Latest / SpaceTomatoes / Duncan Cary Palmer - Pixelated Privacy Wizard - Bitcoin, Nostr, Tacos & More S2-EP18

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Duncan Cary Palmer - Pixelated Privacy Wizard - Bitcoin, Nostr, Tacos & More S2-EP18 · SpaceTomatoes

• 0:00
  all right everybody welcome back to another episode of the space tomatoes podcast i'm one
• 0:27
  your host havoc i'm alex hello and today we have a guest joining us duncan carrie palmer
• 0:37
  here to talk uh i don't know stuff bitcoin nostre uh life gardening maybe not gardening
• 0:46
  maybe terrible gardening we don't know welcome to the show thank you thank you it's good to be here
• 0:55
  Glad to have you.
• 0:58
  So I do have to ask, where did you, does the pixel filter, is that just part of your camera setup or where did you come up with that?
• 1:09
  Well, that's intentional.
• 1:12
  Because of my checkered past, I represent myself to the world sort of pseudonymously.
• 1:26
  So Duncan Carey Palmer is actually my pen name, my nom de plume.
• 1:32
  And I have, shall we say, less than satisfactory relationships with certain three-letter agencies and state actors where we don't necessarily see things eye to eye.
• 1:55
  so mostly for the sake of not embarrassing my wife
• 2:02
  I keep my public identity and my private identities more or less separate
• 2:10
  maybe we should have done that all along
• 2:14
  probably
• 2:16
  you guys look great
• 2:19
  and you can probably tell even through the pixelation
• 2:24
  that I'm a member of the club.
• 2:28
  These whiskers have been there.
• 2:31
  Have you seen my Nostra icon or image?
• 2:36
  Yeah.
• 2:36
  The wizard?
• 2:37
  Yeah.
• 2:38
  That's pretty much me in real life and reality,
• 2:41
  I guess you could say.
• 2:45
  All right.
• 2:46
  I haven't made the jump to Nostra yet,
• 2:48
  so I have not seen it.
• 2:49
  Oh, well, so maybe, hopefully,
• 2:51
  I can help drag you there, man.
• 2:54
  It's awesome.
• 2:56
  I have all intentions of going there, but I just haven't done it quite yet.
• 3:00
  Yeah, it's my daily driver for social media.
• 3:03
  And it's basically, I mean, I gave up listening to mainstream baloney news a long time ago.
• 3:12
  But Noster is essentially where I get my information about life, the universe, and everything these days.
• 3:22
  So 42?
• 3:24
  nostor is 42 so yeah i mean we were gonna get lx set up on nostor while we were down in tampa
• 3:34
  because he lives in the area and uh unfortunately it was kind of a i'm not a very good planner i'm
• 3:44
  i'm more of a spontaneity came over here my kind of guy especially when i'm especially when i'm on
• 3:51
  vacation they're like well what are we gonna do today i'm like i don't know whatever happens i
• 3:55
  guess and they're like no we have to have a plan not not lx well okay maybe lx too but pretty much
• 4:03
  everyone wants that i guess and i'm like i'd like to not plan and just like my day is planned right
• 4:09
  on a normal basis when i'm on vacation i i kind of want to just i don't know get a wild hair and
• 4:16
  let's go do this i have that same tension with my wife she's the planner and i'm the
• 4:23
  i'm the surfer so i'm the surfer dude
• 4:26
  yeah literally we'll get them set up well i like that i like that i spent many a year
• 4:36
  doing exactly that all the way from no fees all the way up to well i guess i didn't go much past
• 4:44
  I'm trying to think.
• 4:47
  So, yeah, I guess not much past.
• 4:52
  Well, I don't know.
• 4:53
  So Salt Creek.
• 4:58
  Missed the days of Doheny.
• 5:01
  Okay, so you were a left coast guy for a while?
• 5:06
  I was, yeah.
• 5:09
  Yeah.
• 5:09
  Cool.
• 5:10
  I miss the tacos.
• 5:11
  i'm not kidding you tell about the tacos it's always about the tacos
• 5:17
  you got to get the street variety you know like they make in tj oh yeah
• 5:23
  yep yep street tacos are amazing yeah no we we i'm i'm really big on yeah i'm terrible with that
• 5:30
  like we found a taco place when we were down there but really good one actually i was i was
• 5:35
  pretty amazed um it's hard to find at least around us a really good taco place um or mexican
• 5:46
  restaurant i should say uh but we found a place and and went to go order tacos and i'm like
• 5:51
  i ordered all the tacos i'll take one of each yeah four bags full of just tacos it's crazy
• 6:02
  That's kind of how it went.
