#772: Bitcoin Is The Peaceful Revolution with Average Gary

you've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency Bitcoin wins in world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. The recruiter was good at being a recruiter. And then, you know, my ex-girlfriend's stepdad was like telling me these stories about being on a ship and using rebar to spear hammerhead sharks to like off the side of the ship. So signed up, fully psyopped into freedom, played a lot of like Socom U.S. Navy SEALs on PlayStation 2 and Call of Duty and all these other things. So I, like, fully bought into that whole psyop very much like let's go spread for democracy. Yeah. So, yeah. Bubba would tell me stories. He was a captain of large ships, and he would tell stories about having, like, take the ships down the Mississippi into the Gulf. I'm, like, navigating that, but I forget when he was deployed. I think it was after the Gulf War in the 90s or before 2001. And he would tell stories about it. They would just get commands just like there would be stranded boats in the ocean. They'd just use their artillery to sink them. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no international law, right? Once you go 12 miles off the coast, you're in international waters. and it's, I don't, you know, there's not, there's like rules and treaties and ways that things should be happening. But yeah, if there's a boat out there, it's blowed up. Yeah. I don't want to dox too much, but if you're comfortable sharing, so you enlisted when you were 18, what year was that? I was 08. 08. Yeah. Yep. And so you got deployed in 2012. I was in bootcamp when the meltdown happened. Oh, what was that like? I had no idea. I mean, I was completely oblivious. Um, I remember distinctly there, it was the same thing. So like nine 11, I was in like sixth grade. And I just remember like the teachers were all like like worried and i remember the same time like when when you know the whole lehman brothers bears whatever was like crashing because i was in boot camp from august to october of 08 and i just remember like people were very much paying attention to the news and not to what we were doing i'm like okay what's going on here like something's happening i don't know what it is because they don't they completely isolate you from the outside um to you know it's a whole process but uh i came out and in hindsight there were a lot of like second career older men joining the military at the time. And in hindsight, it's like if I'd been paying attention a little bit more, it's like, oh, these guys like just got their asses handed to them because of the crash and needed something to go do. And the military is a fantastic, you know, if you're looking for something like the military is always there, they're taking volunteers all the time, steady pay, great benefits, you get the pension all these other things and so there was like i was 18 and there was a bunch of like older older men that were were joining at the same time which i think was a boom and i mean going back to 2012 when you were deployed what was that experience like um i'm very fortunate so none of my deployments i saw combat like i thank god that i never i was never shot at we got mortared right so like called indirect fire there's like sending mortars on the base um nothing super close but I was never like in gun to gun combat. And I'm very thankful for that. You know, as a young man, you glorify combat and you think about that. But then as I've gotten older and reflected a lot more, it's like, no, I'm really glad I don't have those demons to deal with. Cause there are, I'm sure you've heard about like veteran suicide numbers, like guys go through hell in combat. And I'm thankful to not have that hell to have gone through while still very, very, very much participated in it. I called myself a fobbit, right? I never left the fob when I was downrange in Afghanistan. I was like Intel sort of back-end support, running operations on the backside of things in my nice air conditioning without exposing myself too much to harm. How high-tech are those operations in the battlefield? field? I mean, they're pretty high tech. If you, there's this guy on YouTube called Data Slayer, and he releases all these YouTube videos about like, I built military grade radios using like open source, whatever. Some of the things that he's building were like being fielded and deployed like mesh radio, like wifi mesh radios, right? So like one of the systems that some of the guys were using would have this like wifi mesh radio. So that way you were on this ridge and another guy was on this other ridge and another guy was on this other ridge and it would talk long range wifi. so that way all the sensors could collaborate and coordinate with each other. And this was 2012, right? So you can fast forward and just look at the trajectory of software, like what Palmer Luckey's doing and everything. Warfare has become even crazier. One of the things that in another universe, I would have gone on to do some technical R&D work for Naval Special Warfare. I'm glad again, glad I didn't go that path. I decided to get out and be with my family and ended up going into a different kind of warfare R&D. It's like open source battlefield we find ourselves on of ideas and technology. But it was pretty sophisticated, even in 2012, because that's where a lot of the bleeding edge tech always comes from, is from war. So are you officially retired from the Navy or are you in reserve? I am not retired. No, I got out 11 years, four months, and three days. Just separated, no retirement, just decided it wasn't for me anymore. I had my first kid, and I realized that being away wasn't worth it anymore. The Navy was going to send me back to a regular unit, and I was going to have to deal with regular Navy problems, which is not great. I was in middle management, too, and I started to see behind the curtain of, oh, all these people that have problems, they're now my problem because I'm the middle management. I'm a Navy chief, right? It's like the middle management, senior enlisted of the Navy. And so I'm like having to counsel this guy on like sexual harassment, like, no, you can't talk to this woman like that in the workplace. And I'm doing it like multiple times and nothing's happening to this guy. He's just like still around. He just like gets shoved into a different department or something like that. So it's like seeing that there's a lack of the ability for anybody to actually drill in and have consequences for people that weren't doing their jobs was like super demoralizing. And then also the Navy stopped giving me sort of like what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into, like, cyber. I wanted to go into these more advanced technical fields. And then he was like, no, you're a Chinese linguist, according to the Manning numbers, right, because everything's just like a number. According to all the personnel numbers, like, we need you here to be this job, and we're not going to send you over here because you're too high rank, and whatever the numbers worked out didn't accommodate that. It's like this weird formula. What are your thoughts on Hexeth and the trajectory of the armed forces under the second Trump administration? you know i haven't paid too much close attention to it um from what i can tell i like that there's like an actual aggressive like assertiveness to the military i think the whole oh we're the department of defense but we're going to go out and like conduct offensive wars was just a huge misnomer and like completely misleading so i'm happy that we relabeled the department of war because that's what it is um you know hold comments on recent military actions uh but i i I think it is a positive trajectory. I think, though, that there is still a lot of things to, like, wash out in the broader complex that is the federal government that are, like, deeply, deeply entrenched. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think there's still some, like, very deeply rooted entities that are not aligned with, like, this whole, like, Hexeth revamp and revitalization. Like, they're giving people, like, tea. I love it. I mean, all my boys were on tea anyway. it's not like i got my one buddy that he's just like he's just super big and yoke because uh you go in and you you beat your body into a pulp and especially in in the special operations community right and again i'm not i was just like an intel guy i got to work and enable the special operations guy so like by no mean am i like an authoritative like special operator so let me just like throw that out there um but i work for a lot of these guys i have a lot of friends that were in this community. Um, and guys like their body is just destroyed. You do, the reason why the special operations is so good at what they do is they do the same thing over and over and over and over again until you don't even have to think about it. And so you're in and out of helicopters and Humvees and boats and like all these, you know, physically demanding things, your body just starts to tear down. And so a lot of guys would look for other things like tea or, you know, HGH or whatever, whatever like juice they were looking for. Like there's a guy, there's a team of Marines in Afghanistan that they were unable to take helicopters because they all got so big and jacked that they were out, like they outweighed the capacity of the helicopters. So they had to always go on ground. Now that's like too far in my opinion, but if you're signing up to like destroy your body for, you know, your brothers on your left and your right and for the greater good of the nation, I think you should be able to have access to some of these like performance enhancing drugs we'll call them right uh i don't see any reasons for that like you want the tip-top shape military if you're going to fight a war if you're going to have a military like the purpose of a military is to close and destroy the enemy um to do that you need to be physically dominant uh it's becoming less so with the drone warfare and all this other stuff but still you still have to be able to like take 100 plus pounds carry it for you know 15 kilometers go execute a bunch of people take things off the objective whatever it is and then also exfil and you have to do all of that without your body breaking down and the reality of our bodies is like they just don't work after a certain point yeah it's insane to think about it often makes me feel like a pussy i was like god damn it uh and it is like uh it's true you have to truly admire the people that that take that burden on and go do it with the intent to protect the country and the ideals that it was founded on. And I think that's one thing. It was very conflicting for civilians, and I imagine veterans alike, where you get to a point where it's like, are we the baddies? Did you ever ask that question? Not until after I got out, right? So it's a heavy thing to consider, but I cheered when people died. I don't think that is good for your soul, but it's a reality, right? you're watching the the stream the live stream basically of a drone and then it puffs him up dude's gone and then you all cheer because that was the guy um in the moment it's fine but like reflecting on i'm just like man that like there should be some very stoic sort of like not a celebration but stoic acceptance that okay job's done move on to the next thing but it's not like i don't think anybody should ever celebrate somebody else dying like that just is uh that just doesn't work out. And then you look into the monetary implications of the forever wars and the debt funding and all that kind of stuff. And this is like a huge thing. And I'll say, you know, Bitcoin veterans in general has this sort of thread throughout it. It's like a lot of these guys realize that some of the things that we were sent over to do were not necessarily for the benefit of the nation, but were the benefit for the people printing the money. And that's why Bitcoin is like a huge thing for veterans. and the veterans that finally get Bitcoin understand what's at stake and understand that you have all these tools in your toolbox. And ideally, we never want to get to the point where there's violence, right? We want to be extremely peaceful. Peaceful is not harmless. It's peaceful, meaning you have a capacity that is restrained. Bitcoin enables you to be extremely peaceful and also have a way to usurp and go against this apparatus that is just this beast that's just like churning through people and souls that are, it doesn't stop, right? No. Was it the monetary aspect that led you to reflect and think about, or was there a particular moment that you were sitting and reflecting and saying, I mean, what was I doing? What are we doing? Yeah. The monetary aspect was the first of it, just because there's like some, you know, Smedley Butler has some quotes like wars are racket. All wars are bankers wars. That's somebody else, I think. so like understanding that kind of like opened the the door for like oh wow like this was what i was told we were doing was not necessarily the ultimate motive right even though there might have been some kernels of truth in there some like good things some good intentions it's like no man there was we could there was opportunities to have like close and destroy the enemy that were kneecapped or halted or whatever it was and these people you know it there's a there's a monetary incentive to keep the machine going, to keep, right, all these contract companies, all these logistics and supply companies, like they get paid if they're downrange doing the support and the supply and the logistics. They don't get paid if there's no war, right? That was the first revelation. The second was just like, I've returned to my faith in God and understanding and reading into like what the Bible says and everything like this. It's like, oh, wow, there's, there could be a just war. I don't think the wars that I fought in were necessarily just, not at the point that I fought them in. Maybe early on, you can make a case for it, depending on what kind of theories you believe on the origin of the war, which that's a whole nother rabbit hole. That's a rabbit hole that I don't want to explore. You may not have time for. So I'm open to all those concepts and theories, and some of them I think carry some water. But yeah, once you just start looking at the war that doesn't stop and what that means for your soul and for the souls of the people participating in it. And the fact that it's purely extracting from the American populace to go fund this mass, mass murder campaign, that's heavy. That's heavy. And that... Mass murder campaign? And was the defending of the poppy fields real too? Ooh, I don't know. I can't count on that one. Okay. Yeah. All right. But at what period of time were you having this revelation? interesting enough it was um shout out to my boy tim uh he's the guy that orange pilled me he coded sort of like liberty pilled me uh he's been just like a fantastic friend of mine for a long time and i lived with him so i went to afghanistan and then 2014 i started going into this special operations community right doing intel stuff there um and that's where i met tim and just over like bourbon and drinks at the house we were living together and he's just like starting to introduce me to these ideas of like liberty and self-sovereignty and like all these other things. That's where it was weird being on like the tip of the spear, the proverbial tip of the spear, like bleeding edge kind of stuff, while at the same time starting to see the rampant fraud, waste and abuse that was in the military to just like go do something. Because by the time I got into that community, we were like ramping down from Afghanistan, you know, kind of rolling up all those things like the unit that i got to within a week of arriving like our last group of people that were deployed to afghanistan