit those pain points the the the hope is that open source contributors around the world will build tools and improvements that that will get us past those points. Now, with Bitcoin, we've gotten through a lot of the pain points, but one of the big ones is box space is scarce. With adoption, transaction fees should should increase, right? Humans increase. Humans have a tendency to increase exponentially. We grow very fast, We have lots of children. Our production increases, right? Our GDP increases. All these things increase. Block space does not increase. So as people transact more in Bitcoin, regardless of their degens or not, transaction fees should increase because there's more people transacting and there's the same amount of block space. And we just have not been in this environment for very long. So we should see substantial improvements in terms of the tools and services that are built on top of Bitcoin in terms of handling high fee environments. And the big one that has been championed for years in Bitcoin circles has been Lightning. The Lightning Network. This idea of of of basically an interoperable protocol of batched Bitcoin payments. I can make a single on chain transaction to open a lightning channel and then I can send 10,020 thousand 30,000 Bitcoin transactions through lightning without trusting a third party. And then I can close that Channel and it's only two Bitcoin transactions on chain. I'm only paying my transaction fee twice, but I'm able to send 10,020 thousand, 30,040 thousand transactions to that Channel before I close it. It has been herald as a way to be more efficient with your transaction fee burden and it is, but it has not been built to the point where it it is very it, it has issues in a high fee environment, which is insane, right, because that is like almost exactly what it's trying to solve for. But it hasn't existed in a high fee environment. So it's kind of it's it's to be expected. So with this, yeah. So with this pressure, we're seeing this pressure. The tools should get better, the layer two should get better, all these different toolings on the sides. The businesses should interact with Bitcoin in a more efficient way because because at the end of the day they have the best incentive ever, it will cost them more not to, and they have to figure out how to do it in the most cost effective way possible, otherwise they will lose money. So if you asked me two years ago what was I most excited about with Bitcoin, I probably would have said the Fetamine project and people thought I was fucking crazy. You know, like that's a custodian. Oh, but it's a multi sync custodian. I don't care Matt, Not your keys, not your coins. Oh but the multi sync custodian can't see your transactions. Yeah, I don't care. Matt is still a custodian. It's like OK, but it's interoperable with the Lightning network between other multi sync custodians and all of a sudden two years later you start to see why a project like Fetterman should exist. It should exist because people need to be able to use the chain more efficiently. And if you have a low value transactions that you're that you're trying to save low value amounts in terms of stats, in terms of Bitcoin or transact in low value amounts. You're going to have to figure out ways to share UTXOS with other people. You're going to have to figure out, you know clever good trade off mechanisms to do this on a higher layer above Bitcoin. And so, so I'm I'm excited about Fetamine. I'm excited about Lightning innovation. I'm excited about things like state chains. I think there's going to be really compelling innovation in terms of efficiently using Bitcoin in a relatively secure and private way in a sustained high fee environment and it was never going to happen unless we had one. Right. That's a great point and nice transition to something else I wanted to talk about which you you mentioned earlier in the call, but your work with Opensats starting up that maybe tell the listeners a little bit about what that is and why it's important. Generally speaking, you know, related to what we just talked about in terms of tools being built, when the pressure's there and who's going to go build it. He's open source contributors. So maybe shed a little light on on what you've been doing there? Yeah, so I mean Opensats is a 501C3 that I Co founded with this guy Ben Price. He's the founder of the Bitcoin company. Great company, does not run Bitcoin. I disagree with the name of his company, but he did. His lawyers also disagreed because he can't get it trademarked or anything. He has horrible SEO because if you search the Bitcoin company there's like thousands of companies come up. But anyway, that was his prerogative. He came to me and he was like, let's let's start this 501C3 that supports open source contributors. I said that sounds like a lot of paperwork. He's like, yeah, but it's needed. I was like, well, if you take care of the majority of the paperwork, like I'll help you build a board and and and do all the other good things. But like I just don't want to deal with paperwork. Fast forward to today, we have a great board. We have nine people on our board, all great bit corners that have strong reputations of the space and what we do is we accept donations. You get a tax deduction if you're in America, if you want, or you can donate it anonymously with Bitcoin. If you donate via credit card or wire, we automatically convert it into Bitcoin. All grants are paid out in Bitcoin. We take zero cut whatsoever. A lot of these charities will take 1020. Thirty 40% For operations we take zero cut 100% gets passed