• 6:05
  Tacos for days.
• 6:06
  Yep, yep.
• 6:08
  I love tacos.
• 6:10
  You gotta...
• 6:11
  I can tell.
• 6:11
  Who doesn't?
• 6:12
  Have you ever met anyone that's like, no, I don't like tacos?
• 6:16
  No, come on.
• 6:19
  You don't like tacos?
• 6:21
  You know I don't like tacos.
• 6:23
  My wife makes...
• 6:25
  They're all you, man.
• 6:25
  Super tacos.
• 6:27
  Basically, we just chop up all the vegetables and, you know,
• 6:32
  It's like a Mexican street taco, only you just keep piling it on.
• 6:39
  I call it the PhD style, pile it higher and deeper.
• 6:44
  There you go.
• 6:46
  Yep, BS, bullshit.
• 6:49
  MS, more shit.
• 6:50
  PhD, piles higher and deeper.
• 6:55
  Is it like a taco app or a forum or something on a Nasser that you could join,
• 7:00
  or maybe you need to start with?
• 7:01
  There's definitely foodies there.
• 7:04
  And, you know, a lot of people that are into food and publish recipes and show what they're working on and making.
• 7:11
  And there's people that sell various things like jerky, various concoctions and so on for Bitcoin.
• 7:24
  And to me, that's one of the beauties of Nostra and Bitcoin is that we have really a worldwide free and open peer-to-peer market now with Nostra and Bitcoin.
• 7:39
  It's amazing.
• 7:41
  And it's unstoppable, you know, unless they decide to shut down the Internet permanently, at which point, hopefully, we'll have something like reticulum to replace it.
• 7:54
  Yeah, or MeshTastic or whatever, you know?
• 7:57
  Well, so Reticulous. So yeah, I've been experimenting with MeshTastic. So my buddy and I, a couple years ago, started a Bitcoin meetup in the local area here in Southern California.
• 8:12
  And one of the things I did early on was pull together some MeshTastic nodes and set it up so I took a walk around the block just running a portable node and left the node with the meetup and was just communicating in text as I walked around the block.
• 8:37
  and sent a, it was just a mock transaction,
• 8:43
  but to show that you could transfer Bitcoin using Cashew
• 8:48
  just over any text channel.
• 8:54
  It's really cool stuff going on.
• 8:58
  Okay, so that was just the lead-in.
• 9:00
  Since then, I've found out that reticulum is, I think,
• 9:05
  either reticulum or something like it is what I think will ultimately replace even,
• 9:14
  replace the entire internet, I believe at the IP level, the internet protocol level,
• 9:22
  replace IP with totally encrypted identities and the ability to communicate with anybody
• 9:31
  anywhere in the world unstoppably.
• 9:35
  that sounds like the original intent yeah
• 9:41
  yeah i have no idea what any of that stuff is so i'm just kind of going to nod my head and say
• 9:48
  okay well you know i mean it sounds good to ask questions here here's the thing you know right now
• 9:53
  the internet is kind of a bunch of centralized things it became that you know as big actors like
• 10:02
  Google and others got in Facebook.
• 10:07
  And all this was by design, what I think of as from the dark side.
• 10:15
  What I call the powers that shouldn't be kind of got their fingers into the mess and said,
• 10:23
  all right, we're going to own these people out there and we're going to surveil their every move
• 10:29
  and follow them wherever they are.
• 10:32
  And so we'll make it a requirement to sign up everywhere and to provide your license and registration.
• 10:46
  KYC, know your customer, which they blatantly lie about.
• 10:52
  They say, oh, it's to protect us from all these evil people.
• 10:56
  But what it really is for is to keep tabs on every move that everybody makes and every transaction and get a piece of that action right out of the middle.
• 11:10
  And Noster and Bitcoin are huge steps away from that to free us.
• 11:16
  And I'm profoundly and eternally grateful to the technical people out there that are building the tools that can protect us from the power, what I call powers that shouldn't be, PTSB.
• 11:33
  yeah no and i like i mean the the whole you know the concept of an oscar is is pretty cool because
• 11:44
  you know like at this point i'm running a relay um so got my own little space my space yeah it's
• 11:52
  someone else's server so uh but i can move it if i need to you know what i mean i can put it on
• 11:59
  home system i could do whatever i want with it and then use you know pretty much any app i want
• 12:07
  even down to just command line if i want to just do command line you know a little messy but you
• 12:14
  know you've got things like uh what is the one uh grimoire where you can run command lines but it's
• 12:21
  got kind of you know a shell for you and you can what was the name of that your pieces grimoire
• 12:27
  spell uh G R I M O I R E thanks I gonna look that one up cool yeah so being able to you know interact in a way that fits your style is is really cool to me right um what got me on android you know early on out of the gate was the
• 12:54
  ability to customize my own stuff you know right uh which which i enjoy you know and again i'm not
• 13:04
  I have no skin in the game on which one's better for whatever reason or anything like that.