like came back and gave their full like debrief and everything so it's like a period of time where i was like what are we going to do now like what what what is our purpose like what what are we doing like we we spent all this time training for iraq and afghanistan everything like that now that's like ramping down what's what's next right and then you just start to see it's like well nobody has any idea and everybody's just trying to figure it to see where we can throw money at things. And that's where I'm like, oh wow, okay. So my boys tell me about the Federal Reserve and the money printing, the Cantillon effect, like all these things. And then at the same time I'm seeing, it's like, hey, it's September, we have a bunch of money to spend, who needs gear or who wants to go to a course? And I'm like, oh, oh wow, like this is, because if we don't spend our budget, we're not gonna get budget next year. So it's like this whole game of like, we need to spend in excess so that way we can ask for more money next year to do more things. And then that just, like, the loop. So this is an official special ops group that's not deployed, and you guys are giving autonomy to do things? Or what budget is it? It wasn't autonomy. It was part of the normal military budget, right? And you have a budget to, like, train, man, and equip, right, or man, train, and equip. And it's fully within the scope. And it's not that it's, like, inherently bad, but it's, like, these incentive structures of, and you can see this across the entire government, right, is you have a budget for a given fiscal year. if you don't spend your budget the next time they come around to like you know do the line item for your budget they're like oh well you didn't spend your million dollars so we'll give you you know nine hundred thousand dollars well that like for a given organization within the government like that doesn't work out right so it's just like getting a very clear picture of like these things i was learning and reading about but very clear and defined within the dod of like oh wow yeah there is like this gross budget inflation problem and it's not it's not like in a malicious thing in the sense that the commanding officers and the people running these organizations, there's no malice. They want to do good. But the do good is to spend more. It's like this perverse incentive of, oh, we need to spend more money. If we don't spend our money, they're not going to give us the same amount next year. They might even give us less. So when we get to the end of a fiscal year, we have some money left over. We got to figure out how to spend it. Now, there's legitimate uses to spend that. It wasn't all just boondoggles. But at the same time, just the incentive, the fact that it's like, oh, we have money to spend, we need to spend it. And then you start talking to people, like, as I've talked to people throughout the government that manage, like, budgets and stuff, they're like, oh, yeah, that happened in, you know, this organization. Department of Energy. Yeah. Everywhere. It's always, it's part of the rampant, like, usurious, inflationary nature of our monetary system. And, like, the incentives are so clear. It's like, if you have money, who doesn't want more money? And who doesn't, if given the mandate to spend the money, who's not going to do it? Exactly. Right. Yeah. Like, it's, again, it's not a malicious thing. It's just, like, the system is just designed to make you want to consume and spend more over and over again. All right, so bringing this back to Tim, what was Tim's background? Was he, was he? I won't get into his background. Okay. He's a friend. That's all I'm going to say. He's a good friend. From, like, was it, like, broadly speaking, was, like, liberty-minded growing up? Yeah, he had, like, a libertarian background, right? That was, like, his sort of philosophy that he introduced me to, you know, good Christian man. Was his first foray via the monetary system, or was it free markets and freedom of association? I don't know. For me, it was the monetary system. I read, was it Tom Woods' Rollback? Yep. That was the first sort of liberty book that I dug into for whatever reason. I started listening to Tom Woods. Great man to start listening to. Yep. I learned that 30 minutes every day. I was like, okay, this is good. And so I read his book, and that was my entry point to all of this. was like, oh, the money is broken, which is why I think once I got to Bitcoin in the future, it's like, oh, I had the money broken problem. I just didn't see the solution until much later. So money broken problem incepted in your brain, what, like 2014? Yeah, 2015, 2016. Yeah, right around that. What was the first time you were like, oh, Bitcoin's the solution? So fast forward again to 2021. I was working in big tech. I was in the office because I was essential. Um, and, uh, I'm looking for anything that is remote. Right. So like, cause all these people are going remote now and I'm in software and I'm like doing software engineering and, uh, I wanted a job. And again, Tim's like, Oh, Hey bro, check out this crypto thing. So, you know, he did his time as a shit corner. Uh, but he was like, Hey, go check out this thing. So I like, I interviewed at Celsius. Oh, yeah. What was that like? Did you mean? They ghosted me. They ghosted me. It was fine. It was like, I'm glad I interviewed. I tried to get an interview at Kraken. Like. Dodged a bullet there. Absolutely dodged a bullet. I didn't land a job there at all, right? Like there was no, I had no proof of work. This is like something I came to realize too, but it got my foot in the door of like the idea. Like I bought some Ethereum, right? Cause he was like, oh, you gotta go do some smart contract. You're a dev. You gotta go do this. And then come to find out, I need like, I don't know, like three grand worth of ETH to like do anything fun or exciting. And I'm just like, what is this? And it costs like $30 to send it to my own wallet and everything. I'm like, I got kids. I can't afford this thing. And so it was like, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin. I was like, okay, well, let me go check out this Bitcoin thing. Boom. Node was syncing within a day. Like I had my old gaming laptop up and running, downloading the blockchain, doing IBD, syncing. And I was like, huh, okay. And then like I send myself some. It doesn't cost, you know, 30% of whatever I bought. I'm like, okay, what is this? It's all open source. And so I just started like going down this rabbit hole of like, okay, what is this Bitcoin thing? Because it's, to me, it was like accessible and it was like cheap, I guess, which is funny to think about. and so like I just started exploring that and just I got onto Twitter again and just started like poking around there uh eventually it landed on RHR right that was like one of the first I was gonna say I feel like you've been like a ride or die RHR fan like for like obviously many years like it feels like longer I feel like you were like an A1 day one no not that long uh but you know I have this this this blessing of ADHD that I've really learned how to channel and manage and so like when i get into something it's like i'm going down the rabbit hole and i'm like free falling so you know i i did find a remote job uh at a startup it's not worth mentioning but they laid off like 14 of their headcount after the first year i was part of that and i acknowledge why because i was simultaneously like on my gaming laptop like managing nodes and like losing money on lightning channels and like doing bitcoin twitter stuff and trying to do my job at the same time. And so I was just like completely checked out from the job because I was like rabidly consuming Bitcoin content. I listened to the whole Sailor series with Breedlove. Like that was a huge like unlock of like, oh, this is a thing. And like this, like this matters. And that was like a big unlock for me as far as like the conviction point. And then there's just just rapid consumption and just trying to learn every possible thing and poking holes in it. Right. Like trying to figure out like, okay, where does this break down? Where does this, what, what makes this fail? And, you know, it's apathy. I think it's true. The mining centralization thing, that was like, that was a big thing I found. There was a blog post by Adele that was like titled Fetty Pools. Yeah. I was like looking for something to do, looking for a problem to solve that was not being addressed. And I read this and I was like, huh, okay. And I worked on Fetty Mint for a little bit. and I realized that there was not anyone doing Bitcoin mining development, like not in like an open source, like large way. It wasn't for a long time that I finally came across like the Stratton B2 project, which existed at that time, but was not the project it is now. You know, I was looking for like open source, like pool software. It was like CK pool, but even that was like, maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, but it just seemed like mining and engineering and mining was like the right place to go. And I feel pretty vindicated about that today. Yeah. But, yeah. And so with your special ops Intel background, I feel like you're well equipped to prod and probe the edges of the technology around Bitcoin. And I imagine you know when a system's secure and when it's not. Did anything about Bitcoin impress or depress you about the security of the network? No, not the security of the network. again, it was the mining thing. It was seeing that there was this massive underdeveloped space that was centralizing and it's still to a degree centralizing. I think we're getting better in that front, but it was purely in the mining spot, right? Like the cryptography, which I've gone down that rabbit hole. I did a whole like year long, uh, motivate the math series with, uh, fundamentals where we talked about like, he has this whole magic internet math thing, but like I was the first sort of like test pilot of like learning cryptography. Cause I wanted to understand, like, okay, what is this math? He's doing that. He's got a website. Shout out to Philly John, Die Hard, Ride or Die. The last one, before we went into summer remission, was about his Fundamentals Math program. If you want to learn more about the hardcore cryptography of Bitcoin, I think he's open towards it, and he still has the podcast, right? It's a new podcast. With Rob. With Rob, yeah, but there was the prototype with myself. It was a great time, But I went in down that, right? It's like, okay, the cryptography. I don't think the cryptography is broken. I'm not a quantum guy. I don't lose sleep at night over it. Looking at the node implementation, like, I can grok what's going on in, like, Bitcoin Core's code base. You know, I vibe coded a testnet for CTV activation client at, like, a conference one time, like, early on in the vibe coding days. So like I feel comfortable enough, but I feel like I still lack a lot of like the academic rigor and sort of like patience, really, to be honest, to like meaningfully contribute to that project. So, you know, I looked into that, but it was I don't think that's my cup of tea necessarily. And so I just kind of like looking around for different opportunities. I didn't see any edge cases, though. I didn't like probing. It's like, OK, well, the cold card like clicked instantly. Right. Because if you're in comms in the military, even, not even like, you know, the super sweet secret squirrely stuff, if you're in comms, you understand that there's these like devices that you carry around that like you can't let anybody hold it. Right. And it's like locked up in the safe at all times. And it's like never gets connected to the computers. Right. Because it holds the cryptography keys for like the military communications. Right. And so all these principles and properties of like security and cybersecurity and everything like that, like I was like, oh, OK, like Bitcoiners are doing this for their money. And they have these special purpose air gap devices, right? And like pull cards is like one of a number of them that you could use. I was like, oh, I don't have to connect this thing to the internet. And it just made sense because I had devices that I operated that I couldn't, like you don't plug it into the internet. You don't connect it to the Wi-Fi. Like it's all a standalone self-contained system. And that's how I like learned Linux, right? It's like, you have to run this black box. Oh, it runs Linux. I'm like, what is Linux? Like, oh, it's the operating system thing. So yeah, I mean, I definitely probed around and have thought about it. There's tons of veterans. One of the things that military does is sand table, war gaming, adversarial thinking. How would I attack this? Red teaming. I try to get into that. I have some friends that did legit red teaming. Get the orange vest and the hat and go walk in with a ladder and say, hey, I'm just here to fix the sprinkler, to get past security, then go plug in a Raspberry Pi somewhere and hack the network. so like that kind of thinking definitely is applicable to bitcoin but from a technological standpoint i haven't the biggest thing is just like people running running the hash rate running the nodes holding the keys right not trusting that the benevolent overlords of the custodians are going to like do what is best in the in the minds of the people what's up freaks this episode is brought to you by blocks bitcoin ecosystem you probably know cash app you probably know square you definitely know bit key if you've been listening to the show for the last couple of years. What matters most is that these are not disconnected random products. They are part of a broader push to make Bitcoin easier to buy, easier to hold, and easier to use in the real world. Cash App helps people stack Bitcoin. 