Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #803: The Long End of the Curve Is Breaking with Parker Lewis

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#803: The Long End of the Curve Is Breaking with Parker Lewis · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
• 0:10
  When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.
• 0:16
  So it's all acting like safe haven.
• 0:18
  I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
• 0:23
  currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
• 0:28
  I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
• 0:31
  If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
• 0:36
  We don't have to slap anymore.
• 0:38
  We're not in the studio.
• 0:39
  I miss the studio.
• 0:40
  We do it for fun, though.
• 0:42
  We do.
• 0:42
  It's good vibes.
• 0:44
  How is Austin?
• 0:46
  Austin's good.
• 0:47
  You know, the Bitcoin vibe has died down.
• 0:50
  You know, it's like the vibe.
• 0:53
  2021 was a vibe having you you know no longer here there's been some energy dissipating but uh
• 1:00
  but there's still just a ton of bitcoiners around so it's just like less than less of a
• 1:05
  meetup scene less of you know pause bit devs but still a bunch of people around so i see everybody
• 1:11
  and um was at the gym with uh jimmy and sile this morning you know we're going over to jimmy's for
• 1:17
  a barbecue tomorrow so the vibes are good just it's a different vibe getting back to basics you
• 1:23
  Before the meetups in Austin, it was steaks at, bring your own steaks at Well Coal's House.
• 1:29
  So we're just getting back to that.
• 1:31
  Yeah.
• 1:31
  I had somebody reminiscing about the mini beef steak we threw in my backyard when it was down there.
• 1:37
  Remember, it was after the takeover.
• 1:42
  I think it was after the first takeover.
• 1:43
  That was the time.
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  That was 2020, early 2022.
• 1:46
  So that was still in that vibe.
• 1:50
  It was a great vibe.
• 1:53
  But we're getting back to basics today.
• 1:54
  I think we've got flying cars now.
• 1:56
  I don't know if you've showed that off in Austin, but there's a lot going on here.
• 2:00
  It was definitely in Texas somewhere, I would imagine.
• 2:02
  I would hope.
• 2:04
  You can probably, yeah, I would imagine there.
• 2:08
  But we're going to get back to basics, back to first principles.
• 2:09
  I think throughout the years, you've been a grounding force on this show.
• 2:14
  And for those of you new to this show, I know there's tens of thousands of you.
• 2:17
  This is Parker Lewis.
• 2:20
  Good to be back on, Marty.
• 2:21
  author of gradually then suddenly
• 2:24
  if you found yourself buying a bitcoin treasury company
• 2:30
  go to the nakamotoinstitute.org you can read it there for food
• 2:33
  yeah treasury you've been on the treasury company tilt
• 2:37
  talking about getting back to first principles do you think priorities have been
• 2:42
  been dissipated or diluted
• 2:46
  in the bitcoin space
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  you know i i think that it's you know some of it's that it's also tiresome like there's always
• 2:55
  going to be some next thing and then those people will figure it out and can't ever predict what the
• 3:03
  next thing is that that distracts people or gets them off the you know just stay humble and stack
• 3:10
  sats but something always done you know it's like there's always some next iteration that you
• 3:13
  you couldn't predict and so um yeah i think uh this is just an evolution of that um and so
• 3:23
  yeah i do think that those you know second you know the saying of everybody gets bitcoin at the
• 3:30
  price that they deserve well that also applies to bitcoin treasury company shareholders yeah
• 3:35
  unfortunately but um but it will be a learning moment for everybody and then you know people
• 3:42
  we'll move forward stronger.
• 3:44
  Yeah. Speaking of moving forward
• 3:46
  stronger, seems like
• 3:48
  there's a crisis of confidence in parts of
• 3:49
  the industry or parts of the holder base,
• 3:51
  if you will, with the cold card hacks.
• 3:54
  Last week, the ledger
• 3:56
  supply chain attacks.
• 4:00
  I wanted to bring you on.
• 4:01
  I know we talked on the phone
• 4:02
  about 30 minutes earlier this week, but
• 4:05
  again, I think
• 4:08
  you're a steadfast
• 4:10
  stern voice in the space. Why right now, considering everything going on in the world,
• 4:15
  you've got the hacks of cold card, of ledger,
• 4:19
  you've got treasury company stocks taking a lot
• 4:23
  of attention away from UTXOs, you've got
• 4:27
  ETFs, you've got AI having sucked the
• 4:31
  capital out of every other asset class for the last 18 months.
• 4:36
  Why is
• 4:37
  an important to still have Bitcoin on the mind or to be stacking Bitcoin.
• 4:43
  Have you lost it? Do you have a crisis of confidence in Bitcoin? Number one.
• 4:47
  And if not, why not?
• 4:50
  No, no crisis of confidence.
• 4:53
  What I can say is that two things is clear to me.
• 4:58
  or
• 4:59
  one thing that I've observed
• 5:03
  is that at least in my time in Bitcoin
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  that sentiment has never
• 5:07
  been worse I don know if it was you who put something out but like um the there a reality that this is probably the tamest bear market that ever happened um in terms of the drawdown
• 5:27
  but the reality of just in the bitcoin industry or amongst bitcoiners from my own personal
• 5:35
  observation is the worst that sentiment's ever been if that's not my I am not
• 5:40
  negative you know I think that the setup is as good as it's ever been the
• 5:47
  fundamentals are as strong as they've been but it's just reality and I think
• 5:49
  that that is kind of a signal for the light at the end of the tunnel it's like
• 5:55
  when sentiment is worse I personally believe that it's a function of two
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  things one being that there was there has not been an adoption wave since 2020
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  in 2021 that in my view you know when I say that I'm talking about like being at
• 6:15
  the meetup scenes going to conferences there was not a wave of new people that
• 6:19
  became excited about Bitcoin there's ones and twos trickling in but but not a
• 6:23
  decided wave like what happened in 2017 2020 2021 and and there hasn't been us
• 6:30
  So there's a lot of fatigue because there has not been new energy that's come in.
• 6:39
  And I also think that that sets up for when it does happen, it's going to be large and significant.
• 6:48
  But when you don't have – and the way that I – there was a bull market in 2024 and 2025, but there was not an adoption wave.
• 6:55
  And a lot of what drove that price rise in 2024 and 2025 was what I would call low conviction, small exposure, institutional flows that came with the ETF.
• 7:10
  I do not – I think if anybody objectively looks at the Bitcoin treasury companies, they're not driving institutional adoption by any means.
• 7:20
  They're not driving adoption at all.
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  If anything, they're cannibalizing adoption and they're confusing people about Bitcoin that would be adopting Bitcoin.
• 7:31
  It's like, you know, it's missing the boat in a big way, in my opinion.
• 7:36
  But that's what you do when you're when you're so focused singularly on.
• 7:42
  Number go up and not focusing on what causes number to go up more people understanding Bitcoin is money.
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  and so but regardless of the you know explanation for it it's just that there has not been an
• 7:54
  adoption wave and that when you have the same group of people talking about the same things
• 7:57
  and the same ideas and they don't see that affirmation of new energy coming in number going
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  up really that would come within an adoption wave and that's another thing you know relative to these
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  you know treasury companies is when when there is an adoption wave and i don't i don't i think
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  The sign of the next bull market will be when the treasury companies are trading at significant discounts to net asset values, because when there is an adoption wave of Bitcoin, the people who figure it out, the signal, what are they going to buy, Bitcoin or stock in a corporation that owns Bitcoin?
• 8:33
  It's almost definitional to an adoption wave.
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  But I think that that's what's caused a lot of fatigue.
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  You know, and there, you know, there also is a function of it that the treasury companies are what I call cannibalizing demand for Bitcoin rather than unlocking adoption.
• 8:53
  And that's having an effect on Bitcoin companies.
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  So, you know, add that all together and you have really negative sentiment.
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  But I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I went and gave two talks in Fort Worth about a month ago right after Labor Day.