through to open source contributors. We have a separate operations fund that pays for a few few full time employees that you can donate to separately if you want to support our operations. And that's how we're able to to, you know, execute efficiently, but also an ethical way. And it's relatively simple. You apply for a grant@opensets.org. Our nine person board reviews it, we debate it, we argue about it, And then if you get five of nine votes, you get approved. And the reason we have a nine person board is to reduce corruption and bias. If you if you want to attempt to block someone, you need to get 5. You need to get four other people to join you, to block someone in a corrupt way. If you want to get something pushed through, you need to get four other people corrupted to push through something. So we naturally built it in a way that obviously it's still centralized, but trying to distribute those roles a little bit, right? Reduce the pressure on any individual. And I'll tell you, in the beginning people thought we were fucking crazy because you have a nine person board. There's a lot more friction to run that organization, right? You can't just like push changes through and change all this other stuff. But like Bitcoin, it was a feature, not a bug. And now that we have millions of dollars we deployed, we allocated over $7,000,000 to open source contributors this year. That's a lot of money, and there's a lot of great conspiracy theories where I'm like the head of the Illuminati or whatever, and we designed it so that I'm not like that is the point. So if you have large tax gains, I know this is coming out like the first week of 2024 but this is going to be a ball or year. You're going to have very large tax gains. Potentially consider donating to open SAT's and and get your tax deduction. If you're an open source contributor, consider applying and and why why is this important? This is important because these open source contributors around the world are making this movement possible and they're often not compensated whatsoever. It's it's usually a side hustle. It's something they're doing on the side. They work there 9:00 to 5:00 or they're, you know, they're 7 to 10, you know, like insane hours at their at their normal job. And then they come and they do their open source, almost charitable work. It's it's available to the public. It's free. Anyone can modify it. It's often times hard to monetize and we want to speed up this process. We want to speed up the process because we don't need freedom yesterday, we need freedom today. And and the stakes are quite high. The stakes are quite high at the end of the day. Like if we fuck this up, like our children, their children, they're digital slaves. They live in a complete dystopia like we need to make this shit happen. And if it's not us, then who's it going to fucking be? So it's important that there are these organizations and there's other ones that are doing similar work. I like to think we're particularly unique in our scope and our scale but but giving giving these people the ability to to say no, I want to work full time on Bitcoin. I want to work full time on Noster. I want to work full time on freedom tech and have a a relatively you know secure and sustainable salary right. So like sometimes we'll do one off grants, but also we have this idea, this long term support program where like Bitcoin core contributors like people that are working on like the core foundational code that runs the Bitcoin network. We provide them two year grants where where they know their monthly salary in dollar or euro terms, not in Bitcoin terms, dollar or euro terms because that's what their rent is in, that's what they're paying for diapers in, that's what they're paying for food for their family. And and if they're going to leave Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter and focus on Bitcoin we need to provide them a competitive, competitive, safe, safe compensation for that right. And it speeds up the whole process. Like, I don't think it's necessarily I, I, I, I I would. I would hesitate to say it's required for this movement to happen, but we speed it up. And anyone who's building on top of these open source protocols, their company will benefit if they support these initiatives. Like if you are running an ETF, you should be donating a portion of your fees to to open source contributors. They are a requirement for your business to function and and you will benefit significantly indirectly over the next 10 years if you do support this. If you are running Coinbase, you are building on top of these people, you you should support them. It is in your best interest to support them and we will make it as easy for you as possible. Whether you want to send U.S. dollars, whether you want to send us Bitcoin, you don't have to do any of the hard work. We'll evaluate the projects, we'll stay on top of them, we'll decide if they get renewed or not. And to us it's it's almost a full time job for us and in this in the classic state of open source, none of us get paid for it. So we're all doing this you know pro bono or whatever and not pro bono because we're not fucking lawyers, but you know we're doing it. No cut, no salary to ourselves because I mean I think first of all because it's an important mission, but I think also like partially selfishly because I I want there needs to be freedom in the world and and it's actually valuable if you would think about it from a long term horizon, if you think about it in a low time preference way like it's valuable to to all of us to support these open source ecosystems. Yeah, and