EP103 Bitcoin podcast with Nico @BITVOLT7

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Alright, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space, and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. I had Nico back on the show, and he did not disappoint. We got into all different types of things, including mining, which is something that I'm starting to look into at the moment.

I find very, very interesting. And yeah, really enjoyed the chat. I hope you enjoy listening. And if you have any questions, just remember you can reach out any time, and I'm happy to chat.

If you're looking to stack Sats in the UK, you can use an auto-buy service with Coin Floor. They have been sponsoring the show from the very beginning, and they have a fantastic team. I'm hoping to be speaking to Obie, their CEO very soon.

They've got a new app coming out, and a lot of bits are happening behind the scenes. So watch out for that one. Next up is crypto cloaks. Crypto cloaks is a Bitcoin-only 3D printing shop.

They have all different types of products, including amazing node cases that you can personalize. I've done one for myself, which is really, really fucking cool. I love the fact that you can personalize these things.

The team are fantastic. They're Bitcoin-only. You can't ask them all. Cryptocloaks.com. - Hello, hello, Nico. How you doing? - Good, man, and yourself. - Yeah, really good. Thank you. Nice to speak to you again.

- Likewise. Kimmy, Kimmy wants to take a nap. - Yeah, no worries. - I apologize for that. - That's all right, no worries. - What were you saying? - That I'm sat in a flat at the moment with no aircon sweating my bollocks off.

- Oh my God, I'm so sorry, dude, I heard the temperatures in all of Europe are just so high this year. - Yeah, it's like proper, proper heat here, which is nice, but yeah, I've just literally moved flat and haven't sorted any of that stuff out.

So, you know, it's like, you can't have the fan going when you're recording. So I'm joining you in my boxes. - That's all good, dude. I literally, bro, I literally, I literally film in my boxes all the time.

- You only see the chest up on simply Bitcoin, so. - No one knows. - No one knows exactly. - I love it, I love it. And yeah, I really enjoyed your interview with self-banked. It was really interesting to hear the stories and everything that was going on with you guys and I really liked the feature.

We had a conversation before, but, you know, I didn't know about your mining. I didn't know about any of that side what you'd done previously and it was fascinating. So I was hoping to get into some of that today.

- Yeah, absolutely. - Get a feel as well for like what your thoughts are with everything that you're seeing, especially coming from that mining perspective 'cause it's fucking crazy shit going on.

And I've just ordered a couple and yeah, I'm new to it. - It's super, it's super, Superman. It's super crazy what just happened essentially, you know, just to kind of give some context to the audience.

The CCP shut down approximately 90% of all mining, or that's the goal. It's estimated about 60% of Bitcoin mining has been shut down in China at the moment. They want to get it up to 90%, right?

And we're witnessing like this great migration, but what's awesome about this whole thing, right, man, is that it's all happening in a completely decentralized manner. And that is because of the incentive structure of Bitcoin, right?

The incentive structure of Bitcoin makes it so that you're incentivized to go find a cheap place. I mean, a location with cheap electricity so that you could start mining again, right? Because all that hash power that just dropped off the network, right, that presented a huge opportunity for the people that kept on mining, right?

Because after the difficulty adjustment, which was the largest in Bitcoin's history, it was 29.7%, that incentive is enormous. That's a huge assessment. Massive. So yeah, man, like what happened was crazy.

And then another thing that a lot of people don't appreciate is that Bitcoin was just attacked by a nation state, okay? It was literally attacked by a nation state, all the China fund that we've been dealing with for years about how it centralized there, and that's a problem.

Well, we just survived that, right? And the worst thing that happened was that blocks started coming in until the difficulty adjustment. After difficulty adjustment, we're back to around the block is found every 10 minutes, like it should be, but the worst thing that happened was the blocks started coming in at like 12 minutes,

13 minutes, that's the worst thing that happened. What other network on the face of the planet could resist an attack of that size, right? And the hash rate has already started to recover, right?

So again, like the incentive structure of Bitcoin is just so resilient, man. Like it's like, it's not only is it meant to be attacked, right? It just, it takes over your, one of the most basic human emotions, which is greed, right?

And it uses it to survive, but not only does it use it to survive, right? It's not like a one-way relationship. It's a mutual relationship because, because you're helping the networks survive, right?

Either by giving, either by running your own node or by, you know, by mining yourself, right? The network rewards you in the process and you become a soldier of the network because you're incentivized to, right?

Because you're getting paid in Bitcoin, right? So it's crazy how the game theory is playing out, but I'm super bullish, man. This migration is happening a lot faster than I thought. My current hosting facility in South Carolina is completely full because of how much interest people are just trying to find a place to put their miner.

A lot of plebs on Bitcoin, Twitter are also, you know, super interested and they've wanted to get involved so they've just been buying their S9s, man. It's awesome that it got away from China, right?

And now it looks like it's moving mostly to Kazakhstan and the United States, right? Specifically Texas and, you know, Texas, they love their freedom, right? So perfect place for freedom money.

You know, a lot of that hash is going to the Lone Star State, right? And they love freedom there. So it's good things, man. It's short-term bad news obviously because they had an effect on the price, right?

But long-term, again, what doesn't kill Bitcoin makes it stronger. - Yeah. And like you say, like to survive a nation-state attack is a fucking big thing. But to survive a nation-state attack from China and where the majority of the hashing power is and to just keep on going is fucking crazy.