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  And when I signed up to do it, I was expecting there to be one talk, and I would have called success 40 people for a Wednesday afternoon talk about Bitcoin 101.
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  there ended up being two different events,
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  one at lunch, one happy hour.
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  And for one, there were 80 to 90 people there
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  and the other there were 60 to 70 people.
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  And I knew virtually none of them.
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  10% of the people were people that I recognized.
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  90% were people that were new.
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  And so the signal that I got from that,
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  and I have other data points, anecdotes to say the same,
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  is that sentiment is worse than it's ever been
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  within the Bitcoin community.
• 9:53
  But outside, people are paying attention. And the things that I would attribute to people paying attention is the fact that inflation is still high.
• 10:03
  Interest rates are rising. People are looking around, recognizing that things are broken.
• 10:08
  And here Bitcoin is hanging out at 80,000 or wherever it is today.
• 10:15
  And it was right after Bitcoin popped back up because the signal that the market gets when Bitcoin starts going back up is that it didn die that the greatest signal because when Bitcoin starts to crash for people that didn actually move in it it affirms I made the right decision not buying but then when it finds a base and
• 10:33
  starts going higher than the doubt starts to creep in hey this thing just
• 10:37
  never goes away maybe it maybe I wasn't right after all and so in you know with
• 10:45
  a macro backdrop of bitcoins at 80,000 with the 30-year interest rate at 5.4 or 5.5 percent or
• 10:53
  wherever it is 5.6 that the long end of the curve is getting out of control and it's not just high
• 10:59
  it's also particularly volatile so it's going to be clear that they're going to need to print money
• 11:05
  I don't know if it's the housing market that breaks or some other credit market potentially
• 11:09
  corporate credit, something's going to break and then that's going to usher in the next wave of
• 11:15
  money printing. And that's going to be the unlock likely in my mind. Sure. You know, it's why
• 11:20
  Bitcoin's always existed. The problems haven't gone away. Bitcoin's as fundamentally sound as
• 11:25
  it's ever been, you know, Square released Bitcoin payments has been rolling it out over the last 12
• 11:29
  months and that extremely high signal has gotten drowned out by you know all the noise of the the
• 11:41
  fight over opportun or BIP 110 the Bitcoin Treasury companies the degeneracy there the
• 11:51
  cold card hack or
• 11:54
  I don't know if you call it, yeah, I guess it's a hack, but I was going to say
• 11:59
  attribute bug, vulnerability,
• 12:03
  supply chain attack with Ledger, you know, all those things add up, but
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  Bitcoin solving the exact same problem in both of those cases for cold card and Ledger,
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  like as devastating it is for the people that were directly
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  impacted, it's also Bitcoin working. There's no moral hazard.
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  there are no bailouts there was also an exchange that was hacked an exchange that i never heard of
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  that lost more money than the cold card incident and ledger combined but again it's also bitcoin
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  working there that firm and whoever trusted that firm they weren't bailed out i don't know how much
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  actual bitcoin there was there but you know loss of loss of funds so the fundamentals i look at is
• 12:46
  that the debt problem is larger than ever. The interest rates at the long end of the treasury
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  curve are demonstrating that. The system can't bear higher rates. The credit markets are on the
• 12:59
  path to breaking. And Bitcoin is sitting at an exahash of hash rate or a thousand exahashes of
• 13:08
  hash rate, whatever you call that. Zeta hash. We're going to start normalizing that term.
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  um and the world needs sound money now as much as it ever did so um i can accept and recognize that
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  yes the the sentiment is as negative as it's ever been mine personally is not and that's what
• 13:27
  allows us to just keep our head down and stay focused and work on bitcoin payments and you
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  know ride out the storm yeah i tweeted it out earlier from the tftc account uh we had a six
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  percent difficulty adjustment upwards today difficulty in hash rate highest they've been
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  since march of this year where do you think that's coming from um i would not be shocked if it's uh
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  a switch out of higher efficiency miners and i can speak and this is public i can speak um
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  from experience at a dark horse that um we had a deal a bit dear that we signed earlier this year
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  and they put in new machines that are extremely efficient and powerful.
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  So I don't know if it's net new.
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  Miners, per se, I think it's miners that are already plugged in,
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  just refreshing their fleets with higher efficiency miners, is what I would say.
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  And then on top of that, obviously, summer demand response programs
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  are probably cooling down as the weather gets more temperate.
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  yeah there's just a lot of those large public miners that are in the process of pulling out
• 14:36
  a lot of ash rate permanently so it's just interesting to see that bump in hash rate
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  yeah we'll get back to mining because this is a lot of what we talked about earlier this week
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  i definitely want to touch on that the dynamic between the mega miners transitioning away from
• 14:52
  mining towards ai compute but first i'm really interested fort worth was it bitcoin one lesson
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  did you give that again or yeah i gave two different bitcoin and one lessons
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  what uh any any unique questions new questions or is the same old questions um um i
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  let me i think let me think about it was mostly the same questions you know and i say that because
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  on the path to bitcoin the questions are both very logical and they're generally all the same
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  you know where it's yeah there were questions about on the computing there
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  were questions about yeah hey if this is what you say it is you know why would the government ever allow that you know where do you see the risks yeah you know how do you think
• 15:49
  about the volatility you know so it's like there were probably one or two
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  questions that were you know not standard but in both of the rooms the Q&A lasts for 30 to 45
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  minutes which I always view as like you know if it's middle of the day people are coming from work
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  again this is this is a day right after Labor Day where people are kind of getting reengaged in
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  their businesses and so I think that that was also noteworthy to me it's like hey you come and spend
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  in two hours and then hit when the presentation's over that just question
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  after question after question just kept rolling through so but but they were all
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  I'd say fairly logical and standard and the bigger takeaway for me was that
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  everyone like when I was looking around the room people are locked in you know I
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  was talking about the problems that are one of the things that I had in this
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  presentation that I always try to make something timely or top topical so that
• 16:46
  it's not just you know stale but about six months ago I know that you would
• 16:53
  have seen this as a hawk when Hank Paulson came out and talked about needing
• 17:00
  a break the glass player and you know showing the room the the movement in
• 17:06
  interest rates and pairing it with actual quotes from him talking about the
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  need for it that it that it's inevitable like when we hit the wall when we hit
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  the wall he's not talking about it in if we hit the wall that it is talked about
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  in in terms of certainty that it's inevitable and he's basically talking
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  about what what Hank Paulson the guy who is running the Treasury at the time of
• 17:33
  the great financial crisis and helped engineer the bailout of the banks
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  alongside Congress and the Fed when he's talking about like we need to break the
• 17:43
  glass plan, it's like, hey, when we print money and it doesn't work or when rates get out of
• 17:49
  control and we print money to control them and it doesn't work, what do we do? We need to break
• 17:54
  the glass plan. And that then four or five, six months later, and these presentations that I did
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  were just a few weeks after Besant talked about repurchasing more at the long end of the curve
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  than they had previously.
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  And it's like the only institution that can really control interest rates
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  is the Federal Reserve.
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  The Treasury, the United States government, is $40 trillion in debt.
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  So, you know, like Besson was talking about his Treasury General account,
• 18:31
  well, you've borrowed the money that's sitting in the Treasury General account.
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  And so all you're doing is, you know, going into more debt to buy the long end and for $2 billion or $4 billion on 40 trillion is, you know, whatever that's saying about, you know, in a, yeah.