I think me and Matt have been friends for some time now. And I think partially we've really appreciated Matt's friendship and him just giving back to the space. It's very commendable to realize these things. The very first principle, like what you're describing reminds me of, like who will build the roads where people forgot about, like the resilience of humans? Or like if we look at it from an investment aspect of the the network, it's like who will? Who will fix the code? It's like, who will? Ship the code. Yeah, like. We will like, we will partner ourselves because that's what humans did and do when there's like meaning and things behind it. And this ties into like the aspect of Bitcoin and its resiliency to it and then when you kind of tie in and not to go down that rabbit hole, but it is relevant when you think about all coins and you know pre mines and all the things associated, it's like we need to figure out development. We got to figure it out. It's like this is completely different. It's completely opposite. Dev funds and. Dev taxes and we'll say that's why we had to like pre mine and that's why we had to get the tokens and why you had to put $10 million in this and all the things associated. And so I just think it's very important to just realize and highlight like this is how society generally worked for hundreds and thousands of years is like you create capital, you benefit from the capital you give back because it actually benefits you as a society versus like raping and pillaging the the the city center that like basically you live in the muck. And that's kind of what we're we've experienced whether it's in digital or like meet space. So it's very cool to see you doing that. I know you've been picking up a lot of traction. You've been getting some some very interesting phone calls on the open sat side and hopefully that like you said continues into the bull market and it's the best year for you guys. Dude, the momentum on open open Sats is the I can sleep well at night because Open Sats, man. Like, it's to me, it's. I think people are going to look back on this stage of Open Sats and just be like, wow, like it turned into a fucking juggernaut for good. So I'm incredibly excited about open sets to bring it back to the token part of Brian's question that I just didn't answer at all. Like you're repeating crypto tokens. Like, the way I look at all this shit is very simple in a free market. In a proper free market where there aren't legal tender laws, where they're saying you have to use this money, you have to trade it this way, you have to do this here's, you know, brutal tax, regulation, all this other shit. If you if you do forex in a certain way or whatever, in a proper free market, monies compete against each other and the best money will win. The hardest money will win. And Bitcoin is is the hardest money ever in humanity. And it's going to win. I, I I believe it's going to win. I, I, I, I crunched the numbers, I did my own research and I believe it's going to win. And as a result I have incredible conviction that shit. Coins, crypto tokens, the US dollar, the Euro, whatever bricks comes out with in their future currency, gold, real estate as a store of value are no competition to Bitcoin and the market will prove that out over time. They are not a threat to Bitcoin, they're a threat to the users that speculate on them, right? So. So I don't pretend that, you know, like if if if you have some new scam token that comes out, like absolutely it it can be a malicious scam token. It is and it's a threat to the users who decide to purchase it thinking that they're going to get rich quick. But it's not a threat to Bitcoin. And and so I I sleep well at night on on in that regard. I don't try. And yeah, I mean you will just you will die a miserable life if for the rest of your life you try and call out all the scams and tokens and everything else in this space, it's it's much easier to just go into your bitcoins Zen and realize it's not a threat to Bitcoin and accept the unfortunate reality that that people that don't want to accept personal responsibility will fall for get rich quick schemes forever. Bitcoins Zen in 2024. It's a It's a nice, nice motto. Things to get sets. Yep, exactly. Unless you're going to get crazy once you're following that on Noster, then it's there's, it's it's even less than the Caps have come back so that. I'm not the Caps doesn't mean I'm shouting. I'm just speaking clearly. That's all the. Caps like the Cramer. Enunciating. The caps are scary, though, because you remind me of like the Cramer. They're like the reverse. The reverse if you're bullish and then it just it all starts crumbling, you got sand. Well, I mean, it's easy for people to cherry pick. I've been bullish at every single Bitcoin top, but I've also been bullish on every single Bitcoin bottom. So. Consistent. Nothing else. Yeah, very consistent. Well, this has been this has been awesome Matt. I think being mindful of your time we can probably wrap here, but super, super excited to get this this pot off the ground and again, couldn't think of anyone better than you to to help us launch it. So appreciate it man. It was a fun rip. Appreciate you guys. Yeah, appreciate. Appreciate coming on. I think we're going to try to make the the future ones nice and tight. But this one, we felt we got it. We had to go go for it and get Matt's background, some of the early stories and then tying into what's happening now and what we're looking forward to. So appreciate everybody tuning in. Yep, appreciate tuning in. See you guys in a couple weeks later. Thanks.