• 13:10
  I just, I don't like locked-in ecosystems.
• 13:13
  That, to me, has always been something I'm not a big fan of.
• 13:19
  But there's huge benefit that comes along with it, right?
• 13:21
  I mean, there's no doubt about the fact that when you control the OS and the apps and the hardware,
• 13:29
  you're going to have a better experience because it's all purpose-built, right?
• 13:34
  So, um, but you know, having that ability to customize in a way that you want and Nostra
• 13:40
  kind of gives you that, like, I don't like this app.
• 13:42
  Okay.
• 13:42
  We'll get a different app.
• 13:44
  And there's so many of them.
• 13:46
  So it's not like, oh, I've got this Facebook app.
• 13:49
  I really don't like this.
• 13:50
  It's clunky.
• 13:51
  It's weird.
• 13:51
  It's, it's terrible.
• 13:54
  Too bad.
• 13:55
  Just what you've got.
• 13:56
  Right.
• 13:56
  Nostra is like, well, if you don't like any of them, just make your own.
• 14:00
  Exactly.
• 14:01
  Exactly. And the beauty, additional beauty of that is your identity and your data is portable from app to app to app. You don't have to sign up, you know, everywhere. There's scare quotes.
• 14:16
  sign up for every
• 14:20
  freaking place that you want to use
• 14:22
  or every app
• 14:24
  or whatever
• 14:24
  you've got your private key
• 14:28
  your NSEC
• 14:29
  your secret key
• 14:30
  and your NPUB is your face to the world
• 14:34
  and additionally
• 14:36
  you can have
• 14:38
  different identities
• 14:39
  for different things that you do
• 14:42
  you can
• 14:42
  you know you can have one identity
• 14:46
  that you are the writer at and you become well-known and you're that person.
• 14:54
  But then you can have a separate identity where you might say,
• 14:58
  let's go use financial apps here or let's do our transacting on this separate identity.
• 15:07
  And you can, you know, between or among those identities,
• 15:11
  you can vouch for an alternate identity, you know, if you want to.
• 15:15
  Or you can keep them totally separate where nobody knows that they're connected at all.
• 15:22
  It's, yeah, not, and yeah, Noster has made that possible.
• 15:29
  So that's awesome.
• 15:31
  Yeah, it really, it really takes, to be honest with you, it takes a while to, at least it has for me.
• 15:39
  I can't speak for everyone, but it's taken me a while to get my brain out of that mode of, you know, where's the content?
• 15:50
  You know, when you first join Nostra, it's kind of a dead zone, feels like.
• 15:58
  All you really get is just a bunch of Bitcoin and developers.
• 16:03
  That's all, pretty much.
• 16:05
  and you're like, I don't know, is this the right place for me?
• 16:09
  But you have to like retrain your brain, right?
• 16:13
  You're not being spoon fed anything.
• 16:15
  What's there is just what's there.
• 16:16
  That's it.
• 16:17
  It doesn't, it's not going to be reshuffled or rejiggered for your personal consumption.
• 16:22
  That's on you to do, right?
• 16:25
  So you find the people you want to follow.
• 16:27
  You find the topics that are interesting to you.
• 16:30
  you follow these people and you start to build up basically that feed right now you are the algorithm
• 16:38
  there is no built-in algorithm well unless you know again depending on the app you're using there
• 16:44
  may be an algorithm so you know for example i'm a little i have some concerns about certain actors
• 16:52
  out there like Albie, actors like Primal, you know, they make, in some sense, they make
• 17:02
  things easier and more comfortable.
• 17:05
  And, you know, Primal, for example, might be an excellent way to dip your toe into the
• 17:10
  Noster and Bitcoin waters because it makes it easy to onboard, gives you a wallet right
• 17:20
  away and you can just be up and running in no time. However, I think they filter what you see
• 17:28
  and they do have algorithms. But once you're there and you start to understand what Nostre is,
• 17:36
  then you can branch out and start using other things. And yeah, I see the same future potential
• 17:43
  for reticulum in particular.
• 17:46
  There's something else that showed up on Nostra recently.