Unless Senor Odell's theories are correct and they're actually being clever and they're going to try and attack the network, you know, it's a possibility, I suppose. But, you know, if we get through this, it's pretty amazing.

The price dip is a temporary thing and it's selfishly, it's worked out very well for me because it's been a perfect stacking opportunity. So I'm very, very happy about it. And like you said, like all these plebs who are getting involved, like myself included, just whacking a couple of miners online to test the water

because it just seemed like too much of a good opportunity to be like, okay, well, there's a discount on these things and you can get cheap enough electric, why not give it a go? And that's exciting because that's where I'd like to see more mining, like more individuals, more people getting involved.

And you feel like more connected to the network when you start fucking around with this sort of stuff, which is cool. - I agree, I agree, man. But, you know, it's a very, I can't believe we're living through this moment in history, right?

We're witnessing like not only the separation of money in state, but also simultaneously we're watching this great awakening, you know, where, you know, and I tweeted this the other day, essentially before the media, right, specifically the mainstream media, right?

And, you know, newspapers and all of that stuff, they had a monopoly on information, right? They have a total monopoly on information. And they were able to do some atrocious things with that.

Remember WMDs, Iraq, you know, that turned out to be bullshit, right? So, and you're starting to see the break in the matrix and you're starting to see, right, the meltdown from the media because they realized they're being disintermediated by the internet, right?

And it's also allowed a significant portion of the population and this just keeps accelerating to wake up from that media matrix, right? So, you're starting to see a lot of independent content creators online getting a lot of traction.

In fact, they're getting more views than like, for example, CNN, CNN and MSNBC. There's some YouTube show like Tim Cast and Paul, which I highly recommend by the way. And man, and it's just because it's like, forget about the value, the production value that these legacy media establishments are able to offer.

People just wanna hear the truth. So, people would rather hear the truth than all the fancy production and, you know, the anchor with the makeup on and whatever. They just wanna hear the truth, man, because we're living in a world full of lies, right?

But this is all happening at the same time as the disintermediation of the money and state, right? So, the disintermediation of information, right, from the institutions, and we're also having the disintermediation of money from the legacy institutions as well, from the state, right?

So, it's causing all this chaos, right? Because there's still people that are asleep. You know, I think anyone under the age of 35 knows what the deal is, right? But, man, it's absolutely insane.

And what worries me a little bit is the battle to come, right, which is when the central bankers finally get pushed into, you know, into their inevitable corner where, you know, they're gonna die, right, essentially, because Bitcoin makes them obsolete.

Bitcoin was designed to kill central banks, and it's doing it very effectively. It's only been 12 years. It's managed to become a legal tender of a small nation. I have no idea, like, I can't even imagine where it's gonna be 10 years from now.

That being said, man, it's like, like, I feel bad, man, for the other side. I feel bad because, you know, the reckoning that these people are gonna have, and all the people that they pull with them, right?

So, like, for example, all the government scare tactics with the pandemic that's happening right now, where they're, like, pushing max vaccines to children and to people under the age of 35, even though it literally makes no sense, like the probability of you dying from COVID if you're under the age of 35 is 0.0000.

It's like some stupid number that it doesn't makes, like, why are they pushing vaccines, not only for that, but also for children now, right? So, it's like, it's crazy, right? But it's all due to what I was saying before that these people have been able to do this for so many years, decades,

because these media institutions were the only place that you can get your information from, right? So, they were able to manipulate the masses and the same applies to money, right? Before, you didn't have a choice, dude.

It was like, you were born in a country and it's like, okay, say you were born in the UK, you know, I was born in Europe, but I migrated to the United States. So, because I live in the United States because you live in Europe, you have to use, you know, you have to use the pound and I have to use the dollar, right?

Period, right? The free market doesn't get to decide the currency. It's the government, it's the state, right? So, that inevitably causes corruption, right? Like, back if you look at the Renaissance when, you know, the French Revolution and all that stuff, the French Revolution, a big part of it was separating church from state

because the church inevitably, right, absolute power corrupts absolutely, the church was getting too much power and it corrupted the institution and we're seeing the same thing with the state and control of the government, right?

I mean, I'm sorry, the state and control of the money. As long as the state is in control of the money and they have this unlimited money printer to pay for wars, to pay for failed policies with no repercussions, man, what did you think was gonna happen, right?

So, we're living through this time right now where it's like, literally, we're on the verge of mankind being freed, right? Because all of a sudden, the incentive structure changes, right?

If now, on a Bitcoin standard, the government has to work for you rather than you working for the government, right? Because, again, they don't have the money printer, you know? They have to be asking, they have to provide value for you to turn over your precious satoshis, right?

So, man, this is all happening all at once, dude, in a matter of like three or four or five years, man. I think Brennan Quinton calls it the fourth turning, man, but it's been crazy what it's happened to you live.

- Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything you've just said there and it's just, it is fucking crazy. And I have a feeling it's gonna get more crazy over the next couple of years because, you know, if we're right and this forces accountability for governments and they can no longer print and therefore, they either have to do a good job,

which they can't 'cause they're fucking useless, or they have to basically go to war with us, you know? They have to try and somehow bring this down or to just tax the shit out of people because if you can't print, then, you know, that's the only other way that you're gonna be able to do things and so, you know, maybe this is a case

where the wars that they're raging, they can't do any more and the things that they're doing, these propaganda campaigns and all this crazy shit with COVID and everything, you know? Like, do you think that it is, they are starting to realize and they've gone shit, our days are numbered, let's just do everything we can now

to take as much control for as long as we can? 'Cause that's sort of what it feels like with COVID to me because it's so obviously a fucking scat, like it's so fucking obvious to anyone with half a brain but it seems that everyone in England, like honestly, I would say 80 to 90% of people here are fully brainwashed

to the point now where they're attacking anyone who has decided not to have the vaccine and believe it's acceptable to within any normal conversation to ask, when did you have your jabs? Where did you have your jabs?

Which, you know, like, how quickly they have managed to take control of these people's minds and I'm like, this feels like they've accelerated for a reason, it feels like it's a last ditch attempt.

What was your thoughts on that? - Yeah, that's actually a really good point. So we know that there is a global cabal for lack of a better world and it's not necessarily because these people are evil and they're twirling their mustaches but essentially the World Economic Forum is this place

where all the strongest, you know, world leaders and billionaires and they all come there and these are the same people that released the propaganda, you know, you'll own nothing in 2030 and be happy, right?

It's come out that a lot of the responses to this pandemic were organized by, you know, essentially they were all drawn up by the same people, right? And you've been hearing the same rhetoric from all these politicians, right?

Essentially saying build back better, build back better. You hear a Boris Johnson say it, you hear Joe Biden say it, you hear the Prime Minister of New Zealand say it, right? So there was clearly a global effort.

There's clearly a global effort to try to have a top down approach at managing the pandemic, right? And again, there's a, you know, there's a couple, you know, there's in sprinkle a little bit of neo-Marxism in there, which I feel like the founder of the World Economic Forum kind of is based on his writings, of course.

And you have the situation that we're in. And again, they're using the media to instill fear in people, right? And specifically in the United States, and I know this has happened in the UK a little bit, you know, they're now using cultural Marxism.

They're using, you know, the color of your skin to determine whether you're an oppressor or an oppressed, right? Which is Marxism 101. How do I know this? I come from Venezuela, my country, what went from the richest country in Latin America to the poorest country with the failed economy,

failed state in less than 20 years because of socialism. I know how this works, okay? And what they're trying to do is that they're trying to demoralize people so that they can have more and more and more control over the population.

And I completely agree with what you're saying. People are waking the fuck up. Specifically in the United States, more often than I see it, I think it just by our very nature, you know, the US Constitution, you know, the way that we fought the war of independence, all that stuff.

So I would say about 40 to 35% of the United States, the people on the right are not vaccinated. And the people on the left are like, like, you know, they can only do so much because of how the US is structured unlike the UK, right?

Where the individual states retain a lot of sovereignty over the federal government, right? So there's more checks and balances, but, you know, the left here is still trying to label us as like, you're a murderer for doing these events and all that stuff, right?

But yeah, man, this is a last ditch effort. By the legacy media and by this deep state actor, right? That essentially that I feel is part of the globalist elite, globalist billionaire elite, right?

That benefit from China, right? They want that whole globalist movement to work out, right? But in order for that to happen, they need to have centralized control, right? And I think based on the videos that I'm seeing on Twitter, you know, based on, you know, all the, all the plebs just calling out the truth on all the,

you know, all the propaganda that these people post out, you know, either the vaccine propaganda or the central bank digital currency propaganda. It's like, if you go to those videos, man, they're getting ratio, dude.

Like the truth is, the truth is coming out. People are waking up. What they don't want you to know, and I tweeted this the other day, what they don't want you to know is that we are part of the majority.

They just control. They just, they're just, they're just in the positions of control, but that slowly is changing and people are slowly waking up. And I hope that that man as inflation keeps ramping up and they can no longer deny it, right?

And people, you know, because that's when people really wake up, dude. Like that's when all their ideologies go out the window. When you can't, you can't start putting food on the table, you know, because the dollar that you were paid for last week is worth, you know, a significant amount less, right?

So that's usually when people start waking up. When that happens, and it's starting to happen already, right? Because of the absurd amount of money they printed. Man, like, I see this great awakening and unfortunate Clara Schwab is gonna be unpleasantly surprised because his great reset is gonna come from Bitcoin

and it's not gonna come from whatever fucking communist idea he had, he concocted up. - Yeah, it's a good point you make about people wake up when there's no food on the table. And I think that's part of not the problem because obviously you don't want people to be in that position, but right now in the UK,

there's a lot of people who are, if you look at it in a sort of global sense, pretty privileged and we have a pretty comfortable life and they don't really see how controlled they are in their lives and they just sort of go along with things because they don't like, British don't generally

like confrontation, they sort of just like go along, keep your head down and go along with the crowd. And like you said, until they have a real hardship, they're not gonna wake up and what I have seen is that generally the more working class, the people who have a little bit harder lives who have realized over time that the government

is not their friend and it's not there to help them, they are waking up quicker than the more privileged. And it's an interesting thing to observe because that could change very, very quickly and when these people fall from grace, I imagine they're gonna be very angry because they've been lied to about the money,

they've been lied to about education, they've been lied to about food, they've been lied to about a pandemic and now they've gone and had these jabs that they're gonna have to keep having.