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If you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your Bitcoin without giving up control, go to unchained.com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. That's TFTC10 at unchained.com. And so you're having these realizations, and it seems like, obviously, because it exists, independently, other veterans are having these realizations as well. And you guys started the Bitcoin veterans project. And so how did that come to be? So I didn't start it. There were five guys originally that started it. You can go look it up if you want to. But it started as like a Twitter group chat. And it was just this realization that there was no Bitcoin veterans community. I think there's maybe one other, two other Bitcoin-adjacent blockchain, whatever, veteran stuff. But they just identify that there was this gap in the Bitcoin industry, in the ecosystem, community, whatever you want to call it, that there was no veterans organization. And then understanding that Bitcoin is this important thing. It's like, oh, well, we need to be educating veterans. and also the government has trained all these veterans on all these skills that like directly map onto all these aspects of the bitcoin ecosystem that we can be force multipliers for right like beans bullets and band-aids i mean you're like asics electrons and you know like whatever else is like secure enclaves secure enclaves yeah yeah exactly like you know understanding that you have to secure the the radio crypto in a certain way directly translates to it's like oh yeah there's my keys like I can let my keys go online you know backing up physics physical security defense in depth like all these applicable skills to like I going to run a hot wallet on some HSM somewhere Well, I better have like these layered security things. It's the same thing the data centers are doing, right? It's the same thing. It's like nothing new necessarily, but the gravity and the understanding of the day-to-day operations of doing that, it's like veterans get that, right? Veterans are molded to be leaders, right? You're taught to step up and get things done when other people are either demoralized or demotivated. You're taught organization, right? Like even if you don't know how to organize things, by the time you reach a certain rank in the military, they've drilled into your brain. This is how you get people to accomplish a goal. This is how you define a goal. If the goal is unclear, you need to go take it back to your commander and be like, hey, sir, what are we trying to accomplish here? Let me develop the plan. Let me bring it back to you. We'll reiterate it. Let me go brief it to the boys. And then we're going to go execute. But first we're going to train on this and everything. So the whole thing originated from just a Twitter group chat. And then it just grew steam. It was like a Bitcoin or Twitter Spaces. So we run one every weekday at 10 a.m. on X now. But this was back in the Twitter days. We were running one. And it just kind of blew up. It was just a thing. People came in. It was good conversations. We moved from the Twitter group chat over to we have regional chats on Signal. So primarily it's run on Signal. Depending on where you're at in the country, you will get plugged into a regional chat. Those are veterans only. And then we have this huge list of topical chats. So it's like you want a gun chat. You want a privacy or self-custody chat. There's like a Tesla owner's chat, right? There's a pilot's chat. There is a chat for health and wellness. They're like any of these topics. It's just veterans that are Bitcoiners that are like, hey, I'm super passionate about this. I want to run it. So we spin up the chat. We throw in some of the founding members of admins and then we make the dude an admin and we say, here you go. Run it. Right. Like one of the most active chats is like the Bitcoin Veterans of Christ. And there's just like, oh, yeah, I do theological debates and like all these other things going on. The regional chats are more for like coordination and like, hey, here's a meetup going on here. you know the event tonight at pub key i like threw that out there i was like hey come on out so there's gonna be some bitcoin veterans showing up for that um but yeah it just kind of spawned into this like bigger group and to the point where we ended up getting a room at the 2024 conference for free which was awesome um and you know that blew up that was a huge success we had like met vendors in there and it's like this very like low key down in the basement of the conference but like very very high signal event we qualified people on ham radio down there and so just kept gaining this momentum. And then the following year in 2025, we partnered with Bitcoin Park. We're like, hey, can you host like a summit or something like that? Yeah, absolutely. Right. Park's great. Love the park. So we did the first like official sort of like summit, named summit at Bitcoin Park in 2025. It was a day of just like speakers. And it was a lot of just, you know, discussion of like what the what veterans are. What are these topics that we go into? Right. What is fifth gen warfare? What is the what is the fight for your health on the emotional, spiritual, physiological aspects, right? We had doctors out there. Like we have the Bitcoin veterans, as we've come to find out, it's like veterans have this diverse group of skills. And so they're everywhere. We got doctors, we got pilots, we got mechanics, we've got electricians, we've got Intel guys, we've got, you know, admin guys, right? And they all have these different skill sets. And so they're getting plugged in, in all these different aspects across the industry. You know, speaking on stage, running their own meetups, running companies, right? So like this t-shirt, this guy started BitPrint Solutions and he just identified that there's not like a good like swag store for like Bitcoin merchandise. So he started a swag store, right? And he's got like lightning checkout and all these other things. But it's people like that that are just identifying these gaps and like filling the gaps, right? Because again, veterans are prone to action when they see that there's a problem or something or they're given a problem to solve. It's like, okay, let's go ruthlessly attack this. Let's get with the boys. Let's figure out what's going on. Let's go solve problem solve and it just kind of evolved from there and now you know we did a we're doing our third annual summit at bitcoin park this year november 9th and 10th bitcoinveterans.org summit 2026 for all the info we're still looking for like participants and volunteers and everything like that that's the other crazy thing is like there's no like official like bitcoin veterans org like there's some non-profits that sort of like operation bitcoin does veteran education. They're partnered with the state of Georgia to do distinct Bitcoin veteran, like Bitcoin mining, workforce development and training and everything. That is like an official org that exists. But this broader Bitcoin veterans group is just people getting plugged in. Nobody's in charge of it. I'm not in charge of Bitcoin veterans. Do I get asked a lot of technical questions? Absolutely. But there's other very technical people within the community. And so it's become this network of individuals that just understand that there's two rules. There's no violence and there's no shit coins. And outside of that, like have at it, bro. You want to do like a Bitcoin veterans pop up meetup in like Des Moines? Sure. Go for it. Call it Bitcoin veterans, but no violence and no shit coins. Let's I mean, I get the second one. No shit coins seems pretty obvious to me. No violence. Like what is the sort of boundaries of that specific role? Is it like not advocating for violence? Is it not like getting together and doing like a fight club or what is it? It's not advocating for aggressive violence, right? Here in America, we have the right to self-defense. We still have the second amendment, right? Which defends the first. And so we have government sanction right to self-defense. That means that we are an extremely peaceful organization, but again, being veterans, we are highly trained and highly capable that if there's violence to be met in a defensive or responsive manner, it's like we're going to be the guys showing up for that, right? We've got law enforcement. We've got people that are still active duty. So it's not so much that we don't practice violence in a controlled setting, right? Like rolling jujitsu or going to the range. The summit, we're going to have a range day. The second day of the summit is a range day at a private range just outside of Nashville. And you'll get some of the best training you've ever had in firearms. So it's not so much like violence. It's like no calls for violence, right? And that's really to curb people coming in, Fed posting. Right? Like we're not trying to incite violence. We're not trying to incite a revolution. The revolution is fully underway at this point and it's completely peaceful. One of the key things that I believe, and I think a lot of Bitcoin veterans would agree with me, is the greatest appeal of Bitcoin is the fact that I can use this tool as a peaceful means to protecting my family, protecting my community, and protecting my country from those that would wish it harm. Right? I don't have to go out and mow down a bunch of people because they wish my community harm. I can just be successful. I can stack stats. I can run a business that is cash flow positive and push all of my excess cash flow into Bitcoin. And eventually I will starve out the parasitic people that wish me and my country and my community harm. And they will just die a slow death of starvation. And that to me is like the direction that we're heading in. It's going to be a long, slow grind. But that's why you build the community. You build the networks. You build your citadel, right? Learn how to farm. It's not that hard. Learn how to run the meetup. If you're running the meetup in your local area, now you have a network of people. It's like, oh, Billy does goats. Well, we're going to buy goats from Billy. And Bobby over here, he grows herbs and stuff like that. And Joe runs like a trash company. So we're all going to go and we're going to pay Joe now to pick up all our trash. Not because he's got the best price. Maybe not even because he's got the best service, which he's a veteran. He would. But because he is on the same mission and he is ethically and morally aligned on this idea that Bitcoin is money and it is a superior money and it lacks all these negative aspects of fiat. So we're going to enable the people in our community that we want to win, that will enable us to win by using Bitcoin and funneling Bitcoin into these companies. Right. Do you think veterans are more attuned to Bitcoin than other subsets of the population? Yeah, we like pain. We know what it's like to suffer. High pain tolerance. Yeah, high pain tolerance. You know, we say that in the depth. We're at 64K, right? It's like, I'll take 64 tonight. Absolutely. Absolutely. I came in on the way down from 69 and rode that thing all the way down, listening to R.J.R. every week. It is. I mean, my pain tolerance threshold was developed like skateboarding and fighting my brother growing up. But you get used to it. The first bear market was certainly scary for me. But this time around, it's like, yeah, it's just another one. And it's not the pain, right? It's the ethos. You know, everybody that's a veteran stands up and swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution. That like that is a thing. You get some guys that will join. It's like, OK, you were either going to go to jail or you're going to join. It's like, OK, commendable for you to like sign up and serve. But we're still primarily a volunteer force. and so whether you were sold a lie on what the patriotic mission was, a lot of us, myself included, still believed in like, okay, there's a country and I can serve that country and I can die for that country if needed in the defense of that country and Bitcoin is now just a new mission and a new tool that enables me to not die. I can flourish. I can flourish while still serving others, right? So you get a lot of veterans that are service-oriented, right? They just want to do good, whether they were misdirected or misguided or misinformed, whatever. It doesn't matter. The heart was set on acts of service and they're willing to sign up with their life to carry that out. And so when they get out, you lose this entire identity structure. You lose this entire support structure. So that's another one of the things that Bitcoin veterans aim to do is like provide a new mission and a new community to get veterans plugged in to another band of brothers that say, hey, man, we get it. We know you're out there alone on this island. You're struggling with PTSD. You're struggling with whatever it is. Like, you don't know how to cope. You don't know how to exist in the world. We've got a community for you to plug in, and we're going to help you uplift yourself. We're going to teach you this new skill set. We're going to try to get you plugged into this new skill set. And by the way, if you listen to us and you stack Bitcoin for five to ten years, you're going to be doing all right. Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. 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That's 10 times longer than most lenders out there or go interest only for up to five years. Rates start at 7.99% APR for a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity. It's hard to beat. I mean, the duration in the rates is the best I've seen in the market to date. You also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card, spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and you need liquidity without triggering the taxable event, this is worth a serious look. Go to aven.com slash Bitcoin. That's A-V-E-N.com slash Bitcoin. Check it out. As somebody who identifies as a Bitcoiner, that was one of the things that made me most proud to wear that label was the response to Hurricane Helene. The Bitcoin veterans really stepped up in a big way. We raise over an entire Bitcoin to support operations in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee. And when I say operations, I don't mean like FEMA and all these other like NGO things. A lot of them are like, you know, disaster scammers. Sometimes I don't want to denigrate a lot of it. The other thing to realize is like Western North Carolina is home to a lot of veterans already. And so when we got on the ground there and I mean, like dudes got in their trucks with camping equipment and like whatever resources, like water and food and like extra clothes and blankets. And cause we, we understand what it means to live in, you know, a hole in the ground, right? You understand what the bare necessities are. Like when you, when you have to take that ruck and throw it on and go like camp in the middle of the woods for like a week with your buddies, you don't want to take extra stuff with you. You know what the necessities are. And so the guys were like packing up trailers, packing up their trucks, driving out there and just making contact with the local people that were already plugged in and knew what was going on. And it just happened to these local people where this group called Christian Rangers, um, in at least in the area that we were operating. And so we just basically plugged in and said, hey, how can we force multiply you? And by God's providence, I had all these MeshTastic radios, these little like off-grid mesh network radios. And one of my buddies, Jordan, shout out to Jordan. I bought like 300 of these from China. I imported them like a couple of years back. He's like, hey man, I got like this like bourbon night with my buddies. Like I'll take 80 of them off your hands. And so I ended up delivering those to him. Lo and behold, a couple months, a few months later, Helene hits and we're like, oh, we have radios that work off grid that can be deployed like now. And so one of this was like driving in all these Mesh Tastic radios to go hand out. We had them on the National Guardbirds, right? The way Mesh Tastic works is like you have to be able to see line of sight and they kind of ping around in a mesh network. And so you got people down in the hollers in the hills of Western in North Carolina, well, you can't get radio contact unless you have a National Guard bird flying over top. And now the messages can ping out up and out. So before the Starlings, before like anything else were going on, there's like guys hiking through the woods or riding ATVs through these back, you know, these back hollers to go check in on people, making contact usually with local churches. Churches, you tend to know like, hey, who's around, right? Even if they're not attending the church, they know like who's in the general facility and just making contact, make sure there's water and communications, right? Because everything was down, the entire grid was down. The electricity, cell phone. And so we probably had anywhere from like six to 12 dudes on the ground with their own vehicles fully funded via Bitcoin donations. You know, they were sleeping in like half finished condos and sleeping bags. Right. Meanwhile, you have like FEMA taking up all the hotel spaces so that people coming in like can't like find lodging. So we did a very, very low budget. It was very low budget, but highly effective because we knew that it's not necessarily about going and like figuring out how to just do it for the people there. It was going and figuring out who were the leaders in that area, enabling them to figure it out and distribute it. We actually ended up with this one guy. We got him set up with a cold card. We got him funded and he had this massive warehouse that he ended up using as a logistics hub to disperse all this disaster equipment. And so like he was not a Bitcoiner. He was just a veteran. You