• 17:50
  I can't remember, but there are, and again, I will repeat,
• 17:56
  I'm profoundly grateful to the small army of developers out there
• 18:02
  that are working on the code and on the projects to help liberate us
• 18:07
  from the powers that shouldn't be.
• 18:10
  There are other things that will ultimately enable us to use the Internet and stay in touch with each other and have a truly free worldwide market and not worry about the Internet being shut down or whatever.
• 18:29
  yeah and and nostril really does also like you mentioned the the you know kind of marketplaces
• 18:39
  that are available and uh it really kind of changes the the perception at least i i would
• 18:49
  imagine it does for a lot of people and did for me uh quite a bit in what bitcoin really is right
• 18:57
  I think a lot of people just look at it as an investment, right?
• 19:02
  Like you can just put money in there and just wait and eventually you'll probably have more available.
• 19:10
  Whatever fiat money, right?
• 19:14
  But what's what's missing there is I think the, you know, one of the original intentions was this is money.
• 19:21
  It's to be used as money, not just accumulate hold and, and accumulate more and hold and accumulate more and hold.
• 19:30
  Right.
• 19:30
  That doesn't change the paradigm at all.
• 19:33
  You're still stuck in fiat land.
• 19:35
  Right.
• 19:36
  Right.
• 19:36
  You're just taking your fiat and putting it somewhere.
• 19:39
  Might as well be gold, silver, any other thing, you know?
• 19:43
  But you get into Nostra and next thing you know, you're like, yeah, look, this product looks good.
• 19:48
  I'd like to try that.
• 19:49
  And boom, you're like, Hey, here, have some sats.
• 19:52
  And next thing you know, you've got a product and you're like, Hey, this is really good.
• 19:56
  And it's, you know, at least so far for me, it's all quality handcrafted, you know, real
• 20:03
  goods.
• 20:05
  It's not, you know, some trash from, you know, wherever that's going to, you know, make you
• 20:12
  sad.
• 20:14
  It's not wherever it's China.
• 20:16
  You know, it's from China.
• 20:17
  All the junk comes from China.
• 20:18
  pretty much yeah pretty much so havoc i'm yeah i'm glad you brought that up i guess that's
• 20:24
  probably what i'm here for is to talk somewhat about bitcoin and
• 20:28
  so i i mentioned my checkered past and you know speaking of checkers you can see the pixelated
• 20:39
  checkers on my face here um so the disagreements i've had with these powers that shouldn't be
• 20:48
  I am sort of an early adopter of a lot of things because I found out the hard way. Well, okay,
• 21:00
  let me back up a little bit. Can I get into a little autobiography?
• 21:05
  Absolutely.
• 21:06
  Okay. So I grew up in the United States of America. I was telling Havoc earlier before
• 21:12
  we started recording that I was born on a farm or near a farm in Michigan, a berry farm.
• 21:21
  And one of these days, I hope to visit Havoc's farm because I've missed that segment in the rest
• 21:29
  of my adult life. In any case, I grew up in America. I went to public schools. I grew up in a time,
• 21:37
  in the 1950s when
• 21:40
  there was substantially more
• 21:45
  real shirt sleeve freedom in the country
• 21:49
  and there was less oppression.
• 21:53
  I was told America was the greatest nation in the world
• 21:56
  and all of the standard things that you learn.
• 22:01
  But as I've grown older and
• 22:04
  you know, married and raised kids and grandkids and so on, I've found that it's not quite all the textbook, you know, rainbows and unicorns that I was taught growing up.
• 22:22
  Um, so fast forward a bit to, uh, some point where I had some disagreements with, uh, you know, different perspective or viewpoint from one of the three letter agencies.
• 22:39
  and, you know, after that, one day I went to my bank
• 22:48
  and was going to take some money out of an ATM
• 22:51
  and there's this zero balance.
• 22:54
  And I'm going, what the heck is going on here?
• 22:57
  well the
• 23:00
  infernal
• 23:03
  the IRS
• 23:06
  had sent a fax to my bank
• 23:09
  well back up once
• 23:11
  have you heard of due process of law
• 23:14
  you know theoretically you're innocent until proven guilty
• 23:17
  all of that stuff
• 23:20
  the IRS sent my bank a fax
• 23:24
  and said send us all his money
• 23:27
  And the bank says, OK, there you go. Absolutely zero due process of law whatsoever in this country. It's all a matter of power, raw power. You know, whoever's running the show, they pull the strings on the puppets.
• 23:46
  And we individual folks out here, we have absolutely zero protection. And that's where Bitcoin came from, I believe. It was a matter of getting money out of the hands of the state.