God knows what it's gonna do to them, their bodies, their families. And if they realize how fucked over they've been, we might just have riots in the streets and we might have some serious stuff going down.

- We already are, dude, we already are, man. Look at France, bro. - But France are different, France have some bollocks. France will fucking get the pitchforks out and go, like British are soft.

- You know, it's because the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the people really,

value their right to a voice, right? I feel like in France, in America, I feel like it's like a magnitude, it's magnitudes higher, right? The people in America value their sovereignty, independence and freedom, government, get the fuck away from me, right?

Europe is more socialist, collective-minded, right? - Absolutely, definitely. - And, you know, it's just the way it is, but listen, like to each their own, like that system, that economic system in Europe, right?

Which is, it's obviously capitalism, but, you know, there is large social programs like that free healthcare, free school, whatever. The benefits of that is that obviously you could live a comfortable life, no matter where you are in the economic scale.

However, there's very little slow social mobility. America is the land of opportunity, right? So, essentially, if you wanna come here and you just wanna work, you're not gonna live comfortably.

You could do that in Europe, but you're not gonna do that here in the US. The US is made to hustle. Like, you are made to make your dreams happen. That's what makes America great, right? So, yeah, I mean, like it's all different in people's minds, but it's crazy because these globalist people, they wanna make America like Europe.

They're not gonna be successful, but that's what they wanna do. Right, so, yeah, man, it's crazy, dude. Like I said, I think that mainstream media won't survive. They won't, like, they're grip on the narrative.

It's just dying, and I don't think they'll be around in 10 years. They will be around, right? Radio never died off, but they won't have the influence over the population they do now, you know, because they sold themselves, you know, when they got this intermediated by the internet.

Now, anybody with a camera, with a podcast, with a voice, you know, they could put their voice online, and just because they're telling the truth, they're gonna get more views than whatever fucking corporate media wants to sell you, you know, so, so yeah, man.

- It takes time, but building a voice and speaking truth for long enough does, you know, you do see the audience grow, you do see more and more people tuning in, and I guess it's just such a stark contrast to what people are used to, that it becomes addictive.

Like, you know, for me, that's why I got so fucking excited by Bitcoin. I was just like, this is completely different to everything else. There's this whole, the people, the system, the ideas that the structure of things, like this is truth and everything else is a lie.

And once you get involved in it, then it's almost impossible to step back and almost impossible to go back into a little hole of lies. And so, you know, I look forward to seeing more and more people, you know, finding that truth.

But what do you think is gonna happen? Like, if you play it forward the next couple of years, for example, I see battles, I see wars basically happening, but what's your thoughts on, like, generally, how this plays out over the next couple of years?

Are you positive about it, are you scared about it? You know, seeing what's happened in Venezuela, and I'm sure stories you've had from your family and going through the problems were there, does it scare you what's coming?

- Okay, so am I scared? No, because I have Bitcoin. And that should be a very powerful statement because Bitcoin not only allows you to vote with your feet, but it allows you to vote with your wallet as well, right?

So with Bitcoin, you know, you, essentially, you're gonna go to whatever country treats you best, right? But that's my personal situation, okay? And of course, you know, you should wanna get a second passport as well, you know, to try to, you know, be a complete sovereign individual, right?

But, you know, on, you know, just in the state of the world, I guess. - Okay, so on a geopolitical level, China sees the US as weak. They're about to take over Taiwan. Taiwan controls 60% of the semiconductor manufacturing of the world, right?

Essentially, you know, every piece of technology have iPhone, camera, whatever. Imagine if China just took that, you know, under its possession, right? Look, what could the havoc that they could do, right?

And, you know, the US is Taiwan's strategic partner, right? But, you know, China feels emboldened. The reason they feel emboldened is because of, you know, the last election that just happened, right?

Essentially, Donald Trump won in a landslide, right? And like I told you, you know, the globalist, these elites, you know, they stole the election from him. And it's crazy because, you know, it was a collusion between big tech, you know, big tech, the deep state in the United States that, you know,

essentially at the night of the election, I'll never forget this because I had literally some of the biggest Bitcoiners hit me up and say, are you seeing what I'm seeing? And I'm like, yes, I'm seeing what I'm seeing.

And I was getting chills because it reminded me of what happened in Venezuela, right? Biden goes up on stage, never happened before without, you know, Trump calling to concede or whatever.

And he goes up and he says, we're stopping the count for tonight on the six states, you know, in question that would, you know, that we're gonna win him the victory, right? And they stopped the count in the middle of the night, midnight, and their excuse was COVID, right?

And Trump was winning at that point. Everyone thought was gonna win. And then, you know, around two, three in the morning, magically votes started coming in. All the votes were 90% Biden, 10% Trump.

And dude, like they fucking stole it from him, dude. It was crazy, man. And the fact that these people felt emboldened that they were able to do that, right?

Puts not only the US in a bad position, because now half the country doesn't believe in the electoral system, of course, that's getting fixed slowly, but surely the truth, you know, the truth is gonna come out eventually.

There's the Arizona audit, Trump's, you know, he's still going after it, of course. But back to my point, that whole thing that happened, right? That a US election being stolen, remember, the US was the world police.

They wouldn't go to other countries and say, like, listen, you gotta fix your democracy, right? So that makes America look very weak. It looks America look prone. It looks America look fractured, right?