• 18:54
  yeah and what i don't know what that saying is but it's like you're picking up pennies in front
• 18:59
  of a steamroller something you know it's like one of those two sayings of like you're not moving the
• 19:03
  needle you're just shifting you know food around the table and claiming that you ate um you still
• 19:08
  have a debt problem and the only way to to functionally solve it it's a math problem you
• 19:15
  can't grow your way out of it you have to print money and that's what everyone's figuring out the
• 19:18
  long end of the treasury service is uninvestable but when i was talking about those people and i
• 19:22
  I talked about the inevitability of hyperinflation. People were both locked in and didn't flinch,
• 19:28
  that they were receptive of the message. I don't talk about it. I mentioned it in the room. I don't
• 19:35
  talk about hyperinflation to get a kick. It's uncomfortable. I'm not rooting for hyperinflation,
• 19:41
  but you print $5 trillion over two years from 2020 to 2022, you'd print 3.5 to 4 trillion after
• 19:51
  the great financial crisis that's the inevitable inevitable consequence and people have to prepare
• 19:56
  for it um and when i was sharing that message in the context of bitcoin the room was locked in you
• 20:03
  know they weren't they weren't spooked by it you know these are business these are people that run
• 20:06
  their own businesses you know small business owner types um so that that's what my takeaway was
• 20:15
  there were small business owners so it wasn't like fort worth institutional capital
• 20:19
  I mean like well I would say you know small business owners are typically the most wealthy
• 20:24
  of them all you know it's like people that that have their own money and um you know oil and gas
• 20:33
  industry people um family offices those that type yeah that's I mean that run and people that run
• 20:44
  to manage their own wealth. Yeah. And I think, uh, I think I completely, I mean, I agree with every
• 20:50
  My conviction's never been stronger, and you were right.
• 20:54
  It was I that tweeted out.
• 20:55
  It was I.
• 20:57
  It tweeted out.
• 20:58
  It was I.
• 20:59
  The dislocation between sentiment and market structure has never been wider.
• 21:03
  And I will say 2015, people legitimately thought Bitcoin was going to die.
• 21:09
  I think this is the worst sentiment since 2015.
• 21:12
  And I wasn't involved in 2015, so I wouldn't have been around to see it.
• 21:16
  So in my mind, you know, because I really went down the rabbit hole in 2016.
• 21:22
  And it was like part of that 2017 wave that since then is clearly the worst.
• 21:31
  It's worse than when Bitcoin crashed from $8,000 to $4,000 a single day by far.
• 21:36
  Oh, easily by far.
• 21:38
  Because you knew there was like this imminent money printing coming after that.
• 21:41
  and there was an easy thing to point to
• 21:46
  like BitMEX and everybody being levered
• 21:48
  levered long
• 21:50
  but also this is what I think it is and I'm curious your thoughts
• 21:54
  on this but like I've had people text me who got
• 21:57
  involved in Bitcoin in 2021
• 22:00
  that
• 22:03
  are
• 22:04
  that have such fatigue
• 22:08
  that are like I would have
• 22:10
  I would have made more money in the S&P, you know, like saying things like that.
• 22:18
  And so it's like, well, you know, so if you think about someone who was in that adoption wave in 2021 and they bought Bitcoin at 60K or 65K or 69K, wherever, you know, towards the top.
• 22:31
  that there hasn't been an adoption wave since and Bitcoin at 80,000, you know, going down to 16
• 22:40
  and back up and sitting at 80. If you zoom out and you're like, hey, well, in 2020, it was at
• 22:46
  8,000 and then crashed to 4,000, like zoom out, you're doing, you know, like this is working
• 22:53
  exactly as intended. But if you were somebody that wasn't at the last adoption wave,
• 22:58
  you know you're not feeling you're not you know and when i say feeling the gains it's like
• 23:04
  that that's where the fatigue comes from the lack of an adoption wave and you know tell me if you
• 23:10
  think wrong like was there an adoption wave in 2024 2025 not from my vantage point but i'm curious
• 23:17
  yours so if you're in that world where like you're not really quote up a lot but you felt you've had
• 23:22
  you've had to ride all the way down to 16k now it's five years later and there's no new energy
• 23:28
  coming behind you to affirm ah you were right about bitcoin like that that's the that's the
• 23:35
  source in my mind of of why sentiment within the bitcoin community is as bad as it is you want to
• 23:41
  consider etfs adoption i guess that was like i don't consider it an adoption wave like what i
• 23:46
  What I mean by that is like there was not a new wave of people that had an unlock of Bitcoin making sense.
• 23:56
  Like I've met ones and twos that have stumbled down the rabbit hole.
• 24:03
  Not a wave, not a 5X, 10X prowl where like a lot of people that you all have met over the last five years, they figured out Bitcoin in 2020 or 2021.
• 24:14
  there wasn't an unlock it wasn't something that unlocked in 2024 25 like an example of a low
• 24:23
  allocation low conviction position is like the wisconsin pension board
• 24:28
  you know like i think that it's a wisconsin pension where they bought 160 million dollars
• 24:35
  worth of bitcoin which is a lot of money right but it only was point a point one percent position
• 24:41
  and then they sold in 2025 rebounds they sold like 90 of something so it's like was that bitcoin
• 24:48
  adoption it was a trade it was a trade it was a trade you know to low conviction small positions
• 24:57
  are what drove the price up not a new wave of people really figuring out the signal behind
• 25:04
  Bitcoin. And all I'm saying is that that is what I attribute, you know, that now going on five to
• 25:11
  six year gap of not a new wave of people figuring out which would be new energy coming into events,
• 25:21
  conferences, Bitcoin companies at the same time where, you know, quote, the price didn't go
• 25:29
  at many multiples higher, like it all leads together.
• 25:34
  But from my vantage point, you know, again,
• 25:37
  I don't over-index to the events that were hosted in Fort Worth.
• 25:41
  It's just looking at the market setup
• 25:43
  that the sentiment isn't nearly as bad outside of Bitcoin.
• 25:48
  You know, people might be focused elsewhere.
• 25:50
  They might be focused on AI, but they're not just down and out.
• 25:54
  And people are paying attention.
• 25:55
  and the interest rate environment is setting up for something to break critically in the money printing And so it just like everybody has to stay focused
• 26:08
  Yeah.
• 26:09
  I mean, it's like I pulled up that Wall Street Journal headline from October 1st,
• 26:15
  so the beginning of this month, like two weeks ago,
• 26:16
  Trump says inflation could pay down the debt very rapidly.
• 26:19
  It's like they're prepping the narrative skis.
• 26:22
  Right.
• 26:22
  And that's one thing I always like to have.
• 26:27
  it's the, you know, Wizard of Oz, like the emperor has no clothes.
• 26:34
  Like you're basically saying the only way to get out is, quote, inflation.
• 26:38
  Well, the only real way to get out is money printing.
• 26:41
  That's the source of inflation.
• 26:45
  But it's the only way to create, you know, pressure on the long end of the treasury curve.
• 26:53
  What's the 30 you're at today?
• 26:57
  Give me your U.S. is at 544.
• 27:08
  I think it went as high as 566 or 577, something like that.
• 27:14
  Also, because it's like it's come in, right?
• 27:17
  But also the volatility is also problematic.
• 27:21
  The volatility of this 30-year interest rate,
• 27:23
  because the 30-year mortgage priced off of this,
• 27:28
  that when you have a credit system that is as large as the U.S.'s is.
• 27:35
  So right now, that metric that I always like to go back to,
• 27:40
  when I was figuring out Bitcoin, I went back to look at the, you know,
• 27:43
  why the Fed had to inject $3.6 trillion over the course of, you know,
• 27:48
  immediately in 2008, but then over the course of 2009-2014 as well, that there was $52 trillion
• 27:57
  in debt at that time, and there was only $900 billion that existed. And of those $900 billion,
• 28:04
  the banks only had $350 billion. And that imbalance between debt and dollars was the
• 28:08
  the source of fragility. Well, that $52 trillion in 2007-8 is now $107 trillion.
• 28:19
  And the $900 billion is $6.7 trillion approximately. So it's like the credit system is
• 28:30
  larger by in excess of two times. They've increased the money supply by six to seven times.
• 28:38
  They increased it up to nine and then started subtracting out.
• 28:42
  But each time they subtract money out of the system, it functionally re-leverages the system.
• 28:47
  And the only – there's two ways to deal with the debt crisis.