• 24:02
  because the state inserts and insinuates itself into every transaction, every move,
• 24:12
  and Bitcoin absolutely eliminates that middleman.
• 24:17
  So I could send, well, yeah, if we exchange NPubs, I could send Havoc money right today,
• 24:28
  even while we're talking here.
• 24:30
  I could send him real money, Bitcoin, that the state, even though they're bombing Iran and, you know, they've got huge navies and so on, they don't have the power to stop transactions in Bitcoin.
• 24:50
  Well, if they wanted to come find me personally, they could stop me.
• 24:57
  But there's tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes out there running.
• 25:02
  I'm running a node.
• 25:04
  Havoc, I was delighted to hear you're actually ahead of me in the Noster world running a relay.
• 25:09
  That's awesome, dude.
• 25:11
  But I'm running a Bitcoin node.
• 25:14
  So I helping to support the Bitcoin network individually And we can exchange money around the world between Noster and Bitcoin users and no nation state can stop it You know how cool is that
• 25:37
  No, it really is, right? And again, it goes back to that whole thing, right? I don't think the
• 25:45
  original intent was you know to create a system that would look you know not that it's it's not
• 25:55
  there anything it can you can certainly do this but it was i don't think the original intent was
• 26:00
  to just you know stack right i think the intent was use this as money and get away from that right
• 26:09
  Exactly. Of course, the beauty of game theory is that the desire to have your wealth grow, or at least at the very least be protected, is the carrot.
• 26:29
  You know, it's the honeypot that sucks people in when they understand that.
• 26:36
  And especially when people discover what I discovered very painfully, you know, like 20, 30 years ago, that the powers that shouldn't be can just say, give us his money and boom, it's gone.
• 26:50
  You know, everything you sweated and worked for and thought you were saving, when it's in the hands of a third party, it's called counterparty risk.
• 27:03
  When your funds, when your savings, when your wealth is in anybody else's hands, it's not yours.
• 27:10
  And that's the beauty of Bitcoin is that you own it and it is protected.
• 27:18
  I think back to one of my friends who is now a Bitcoiner came to his realization when he saw back during COVID, the truckers up in Canada went on a big trip across the country.
• 27:39
  and people had donated to support that protest up there,
• 27:45
  donated like a million bucks.
• 27:48
  And Trudeau says, we're going to take that away.
• 27:51
  And boom, it was gone.
• 27:54
  So they realized, and my friend in this case,
• 27:58
  watching the news realized, hey, you know,
• 28:01
  my money in the bank isn't safe.
• 28:03
  I better get me some Bitcoin.
• 28:05
  It's more secure than gold.
• 28:08
  You know, gold, physical gold, physical silver, those are great.
• 28:13
  But, you know, basically you have to warehouse them somewhere.
• 28:17
  You have to put them in a safe or protect them.
• 28:21
  Bitcoin is a number.
• 28:24
  You can keep your Bitcoin in your head.
• 28:27
  If you can remember 12 words, you know, the worst they can do is kill you, but they can't get your Bitcoin.
• 28:36
  so it's like giving the middle finger
• 28:40
  to the powers it shouldn't be
• 28:41
  yeah and you know especially if you go to
• 28:46
  you know the big piece there I would say is self custody
• 28:50
  right which is the act of taking the Bitcoin that you do
• 28:54
  own and moving it away from an exchange
• 28:58
  absolutely exchanges are how you get Bitcoin
• 29:02
  from fiat fiat being the dollar we can talk about that you don't want to do that
• 29:09
  you want to get bitcoin from another individual peer-to-peer because the exchanges are gonna
• 29:15
  you know they tie you into again to the powers that shouldn't be when you buy bitcoin from an
• 29:22
  exchange they know the powers that shouldn't be the ptsb know who has it and how much and all of
• 29:31
  those details. So buy your Bitcoin from another Bitcoiner. Absolutely. And I guess my only
• 29:40
  caveat to that would be, especially for a lot of our listeners, they are completely
• 29:48
  clueless on what it even is. Right. And so I would rather have someone go and start off
• 29:56
  on an exchange and then move to self custody and throw some into a lightning network and then
• 30:04
  toss it back into a different self custodial wallet. And now you're in, in fairly good shape,
• 30:11
  right? Um, but you know, peer to peer is something that is, is, I mean, it's wonderful.