So yeah, man, on a world scale, it's absolutely terrifying, because could you imagine a world instead of like with US principles led by, you know, everyone's created equal, you know, land of opportunity, you know, the world is led by the CCP, right?

So it's very scary what's happening, right? But like with all of this happening, right? With all of this happening, right? With Europe turning kind of socialists and their passing vaccine passports to everybody, the US election being stolen, you know, China rising, right, banning Bitcoin, all this stuff.

Dude, I am so hopeful for the future, right? Because Bitcoin, dude, Bitcoin fixes all of this. It fixes China, it fixes the United States, it fixes, I don't know if it fixes the Europe problem, but it fixes essentially this, this, this, this, this, this F Dub system were elites in these countries, right?

Because of the way that the fiat system is structured, right? It's essentially a proof of stake system. The more fiat you have, the more influence you have over the network, over the system, right?

Which is basically the fiat system. Dude, all this fucked up shit happens, right? All these fucked up policies you don't agree with, all these fucked up wars you don't agree with, all these fucked up things that you don't agree with, they're able to get away with everything, man.

And on top of that, they oppress small countries. Like it, like, for example, the King Boukele tweeted out the other day, United Fruit Company, you know, after US diplomats, you know, showed up to El Salvador for some reason.

It's like, they've never been interested in El Salvador, but now they show up because Bitcoin's becoming legal tender, you know, so it's like, it's just crazy, man. But I'm gonna quote what this El Salvadorian politician said, right, when the law passed.

And she basically said she had a dark map of the world, and there is this little orange, like little orange dot, right? And that was El Salvador, and she points out to it, she's like, you see in this world full of darkness, you know, there's hope, right?

And that's what Bitcoin's all about, bro. It's about hope, it's about taking the power away from a couple of people that, you know, manipulate the money and control people's lives with that money, with that ability to print money, and giving that money, that sovereignty, that wealth, that private property, and giving it back

to the individual, man. You know, and it's gonna be a very rocky road, because the powers it be, you know, specifically the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, you know, they're not gonna go gently into that good night, you know, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve recently just changed their rhetoric,

they made it seem like essentially the like, they went from Bitcoin as an alternative to gold, Powell a couple of days ago in a hearing with Senator Loomis basically said it like, it failed as a payment instrument, okay, and it's only useful for anonymous transactions, right?

That's changing the narrative, right? Because they know, they're scared, they're scared, they know what Bitcoin means, right? And the European Central Bank, they're using the same type of rhetoric.

If you want the safest money possible, the safest transactions, right? You gotta use the Euro, you can't use Bitcoin. Let me tell you something. When someone in a suit has to go up in front of a TV and they have to tell you that they have, they have the safest best money in the world and you have to trust us because we're a guy in a suit

and we're from this bureaucratic agency and whatever and trust us, yo, go, they can go fuck themselves, they can go have fun staying poor, okay? I'm gonna have my Bitcoin. People are gonna have their Bitcoin and the world is gonna be fucking free.

But the battle to come is gonna be bloody, man. Let's see what happens. - I agree, yeah. And yeah, the whole idea of freedom and obviously with freedom money, the sort of online aspect of it is already, we were already there like I feel, I feel I can transact freely with anyone that I want, I can speak freely with anyone that I want.

Yeah, I might get censored on one platform, but I can go to another. And so communication and money is secure and my money is secure at the same with you because we hold Bitcoin, we don't hold shitcoins like the US dollar or the euro, we hold Bitcoin.

So those aspects of life are good for us, but it's in the physical realm where the problems lie and it comes down to where do you go? And obviously, as you said, El Salvador is this little orange shining light in a load of darkness, but it still has its problems and they're still gonna do authoritarian things,

they're still gonna have vaccine passports, I'd imagine they're still gonna do all the crazy, dirty shit that everyone else is doing. And so, yeah, it's trying to find a place and I agree with you somewhere like Texas is probably a pretty damn safe bet as they go and at least you've got all the guns there.

But I just wish there would be someone who would stand up and I understand they're gonna have pressure on them, but someone who would stand up and go, look, we're not only gonna take Bitcoin, we're also gonna have more of a freedom tilt and we're going to be competitive compared to everybody else.

When everyone else is going left to this authoritarian nightmare, we're gonna go right and come here and start a business, do something productive, bring your Bitcoin here and there's no doubt that they would thrive and become incredibly successful if they were to do that.

But what do you think it is that stops in doing it? Like, for example, El Salvador, I listened to the conversation with Peter and the president and I thought, this guy sounds really measured, he's chosen to go with Bitcoin, which is really fucking smart, but why then all the other authoritarian shit along with it?

Like, what is that pressure, who's pushing it? Because if you're smart enough to see Bitcoin for what it is, you would think you'd be smart enough to see that COVID is a scam and that you shouldn't force your public to be taken advantage of.

So what do you think that is? - I'm gonna go back to again, what I said about the World Economic Forum and the globalists, right? You have to understand that these people have influence over every single country around the world, okay?

So the same guidelines that they sent to the lockdowns all over the world, do you realize that they've all been kind of similar and none of them have worked and the only places that have refused the lockdowns were Texas and Florida and both of them had less cases than the places that did lock down, right?

So have you noticed that, right? So El Salvador, I'm sure got some type of pressure from either the World Economic Forum or some type of globalist pressure to apply those totalitarian, like you force vaccinations, et cetera, et cetera.