• 28:50
  It's one to let the bad debts go away.
• 28:51
  The other way, if you can print money, is to print money.
• 28:53
  is that that $107 trillion can't bear the 10-year 5.2% or the 30-year at 5.4%
• 29:03
  because a lot of virtually all corporate credit is priced off the 10-year,
• 29:09
  some the five-year, but then the 30-year mortgage is priced off the 30-year.
• 29:17
  And you have that debt stack.
• 29:19
  It's like if we were in 2008 with a credit system that was unstable and unsustainable, it's now two times as large.
• 29:28
  The sins of the past and the financial crisis never went away.
• 29:33
  They're still sitting in the credit system today.
• 29:36
  And, you know, as those rates go up, it starves that market.
• 29:42
  Anybody who needs to refinance is just getting destroyed.
• 29:45
  destroyed us all you know it's probably a separate issue but the the ai craze there's a company that
• 29:52
  was founded earlier that earlier this year and jp morgan issued them a five billion dollar loan
• 29:57
  at 11 interest you know like that's the type of crazy town we're living in and that's also a
• 30:02
  function of where rates are so it's just it's yeah the credit market is in the process of breaking
• 30:09
  what actually caused it to go from like breaking to all out pandemonium anybody knows i just look
• 30:15
  at it as inevitable yeah i flashed up that high yield uh yeah that's one of the things i look at
• 30:21
  it's like that market will get super illiquid really quickly and when it does that hyg will
• 30:27
  start taking a nose up pull it back up can you
• 30:30
  boom
• 30:33
  show the five year
• 30:36
  and then you know show the max now
• 30:39
  so it's like you look at this event back in like financial crisis
• 30:44
  you know going from 100 down to 60
• 30:48
  and then you see in 2020 that like 90 going down to 70
• 30:54
  there's like slap downs that that'll be what we're looking for
• 30:58
  when things really break
• 31:00
  less of the intermittent kind of,
• 31:04
  it's like absolute, you know,
• 31:06
  because functionally what happens is
• 31:08
  those credits become no bid The underlying credits are people need to source liquidity in a financial crisis No one bids them And if you want to get any liquidity you have to start pricing bonds down 10 if you going to get a bid at any bond
• 31:28
  And similar things happen to the investment.
• 31:31
  That's high yield.
• 31:32
  Some of the things happen to investment grade.
• 31:33
  And so I think, you know, once we'll be, I'll be looking for that to happen again.
• 31:41
  And when, if you look at, I mean, let me pull it up again.
• 31:43
  Cause if you look at it, it looks like, I mean, this is caveman TA just looking at it,
• 31:47
  but you go on max and you look at like this consolidation of the dump and we've, we've
• 31:53
  had that crash right there when that was 2020, that was March 12th, 2020.
• 31:57
  Yeah.
• 31:58
  Like that.
• 31:59
  But like also like a $1.0 trillion, this is a 1.0 trillion, 1.7 trillion.
• 32:03
  $6 trillion bond market, that going from 90 to 70 virtually overnight, what it is is absolute zero liquidity.
• 32:17
  And when rates are high, like if you think about the 30-year at 5.4%, everything that's long-dated trading off that or the 10-year, the five-year is at 5.05% or wherever it is.
• 32:28
  And so they're all above 5%.
• 32:29
  Everything trades off of this.
• 32:31
  So that's why when people are looking at Oracle bonds, any credit in the market is having to refinance at massively higher rates than whatever they were taken out at.
• 32:42
  And then it destroys the economics of the underlying business.
• 32:47
  The 30-year mortgage is something like 7.6%.
• 32:50
  So nobody can afford that at the price levels.
• 32:55
  What does it cause?
• 32:55
  It causes asset values to crash.
• 32:57
  you know um and then when asset values crash that's the whole in these questions
• 33:02
  yeah but i say all that not to be a doomer i say it's saying it's like hey when you ask me about
• 33:07
  the signal bitcoin the signal is the same like we're not getting out of this problem until people
• 33:15
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  slash tftc. That's simplemining.io slash tftc. That's another thing I was going to bring up.
• 35:52
  You talked about the lack of an adoption wave in 24 and 25. Do you think the narrative is getting
• 35:59
  stale? Is it getting diluted? Do we need to rejigger how we position Bitcoin to people,
• 36:05
  or is it just they'll get it when they get it? I think they'll get it when they get it.
• 36:09
  the signal is the signal that I look at as like there's truth and objectivity in the world.
• 36:20
  There also high time preference in the world You know that what I attribute the Bitcoin treasury companies to that that it a function of you know imagine you figure out what Bitcoin is like
• 36:33
  Most people that are buying them really haven't or if they have, they just become, you know, they've lost track.
• 36:41
  That's a hundred percent. People don't get it. But a lot of them, a lot of the people that are there have no real concept of the fundamental signal Bitcoin.
• 36:49
  But those that are there that have kind of lost track of the real signal is like if the prices of Bitcoin is not going up higher or as fast as you want it to, then the solution is more people understanding Bitcoin as money, not kind of shifting narratives to Bitcoin being capital, which then makes it more confusing for people to understand Bitcoin.
• 37:19
  and to, you know, essentially get drunk behind the wheel and just, you know, start, um, oh, let me,
• 37:27
  let me, I feel laid or I want to catch up. Let me give my money to this corporation to
• 37:31
  buy Bitcoin and I'll buy their stock at a premium because I just, I want more Bitcoin. And I think,
• 37:36
  I think leverage plus price number go up means more Bitcoin, but I have no concept. I actually
• 37:42
  have the price of public company stock. And so I'm going to YOLO it like that. That's what's
• 37:46
  happening um and i think that you know like the high time preferences bitcoin's not going up as
• 37:54
  fast as i wanted to on the time horizon that i want you know to the level that i want to the time
• 37:59
  horizon well sorry like the path is on them understanding more people understanding bitcoin
• 38:06
  and the macro environment plays into that.
• 38:11
  Like rates going from 2009 when Bitcoin was created
• 38:17
  till 2022, interest rates were zero functionally.
• 38:24
  And then they decided to aggressively increase interest rates
• 38:28
  and immediately several banks failed.
• 38:33
  also large institutions that were holding people's bitcoin failed ftx
• 38:39
  celsius um and so bitcoin has been in this environment with rates being high
• 38:49
  as well as the entire rest of the market has been dealing with that
• 38:52
  and at a time when inflation is destroying people like what do you think is going to happen like
• 38:58
  Like that, you know, Bitcoin is here to replace the dollar and the euro or the yen.
• 39:05
  But those currencies are still ninety nine point nine percent of the real economy.
• 39:13
  And there's no like easy, seamless transition.
• 39:16
  So with rates being high, what do you think is going to happen when people's home values are starting to be pressured because of the high rates and food inflation and gas inflation is up?
• 39:29
  Where are they getting the money? People look at the statistics about how 50% of Americans don't have $500 put away, that the high interest rate environment is pressuring asset values and Bitcoin is a liquid one.
• 39:45
  And so, you know, lower your time preference.
• 39:47
  People will find the signal in Bitcoin for the exact same reason.
• 39:50
  The way I generally look at it is that people have to have some primary knowledge of Bitcoin.
• 39:55
  And then there has to be some real world event in their own lives that they connected with to have that real unlock.
• 40:02
  And, you know, money printing is a common one.
• 40:06
  The Canadian trucker is a second one.
• 40:07
  The cutting off of Swift.
• 40:09
  One of those events is going to trigger the next adoption wave.
• 40:14
  And you being, you know, I'm picking on them, but like you being a treasury company and, you know, getting someone to, you know, make a terrible investment decision buying perpetual preferred equity doesn't make anybody wealthier, you know.
• 40:29
  So it's just the thing that's going to cause the price to go higher is more people, like a wave of people, 5x the number of people that have been there before figuring out Bitcoin.
• 40:42
  What does that say?