• 30:19
  It's great. You can do it as long as you know, people and you, you know, you trust them and,
• 30:25
  you know all those things exist but if you're new to it there you know there aren't there's no
• 30:32
  really easy on-ramp for going well right out of the game can i can i throw out a counter to that
• 30:42
  with please do please do with all due respect and you're making a big no no you're not at all
• 30:48
  and i'm good not at all i i understand your perspective but here's my alternative recommendation
• 30:55
  And it's a it's a strong one because, well, all right. So I would say that your your path that you just described would be fine for just for a start.
• 31:09
  You know, get ten dollars, get a hundred dollars, you know, whatever from an exchange if you want to.
• 31:16
  But, and that way, you know, you can dip your toe into the water and you can maybe have a plausible deniability, a separate stack of Bitcoin that's your public stack.
• 31:37
  And it's pretty small and that might even be a good decoy for the powers that shouldn't be.
• 31:45
  But when you really want to start stacking and even right from the beginning, find a Bitcoin meetup in your local area and go and hang out with Bitcoiners.
• 31:58
  You know, people that are that are there and that are doing it where you can ask questions face to face.
• 32:05
  You know, like we're sitting here. It's almost like we're together in a room here. That's one of the cool things about the Internet is we can have these conversations.
• 32:16
  But go and talk to some real Bitcoiners or even just go on, you know, sign up for Primal or whatever and get your initial Bitcoin in Lightning and get a wallet.
• 32:33
  There are wallets out there. I'm trying to remember. I think Moon Wallet, M-U-U-N Wallet, lets you save things either as lightning or on chain.
• 32:49
  You can learn these things and be completely self-sovereign, have your stack of Bitcoin totally private from those powers that will come knocking at your door.
• 33:10
  And they do, by the way. They sneak up on your house and they make a big show.
• 33:17
  So speaking from experience here, that three-letter agency I mentioned at one point could have sent me a letter.
• 33:30
  But they chose instead to descend on my house with like a dozen or more armed agents from local, state, and federal powers.
• 33:46
  And, you know, just basically to show my neighbors what a bad guy I am and all of that good stuff.
• 33:55
  So you don't want that, is my point.
• 33:59
  So you want to keep your privacy.
• 34:02
  Yeah, I don't think anyone wants that.
• 34:07
  Here's a silly question.
• 34:08
  So those meetups and things, what incentivizes somebody to sell their Bitcoin instead of just keeping stacking it for themselves?
• 34:18
  Not a silly question at all.
• 34:20
  That's a fantastic question.
• 34:23
  I have an article about that.
• 34:25
  The title is Why I Sell My Bitcoin.
• 34:29
  So I've been in Bitcoin since before Bitcoin began.
• 34:34
  And you'd think that would make me a wealthy man.
• 34:37
  Well, I'm absolutely not because the way God wired my brain,
• 34:42
  I see the world from about 80,000 feet.
• 34:46
  I see the big picture.
• 34:49
  And one of my huge errors back in the beginning,
• 34:52
  I followed the development of Bitcoin.
• 34:58
  There was various attempts to use gold to back Internet money.
• 35:07
  And there were various organizations that basically the effort of trying to protect ourselves from the state.
• 35:17
  So I watched Bitcoin come along and I did get involved fairly early.
• 35:23
  But I made the mistake that I'm trying to encourage havoc, not to encourage or, you know, at least to change the way you present it.
• 35:35
  Don't deal with those exchanges or minimize your exposure on an exchange.
• 35:40
  Because I originally bought Bitcoin on the first Bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox, M-T-G-O-X.
• 35:51
  And I did not understand what has become a mantra in Bitcoin, and for good reason. The mantra is, not your keys, not your coins. Not your keys, not your coins. Pound that into your head. Don't ever forget it.
• 36:13
  because I would have retired a decade ago or more
• 36:21
  if I had understood that from the beginning.
• 36:25
  But as I said, I see the world from 80,000 feet.
• 36:28
  So I missed that point.
• 36:30
  And I thought I was doing okay until the day the news came across,
• 36:36
  oh, you can't take your money out of,
• 36:40
  you can't get your Bitcoin off that exchange.
• 36:43
  It's been hacked or, you know, some bad machinations went on.
• 36:49
  And so I lost the vast majority of that.
• 36:55
  And I learned my lesson the hard way.
• 36:58
  I've got the arrows in my back to prove I'm a pioneer.
• 37:02
  So you want to have your Bitcoin in your own self-custody,
• 37:07
  in your own private set of keys and offline and stored.
• 37:15
  So back to your question, LX.
• 37:19
  Is that how I address you, LX?
• 37:22
  Yeah.
• 37:23
  Okay.
• 37:24
  So back to your question.