But here's the good news, right? Is that, and Alex Gladstein wrote an excellent article about this, you cannot separate the number go up technology from the freedom enabling technology, okay?

So once you take the orange pill, okay? Whether you realize it or not, you can't take the freedom out of the orange pill. And again, you don't change Bitcoin, Bitcoin changes you, right? So the moment that Nikim Bukhele made Bitcoin legal tender in El Salvador, no matter how totalitarian he is, dude,

just by the mere fact of Bitcoin being legal tender in that country will free the goddamn country over time, right? Because it will change the psychology of the people within the country, right?

And eventually that will lead up to the government. Anyways, in terms of other countries, in terms of other countries being accepting, Texas and Florida have been super, super open to Bitcoin businesses, Texas is opening up their hands, saying listen, come mine, come do whatever you want

here in Texas and Miami, man, the mayor of Miami, dude, he took it upon his shoulders. He reached out to Bitcoin Magazine to have Bitcoin 2021, which was the largest Bitcoin conference in the world at the time.

And guess what? No one was wearing fucking masks. And you know what? It's been two weeks after that. And guess what? No one got fucking COVID, okay? So listen, like there are places of freedom around, you know, around the world.

I see the most in the United States, again, because of the way that the government is structured in the United States puts a lot of sovereignty in individual states, right? So a lot of red states, what I've seen, you know, are conservative, right-leaning states.

What I've seen is that they haven't done the lockdowns. And they've had the same effect of the blue states that did the lockdowns, right? And the red states are also the ones being opening up.

For Bitcoin businesses, they're opening up for entrepreneurs. They want less taxes. So you're seeing a great migration from the copy states, New York and California, you know? There are other people, people are leaving in droves, man.

You know, and they're going to these freedom states. Hopefully, like I've been saying a lot on Twitter, they leave their votes behind them, you know, and they come here and then they realize that there's a reason that Florida and taxes is the way it is.

Don't fucking vote. The same policies that fucked up the place that you ran away from, you know? So, yeah, man. But dude, I'm telling you, dude, like, if it wasn't for Bitcoin, it would be a dark future ahead of us.

But because of Bitcoin, there's a bright orange future. It's a quote, "Cory Clips in, CEO of Swan." There's a bright orange future. And the only thing that worries me is, you know, the last boss, right?

The last gatekeeper, right? And of course, those are going to be the central banks that are going to have tremendous influence in the halls of government. But at the end of the day, you can't stop the signal, man.

No company, no, no, how powerful you are. It doesn't matter, dude. Listen, the internet is undefeated, okay? It's undefeated. Look at what Netflix did to Blockbuster. Look at what the internet did to the long-distance telecommunications companies.

Like, dude, like, if the telecommunications companies got their way, right? Every time you would have to make a Skype call to someone in the UK or New Zealand, I'm in the UK. I'm sorry, I'm in the US.

I would have to put, like, a diamond into my computer to continue the call, right? Like, you can't stop the internet. You can't stop it. Any company that has tried said, no, we can't have this.

We can't have it. They've utterly failed. Why? Because open networks always be closed networks, always, right? So, yeah, man, I'm incredibly bullish. And I think, and not only do I think, I know we will win this fight, right?

I just don't know how many casualties along the way, right? We've already had a couple, you know, we've had Ross, right? Charlie Schrem, I think, was in prison as well, you know. McAfee, look, listen, he was a shit-coiter, not gonna lie.

But at the same time, you know, that there is a lot of his principles that I appreciated. You have Assange, right? And men, like, these are all people that they're standing for freedom, liberty, freedom of expression, right?

Assange was just reporting, you know, Ross was just literally setting up a website. And now he's in jail for, you know, three life sentences. Like, that's unjust. And the only reason that they're, that the only reason they're able to fucking do that is because they control the goddamn money printer.

That's the only reason. You take away the money printer from the state, right? And you give it and you democratize it, right? The state doesn't have an advantage. If you want some Bitcoin, you gotta pay the same amount of electricity as everybody else, right?

Right now, it literally costs, I think, five cents to make a $100 bill, right? Like, man, like, who gave them the right? Like, why do they get to make the money? You gotta try to tell you, like, it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't make sense. So now we have to separate the money from state. And that's exactly what Bitcoin is doing. And you know what? It's gonna make the dollar stronger. It's going to make it stronger.

Because again, it's gonna be the dollar either partially backed or backed by Bitcoin, man, you know? So it's like, it's not, it's like fiat currencies aren't gonna go away. But what Bitcoin does is it gives them competition, man.

Before they had a monopoly, they're like, listen, we could devalue our citizen's currency as much as we want, because there's no repercussions. They don't have another option. They don't have a way out.

They don't have, you know, like, they're stuck. Like, there are slaves, essentially. And Bitcoin's like, yo, if you start misbehaving, if you start devaluing our currency too much, if you start fucking with us, if you start being totalitarian, I'm just gonna opt out.

I'm just gonna get the fuck out of your system. Fuck you. And it takes away their power, right? You know, so... - One by one. - One by one. - I'm excited and I'm trying to prepare myself for what's to come.

(laughing) - Yeah, me too. And what's your thoughts, like, mining-wise, you know, all of this hash power going over to places like Texas, if you're looking forward now, are you looking to mine or are you looking to stack?