• 40:43
  says kofi i was gonna the the camera wasn't working with me i can see i can see it from
• 40:49
  where you are right now so when you put it close to the screen it actually came for you but the uh
• 40:55
  i mean i completely agree and so you're talking about like the mechanical
• 40:58
  monetary aspects of bitcoin like yields blown out trump saying we need to
• 41:04
  we're gonna get out of this via inflation we're gonna give people five thousand dollars if they
• 41:09
  vote Republican.
• 41:11
  He also said that.
• 41:13
  You're going to get your Trump checks.
• 41:14
  You're going to get your Trump checks.
• 41:16
  And this week
• 41:19
  too, I think we should pull this
• 41:21
  in, separate from
• 41:23
  the monetary
• 41:25
  mechanical side of things, which is Bitcoin
• 41:27
  is competing with this fiat system, which
• 41:29
  has levers that are pulled and creates more
• 41:31
  units of the fiat currency.
• 41:33
  I mean, the other aspect of Bitcoin is
• 41:35
  be your own bank.
• 41:39
  CONTENT.
• 41:39
  control your own money. And we have headlines, two headlines this week with Bank of America
• 41:45
  getting fined $1.21 billion for money laundering. And it was a slap on the wrist for them,
• 41:53
  cost of doing business. They did $8.1 billion in profits in Q3 of this year. And those profits
• 41:59
  are derived from the fact that they take their users' deposits and put them in short-term bills
• 42:04
  and notes and just rip that yield and don't pass it on to their consumers. And then the OCC comes
• 42:11
  out with the report on Operation Choke Point 2.0 and confirms, yes, the large banks, JP Morgan,
• 42:18
  Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, were all discriminating against individuals and businesses
• 42:24
  based off of their political, religious views or the industry they're in. In our case,
• 42:31
  Bitcoin, the Bitcoin industry, and so it validates that Silvergate signature, First Republic,
• 42:37
  Silicon Valley Bank, the catalyst, one of the catalysts for them going down was not only the
• 42:45
  sort of structural lack of integrity in the monetary system and the banking system, but also
• 42:51
  this political attack on people who have certain views and preventing them from accessing banking
• 42:59
  services and so like talking about like narrative catalyst for an adoption wave like what you would
• 43:05
  be looking for she's like more people becoming aware of things like this and i know both you
• 43:11
  and i have talked to alan lane at length about the saga of silver gates specifically and it's
• 43:16
  absolutely atrocious what happened to them yeah they're i mean i don't know the story of signature
• 43:23
  as well but the story of of silver gate specifically is is just atrocious um because i think anybody
• 43:30
  that was observing that one as it was happening recognized exactly what was happening um and then
• 43:38
  also yeah have you know knowing alan and considering alan a friend and knowing how principled alan was
• 43:43
  you know one of the things that i'll just share is that and i mentioned this but the first time i
• 43:50
  I met Alan, we had breakfast and we had met over the, you know, talked over the phone a few times
• 43:56
  before this, but I think it was 2021 at the Miami Bitcoin conference, had breakfast and I was still
• 44:03
  at Unchained at the time and we were talking Bitcoin back loans. I don't know what context
• 44:07
  that came up, but I remember him very clearly telling me that they built Silvergate in such a
• 44:13
  way that if all of the Bitcoin related or crypto related deposits fled and left, that
• 44:21
  Silvergate would survive, that they very intentionally built the business that way.
• 44:30
  And that proved to be true, that despite a 60%, 70% bank run, that was then effectively
• 44:42
  finished when all the regulatory overhang came, they wound down not being taken over by the FDIC.
• 44:52
  And basically every depositor got their dollar back. And the people who lost were the equity
• 45:00
  holders, you know, as it's designed to be, but they were a political assassination, effectively.
• 45:06
  and after that i had spoken with a friend of mine who was an ex-bank regulator
• 45:13
  and asked him straight up it was like bank supervision specifically and said true or false
• 45:21
  silvergate was the only bank in america that could have withstood a full bank run without
• 45:26
  needing a bailout and to be taken over and unwavering no hesitation unequivocal true
• 45:33
  you know i think anybody that's paying attention any other bank you know it's like silicon valley
• 45:40
  bank i don't know if they were associated with crypto like they they failed because they bought
• 45:46
  a bunch of long duration credit and treasuries i don't know if those treasuries and mortgages
• 45:52
  and when rates rose that created a hole for them and they failed swiftly you know i think they were
• 46:00
  they were issuing like uh i guess like margin loans i mean liquid startup debt for a lot of
• 46:07
  the founders who had quote unquote unicorns yeah and i can i can understand why they're not
• 46:12
  politically unpopular right um the same reason that they you know they had 90 of their deposits
• 46:18
  were not fdi c insured that's why all these you know hedge fund guys like bill akman were out
• 46:25
  hammering about how they need to be bailed out because there's so much of it that wasn't
• 46:28
  insured and you know you knew they were gonna get bailed out you know and that
• 46:34
  one was different but that you know something like that occurring again
• 46:38
  could be the thing that creates the wave because in response to that there was
• 46:44
  this mini money printing where they changed the you know created a program to be able to like stop the bank run wave but you know i think the most likely scenario is something else breaks in the credit system and they have to put money
• 46:59
  and that's the thing that the people who did not participate in the wave of 2020 and 2021 but have
• 47:06
  you know bitcoins remain on their radar that they look themselves in the mirror and say ah
• 47:12
  the Bitcoin is right again. They need to buy Bitcoin.
• 47:16
  That's what, yeah, money,
• 47:19
  you don't have to create these false
• 47:23
  narratives about Bitcoin being digital capital or batteries.
• 47:28
  It's money. It's money that's designed
• 47:31
  that can't be printed. And it's solving a problem
• 47:35
  of printing money. And when you explain it to people in that very
• 47:39
  direct way then the next time they see central banks per money it becomes it all makes sense
• 47:44
  you know if you if you instead paint a vision of the world of bitcoin not as money but as it's
• 47:51
  like digital capital and like it starts to create this image of people like all staring at their
• 47:56
  digital wealth and then questioning like wait what are you what are you all doing if you're all just
• 48:00
  buying bitcoin but to what end like what what's the thing that's closing this loop everyone's just
• 48:06
  like staring at the zeros and ones on their computers and then borrowing in it and other
• 48:11
  currencies that can be easily printed like what what's what problem are you solving here like it
• 48:15
  doesn't doesn't logically follow or there's actually a logical gap that makes zero sense
• 48:22
  and that confuses people and the other side of it is just like hey it's not that difficult it's
• 48:28
  like we have a problem the problem is printing money people hedging the printing of money with
• 48:35
  dollar-linked inflation-related, you know, correlated assets like stocks and bonds
• 48:40
  doesn't fix the problem of a broken money.
• 48:45
  Yeah, I was just looking for a...
• 48:48
  I mean, this is the image that people are going to get
• 48:50
  when they're getting in digital capital, you know?
• 48:55
  To live an uncomfortable life.
• 48:57
  Wow. How did you make it?
• 48:59
  I worked hard as an engineer to save money again.
• 49:03
  then I put my savings into stretch
• 49:05
  what is stretch?