• 37:27
  Why would anybody sell their Bitcoin?
• 37:29
  Well, I very painfully at much greater expense managed to stack a much smaller collection of Bitcoin after I understood that life lesson.
• 37:46
  and waited and waited and just kept working and doing, plying my trade and earning filthy
• 37:56
  fiat dollars until Bitcoin did appreciate to the point where I have been able thank God to retire on it So as a retiree I need filthy fiat from time to time to pay bills and buy groceries and so on
• 38:17
  And that's why, excuse me, at a very, at as slow a rate as I can, can manage, I sell my Bitcoin.
• 38:28
  And I used to deal with an exchange on foreign shores that I won't mention on this show.
• 38:38
  But since the local community has been built up and there are more and more private individuals locally that understand the value of Bitcoin, I now do all of those exchanges privately.
• 38:56
  You know, I just let it be known to the local group, hey, I have a little bit of coin available for sale.
• 39:05
  But I'll tell you, I'm really low.
• 39:07
  You know, it's as slow as I possibly can, because even though Bitcoin value is like a roller coaster.
• 39:17
  If you integrate it all out, it's going up forever, Laura, as Michael Saylor says.
• 39:23
  So I know that the $100 of fiat that I get today for a little bit of Bitcoin, if I could only wait a few years, that's going to be $1,000 or $10,000 or it's going to be part of my kids' and grandkids' inheritance.
• 39:46
  So I trickle it out, but that's why I sell it, to pay the bills.
• 39:51
  and that gradually as bitcoin becomes more and more adopted in the world
• 39:57
  um i'll have to do less and less of that there are things that i do
• 40:03
  and by the way i we encourage the people that come to our meetups to use bitcoin as money because
• 40:12
  that's part of the purpose is you know when you use bitcoin as money uh for example we have a
• 40:21
  meetup locally where we meet at a restaurant that accepts Bitcoin. So, you know, when I spend Bitcoin,
• 40:30
  at least at the very theoretical level, there's no middleman, there's no, the state can't take
• 40:38
  sales tax out in the middle. There's potentially no paper trail. Well, there, okay, let me,
• 40:50
  Let me back up a little bit. Again, it's the idea of being pseudonymous. If the Bitcoin that you control is not connected to your personal real world identity, then the state can't lay claim to it.
• 41:12
  they can't haul you into court.
• 41:15
  They can't
• 41:17
  rob from you.
• 41:19
  So it's real money.
• 41:21
  It's like universal
• 41:23
  barter system.
• 41:25
  It's like going down to the flea market
• 41:27
  and
• 41:29
  you meet on a
• 41:31
  corner somewhere, you see a vendor
• 41:34
  on a street corner and you go buy
• 41:35
  a hot dog or whatever.
• 41:37
  You hand them a couple bucks
• 41:39
  or a fin.
• 41:42
  inflation. And nobody knows but you and him. And what Bitcoin and Noster give us the ability to do
• 41:52
  is have that experience globally and cut the thieving middleman state completely out of the
• 42:00
  picture. And we're living that dream right now. And that's why I'm encouraging you. The alternate
• 42:10
  view havoc is to get people into that world where you're self-custodying your Bitcoin,
• 42:17
  you're using it for transactions locally and globally, and reducing the power of the state
• 42:26
  to oppress us and destroy us.
• 42:31
  Yeah, and the not your keys, not your coin, you can think of that for those just
• 42:39
  real easy way to think of this, right?
• 42:42
  Yeah.
• 42:43
  If you go and, you know,
• 42:45
  you get your check or whatever it is for your job,
• 42:49
  if you go to the bank, cash that out,
• 42:52
  and just take cash home, right?
• 42:54
  This is self-custody.
• 42:56
  This is self-custody.
• 42:58
  This is, you have your keys, you have your coin.
• 43:02
  If you leave it in the bank and you use that little card,
• 43:05
  those little numbers that are digitally printed on a screen
• 43:08
  can be changed, altered, or just removed by request.
• 43:16
  Not your keys, not your coin.
• 43:19
  You didn't have physical dollars in your hand.
• 43:26
  They can be removed from your access.
• 43:29
  Like Duncan was saying, it's a $0 balance all of a sudden.
• 43:35
  Well, what happened?
• 43:36
  Well, they just said, yeah, give us some money.
• 43:37
  Okay, well, we gave them the money, so you don't have any money, right?
• 43:41
  But if you had the cash, they couldn't do that.
• 43:43
  It's the same exact thing, right?
• 43:46
  Yes, Bitcoin is cash.
• 43:49
  That's a great analogy.