- So yeah, man, I've been mining full-time since, I would say, 2018. Before that, I mined full-time 2017. I had to take a break in the bull market. I had to go back to a fiat mining job because it was brutal, but now, yeah, we're still mining.

We have facilities in South Carolina. We're about to, you know, we're about to start going in Venezuela. And we are also looking into Argentina, but that's like a year out or so, you know?

So yeah, man, there's huge opportunity right now again, because, you know, China had this unfair advantage, right? And the unfair advantage is first. They controlled, you know, the reason that they were able to get such cheap electricity is because it was government subsidized electricity

from like very, very, very isolated areas, meaning that the electricity wasn't even being used, which is a reason it was so cheap. And you add that, and you add to that government subsidies.

Remember, China's very corrupt, right? So, you know, they were getting ridiculously cheap electricity. So now it's good that it's good. This is a really, really good thing for Bitcoin that is decentralizing the way it is.

And listen, listen, it'd be just as bad if 60% of the hash rate was in Texas. You know, you don't want that. Ideally, you know, you do want a majority of it in the United States. I would agree with that.

You do want a majority of it in South America. You do want a majority of it in different locations all around the world, right? The centralization is the most important thing. That's what makes Bitcoin great.

That's what makes it so hard to attack. That's what makes the freedom money, right? That's what gives it its capability of being able to transact with whoever you want without asking anybody for permission.

- Yeah, I'm really interested in, I know it's a long way away, but some of these ideas around using miners for, you obviously have excess heat and you have the noise. Trying to find a way to harness it.

We basically have a use for the heat because like you're saying, we want to decentralize this as much as possible, but there will be certain hubs where people will go because energy is cheap.

So like for example, across most of Europe, energy is very, very expensive. I would say like average here in the UK is about 20P, which is whatever that is, 26 cents a kilowatt hour. So it's like.

- That's because of what, that's because of this fucking socialist, globalist, green climate narrative that they've been putting out, man. They shut down all the nuclear plants. They shut up.

Germany was ridiculous, man. They shut down, I think it was a nuclear pen or a coal plant and now like they're green, but they're buying all their electricity from Russia that is getting their electricity from dirty sources.

So it's like, it's all bullshit. I'm telling you, it's all bullshit, bro. ESG and the narrative and the climate narrative, whatever. It's all forms of control, right? That's why you're fucking electricity so cheap in the UK, but I'm sorry to cut you off.

- No, no, I mean, I completely agree with all of that, but what I'm thinking is, you know, it is for now it is what it is. And when we do have very, very expensive electricity and so what that means is that people in the UK or all across Europe, you know, we want this thing to decentralize.

We want to be able to have people mining, ideally at home miners as many as you can, but obviously it doesn't make sense with the electricity costs as they are. It makes slightly more sense if you can find a use for the heat and so it's like a byproduct of the mining and if you can put that to use,

then actually then it effectively brings the costs down. Do you have any thoughts around like that? There's been loads of people talk about things like, oh, well, what about if you used it to heat apartments or for if you're growing produce and you need heat for that or like nursing homes or pools or,

do you think there's going to be a way over time as the cost of these ASICS come down and we get more efficiency? Like, do you think this sort of stuff is possible or do you think it will always end up kind of centralizing to certain locations but with particularly cheap, stranded energy?

- Very, very, very, very good questions. Okay, so first thing, yes, there has been Bitcoin miners being used in, I know how to say it in Spanish, I don't know how to say it in English, of malls, malls, okay, and essentially, and I don't know if you have the same thing in the UK,

but in the US, essentially, there's like a door that keeps the cold out and then there's like this middle place where there's like this heater, like blowing hot air into you and then you enter the mall, right?

- Yes, it's fucking lovely in winter where you're going through there, it's the best feeling. - Exactly, so what they figured out is just to change out those heaters that are blowing out hot air and just make them Bitcoin miners and said, so I heard that some mall has already done that, so yes, of course, it's a good thing for heating.

Now, sorry to burst your bubble to go back. The amount of computational power needed right now to mine Bitcoin has gotten to an extent that mining at home on grid electricity, on residential electricity is not feasible anymore, okay?

But that doesn't mean mining is centralized, it's not centralized, right? Mining has to go to isolated, standard energy sources, right? Meaning that those standard energy sources could be in the middle of fucking nowhere, right?

Like they could be, there's so much opportunity for that that like it will blow your mind, right? Because like it, and that's why the climate where it's like Bitcoin's boiling the ocean narrative is such bullshit.

Dude, it's the opposite. Bitcoin's gonna have the opposite effect on the environment because now Bitcoin makes it so that it makes it expensive to waste electricity, right? Now, but before, if you're electricity, like if you had extra flared glass or you produce too much electricity in the grid or whatever,

you know, that shit would just go to waste, which is why it's so cheap. You know, the reason it's so cheap is because it was gonna waste anyways. - Something's better than nothing. - Something's better than nothing.

So it sets a floor. And then what that does is that it's gonna incentivize a lot of R&D into more and more efficient electricity production, right? But this isn't because the problem is that with when Bitcoin first started, when you were able to mine it with like a CPU and then a GPU, you have to understand

that the network was significantly less secure and it was prone to a 51% attack. The advantage that Bitcoin had though, is that at the time when the network was first running for the first like couple of years, no one thought it had any value.