• 49:08
  right now I get
• 49:09
  it's like
• 49:13
  so what I do is I invest in a
• 49:15
  perpetual preferred equity that has a fixed
• 49:17
  dollar claim and a company that
• 49:19
  owns bitcoin it's like what
• 49:21
  like what problems
• 49:23
  you solve you have an
• 49:25
  instrument that's worse than a bond good luck
• 49:27
  you know
• 49:29
  well there is like
• 49:31
  to your point like
• 49:32
  about like the
• 49:34
  existential question like if it's just
• 49:37
  what I would just say is like
• 49:38
  in honesty like if you
• 49:40
  pulled that out from like the thing
• 49:43
  that's incredibly cringe about it
• 49:45
  the whole thing
• 49:50
  makes no sense
• 49:53
  to
• 49:53
  a normal person
• 49:57
  they're like wait
• 49:58
  who are you borrowing from to
• 50:00
  buy the bitcoin are you manipulating the price the bitcoin higher like
• 50:05
  how how does this make any sense at all like who are these people giving you the money
• 50:11
  you know because they aren't credit investors they aren't people who
• 50:14
  lend with instruments that have maturity but they're like you know it just feels like
• 50:22
  robbing peter to pay paul or if bitcoin doesn't make sense to you like if you do not understand
• 50:28
  Bitcoin. Say like, Bitcoin doesn't make sense to me. How does somebody getting paid 13% by somebody
• 50:35
  else that just owns Bitcoin, how does that make, how does that help them understand it? And is it
• 50:39
  more likely to make it harder to understand for them? And they say, stay away. And again, to those
• 50:45
  people, I say, well, hey, you know, you get Bitcoin at the price that you deserve. You might, it might
• 50:50
  make Bitcoin look like a positive. It's not, you know, because there's actual value to the assets.
• 50:54
  But if you don't understand the top level, the asset that's storing value, then somebody getting money and paying 13% just to go buy more Bitcoin certainly doesn't make sense to you.
• 51:05
  And then if you start saying, oh, it's not money.
• 51:08
  It's digital capital.
• 51:08
  We're going to build these fiat instruments that start on top of it.
• 51:11
  You then get into this wicked position about, well, but what's the problem?
• 51:16
  Because you can't then say that the problem is fiat currency because how are you going to solve it with fiat currencies that sit on top?
• 51:20
  Yeah. But so. Yeah, I ultimately think that. Truth and objectivity exists in the world. People find the signal Bitcoin solves the problem. Everyone is feeling the pains of inflation and there's no way out of that. You know, the only trap door is, you know, an exit to actually owning Bitcoin.
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• 54:05
  That's A-V-E-N.com slash Bitcoin. Check it out. Let's think we need the mimetic energy back too.
• 54:12
  And I think what you, Will, John, Nate, everybody at ZapRite is doing is working to make Bitcoin everyday money and make it tangible, particularly for small business owners and individuals.
• 54:28
  And I'm happy to learn that at Fort Worth, it was much of small business owners.
• 54:33
  And in that context, what have you seen recently in terms of business owners having the light flick off or flick on?
• 54:43
  Excuse me.
• 54:44
  You know, I mean, what I would say is we're in a Bitcoin bear market right now.
• 54:48
  Your sentiment is as bad as it's ever been.
• 54:50
  And that impacts people's excitement to adopt Bitcoin, you know, at all levels.
• 54:58
  Right.
• 54:58
  That there's a tempered level of interest.
• 55:04
  So if you think about like a lot of our customers are small businesses, but others are like people that are directly involved in the Bitcoin economy.
• 55:16
  And they're just focused on surviving themselves, not changing their payment gateway.
• 55:22
  And so, you know, we're not immune of that.
• 55:26
  Right.
• 55:26
  So we do continue to see high signal and are unperturbed by the, you know, we are not, the bear market has not scared us away.
• 55:41
  We wouldn't have gotten into, you know, we know that we're early to Bitcoin payments and we know that we're early, or sorry, we're early to Bitcoin and we know that we're earlier to Bitcoin payments.
• 55:51
  But, you know, really, that's why we just focus on the most strategic parts of our business, keep our head down, deliver value and knowing the inevitable wave to come is what we're setting up for.
• 56:03
  So over the last nine months, we've built a peer-to-peer app for Bitcoin that we view as incredibly strategic to everything that we're intending to do.
• 56:15
  We've built an MVP of a ZapRite pay feature that leverages that to really make the paying process in Bitcoin easier.
• 56:23
  And one of the realizations that we had as part of this process of working on Bitcoin payments is that if we were path dependent on these larger platforms, integrating into larger platforms to want and demand Bitcoin payments, say something like Shopify, we've had a ton of interest from Shopify businesses.
• 56:43
  Well, Shopify doesn't care about Bitcoin payments.
• 56:45
  and so if someone like Shopify doesn't care about Bitcoin payments being there and being a third
• 56:52
  class citizen you're not going to actually drive value because the payments experience is is not
• 56:59
  only degraded but it's not valued that we had to be in control of our own destiny and that if we
• 57:07
  were going to really have success we needed to be able to one control the experience and two be able to perfect the actual experience of paying with bitcoin that we we realize okay if we were always going to be scanning qr codes if we don have
• 57:23
  relationships with people paying we're inherently limited in how well we can remove friction and
• 57:31
  manage the entire payment process and you know it was kind of a the p2p app was a two birds one
• 57:38
  stone or said, Hey, one of the early common, most common markets of people paying others in Bitcoin
• 57:46
  is peer to peer, and there's no good solution to it. And that also happens to be the, um, you know,
• 57:54
  a key strategic piece to enabling a more seamless path to paying a business, because we solve how I
• 58:01
  pay you in Bitcoin and remove that friction of, you know, we each use different wallets, several,
• 58:06
  we use multiple wallets, some people use Lightning, some people use on-chain. How do we solve that?
• 58:12
  And that's what we intend to solve. But then if we solve that for me paying you and being able to
• 58:16
  push a payment with a swipe rather than ever seeing a QR code or a string of data, the same
• 58:23
  applies to a business. I can push a payment to a business that way. And then that also starts as
• 58:26
  the foundation for things like Bitcoin auto pay and managing subscriptions and an automated refund.
• 58:32
  And so we've really just been having our head down. But then when we zoom out, it's not why I'm working on Bitcoin payments. We're on Bitcoin payments because I think it's a necessity and it's an inevitability. And there's a great opportunity to being early to that.
• 58:46
  and to develop a moat and a network effect when others don't care about it
• 58:55
  is that I also see it being an unlock for a wider group of people understanding Bitcoin.
• 59:04
  Because there's only so many people who can go down a rabbit hole,
• 59:08
  not seeing Bitcoin being used as everyday money,
• 59:11
  and have the vision to see why it's going to be adopted as money,
• 59:18
  to connect all those dots.
• 59:20
  And I don't say that in a negative way.
• 59:22
  It's just that if you looked at the population that were able to connect all these dots,
• 59:26
  the Bitcoin being at a relative point today is still very small in the grand scheme.
• 59:33
  It's non-immaterial in size, but it's relatively small.
• 59:36
  to say, okay, there's this fixed supply of 21 million and it's, you know, yeah, there's some
• 59:42
  energy involved to, you know, prevent more apparently from being created. I don't understand
• 59:47
  how that works, but that, yeah, I get that the problem of printing money is a problem.
• 59:53
  How in the hell is this actually money, right? Well, when people see that you can go down the
• 59:59
  store or go down the street to the store and buy eggs in Bitcoin, like you can here in Austin,
• 1:00:05
  Texas or go to the coffee shop and buy Bitcoin or sorry, buy coffee using Bitcoin. I paid the
• 1:00:12
  woman who cuts my hair in Bitcoin. It's like when you say if somebody, if you're explaining all those
• 1:00:16
  other things to somebody about Bitcoin and then say, oh, and you can do this today, that there's
• 1:00:23
  a reason that you never walked into a grocery store anywhere in America or anywhere in the world
• 1:00:28
  and something popped up that allows you to pay with your U.S. Treasury or your stock or your bond?
• 1:00:36
  Never, ever. But there are places, and even if they're not ubiquitous yet,
• 1:00:42
  there are places that allow you to pay in Bitcoin.
• 1:00:44
  It's one of the reasons why I think Square enabling Bitcoin payments on their side is such a watershed moment
• 1:00:50
  because it does get that signal out to so many more people that someone small and early like ZapRite could not,
• 1:00:57
  even though we think that what we're working on is just as foundational as the things that Square is doing,
• 1:01:05
  that more people will actually come to understand Bitcoin's money when you can tell them everything else about the fundamentals,
• 1:01:11
  bottoms up and then say, hey, it's also being used today.