know, we did our secret veteran handshake, right? You have a shared experience, a shared ethos. And so like, it's very easy to connect with other veterans and be like, Hey man, what do you need? Right. He's like, I just need funding. I got this warehouse. I just need people. I need, you know, a fire watch, you know, cause there's people there playing games with all the supplies arriving. So it's like some, some of our guys just showed up and stood armed watch overnight over like the supplies that were being delivered. Right. It's as simple as that, but like that, you don't get somebody down off the mountain and say, Hey, can you stand watch overnight here on all this stuff. It's like, no, man, their entire house is washed away in a mudslide. So even just a simple actor, just like watching over, you know, people and stuff, uh, or getting up there, they hiked up, some of the guys hiked up to the top of, I think it's like Bald Mountain or something like that. It was one of the taller mountains and put like a solar repeater node for MeshTastic that ended up just like blowing up the connections all across that area. Um, so that was, that was a response to Helene. And I mean, we were, we were on the ground within, you know, weeks before even like the news was like fully covering it, right? There's that weird like lol. The news is like... You could only see it on X like, hey, is anybody coming to help? It's an incredible example of distributed self-organization. That is actually, I mean, to your point, like FEMA just being reminded of some of the things that FEMA was doing at that point. I mean, you remember the story from Florida where people had the destroyed buildings in their driveways and they were literally trying to pay private trash companies to come in and pick it up and FEMA said, no, you can't do that and yeah they were allowed to sit there and just get moldy and create a health hazard and it's just like the glaring example the incompetence of the federal government where it's like hey you have individuals like yourself and other veterans were self-organizing to solve these problems immediately and there's some bureaucratic bullshit stepping in the way saying like no you can't come pick up this trash yeah it's insane well that's where i see veterans plugging in too right because um it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on politically like veterans are still a very respected class, right? Because we do, we sign up with our lives. It's like, hey, Uncle Sam, you're going to own me for these next four to eight years. And so there's definitely a degree of respect there. And so one of the things I see Bitcoin veterans fitting is some of these harder conversations that might look like they're political one side or the other. It's like, no, this is a problem for freedom, right? So like the old samurai case, right the samurai developers are still in jail um i with the help of ai penned a letter to like u.s senators to describe like hey if you don't and during the bpi day on the hill i went and talked to some of these staffers about not just like the samurai case but just in general that like open source developers should not be prosecuted for code that they write that's like taking like oh you murdered somebody with a hammer well i'm gonna go you know arrest the guy that made the hammer it's like that's not how this works right you're gonna scare people offshore you're gonna to have a brain drain of some of our brightest and our best people leave the country if you do not protect open source software and open source developers distinctly in the Bitcoin space, right? Because Bitcoin is such a powerful tool. You're seeing these parallel now in the AI space, with all these open models. We as veterans have a platform to go say some of these hard things, because throw your slings and your arrows at me. I'll dodge them. I don't care. They'll hit me. it doesn't matter because I will tell you my opinion and I'm going to go pick up the trash and come and arrest me, bro. Come on. I'm going to do the right thing regardless of what's necessary. I see parallels. Not that I'm saying you should do this, but the whole flock camera thing, right? We don't want surveillance. No. Nope. Not really that. I mean, I was on the Bitcoin News podcast. I don't know if it published yet, but we talked about the flock cameras. The The thing that's, I mean, obviously we don't want surveillance, but then it's similar to like chain analysis. Yeah. Like not only are the samurai guys in jail, Roman Sterlingov is in jail for Bitcoin fog and chain surveillance, chain analysis tools were used to, I strongly believe, incorrectly incriminate him with starting Bitcoin fog. And bringing this to plot cameras too, you have so many false positives where it's like, I'm sure you've seen the videos. I think there was a woman in Colorado, like the cop came to her house ready to arrest her. Yeah. And she had to like prove on the spot like, hey, that's not me. It's insane. Well, that's like that's another place where veterans, I think, can step up is like we are in law enforcement. We're qualified for law enforcement. Go run for sheriff. Right. Like if you want to make a change, one of the other things is in civic service, in civil. Like I'm not saying don't run for Congress. Don't represent it. I think at this point, federally, unless you're really, really motivated and charged and you have the funds and the resources and the backing to do it, I think it's probably a waste of your time. But locally, your board of supervisors, your mayor, your sheriff, your city auditor, councilman, whatever it is, go get plugged in there and start talking about FreedomTech. Go start talking about these principles that Bitcoiners understand and that the broader FreedomTech open source movement understands. but go be a beacon of light in your local community to say, no, we don't want this, right? We don't need to be $21 million in debt because, you know, all the boomers have mismanaged this county's government for the past decade and a half, right? We can actually do something different. As soon as you start doing that, you'll start to see the tendrils of control, right? So my local area, I tried to pitch bit bonds, right? I was like, oh, that's a great idea. Well, you can't do unless Richmond tells you you can, right? I'm in Virginia. We are subjects of Richmond, right? The county cannot do things without Richmond's approval and express authority. And so any sort of idea, I have gone through multiple iterations with people in my local area. I'm like, what can we do to like, write the course on this? And they're like, oh, well, obviously we have to build data centers, which that's another hot topic. But it's like, no, we have to destroy this heritage farmland and plow it over to build data centers. And I'm like, wait, that's not the only way to create tax revenue. But all these other mechanisms for tax revenue, you have to go to Richmond and get Richmond to approve it. Richmond's not going to let go of that control. So it's like veterans can plug in, and any Bitcoiners, right? It doesn't take a lot of money to win an election locally, right? So if you're a Bitcoiner sitting on a decent stack and you're civically minded and you have the gumption to do it, go spend some money and run a local campaign or find the guy in your local area that's willing to run and just fund his campaign and get people in the local area. Bitcoin's a grassroots movement, right? enable people in your local area to rise, whether it's the business owners or it's the local politicians to rise up and say, Hey, we're not doing this shit anymore. We're done with Fiat. We're done with the stupid panopticon surveillance state. We're going to use free and open source software. Oh, FOIA. Dude, I tried to FOIA my county government. They want to charge me $4,000 to do an email query. And I'm like, I should be able to come in. You can issue me an API key, right? It's 2026. You can check my ID, scan my face, my eyeballs, whatever. But I should be able We're coming to the county government, sit down at a terminal, and I should be able to query everything you do because you're my employees. You work for me as a citizen of this county." And there's this whole smoke and mirrors thing around FOIA, like freedom of information, acting, and then they charge you an arm and a leg because, oh, it takes IT this many hours to do the query, and then it takes so-and-so to review the query to make sure there's nothing in there that's censored. I'm like, well, first of all, what is in there that's sensitive? What are you hiding from us? And a lot of the people were like, oh, well, some people email in that some domestic abuse victim will email in to seek out help. I'm like, okay, you can flag that one as soon as it comes in. But at the end of the week, everything should be released publicly. And I should be able to query it programmatically using my clanker to figure out what you're doing day to day and who you're corresponding with and who you're signing NDAs with, right? Because I blew up. I did pay for a four-year request. It was very narrowly scoped. It still cost me like 400 bucks. But I found that my local board of supervisors had, in fact, signed NDAs with data centers, even though publicly they're like, we don't know anything about NDAs. We don't know what you're talking about. And we're like, oh, well, what about these emails that we found? And then everybody's surprised. Oh, wow. It's like, no, you work for us. And the radical transparency that you desire so desperately for the populace needs to be flipped around and focused on you. That's what I was just about to say. It's insane, the inversion of the relationship between the government and the governed in this country today. As you're describing, the complete opposite of what it should be. We should be making tyrants uncomfortable again. Yeah. Well, bring this back to Bitcoin veterans. I mean, it started as a Twitter group chat has obviously grown, and it seems like momentum is picking up. Like if we're four or five years into this sort of amorphous, loose association of veterans, you have Bitcoin. Where do you think it will be in another five years? And really with the context of the force multiplier that you described with Bitcoin specifically, I think. So, and this is something that I've seen in the mining industry specifically. there's a strong veteran presence again because just the direct correlation of like if you can run a mining if you can run a fob deployed you can run a mining site like if you feel like you're on a fob like the mining sites that i've been to out in west texas it's like it feels like a mining site there's a gravel pays and there's like all these like huts and boxes all over the place and like you know everybody's like doing meetings in the morning to figure out what we're doing for the day stay hydrated like all this stuff it feels like you're deployed i'm like wow okay but it's that that's one aspect another one is you know you've got the the georgia bitcoin council you got the illinois bitcoin council um you got various meetups that are all being run by veterans uh led by veterans um various groups that like are plugged in like there's i'm fairly confident saying this i'm pretty sure at least one of the core contributors is a vet like there's a core contributor that's a veteran right he's not necessarily directly plugged into bitcoin veterans, but the fact that there's a huge alumni network, essentially, right? Like I've heard people talk about like, oh, you go to Ivy League school, not for the diploma, but for like the network of individuals. Well, veterans have one of the biggest alumni networks ever, right? And they're all across the board. You know, they're in C-suites at S&P 500 companies. They're in Bitcoin companies. They're in, they're running meetups, they're running, you know, random off-grid gas, you know, mining facilities, right? They're doing security audits for whatever, you know, open source tools that they're using. They're working on protocol development, right? So I see Bitcoin veterans, one, just being a bigger and more respectable name, and it's really just a network of people. And I see it as the organizations and the institutions of the first turning that we are going into, Bitcoin veterans are going to play no small part in that. And that's where I see it. That's why I didn't mention it earlier, but I mean, Bitcoin famously has this problem being a distributed network with no, obviously, central organization structure. And it's not that I'm calling for that, but I think the skills that you described earlier that veterans are equipped with around organization is desperately needed. And I think you, obviously, I won't speak for every veteran, understand that the distributed nature of the protocol and the governance around the protocol is extremely important. But bringing the organizational skills the veterans have to work within those confines but still get shit done seems like a very massive value add to the network. Absolutely. Well, and this is like this is the whole thing. If you ever talk to Gabe Lord of Operation Bitcoin, he does that workforce development. This is like one of the things he says is maybe not what he says. But what he understands is, you know, because veterans have these leadership abilities and skills that have been developed. one of the other things is you also train to a point where you can operate without command and control right so like you have to know what the final objective is right the objective is hyper bitcoinization how do we get there i don't know but like how do i and if you look at a command structure and you have command at the top and then all these tiers along the way until you get to the smallest unit of like a fire team right that fire team knows what their tactical mission objective is to the point that even if they lose all of communication and blackout on comms and whatever, that fire team together is an effective unit to go close and complete that objective and then also link back up with the rest of the units, right? So it's great to have like, you know, centralized command and control. There's efficiencies to that. But at the same time, veterans plug in as leadership across, you know, this network of individuals means that even when a cell is isolated and there's, you know, you're alone and unafraid with no support or, you know, resupply anytime soon, you can still figure out how to get the job done. You can still figure out how to enable yourself and the other people around you, right? That's the force multiplication thing is we're not doing it. Like we're not James Bond. That's a whole psyop, right? Like James Bond is not like, that doesn't exist for the most part, right? There's support. There are, you know, tons of people. You can't do things alone. That's one of the biggest humbling aspects that I learned in the military was like, yeah, I'm a smart guy. I'm very motivated, high energy, get a lot of shit done, but I'm nothing without the people on my left and my right. And if they're not coming along and if they're faltering, like you're only as strong as the weakest link in your chain. Right. So it's like shield lock with these guys and push forward together. And you're going to, you're going to push right through anything that you can ever come across. Yeah. Well, you mentioned it earlier, but we have it as a topic that we want to dive into on the list. You mentioned that James Bond, not real. Is that fifth generation warfare? Is that a psyop? So getting into this whole concept of fifth generation warfare. Yeah, fifth generation warfare. Go back and listen to the Bitcoin Veterans Summit. I think it's the pinned tweet on at Bitcoin Veterans, but there's an entire panel about it. And you've had sequences like trench warfare, like air warfare, like all these developments. And where we find ourselves now is in the information warfare, right? We are more