So there was no value of 51% attacking the network, right? But we've reached such so much computational power backing up the network, even after that 50% hash rate drop, that man, like you need a dedicated device and it's in the name, application integrated, specific circuit, the technical jargon,

I hate technical stuff, but yeah. So like you literally need a dedicated machine that's only good at one thing and of course that's the ASIC. That's where we are and that's a good thing because the more hash power, the more of these intense computers backing up the Bitcoin network, the stronger becomes to attack.

And let's talk about this scenario where it's like, oh, the centralization of miners, that's a bad thing. Well, there's a case study for that and the case study for that is the fork wars of 2017, right?

Bitmain, which controlled 80% of the Bitcoin manufacturing of ASICs at the time and controlled a significant portion of the hash rate, tried to take over the network, exactly what you said, right?

But what happened is that people voted with their nodes, they said, you know, fuck, fuck your new software. I'm not gonna download it. I'm gonna run the old Bitcoin, right? And the shit coin that was created by the miners trying to take over the network was Bitcoin Cash.

And look where Bitcoin Cash is doing. It's dog shit. And then they try to fork it again into BSV and look at BSV, it's dog shit. Look at both their hash rates. Look at both their hash rates.

It's literally, they're dead. There's no computational power securing them, right? So it's already happened before, a centralized entity with tremendous amount of power has tried to take over the network.

But again, it's the people that are supporting the Bitcoin network. If you run a node and you decide, listen, I don't want this, I don't wanna accept Taproot. I don't wanna, I don't wanna do this.

I don't wanna do that. You don't have to, right? You don't have to. Unless you download it, you don't have to run, you know, the Bitcoin software that you don't wanna run, right? So there's always that last line of defense, right?

The last line of defense are the toxic maximalists, the people that, you know, we ain't going back to quote Jack Mollers that we will die on this hill because we know it's either Bitcoin or slavery, right?

And if it gets to the point where, you know, they'll start seizing ASICS, we'll all start fucking spinning up our computers at home just to support the Bitcoin network, right? We're all at that point, okay?

Because we're not fucking going back. We are not going back. We refuse to go back, right? We will die on this hill. And that is what, their hubris will be their downfall because they don't understand that.

They don't get it. They don't get that they are the problem. The central banks are the problem. Humans are the problem. That's the issue with the money today, right? Even with the best intentions, right?

Bretton Woods, it started with the best intentions, right? Inevitably, it gets corrupted, right? Inevitably, the financial system got corrupted, right? It will always be corrupted. You have to take the human element out, right?

And you take the human element out with Bitcoin, right? I can tell you the monetary policy of Bitcoin for the next 142 years. I can tell you exactly what it is. Tell me the monetary policy of the United States for the next two years.

No one fucking knows. They're winging it every time. Every press conference they have on Wednesday, the guy's just like, yeah, there's no inflation. The two weeks later, there's more inflation than we thought there was gonna be, but don't worry.

Like, it's a fucking joke, right? And of course it's a joke. It's a joke to us, right? I understand that before it was a necessary evil, but it's a joke to us because we realize that we have a much better money.

We have a sound money. But most importantly, we have an uncorruptible money because humans are taken out of the equation. - It's beautiful. And like you say, we went back down and I think they don't understand it because we realize what this is about.

We realize what happens if we don't win this. And it is a group of people who are militant about this. And once he gets under your skin, once you work it out, like you said, there is absolutely no going back.

And it's why you and I and everyone who sort of lurks on Bitcoin Twitter, all the people who are obsessed with this stuff, like we're all in and we'll go down with this ship, but I don't think it will go down and I'll share your positive outlook because we've got a fucking smart group of people.

We've got incredible incentives and we've got the best money ever. So yeah, I think we win and I can't wait to see it play out. And yes, we're gonna have to watch our arse and look after each other because there is gonna be some crazy shit and people are gonna come after us 'cause we're gonna be the bad guys for a while.

But with time, I think when people look back in history, they'll realize that this was a fight that absolutely had to be for. - I completely agree, man. I think we're on the right side of history and we'll look back on like historically, they'll look back in this part in human history and they'll wonder to themselves

how the fuck did these people allow themselves to be ruled by this elite class that was just like, it will look so archaic in the future. Looking back on how our financial system works today and how it benefits the top 1% and it hurts everybody else, right?

So yeah, man, it's crazy. It's a crazy part in human history, man. And like I keep saying this, we're privileged to live through something like this. - Yeah, agreed. Well, look, mate, thanks for coming on.

It's been cool to have another chat with you and thanks for everything you're doing. It's just great to be around other people who are thinking the same way, thinking adversarially and like you say, willing to die on this hill.

So I don't think we will die. We will fight harder. We will fight smarter. And yeah, glad to be part of this with you, mate. - Likewise, man. Happy to fight on the trenches with you, man.

Every podcast you drop, every like, every tweet, every video that we come out with is a metaphorical shot in our battle for freedom, man. But thank you so much for inviting me again to your podcast.

And of course, guys, if you want to hear more Nico Rants, definitely go check out Simply Pickpoint on YouTube. ♪ No matter how hard you try to catch, stop us now ♪ ♪ You're the winner, can't you just atomic age ♪ ♪ There's atomic age or renegade, renegade ♪ ♪ But renegade to there's atomic age ♪

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