• 43:53
  Bitcoin is cash, but it's cash, right?
• 43:57
  It's cash that, so even with cash, here's a slight difference I want to point out for your listeners,
• 44:04
  And that is that green stuff, folding stuff in your wallet.
• 44:09
  You know, you have it sitting there in your wallet.
• 44:12
  And while you're sleeping and while you're going about your business, the state is still stealing that cash from you because they're printing more of it and diluting the value of it.
• 44:25
  And anybody that's lived through the last five years has seen the price of a hamburger double or more.
• 44:36
  At the beginning of COVID, I think it's something like they printed like 40% of all the dollars that exist in the universe.
• 44:48
  A bunch of thieving, evil people.
• 44:52
  And that's part of what…
• 45:22
  the only way to maintain that infinite growth is to increase the supply of the thing that is used
• 45:29
  to transact or dollars, which of course devalues the currency, but we need more growth. So we print
• 45:37
  more, which devalues the currency, you know, eventually we'll have trillion dollar notes.
• 45:43
  It's just a matter of time, you know, the Zimbabwe has them. So.
• 45:47
  Well, have you seen the photos of the street sides down in Venezuela?
• 45:56
  The whole, you know, along the sides of the road
• 45:58
  There's just money lying on the side of the road
• 46:01
  They're dollars
• 46:03
  And it's going to be that way in the U.S. of A.
• 46:07
  Before we know it
• 46:08
  The paper money is going to be worthless
• 46:12
  Yeah, it's getting there, that's for sure
• 46:16
  yeah so here's another question sure in the past i've done a lot of wheeling and dealing on places
• 46:25
  like craigslist and facebook marketplace and not you know for currency obviously but there are a
• 46:30
  lot of scams and people trying to take your money from you and i've seen stories you know people
• 46:36
  sending the money and never receiving the goods which is breaking rule number one how does one
• 46:41
  not get ripped off when they're buying from an individual if they don't personally know them
• 46:46
  That is a great question. And that, you know, that is a problem. And the way the fiat world, of course, has solved that is with your credit card companies. You know, if you're using, typically, if you're using a credit card and you encounter that kind of thing, there's some recourse.
• 47:08
  But in the global peer-to-peer exchange world, your best protection in that area is reputation.
• 47:21
  And so, and essentially, at the moment, that's your only protection.
• 47:29
  There are, no, I shouldn't say that.
• 47:33
  There are some existing escrow type arrangements where for a small fee, a company will get in the middle of a transaction and you will put your payment to the, let's say you've got a vendor selling beef jerky or whatever.
• 47:55
  And, you know, you're a little unsure about their reputation, but they have this intermediary service.
• 48:05
  You put your and you've used this service before.
• 48:09
  You know, let's say it's become big enough and it has a great reputation.
• 48:15
  You put some of your Bitcoin into the hands of this middleman, this escrow company.
• 48:21
  and you wait till the goods are sent to you.
• 48:27
  And when you receive the goods, you tell the escrow company,
• 48:30
  I got them, and then they release the funds to the vendor.
• 48:36
  But really the best remedy, I think, is reputation.
• 48:41
  So there are people on Noster, for example, that if I wanted what they're selling,
• 48:47
  I would happily just pop them some Bitcoin and not really worry about it because, you know, unless they were going to do what's called a rug pull, you know, let's say they finally decided, you know, we're going to go down to a tropical island or whatever.
• 49:09
  But for us, okay, so I'm also an entrepreneur.
• 49:19
  And one of my principles has always been that the customer is always right,
• 49:24
  even if they're wrong.
• 49:29
  But typically, let's look at it from the seller end for a minute.
• 49:33
  If somebody orders something, I'm typically not dealing with a big company where I'm sending a huge volume of product.
• 49:49
  I'm dealing with individuals.
• 49:50
  So if I send out something that, you know, costs me 50 bucks to make and the retail price is 200 bucks or whatever, I haven't lost my shirt.
• 50:04
  You know, if the customer doesn't pay or if something happens, I remember one.
• 50:10
  Let me rewind just a bit and tell you what I invented.
• 50:15
  The way God wired my brain, I'm an inventor.
• 50:17
  so I invented this machine that makes colloidal silver
• 50:22
  do you know what colloidal silver is?
• 50:25
  most powerful natural antibiotic
• 50:28
  but if you don't make it right
• 50:32
  it can be not harmful
• 50:36
  but you could slightly turn blue
• 50:39
  or you could have certain side effects
• 50:43
  that aren't 100% desirable
• 50:45
  I learned how to make it