interconnected than we've ever been. The Internet has enabled us for good and for bad to directly connect with any individual on the planet for an unlimited amount of time and duration And that been weaponized right That been weaponized by our government other governments non entities individuals, right? Like this episode is a form of fifth generation warfare, right? Like we are, I'm putting ideas into your brain right now that when you're listening to me talk and it's never been easier to participate in that. The thing that I think trips up a lot of people is nobody knows that they're in a war. Nobody understands that you're in a war for what you're thinking about, what you're focusing your time and attention on. And if you don't understand you're in a war and you don't understand that you are a combatant in this war, because there's no civilians and combatants, right? It's very easy to understand that. If you don't understand that, you're just going to get eaten alive. I mean, how about the algo change this week? An example of this. How long have Bitcointers been disconnected from each other? Well, I was at Nostra, so I was completely unplugged for a while. But, I mean, as an example, I mean, Twitter, Nikita, this one guy who has central command over the algorithm of Twitter, clicked a button earlier this week, and every Bitcoin was like, holy crap, I haven't seen you on this platform in years. And it's like isolating Bitcoiners and going back, bringing in what we previously discussed, which is veterans' ability to organize when you don't have any communication with the outside world. I think that was discombobulating for the amorphous Bitcoin community on X specifically. Yeah. Not having the skills to recognize. Because I, my cousin is like a big follower of me on Twitter. And he likes, he's been swearing to me for like two years. He's like, you're shadow banned. I can't find any of your tweets. Really? Like all that. And I don't, I'm not going to put malignant intent in the, like, I'm not going to accuse acts of having malignant intent. But I think regardless of whether or not they did, the outcome was this sort of isolation of Bitcoiners and the inability to pick up signal from others about what's going on. So I think that's an example of fifth generation warfare. It's a spiritual war too, right? Like, I know you're a man of faith. I consider myself a man of faith. It is a spiritual war as well, because, you know, the mind, the body, the soul is all connected. And, you know, one of the things is if you're a man on your own, you know, like Satan's out there looking for you on your own in isolation to devour you. It's like he is a he's a prowling lion waiting to devour the lone man, which is why I think like the Internet's great. But if you don't have like in the flesh, real life people that you are getting coffee with, right? Like the simplest thing you can do is find the boys in your neighborhood or in your whatever. Right. Like I got some good Bitcoiner friends that we get coffee semi-regularly, but it's like, go meet up in person because you will not have the same interactions you do online. We are not, like, we have not evolved or adapted or whatever it is to this digital presence that is, malignant or not, is like sucking our souls into the cyberspace. And I would encourage more people to go to a Bitcoin meetup, right? If you've never been to a Bitcoin meetup and you're listening to this episode right now, find your local Bitcoin meetup, even if you have to drive three hours, and go to it just one time. One time, and I don't know how to describe it, and I feel like you could probably test it. There's many other Bitcoiners I feel is like the first time you go to a Bitcoin event and you show up to a place where everybody is mutually aligned on this fundamental understanding of value, right? Because money is a placeholder for something else. It's a placeholder for value, right? And so Bitcoin as a money means that we are all aligned instantly on the same value set at the fundamental layer. And so now we can build on top of that. And we don't have to start from I'm like, oh, well, do you think printing money is a bad thing? It's like, well, it's great for Civic. No, no, no. We understand $21 million is the hard cap, and there's nothing else to it. And so we can start to build from there, and there's nothing better than somebody in a room with another person conspiring. And it's like, well, people conspire, and they should conspire in the flesh. And we say this a lot on RHR. If you don't have a local meetup, start your own. And it's funny how God works because this is the second time this week I've recorded a podcast and I've been thinking about the gospel and the homily at Mass on Sunday, which was sowing seeds. And that's what these Bitcoin meetups do. And I feel like there's some divine intervention this week specifically. The last two conversations I have, I'm getting goosebumps right now. It very much aligns with what the gospel and the homily discussed this week. So sowing seeds. I recently attended a Farming God's Way class. So my kid's school was partnered with this farm just on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. And this lovely woman basically got thrown from a donkey, cracked her skull, was miraculously healed. It has a seizure dog that's been out of work for years now. Miraculously healed, attributes all to God, is like, I'm going to donate this and become an educational ministry. And so I attended this class because I got in touch through my kid's school. I was like, this is awesome. I've always wanted to feed people. right like i'm gonna retire into farming uh my wife doesn't want to be a farmer i'm like that's fine babe i got it i'll handle it for you but like i'm gonna be a farmer right um i think like the meme of selling our chairs is great but like take it a step further and grow your own food right like nature has provided this like free thing called sun and water that you can just like grow your own food and yeah it might not be the best for the tastes but grow lamb grow goats grow cows grow corn grow whatever it is like start working the land one um you will be physically more prepared if you're working a farm for anything that's coming, right? You're going to be mentally prepared because you're going to be outside in the sunshine, right? One of my good friends said it's like, oh, it comes to find out with all this health research, like we just need to go back to farming because you're going to be outside in the sun eating real food, carrying water, chopping wood, physically active, right? You're not living this sanitary lifestyle plugged into a blue light screen. So you talk about like, you know, reaping what you sow. I think in a very real way, like I think that's where Bitcoiners are headed is like, We're going to start growing our own food. This already exists, right? CreateGee.com. I get my ghee from the big pointer. Soap miner. I got my bags over there. I've got the tallow soap in this building right now. Stats.coffee. I get my coffee. I'm about to buy a head of beef from a mutual acquaintance down in Washington, Virginia there. I got a quarter of that beef in my home right now. So it's like food, this fundamental thing is like get into that business, right? Find out what it is. there's a company like Oshie making nut butter and nut bars and stuff. Figure out what food is out there that you can make better as a Bitcoiner. Remove all the gross goyslop additives and then go do it and sell it for sats. You're going to stack sats. Make bread. The simplest inputs is bread. It's like flour, salt, and water at a minimum. You can add other stuff, but you can quantify this. This is, I think, maybe business advice. You can quantify what your inputs are, and then you figure out what you need to sell it for to make a profit. And you can make a modest profit, right? You don't need to make 100% markup on whatever you're selling. You can make a modest profit. You can do that for five to 10 years continually. You can grow that business. And if you're sacking sats along the way and saving it, now you have more capital to deploy to make more bread and make bagels or whatever else, right? You can grow into this thing. Go find some boomer that wants to retire out of his business. Start to get to know the business. Befriend the guy. There's still good people out there. that have businesses that have no successors. Private equity is going to eat those things up, flip them and sell them out to somebody else. Go find the mom and pop shops, figure out what their business is, figure out if you want to do that business, go run that business and turn it into a Bitcoin standard. And now you are the winner in the local area. You're feeding people. We're talking about literally sowing seeds right now too, but bringing it back to Bitcoin veterans, I think what you guys are doing, you're kind of sowing seeds in the minds of other veterans. And if you're successful in hitting a critical mass of veterans that get Bitcoin and are motivated to organize around it and get shit done, like talk about that force multiplier. But you have like quite literally a military that is opted into. We are not a militia, not a militia, but like military, military trained individuals. We do have a lot of guns, though, who have opted into this. Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, what is it? I think Secretary of War or one of the Indo-Paycom admiral was talking about how. Paparo. Was talking. Yeah, like it's there, dude. We're there. Well, all right. This is where we get into. What are your thoughts on software? The thesis. I think it's a fantastic thesis. And this is probably a contrarian to maybe the broader Bitcoin veterans group. I think it falls down to implementation, right? Like at a fundamental level, it is database of keys, right? Like it's key management. It's a database, right? Introducing Bitcoin to a cyber system does nothing new or novel that isn't already accomplished by other cybersecurity systems and protocols and practices, right? Like I was saying earlier, like having an HSM that is just a cold card is no different than having an HSM that's not a cold card, right? the same cybersecurity principles apply. I think one of the novel things that most people don't, like most people are thinking like, oh, yeah, I'm going to secure like my computer with like Bitcoin. I'm like, no, you're not. That's stupid. I think that the whole, you know, pay-per-queue L402 thing, that's legit. Yeah. But hash rate defending critical military system. I know. I mean, I got yelled at because I had Jason on. And I have a lot of respect for Jason. Oh, I love Jason. Great thinker. Great thinker. And I think a lot of, I mean, obviously, like Bitcoin is a form of force projection on the world. Yep. But like where I will draw the line and say this does make not, this does not make any sense as like hash rate cannot protect military systems. I think this is where, okay, this is where I think there's a there there. The idea of a macro computer, right? Because if you zoom in like this phone, right, there's like tiny resistors and like different electrical components that are essentially controlling the flow of electricity, right? That's what chips are doing, electrical components are doing. And I think there is something, too, and Bitcoin mining is not the only aspect of this, but I think because Bitcoin mining can saturate a shit ton of energy in one go, you might be able to zoom out and essentially use Bitcoin mining as a macro scale electrical component that can be observed, like macro, observed at a macro level to check the state of it, right? Because that's essentially what the electrons are doing here. It's like you're checking the state of the electricity flow. And this is like gross oversimplification, but you're doing that at a micro level, right? Microchips. I think there might be a there there at a macro level where you have the entire grids can be observed in a given state of electrical flow, and Bitcoin mining would 100% plug into that as in one of the electrical components. So you're talking about leveling out draw on a grid system? Sure. That's one aspect, but it's not the leveling out. That's one aspect of it. It's the reason why a certain pixel appears on your screen is because certain electrons are flowing in a range in a certain way and are observed in a certain state, right? Macroscale now. And this is like when you have a planetary grid, one, there's the balancing aspect to it. But like when you have a planetary grid, what would be the best way for you to project signals beyond our solar system? Radio waves? Maybe. Right. What are radio waves? They're just electromagnetic pulses. Right. Right. They're they're they're going through the medium that is the air, that is space. Lasers. I don't know. The way that your phone modulates electricity to make the antenna vibrate in a specific frequency to send those waves out. I think this is like my this is like a theory. We're getting cosmic here. We haven't got cosmic on the show in a while, but I like it. I think Bitcoin mining plays a huge like you look at Bitcoin mining with the SMRs and all this other electrical infrastructure and grid. And I think you can get to a point where we can signal, like, way, way out there using massive energy grids. And people from a distance, galaxies away, are able to observe the given state. And this is where, like, it gets a little cosmic because you have to worry about, like, the time dilation or the time whatever it is between those two observation points. But like nobody's going to be observing from like a galaxy way like my iPhone. But what would be very easy to observe is an entire, you know, the entire North American grid system in a specific configuration that is balanced and managed in the flows of the electrons. Flows of the electrons are given a specific state to be observed using Bitcoin mining and other grid assets. Does that make sense? Macro chips. planetary scale macro chips I might not be mentally equipped enough intellectually equipped enough to so like like a transistor in a chip right? I know yes so you would redesign the grid and that's like where my mind's going I can see you design the grid and basically the idea would be like no electron is wasted to a certain extent Yep. Like, what I'm thinking through, like, getting autistic about this is, like, okay, what if you need to add, like, new forms of hardware that pull from the grid? Like, that messes up the state, right? There's new transistor gates, right? Yeah. Like, fundamentally, it's, like, the gate's open or it's closed sort of thing. Okay. And that's, again, very, very grossly oversimplicated. But it's, like, is the energy flowing between point A and point B between, you know, El Paso and New York? Is that flow? What is that flow? How? High is that flow. And Bitcoin mining definitely can play an aspect in it just because of the monetization aspect of it. Right. Like you have this sink of energy, this demand of energy that is completely monetizable from the first electron. And so you can use that to create what I think is like macro scale transistors. Right. Like all these little silicon wafers that are like super tiny, like the most complex things we've ever done as humanity. they're all working on this very very micro nano scale but it's still just observing the state of the electrons flowing and whether the gates are open or closed okay now i'm picking this up now zoom way out and it's like is the flow of electrons open or close between el paso and new york or between new york and boston or whatever right like things that you would need to if you zoom far enough and out the earth becomes microscopic you can still observe the state of that and react to that as a signal, not to mention you could use that energy to broadcast, you know, whatever signal you want, right? The signal being broadcast is determined, the modulation of the signal, right? The data modulated onto that signal is determined by the configuration of the chips that are driving that signal in that antenna, right? And when you think about like the crust of the earth, right? And it's like, we can get into like pole shift if you want too as well. Oh, God. I try not to think about the pole shift. Well, maybe having a robust energy grid that is well-balanced with Bitcoin mining and all these other technologies are something that can help stabilize the electromagnetic field. Do we have enough time in the middle of the pole shift, aren't we? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So when you learn land navigation in the military, I'm at Fort Pickett in Virginia learning land navigation. And they're like, oh, by the way, this map has the magnetic declination adjustment that you need it's a little bit off right so like that way back when i just kind of i was like okay cool i need to know that it's not it's like seven instead of five or whatever um fast forward to like learning about the magnetic pole shifts and i'm like oh wow like yeah the poles are moving around because my compass needed to be adjusted based on the map from like the 1960s right it's completely different so um i think there's a there there as well and that is very cosmic it's observable right there is absolutely definitely observable. Yep. Yeah, I try not to think of it. But, I mean, how can having a robust grid... And so, like, going back to the macro cosmic conversation, I think now I understand, like, the mini-transistor is, like, microgrids. Daisy chaining, natural gas turbines, whatever, to create a microgrid, small modular reactors, and you just bing-bong, bing-bong. Maybe you have massive generation facilities that are more centralized in certain parts, but But I think that's something. I mean, we're going to be discussing it tonight here at PubKey, announcing the series with American Bitcoin about energy policy, energy strategy, compute, and different forms of Bitcoin and AI. But I think this applies beyond the specific topics to, like, national security. Absolutely. At the pole shift level, like the security of civilization, broadly speaking. We can't rely on Elon. Elon's going to do a lot more cool shit, I think. But he is but one man with one team. So it's like we need a lot more people acting and engaged on space exploration, energy infrastructure. I'm fully bought into the whole we need a grid renaissance. I was reading a book called One Second After. Have you read that? I've heard of it. I haven't read it, though. Well, you'll get there after Mandibles. You know it takes me a while to get to the books. Yeah. One second after basically like the whole, and it's been out for a while, so I don't mind spoiling it, but it's like a nuclear bomb detonates in the atmosphere above the eastern seaboard and wipes out all modern electronics. Right. You have a karrington event because the electromagnetic shield of the earth is down and we get a solar flare that wipes out modern electronics. Like same, same. Right. So it's a book that explores just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, Western North Carolina again, explores like sort of what that might look like. fantastic read. But I remember reading that. And like, I think one of the prefaces of the book, like the dude was right in 2001, trying to illustrate the fragility of our electrical infrastructure and our grid in America. And then 9-11 happened and all the wind got sucked from any kind of sales that he might've started with like, Hey guys, our grid's decaying and we need to do something about it. Uh, that's why he wrote the book as like an educational sort of like fictional narrative, but, you know, got derailed by the war on terror, right? Which. And so I got here last night, had a great dinner and then drinks after. I won't say who, but there's people. Obviously, we have this event again tonight focused on energy policy. But I was talking to somebody who was involved with one of the major utility companies in the country. And we were talking about the fact that a lot of the conversation around energy has become partisan politics, where it's like, how do we get away from making energy a partisan issue when it really has nothing to do with politics? It's just about human flourishing. Like, how do we educate people to understand the problems like the one explained in the book one minute after? One second. One second after. And create a sort of optimistic energy around rejiggering the grid or modernizing the grid. That seems like something we should all want to get behind. Yeah, I mean, I think if you want to, like, attack it on one front, it's like, well, if we have more energy production, your electrical bill will go down. Yeah, and it's funny. I'm not going to dox him. I was talking to somebody at, again, one of the larger utility companies in the country, and I had to explain the Henry Adams curve to him. Which is? The Henry Adams curve is the energy consumption per capita over time. I think we're going back to 1850. One of the charts on WTF happened in 1971.com. There's no energy-rich poor nation? Is that the one? No, that's, I mean, that's, I think, a derivative of it. But, like, it was the Henry Adams curve for U.S. So, like, I think energy consumption per capita is what it tracks. And, like, 1971, it was, like, going up and to the right and then flat lines. Really? Yeah. And that's one of the most underrated charts in the world, I think. Yeah. But getting back to the point, it's like we have been neglecting our energy infrastructure, many would say going back to 1971. And we are behind. We need to modernize it. We need to update it. We need to make it more distributed, more robust. And the fact that it is – it has become a partisan issue is just mind-blowing. It's like this is bigger than politics. This is literally survival and the progression of humanity. Have you talked to Daniel Batten? It's been a while. Yeah, yeah. It's from New Zealand. I mean, that was one of the biggest things on the whole. Because I think a lot of the other side of the aisle parts and stuff is from the green side, the environmental side. And Daniel has just blown all that out of the water. I followed some of his work. It's been phenomenal. And then at the same time, you can point to Gridless in Africa. You can point to, what was it? There was that article some dude wrote about. I think it was a village in Malawi or something that has electricity now because of Bitcoin mining. Oh, it was in the Congo, right? The Nature Preserve. They were able to utilize the excess capacity on, I believe, a substation that sat at the top of a hill and the transmission lines had decayed over time. But the revenue from the Bitcoin mining enabled them to rebuild transmission. Yeah. I think having like highlighting and having those concrete stories of and yeah, it's Bitcoin, which is great, like propagandized by Bitcoin. But because Bitcoin is inherently an energy asset and inherently tied to the grid at this point, like there's no excuse. It's like if you want to uplift people out of poverty, you will build energy infrastructure for them. And the best way to do that is to find some capitalist that wants to make money on mining Bitcoin and say, hey, we've got an energy source. Come drop your Bitcoin mining shipping container next to this energy source. You can make some money, slice off some of us to develop this infrastructure. And then when we don't need you anymore, take your toys and go home. And people will do that. It's happening. That's happening everywhere. And since Bitcoin is distributed, the network doesn't care. Maybe blocks slow down. Maybe block production slows down a bit. But the network goes on. Difficulty adjusts. But bringing this back to revitalizing the grid to be able to survive the consequences of a potential Carrington event or a nuclear bomb, EMP pulse, potentially destroying parts of the infrastructure. You got me thinking, like, you've heard of Atlantis. And if you're a big fan of Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, and then we'll talk about civilizations, advanced, highly advanced civilizations of humanity's past that have been forgotten but may have been super, super advanced but taken out by potentially a character event. The Unger Dryas was probably like an asteroid that created the Great Flood that's been talked about throughout history. Not to be hubristic, we should never be hubristic, but as Bitcoin, We're obviously a highly advanced society. Is this a problem that similarly advanced societies in Earth's past have gotten to, but haven't surpassed? But we have the opportunity to, and we have to recognize that. I'm getting a little rambly and heady here in Cosmic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's almost like Fermi's The Great Filter, right? Or Fermi's Paradox. if we get the grid sufficiently robust, we can survive that event and be the one iteration of humanity. I think it's going to come down to what does sufficiently robust mean. What does that mean? Does robust mean we're all interconnected? Maybe to a degree, but I think you're saying these microgrids. If you have flowing water on your property, go put in a hydro dam and start mining bitcoin right like that you could build a faraday cage around that setup and now you're the guy with electricity right now you want to make sure you're friends with all your neighbors so you're not the guy that they're going to kill because you're the only one with the lights on um but i think i think there is something to the the monetary incentive to expand the energy infrastructure via bitcoin mining that will it not will it is driving micro grids. We're getting micro grids because of Bitcoin mining. I was just listening to 256 Foundation today. Schnitzel was on there talking about how he is using Mugina firmware, which is the open source Bitcoin mining firmware that they're developing, to get to the exact wattage. We're tuning Bitcoin mining to the exact wattage that is necessary for consumption, which is a prerequisite for micro grids. Yeah. Well, so let's explain this. Mugina, Shout out to Schnitzel and everybody contributing to the open source mining effort. Shout out to 256 Foundation for really fostering and pushing that forward. But Magina, I think the big breakthrough is being able to communicate with individual chips on a hash board. Yep. And elaborate and expand on what that does for the efficiency. because we had just had the, we launched a TFTC roundtable. Obviously, we did the home mining energy playbook, not obviously, but we did a home mining energy playbook with the XRG guys. We had a follow-up conversation with the TFTC community on Tuesday night and between when we launched the playbook and recorded that podcast and Tuesday's conversation, literally it's Tuesday morning, and it's all announced Magina advancements. And it's the data that we have in the mining home energy playbook, if you go to the solar section, which is like in, I think, part four of the playbook, you have a bunch of data in there. And it's like the Bitcoin mining on using solar, reacting to solar pulls is very volatile. Yeah. Like Mojina would allow you to really smooth out that curve, which makes incredible efficiencies, makes it more profitable. and it's pretty insane that open source firmware is getting us here. Yes. So on the Mugena front, I'm a big fan. First of all, shout out to Xtras, you boys. They sold me my home heater, we'll call it. And so I will be heating my home this winter and making some money while I do it. Fantastic job. But on the Mugina front, first of all, you have to understand that most of the Bitcoin mining software and hardware has come from China. You have very clear examples of AntBlead. AntBlead. In the past. AsicBoost. AsicBoost. Tons of other things of like chicanery, which like, okay, cool. It's a rational play. AntBlead was 2015. I think most people came into Bitcoin. Biggest wave of Bitcoiners came in post-20. Absolutely. Post-COVID. Yeah. Completely oblivious to AntBlead. So could you explain what Ampli was to people? It was essentially a backdoor on the firmware itself. Firmware is the thing that runs on, like your thermostat has a firmware on it, right? So people that don't understand like the software aspects of it, you have your operating system. So like iOS, Android, or mobile operating systems, Windows, Linux, Mac OS, or like desktop and laptop operating systems. Firmware generally speaks to like specific components for specific purposes. and Bitcoin mining machines have firmware that run on them and have historically been completely closed source and cut off from inspecting or understanding what they're doing. And many companies have built their business around jailbreaking that firmware to make it more efficient. Yeah. Ampli, as I understand it, was essentially just a backdoor. It was a way for, I think it might have been like remotely controlling or diverting hash rate. Remotely brick. There you go. The machines. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in that cohort that came in well after Amplied. Like, I know that it was like this backdoor thing. But yeah, the fact that you could have a remote entity, because you have to be online to mine Bitcoin, right? You don't necessarily have to be with recent developments with Stratomy 2 and Datum. You don't have to be like connecting your miners directly to the Internet. You can connect to your own infrastructure now. So it's way better in that regard. And you can kind of like block it off from, you know, direct control. but generally speaking most miners are connecting over the internet meaning they're exposing a port a lot of these firmware developers will say oh well we need to charge you a developer fee so you need to talk to the developer server to make sure that you check that the developer fee is working well that's a that's a connection to their servers that they control and they're shipping you the firmware that you have no idea what it's doing so it's like oh yeah i see this connection out to this random server. What is that? I don't know. Oh, that's the developer fee server. Don't worry about it. Now, there's a legitimate, like, there's a there there, right, with having a developer fee, but also that becomes an attack factor and a threat to where you get Amplied where you can have your machine just shut down because you're connected to, you know, Bitmain servers, and if they don't like you, they'll shut you down. Or if they want to mine more, they're like, hey, we need less hash rates so we get more Bitcoin. Or if, I mean, this was 2015, I believe Ampli came out. I remember in Bitcoin very obsessed with it for years at that point, being like, holy crap, this is bad. If you believe that Bitcoin is a tool of force projection, not only for the individual, but if we do believe that we're getting to the geopolitical game theory with Bitcoin as a variable, that's, again, fifth generation warfare. Another form of it is if you have these back doors in these chips, and China has a sufficient amount of hash rate, Russia has a sufficient amount of hash rate, and something's going on in meat space between U.S. and China, and they have that back door. It's like, all right, we're just going to turn off their hash rate. Yeah. And that just speaks to the broader open source thesis around like if the tools are not open source for inspection I would consider it insecure at this point right Like trust that third parties are security holes That like a well thing But bringing back to Mugina, the fact that now we have open source firmware, the crazy thing about Mugina, though, is not just that it's open source so you can go check to make sure that it's not backdooring you and going to brick you, and so, like, you greatly reduce your risk. It gives you control over your computer. You give complete control, right? So, like, I have a miner and I won't in the basement that's heating the house this winter. And