• 1:01:16
  You know, that is a closing in the mental loop.
• 1:01:19
  I don't think it's going to be the thing that kicks off an adoption wave,
• 1:01:22
  but it is going to be the thing that when the next adoption wave happens
• 1:01:26
  will be an unlock for a lot more people that have already
• 1:01:30
  shifted to a different point in the same curve.
• 1:01:34
  Should we demo the pay with Zapri P2P?
• 1:01:38
  Can we? Can you do that? Yeah.
• 1:01:41
  Yeah, let's do it. You pull up the
• 1:01:43
  I got this.
• 1:01:46
  Yeah, what?
• 1:01:47
  So you've been testing this out.
• 1:01:51
  I'm going to do it on desktop.
• 1:01:53
  So as you can see here, you have the ability to pay WebLN.
• 1:01:57
  I could scan the QR code, but the browser knows that I've already paid an invoice with the P2P app on my phone.
• 1:02:07
  So I don't have to do any of this.
• 1:02:08
  I just click pay with ZapRite.
• 1:02:12
  You can see I got a ZapRite notification here.
• 1:02:14
  They can't see that.
• 1:02:17
  the, uh, there's a zap rate notification here and I'm just
• 1:02:24
  going to click it.
• 1:02:25
  So I'd probably see this better.
• 1:02:28
  The payment from.
• 1:02:29
  The payment from the website.
• 1:02:32
  Yeah.
• 1:02:32
  They simply slide this.
• 1:02:36
  It's biometrically gated, so you got to.
• 1:02:39
  Oop.
• 1:02:40
  Yeah.
• 1:02:43
  No, it's sending.
• 1:02:47
  Live on air.
• 1:02:49
  Live on air.
• 1:02:50
  Come on.
• 1:02:50
  Work, buddy.
• 1:02:51
  Success.
• 1:02:52
  Success.
• 1:02:53
  Boom.
• 1:02:54
  Is that UX?
• 1:02:55
  Didn't have to scan anything?
• 1:02:57
  Just click the button, got a notification,
• 1:02:59
  slide i should have done the bio first would have been quicker but you do the biometric yeah i don't
• 1:03:04
  know if you can screencast your your uh phone but i we could uh we could we could demo the
• 1:03:13
  p2p if you could i can't i can't screencast it right now yeah but also just explaining what
• 1:03:21
  happened there for folks basically you know this is a demo zap right check out it's live on bitcoin
• 1:03:27
  mainnet, but it was a checkout to say buyer, good or service. Marty has the beta, the P2P app that we
• 1:03:38
  built. The way the P2P app works is, and this is core to the problem that I mentioned it before,
• 1:03:44
  but just to reiterate, the foundation of the problem that we see as it relates to peer-to-peer
• 1:03:50
  payments in Bitcoin is that because everybody uses different wallets, there's an inherent lack
• 1:03:54
  of knowledge of, well, what wallet does my friend use and how am I going to push payments?
• 1:04:00
  And that our solution for that is rather than us be a new, like create a peer-to-peer app,
• 1:04:07
  it's a wall garden that has its own wallet, that the actual solution to it is creating
• 1:04:11
  a peer-to-peer app that integrates existing wallets, that set of users have existing wallets
• 1:04:17
  that they already value that are good at being wallets, combination of custodial or not custodial.
• 1:04:22
  So a couple of examples that might be a strike custodial account or Lexi on the non-custodial account or I'll be on the non-custodial side.
• 1:04:30
  But saying, OK, Marty connected one of those to the ZapRite P2P app.
• 1:04:34
  He could push a payment to me without having to have a conversation with me.
• 1:04:38
  We might have gone out to dinner. I have my own wallet connected to it.
• 1:04:41
  The money never passes through ZapRite. He can just push a payment because he knows how much he owes me.
• 1:04:45
  And rather than him having to maintain a directory of the financial details of all of his friends, I just have connected my peer-to-peer, my wallet to ZapRite's peer-to-peer app.
• 1:04:58
  And also, we've built the peer-to-peer app in such a way that ZapRite itself doesn't know that Marty paid Parker.
• 1:05:06
  And then we thought that that was critical to this network effect forming.
• 1:05:10
  mark he just paid me here I don't know how many sats he sent me but we're gonna
• 1:05:15
  see I can see that Marty bent paid me and this is connected to my strike
• 1:05:20
  account which I use for spending but I've also got not custodial accounts
• 1:05:27
  connected and and it's as easy as that well if he can push a payment to me that
• 1:05:32
  way then we figure well we can connect that same apparatus to merchants and
• 1:05:38
  businesses. And so what he was demoing there was our first V1 or MVP of ZapRite Pay, which,
• 1:05:45
  you know, people can still have, you know, pay with Bitcoin, pay with Lightning and scan a QR
• 1:05:49
  code and go the old way. Or if the merchant has turned it on and the user has ZapRite P2P app,
• 1:05:55
  again, the ZapRite P2P app is in beta, but they'll both be launched. We launch the app to the main
• 1:06:02
  app stores will also launch ZapRite Pay in unison with it or in parallel that now there another option which is Pay with ZapRite P2P where you click a button you can completely abstract the experience of QR codes and you know eliminates three or four clicks in the process of buying attaches the context of the actual purchase to the payment and
• 1:06:30
  actually makes the process of payment on par or easier in our mind than fiat.
• 1:06:35
  And that's what we viewed as critical, that in order for this to be a real unlock, the
• 1:06:39
  the actual method of payment has to be on par better with fiat and that we needed a way without
• 1:06:46
  us being a wallet um without us being dependent on any single wallet to have a path to managing
• 1:06:53
  that full experience so that's what we're doing with this app right p2p yeah we were just we
• 1:06:57
  were explaining before we hit record is that i mean there's a number of employees here at tftc
• 1:07:02
  they get paid at least partially some fully in bitcoin and 95 or 90 of them 80 of them five one
• 1:07:14
  one person doesn't we'll talk about that later but you zap right to invoice me and it's very like
• 1:07:19
  like it's not the fault of zap right before the p2p app came out but now with the pay with zap
• 1:07:27
  write p2p somebody like logan were to send me his app write invoice and i have my strike business
• 1:07:33
  account hooked up to my p2p app instead of taking the invoice getting the uh on-chain address or the
• 1:07:41
  lightning network invoice and then copying it pasting it into strikes um mobile app or desktop
• 1:07:48
  app then hitting send it's like oh click the button swipe send it takes takes three to four
• 1:07:56
  steps out for me. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the goal. And the ultimate goal is to have every popular
• 1:08:02
  wallet in the app. We've built out effectively to the wallets that had capabilities day one that we
• 1:08:08
  need them to change anything on their engineering roadmaps. The ultimate success of it is going to,
• 1:08:15
  you know, when it's in users' hands, them really valuing the ease of the experience and that it's
• 1:08:20
  effectively them not having to adopt a new wallet in order to send money to their peers.
• 1:08:26
  And this is really being built.
• 1:08:28
  It's not being built, even though these test transactions have already sent me 500 sats.
• 1:08:31
  It feels a little cheap.
• 1:08:34
  But no, I'll send you back like 750 sats because the fake good that you purchased online was
• 1:08:41
  like 250, at least 270.
• 1:08:43
  but that
• 1:08:45
  when we think about solving the problem
• 1:08:49
  it's
• 1:08:50
  the problem itself is that everyone has different
• 1:08:53
  wallets
• 1:08:54
  and for a reason because some people want to exist
• 1:08:57
  in the custodial land some people
• 1:08:59
  want to exist in the non-custodial land
• 1:09:01
  and there's multiple
• 1:09:02
  well-functioning non-custodial wallets
• 1:09:05
  there's many custodial wallets
• 1:09:07
  in that world
• 1:09:09
  an aggregator
• 1:09:10
  that focuses on the experience of peer-to-peer,
• 1:09:14
  by definition, in order to solve the problem,
• 1:09:17
  needs to incorporate those walls.