any time I want to tune the power consumption on it, it shuts down. It stops mining and it restarts the whole thing. Which takes time. Which takes time. Burns the chips. And so it's just inefficient from, like, a purely just engineering standpoint. Like, there's no reason why it has to be that way. It's just, like, the way that the manufacturers deployed their stock firmware, right? And one thing I'll say is, so I was a Chinese linguist, right? So I have some insight into Chinese culture. They're ruthless capitalists. I know. They're a communist country. They're ruthlessly capitalist, like hyper-competitive. I've been trying to figure out ways to describe this because just being in the mining industry for almost a decade now and interacting with China, I have a ton of respect. Yeah. They are ruthless capitalists. Yep. The whole, I mean, again, it's like hard to describe because it is command and control Chinese communist party. It's a homogenous culture. Yes. They're very homogenous culturally speaking. So even if you're a capitalist. They get shit done and all they care about is making money. Yep. It's crazy. Yep. And they're making a killing on these machines because they're making the chips. They're making the machines. The firmware is an afterthought just because you need something to run, right? So, like, you've yet to see a Chinese manufacturer lay into, like, serious firmware. In fact, they, like, put in safeguards to, like, prevent you from jailbreaking the control boards. Your warranty gets put. Exactly. Exactly. So by getting Mugina, one is like now we have say over the features that are running on your mining, whether you're a home miner or you're a mega miner. Having a say in the features is huge, right? Like if it's doing something that you that it doesn't if the stock firmware is not doing what you needed to do, there's almost no recourse because these these manufacturers know they have you by the balls. Right. They're like, oh, we're going to go get where you can get your ASICs from. Right. So I'm a big fan of Proto, like doing doing that. We need more people making more ASICs and more miners, right? With open source firmware, if we can jailbreak these and turn these out, the feature is like having different hash boards, right? Schnitzel was on the 256 pod talking about this. He's got two different hash boards. Multiple different hash boards, right? And there's not a limit to that. What do you have, like an S19J Pro and an S21, I think? I think a 19K and J. K and J, okay. Maybe some other ones. But just the fact that, to my knowledge, there's not firmware in the past that's been open source or even that is supported having different hash boards in it, right? So generally speaking, you get this Bitcoin mining ASIC. It looks like a metal shoe box. And there's three hash boards in there that have the little ASIC chips in it. There's like 300 chips on each board. And then there's this thing called the control board. And the control board is like the brains of the thing. It talks to the stratum servers. It connects to the internet. It does all like the logic. And then the hash boards are just like purely like it does one thing and one thing only. And it's like hash Bitcoin. and so you couldn't take a board from a different miner and put it into this other one because you had a bad board and in fact the firmware most firmware won't allow you to run with two hash boards instead of three right like they're like they fix that it's like oh you have three hash boards in here and we only design the logic is such if we don't see three hash boards it doesn't work yeah or we're gonna we're gonna kneecap you if you're not like mining to our pool or whatever right they can do whatever they want it's their it's their software it's their machine you don't You bought the machine, but you don't own that machine. Mugina is now enabling anybody to run the firmware that you do whatever you want. You want to throttle up and have 2,000 watts or 3,000 watts or 5,000 watts? You can do that, and you can do that with a heterogeneous hash boards. And now, with the emergence of Vibe coding, now we can get really sci-fi. And, like, again, that's very bullish on the XRG team and, like, the home mining and the open source mining. Like, this is, I think, going back to, like, microgrids and having robust microgrids. Like, again, making sure no electron is wasted, not only at a behind-the-meter or off-grid flare gas mining, but now, like, literally at your home. Like, you get as granular as your home, making sure that your energy draw from the grid is as efficient as possible via Bitcoin mining. and it's profitable or maybe not as profitable, but you're... No, we're not worried about profit. We're not mining for profit. We're mining for the heat. Yes. It's useful. Yep. And it can be, it can make your energy consumption cheaper. Yeah. That's the way to frame it. Yeah. Yeah. The mining industry, you know, I got into it professionally a little over two years ago. Jumped right into like Stratum V2. I've been working on that. But just in general, the lack of engineering, open source engineering development and talent in the Bitcoin mining industry two plus years ago compared to today is night and day. The fact that it's 256 Foundation works. The fact that you have Stratomy 2 with a working group, a protocol working group of big names you'll see when you go on mempool.space, right? It's happening. It's coming. The fact that Datum exists, right? Like Datum was a huge breakthrough, right? And Jason Hughes is just like, Shredemy 2 is taking too long. I think Rust sucks. I'm just going to go ahead and ship this thing. And, like, dude, awesome. It works. It works. Like, tons of people out there are, like, building their own block templates, right? They're doing these awesome things. Shredemy 2 is further accelerating that. The thing I'm most bullish on Shredemy 2 is it's a Rust project. And if you're not familiar with the Bitcoin, like, dev ecosystem, there's tons of Rust tooling, right? So the Bitcoin dev kit, the wallet tooling. Lightning dev kit. The Lightning dev kit. Like, it's all, there's all Rust. And so now we have this suite of Bitcoin software that's written in this, you know, same programming languages that's able to talk and interact with each other. Right. I have a proof of concept where I rotate a Coinbase address every block on testnet for. So there's like a testnet developer network. And so like Polster came into the Shrime B2 project and did a pass on like the Coinbase and like, you know, how that did. So now it supports Miniscript. So I could take. Wait, so what are you giving the mining software an XPUB and it's just recycling them every block? You take a mini script, wildcard descriptor, right? So for anybody that doesn't quite understand, you have public and private keys for Bitcoin. This public key can be used to create something called a descriptor, which is describing the way that the wallet is formatted, derivation path, all these other things. And you can do something called a wildcard, which just means this is the high-level description of what the wallet is. if you start to fill in the wild cards with concrete numbers, that's where you get like your addresses, right? And so I have a branch of code that takes a wild card descriptor, meaning like here's an XPUB, essentially, very generally speaking, here's an XPUB, and software programmatically, every time you find a block as the pool, just iterate one, right? And by the way, like save it off so you know like which one we started on, so you're not repeating addresses, but it means that every block that was mined on this pool, and I have a whole write-up hosted on GitHub, but every block that was mined on testnet four using this pool that I vibed, very much so. It's like, I'm way better at reading code than I am writing code. So vibe coding has been a godsend, like huge unlock, but it works, right? I have like 40 some blocks on testnet four that it's the same pool and it's the same wildcard descriptor, the same XPUB, but it's a different address that it was mined to in increments of one, right? So the full descriptor, you get down to 001, 002, 003, whatever, whatever that descriptor looks like. It would just iterate through those every time it was generating a new Coinbase on a block find. So a block was found, and the pool was like, cool, we found a block. Let's go look at our wildcard descriptor, iterate on one, create a new address, and now we use that as a Coinbase payout. So for those who are listening to that, it sounds cool, but why is that necessary? Or what is the benefit of doing that? If you're worried about quantum computing, you don't want to reuse addresses, right? So that's, like, the big to-do because everybody loves to talk about quantum now. So, like, if you are worried about this and you're a mining pool, go talk to your custodian and tell them that you want to rotate the Coinbase address every time. It is technically possible, right? I'm having this problem with Ocean where, like, Ocean, you sign up, you just give them the address, and, like, I get a payout. Like, I'm, like, the UX is such where I'm, like, okay, I got the payout, but the address that I have there is, like, obviously the miners are contributing shares, and so, like, it's building up a balance. And, like, so if I switch out the address, do I get the balance from the previous address, or will that ever be paid out? It's, like, no. Well, you should be able to just give them an XPUB. Yeah. Or, like, a silent payment address. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's, and that's where I'm saying I'm like, I'm hyper bullish because like Stratomy 2 is like the mining rust ecosystem now. Like all these other things like Lightning and Arc and like all these other ecosystems are also using the same language. So there's like this synergy, to use a budge word, between the different projects that it's going to get wild. Like, Cashew DevKit, right? E-cash. There are people that have been mining in a subordinate pool, right? So you have your main pool. I mean, it's the last time we were on our shows is what we were talking about. Yeah. Yeah. When we were at Bitcoin Plus Plus. It's happening on mainnet now. Hell yeah. And the pools have no idea. Like, you don't have to – pools are just accounting, right? A mining pool is just – I never thought I'd be working on accounting software, but here I am. Mining pools are just accounting. And so you have these – you can do a tiered structure where the prime pool is doing its own accounting, and there's nothing stopping you from just being a single consumer of this pool and aggregating all your hash rate through a proxy. But at that proxy, you're doing your own accounting, right? Like perfectly normal. It happens in corporate structures. You've got P&L at the top level. You've got P&L, the different organizational structures. So it's just an accounting problem. Well, with eCash, it's a database, right? It's a database that now gives you a bearer asset, right? The eCash token is a bearer asset. And with Bitcoin mining, every mining share is a shitcoin. It's not Bitcoin, right? It's the original. It's an IOU. It's an IOU, right? So they're all using databases to track this. All the mining pools are using databases to track your shares. well let's just make the database a cashew database and issue you tokens and now you can take those e-hash tokens and you can go find your liquidity on the market wherever you can find it right and you can realize your hash rate you know probably gains or whatever your liquidity if i want to speculate i'll buy all the e-hash from you because i think that you know the pool is going to hit a block yeah and you can do this completely separate from what the the pool at the high level is doing you can just do sub accounting and now you have a community right he he punks right my local meetup maybe we're all heating our houses in the winter hey mine on my pool here we'll have e-hash tokens that we can exchange and when the payout happens now there's a definitive value for all these these ious that we have and now you can melt them over lightning and i can you know pay you for for coffee i mean digital credits become such a big meme and i think it's been misapplied in the way that it has so like this is the only form of digital credit that exists like hash rate shares like pps is the first form of digital credit yeah that's a that's an iou yep And it's like you're contributing hash and you're basically trusting that the pool is going to give you a commensurate amount of Bitcoin. And it doesn't work, though, right? Like the FPPS model, as the block subsidy goes down, the guaranteed Bitcoin payout in each block, as that goes down, you need a proportionally larger bag of Bitcoin to float the bad luck variance, right? Yes. Because what you're doing as a miner, when you go to FPPS pool, you're saying, hey, I want you to take all the risk of the luck variance of Bitcoin mining, right? Because you might not hit a block or you might hit five blocks, right? So I'm going to pay you, and there's going to be some VIG there that the pool is going to take to basically carry that risk. You have the alternative – or not the alternative, but one of the alternatives, like PPL&S. That's what Ocean's running with Tides. Demand Pool is doing a version of PPL&S where it's like nobody gets paid unless we find a block, right? And Demand is doing this cool thing where they have factored in the subsidy versus the fee, right? So I actually audited one of the initial write-ups of this proposal for the schema where the guaranteed 3.125 Bitcoin is distributed normally via PPLNS, right? But the fee is weighted. So that way you can construct your own template. And if you want it full of juicy JPEGs and you got high fees in there and I want to have pure Bitcoin and nothing in my block because I don't like JPEGs, your economic weight and reward for the mining pool is heavier. so you should be rewarded more, right? Just from pure economics, like leaving out any other moral principles or anything like that, from purely economic standpoints, if your block template is heavier and juicier in sats, you should be rewarded more. So this PPL and SJD that Demand Pool is using accounts for that in their mining share accounting. It says, hey, we're going to pay out when we find a block, but we're going to factor in what your block template looks like, right? So if you have a heavier block with higher fees, you're going to get a heavier weight in this payout mechanism. And is that determined by the heaviness of the block versus the expected heaviness of the block? No, purely for the heaviness of the block, right? Because in Stratomy 2, I'm sort of telling you the block template I'm using. Because what I'm trying to get out there is like, what if somebody didn't have the intent to mine a block that wasn't optimized for highest fees, but they just accidentally mined an empty block or something like that? The intent doesn't matter. It's the outcome that matters. Absolutely. as it should be, right? Like it's, it's cool. Like, cool. You're telling me you're mining to me a huge juicy block, but it's actually empty. Um, well that's not fair. And again, like it's great that people can create their own templates. I'm a huge proponent of that huge fan. Um, but there is, there's still an economic reality to mining that like you want to maximize for fees. And if you're not doing that, if you're opting to do that, you should be rewarded less economically speaking than somebody that is filling their block with fees. Right. And it's, I also think private mempools are coming. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole. Elaborate. Not in the way that a lot of people think and that are scared. Right. I think what you're going to see is the way they exist now is like slip streams. Yeah. Huge example. Right. Like it used to be, you know, the, the, the dude that minted the four mega, the first ever four mega JPEG. Right. That was like a telegram, you know, hex transaction in a telegram message to somebody at a pool. Right. Like that's Historically, how it's happened, private mempools exist. You just contact the miners. You can get your transactions in there, right? So accelerate via BTC has had an accelerator for... What I think will be realized, because the economic incentives align better, right? Because fees are great, but running the infrastructure for those kinds of things and having to manage it, that's an operational cost. What I think private mempools are going to realize is these microgrids that we talked about. You're going to have communities of people that are balancing their grid with their hash rate. and um you and i are doing business in this community maybe we've got b2b deals maybe we just got you know i'm just paying you for the beef um i don't want to pay a fee on that transaction we got we got 100 petahash like what are we paying a fee for well we'll hit a block eventually and i know you we we have cigars every night right or every every week like we meet up it's like the physical me space the the proof of punch to steal a blurb from mvk um the proof of punch means that I'm not here to screw you over, you're not here to screw me over. So we can actually wait to close our books out, right? I don't need to close my books with you. And we can just keep updating this PSPT transaction of like, okay, well, here, I'm paying you a Bitcoin. Oh, actually, well, let's re-up and you're actually going to pay me back or whatever it is. But we don't have to close our books out. And because we're on this microgrid in our community at this Bitcoin meetup, we can actually have our own private mempool where we have zero-fee transaction clearing anytime we hit a block. Is this like a new payment channel? It could be. Absolutely. Because I'm thinking naturally, I'm like, why not just use lighting or something like that? Do you want to splice? Do you want to use the juicy Omega splice that Dusty was just talking about recently? Why do you want to pay a fee on that? You can pay a fee to these mega miners, or you can build your own block template and hash with your own hash rate in your community. And again, if you know that you have an extra hash in your community, that you're going to hit a block eventually in the next quarter, We can just keep a running mempool of private zero-fee transactions. We don't even need to make it private, right? The Relay will just, like, people will just not pick up our zero-fee transactions. But we can make sure that the node that we're using to build our templates includes those transactions. Always prioritize our transactions within the community and clears it zero-fee because we are already incurring the cost of running the hash rate to pay for that transaction. And you're saving on the transaction. Like, I'm trying to think of the incentives, the economic incentive, like, could this week and... Well, I know you're not a believer in the full blocks, right? You always take the other side of that bet. I think mempools will always clear eventually is my take. Exactly, right? But when they stop clearing, because I think eventually we're going to get to the point, I think they will stop clearing. Will they? Evidence? They're going to be all zero-fee transactions in these mining pool communities. They're going to be micro-graded, zero-fee transactions with fat GC blocks of zero-fee transactions because we're already incurring the cost by mining. and so again like it's the first time I'm hearing this yeah I didn't drop this one because I'm thinking like it doesn't like in that case it wouldn't perturb the mining incentives because like if you find the block the pool that mines the block the miners within that pool are worried about the revenue from that block but in this use case that you're describing even if there's zero fees like you're basically reaping the rewards of the fee outside of the blockchain via the peer-to-peer meat space transaction that you're doing. So you don't care about the profitability of the block that you mined. The profitable miners, the ROI miners, they're not going to pick up our transactions. But again, hash rate heating. And if they do, it's like, all right, cool. Exactly. Yeah. Pick it up, please, because the mempool is clearing. But otherwise, you have a strong Bitcoin circular economy that's all heating their basements or their houses or their businesses or their churches or whatever it is with hash rate, that's enough hash rate to hit a block once a month. You want to clear your books once a month for free? Come participate. Point your hash rate here. And you can still point your hash rate to these bigger pools. Like I said, demand pool will pay you based on the fee rate. So you're going to be economically rewarded accordingly. But there's nothing wrong with you. We don't care about the fees, right? Because we're mining for heat. We're mining for the heats. yeah this is fascinating stuff mempools will always clear eventually I'll just I don't doubt you anymore well the like that what you just explained excuse me we should want that and there's like a where we are and how to get there and bring it back to like vibe coding like I think the sci-fi future that we envision that's where like I've been getting accused and many Bitcoiners have been getting accused. Those of us who have fell down the AI rabbit hole very hard of like, oh, you're like distracted from Bitcoin. Like, don't, like, what are you doing? It's like, no, like, I'm trying to learn these tools and master them to the degree that I can so that I can help steward Bitcoin. I participate in fifth generation warfare. I'm a propaganda arm for the Bitcoin. Thank you for your service. You're welcome. Thank you for your service. working with the LLMs for media, it's becoming obvious to me. We're going to be able to vibe code these use cases. Yes, people say don't vibe code critical Bitcoin wallet software yet. I'll go out on a limb and say we're probably going to get to a point in the next few years where you could probably do that safely. You'll have a well-reviewed core. You still want well-reviewed foundational software. But who's to say you can't train a model based off of that fundamental core and have it narrowly focused on that fundamental core and build off that? We're becoming projectionists. So what you just described, when it comes to Bitcoiners focused on AI, that's what I think your focus should be. How can you master these tools to the extent that you can project to the LLM to build these use cases very easily, if that makes sense? I mean, you're describing my day job, right? I wasn't great. I was very average. Average Gary online. ABG underscore Gary on Twitter. Average Gary on Noster. Very average at software, right? But with an LLM, I know good software versus bad software. I've read enough and I've debugged enough and I've gone through the pain of learning enough. It's like the LLM is now rapidly iterating faster than I ever could, right? because I just don't have that foundational knowledge people pick up in like CS degrees and stuff of like, oh, you know, just spitting out code, right? Like the boilerplate, like the slog of just like typing it all out. Like I just didn't have that muscle memory. So with AI and with LLMs now, because I know enough to be able to articulate with a good context of like what I want or what I desire for the outcome, and I know how to validate the outcome, right? That's a big piece, I think, in engineering and coding is like having designing and projecting something that you can validate and then having making sure that that validation is the piece that you pay the most attention to. So, again, like with Bitcoin, the validation is spin up a registest node and like send a transaction. Right. And like, does it work or does it not work? And you can get to the point now where you can iterate on that. Send that transaction. And then on top of that, in parallel, run a fuzz test to see where this where this vibe could have fucked up. Yep. Yeah. It's, you know, you've got a swarm of super intelligent interns that will do your bidding. And if you're not clear and concise in your meeting, in the meaning of what you want, like they're going to screw it up. But that's where the other side comes in is like you have a robust research and, you know, Socratic dialogue tool to go, hey, I don't know what you're talking about here. Can you tell me more about that? Right. And it can break it down and explain to you and give you links to resources on like go learn about what this means. Hey, go to the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and go read the whole corpus of that sort of sub-forum on Stack Exchange and see if somebody there answered this question years ago. Yep. Two minutes later, like, oh, yeah, somebody did, like, in November. It's still that knowledge for me. Explain it to me like I'm five. Yeah. And it will do this, right? Well, this was true back in 2016, but, like, can you go do some further research on all the development progression that's happened and make sure that it's not stale data? Like just knowing, again, I had, that was the conversation earlier in the world of AI, like what are the critical skills that people are going to need? It's like first principles thinking. And well, it's, it's the rise of the generalists, right? It's the Renaissance man now that becomes hybrid. And that was, there's a whole, I think Mike Hobart wrote a book called like the second Renaissance or whatever, talking about how Bitcoin is going to bring back like this Renaissance of, of arts and science and math and engineering and all this good stuff. because we have hard sound money again. And AI is only going to further exacerbate this because you don't have to be an expert in everything because you have this tool that can make you expert in the very specific niche domain that you need to be in at that given point in time. And you can use it and leverage the tool and grok and understand very in that moment in time and then move on to the next thing, right? And you just have to be just, the intelligence becomes the discernment and the articulation of where you're going. Like you were talking about the projection. It becomes what am I trying to accomplish here? What problem am I trying to solve? And figuring out the edge cases or the who has solved it already or anything like that is like put the clank around it, man. Go out, touch grass, plant your corn, grow your field, come back, and then like I want to learn ancient Greek. So it's like I've got an agent loop like figuring out what is the pedagogy of like learning a language, which I have some experience with that, but not for this specific one. So it's like I can go and tell Claude, hey, man, I want to learn ancient Greek. Like, how should I do that? Right. I could have sat down and gone through the slog of like watching YouTube and learning blog posts and like all these other things to go learn that and contextualize it. Or you let somebody synthesize and distill it, which I don't think like there's the danger of like outsourcing the way that you think. But if you know concretely what you're after, AI is going to go get it for you. Well, that's one of my biggest pieces of advice to people venturing into AI is be very cautious of asking advice of the LLM. The way I use it is I know what the output should be, and I'm using it to help me get that output. And I think that's the most effective way to use these tools at the current state that they're in. Who's not to say? Like, maybe in the future they will be very good at giving you 100% accurate responses. They have the hallucination has gotten significantly better over the last year alone. It's not perfect. But, like, when I write, I pair write the bent with Martin, our agent. Yep. And I know what the output is. I know what I want to present in the newsletter. And if you get something wrong, I'm like, no, you fucked this up. Right. But, like, I pulled this up. Like, again, it's a week or so. Like I was telling you, the homily and the gospel from mass this week. It really stuck with me and come back. And subconsciously, I didn't realize until we're having this kind of, as you may know if you listen to our HR, I've become a homeowner for the first time. Congrats. Thank you. Thank you. We just did our big landscaping overhaul for the first time. We've been in the house for like three months. And we did it last week. And subconsciously, it wasn't subconsciously, I've been going out and watering. Yep. like and like but i pulled that up because i have like my headphones and i have my phone i have the hose in one hand i'm like just talking to martin and the other like okay we need to get this done like run this process it's like yeah yeah yeah it's you know um it's biblical to work the garden that was before the fall of man that we were given work to enjoy in the garden um and uh i i have definitely enjoyed getting the sun and being able like having more of my time to to pursue that uh If you haven't yet, I recommend planting a tree for each of your children, right? And you might not see it ever shade you or your kids, but your grandkids will sure be happy that they're – Yeah, we actually have to – one of the trees on our property's desk, we have to cut that down. So we're going to have to plant a tree. I've got three. I've got to figure out where we can plant three trees on the property. We have a massive ginkgo tree in our backyard. Oh, that's awesome. It's so awesome. I've become such – You're crunchy now. Not even crunchy. I'm just like a homeowner now. I'm like, oh, I've got to tend to my land. I've been a renter. Welcome to middle age. I'm out there in my shorts and flip-flops watering the hydrangeas and enjoying the birds. You walk by, you're in the mall tree, there's this weed popping up and just infuriates you. Oh, dude, we have bamboo in our backyard, too. Good luck. Yeah. Good luck. This has been awesome. I agree. Thank you, Marty. Thank you. Well, before we end, tying this all back to Bitcoin veterans and maybe not speaking on behalf of all veterans, but I think for any or maybe speaking to veterans that are out there, maybe Bitcoin curious, like what is your pitch to them? Go talk to your brothers that are already in the space, right? I guarantee you there's some Bitcoiner that you know that's a veteran that maybe from your unit. if you got sucked into all this crypto scams I'm sorry if you got sucked into that I actually was talking to a veteran guy this morning he's going to power wash the house for me and I was like hey can I pay you in bitcoin and he's like oh no I got this other shitcoin thing I was like alright man but he wants to sit down and talk right so reach out like people respect your own privacy of course but I think it's never been a better time to like come out as a bitcoiner especially if you're a veteran to just go and talk to other people in your life, other veterans, to be like, hey man, this Bitcoin thing has been super helpful for me. Maybe they've seen that you're winning and maybe they feel like they're not. If nothing else, you can say, hey, here's a leg up. This has worked for me. If they're drowning in sorrows and troubles, finding a community and a purpose again is huge. So if nothing else, reach out. If you're a Bitcoiner and you're a veteran listening to this right now or you're just a veteran, reach out to those you've served with, those that you know might be fighting the demons that we all came home with to varying degrees. And, yeah, give it a second chance. If you've encountered Bitcoin in the past and you're like, no, that's dark web, drug money, or it's a huge scam, it's not. We're winning, and you can win with us if you want. We're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show. Gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time. And until next time. Okay. Thank you.