• 1:09:18
  So we're hopeful that we'll ultimately be able
• 1:09:21
  to work with the team at River to integrate River,
• 1:09:25
  hopeful that we'll be able to work with the team at Cash App
• 1:09:27
  to integrate Cash App, any popular wall.
• 1:09:29
  We hope to be there because the idea of this is,
• 1:09:31
  much like when you open the Venmo app
• 1:09:34
  and connect your bank account,
• 1:09:36
  that you won't be opening up Zapparate
• 1:09:39
  And then having to adopt one of the wallets that is supported in the app that the wallet you use is already there.
• 1:09:45
  And it's there because it's one of the most popular wallets.
• 1:09:48
  But then if we think about saying, hey, if we were to build a payments company, but also had to be a wallet, you know, and again, there are exceptions in the world.
• 1:09:58
  Square is a large company.
• 1:09:59
  They have a lot of resources.
• 1:10:00
  But as a startup with constrained resources we would be worse at both of those things And expressly in this problem of peer it would unsolve the problem like if we were also building a wallet because that
• 1:10:14
  that is core to the problem itself of people using many and that you shouldn't have to live in a world
• 1:10:20
  where everyone has to adopt a new wallet in order to send peer-to-peer payments like a wallet native
• 1:10:27
  to the app but then also you shouldn't have to ask your friend well which wallet do you use to
• 1:10:32
  figure out which one you both use to be able to send a wall of garden or even like, hey,
• 1:10:36
  what's your lightning address?
• 1:10:37
  There shouldn't have to be an out of band communication because if there's a lot of
• 1:10:41
  people look at lightning addresses or bolt 12 invoices as a solution to this, but if
• 1:10:47
  you provide me your lightning address or a bolt 12 invoice today, and then say we go
• 1:10:54
  to a conference and share an Airbnb and I owe you like 100,000 sats, something, or maybe
• 1:11:02
  500,000, however much it is, like real payments, not, you know, test payments that are 500 sats.
• 1:11:08
  Well, at that point, I'm not going to trust that the lightning address or the bulk 12 invoice
• 1:11:15
  that you sent me the time before is still good. Because if I send, and that's why, you know,
• 1:11:22
  It's like you might create a phone directory of your contacts, but there's a reason why in fiat world you don't maintain a directory yourself that can get stale of your friend's financial information.
• 1:11:35
  One, you don't really need to know your friend's financial information.
• 1:11:38
  You don't need to, you know, you don't really need to know that I'm a strike user to pay me a strike, you know.
• 1:11:44
  Or if I sent you my strike lightning address, I might want to be paid to my Lexi wallet.
• 1:11:51
  I might not be using Shrek anymore.
• 1:11:52
  I might have lost my Shrek account or I might have stopped using it.
• 1:11:56
  So there's all these fundamental reasons why the solution that we built on the P2P side,
• 1:12:00
  where you basically connect your existing wallet.
• 1:12:03
  You can change that.
• 1:12:04
  You can have multiple.
• 1:12:05
  But at any point in time, if I know that you're an active user of it, that if you've attached
• 1:12:11
  the wallet to that, you can update it in the background.
• 1:12:14
  I would never know about it.
• 1:12:16
  And again, it's done in a privacy-preserving way.
• 1:12:19
  it's not, our app is not anonymous, but it is pseudonymous and you can use it as privately.
• 1:12:25
  You know, so again, if somebody exposes their custodial account to us and connects a username,
• 1:12:33
  like we're one step away of the real identity talking to, you know, being able to outreach
• 1:12:39
  the strike. But if someone used a non-custodial wallet and didn't have something personally
• 1:12:43
  identifying as their username, they could use it privately. And we thought of that in two ways
• 1:12:48
  as being important. One, just given the position that we're in, we didn't want to know what all of
• 1:12:53
  our friends were paying each other. Who was paying what? You know, it was just like, we didn't want
• 1:12:57
  to be in that position of knowing that. But then we also thought of it as prohibitive to the
• 1:13:03
  experience itself if we did. That if it was just a honeypot. So it's like there is a pseudonymous
• 1:13:11
  social graph, say, but we also don't store individual transaction details.
• 1:13:20
  We aggregate it so we can have it for reporting purposes.
• 1:13:23
  It's also all to say it's a very delicate balance to actually solving this problem,
• 1:13:28
  but we think we've done it in a really elegant way.
• 1:13:29
  And if we have, then we have massive downstream benefits of actually solving B2C payments,
• 1:13:37
  merchant payments that we wouldn't have if we didn't have relationships via our peer-to-peer app with users.
• 1:13:42
  So we're really excited about it.
• 1:13:44
  And that's my, you know, it's not just my pitch on the peer-to-peer app, but it's also saying like,
• 1:13:48
  hey when the Bitcoin bear market happening and everybody is bitching at each other you know I participate in a little bit of it right like i i figured out the signal of why bitcoin treasury company is a problem your money
• 1:14:01
  go do what you want to do with it you know to each their own i don't think these things are
• 1:14:06
  going to blow up but like when everyone's kind of having this consternation it's like we we have
• 1:14:11
  our head down working on products that we think are strategic and foundational and we're not
• 1:14:16
  necessarily doing it for the person showing up in the door tomorrow we're setting up for the next
• 1:14:21
  adoption wave that we think is going to be massive and it's going to unlock a lot of value
• 1:14:24
  where can people download the app um well where they they can either go so it's still in closed
• 1:14:32
  beta if they want to participate in the closed beta go to paymeinbitcoin.com and you'll be able to
• 1:14:40
  sign up for it there and then we'll onboard you to the uh to the app you'll get an invite to
• 1:14:45
  test flight or the google play store well i've been using it for three or four months now
• 1:14:51
  it's an incredible experience it just makes a lot easier yeah that's our goal it's like hey do we
• 1:14:57
  actually make the payment easy i mean if like soap miner he goes from like btc pay server to
• 1:15:06
  zap right and i go buy my soap and i can just hit the uh because i i use the web browser hit the
• 1:15:15
  pay and zap right p2p and do that it would be so much easier yeah so minor if you're listening i
• 1:15:20
  emailed you i would like you to turn this capability on via the trial you haven't emailed
• 1:15:25
  me back but if you're listening or if anybody knows him well i know he listens to rhr every
• 1:15:30
  week so if he doesn't listen to this episode i'll make sure i i tell him next week on rhr
• 1:15:35
  okay perfect that'd be awesome it's a good catch up we need we need to go longer next time
• 1:15:40
  unfortunately I got to run here, but I appreciate you doing this.
• 1:15:44
  I appreciate you building the P2P app. It's been a lot of fun testing.
• 1:15:48
  And I think it's incredibly important to your point about setting up for the next adoption wave.
• 1:15:52
  And thirdly, I think just getting
• 1:15:56
  the Parker Lewis sober
• 1:16:00
  distillation of what's going on, where we're going in the market
• 1:16:04
  is important in these trying times for people out there.
• 1:16:07
  who are uh now that you're not in austin and we we don't get to do this regularly on the weekend
• 1:16:13
  and probably we should just do it you know do it more regularly um on the pot let's hold each other
• 1:16:19
  to that we should we definitely should yeah and uh the bear market will end you know at the price
• 1:16:25
  that we all deserve all right tell um tell the austin crew i said hello i talked to them
• 1:16:31
  but tell them i said hello from the podcast okay when i see all the boys tomorrow
• 1:16:36
  Tell them I said what's up.
• 1:16:41
  Peace and love, freaks.
• 1:16:44
  Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC.
• 1:16:46
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• 1:16:50
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• 1:16:54
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• 1:16:56
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• 1:17:01
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• 1:17:04
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• 1:17:09
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• 1:17:31
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• 1:17:33
  And until next time