EP58 Bitcoin podcast with Marty Bent

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

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

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows the 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 deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back everyone. Thanks for tuning in to Bit by Bit's last episode of 2020.

I'll see you all back next year. I hope you had an amazing Christmas. I hope you enjoyed this Bitcoin pump. You all deserve it. You all have gone against the grain and you're fighting for something bigger than just NGU technology.

Never forget that. And thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for all the comments, all the reviews, and everyone who's come on the show over the past year. Thank you to my sponsor's coin floor for supporting the show and allowing Bitcoiners to DCA into Bitcoin.

Today's guest needs no introduction. He runs one of the best Bitcoin podcasts out there. It's my favorite podcast, and it's helped me a lot over the years. Today's guest is Marty Bent. Enjoy.

Here he is, Marty Bent, my favorite podcaster who is in my ears every single day for the last couple of years. When I wake up thinking that I'm fucking mental, almost in tears, everyone calling me a fucking idiot, you kept me going.

I've got to say, with all time highs, thank you for doing that. Thank you for being there. Well, thank you for listening. I still don't understand why anybody subjects themselves to my dumb thoughts about Bitcoin.

[Laughs] Do you know what, for me, it was the fact that you were always not trying to be like, oh, I fucking know what I'm talking about. You were always very humble about things. You know, you sort of didn't try and show up and be that kind of like dick.

There was so many at the time when I was like, I was listening to all this stuff. I was like, who are these fucking dicks who just think they know what they're talking about? And they were so arrogant.

It was just a nice change. I was like, there's someone else who admits maybe they're not completely sure, but they're pretty confident. That was nice. That was different. Yeah, there are people that are way too confident about this stuff out there.

I'm glad my style speaks to you, I guess. I think there's a lot of people like us out there who look at a lot of these charlatans who are putting out some of this content. It's like, oh, look at this slap dick.

Let's just have an honest and open conversation about all this. Yeah, and it's crazy to see where it's gone at this point. Again, thank you for listening. It still blows my mind, but it's fun.

It's a labor of love talking about Bitcoin and now there's more now. We have bit by bit and a bunch of other podcasts are coming out and it's incredible this day. Happy all-time high day.

It still hasn't hit me yet. I've only got a water to cheers you with, unfortunately, because I'm driving, but... I've got a water in the car. I'll double cheers. Oh, there we are. Thanks for rearranging. I really appreciate that.

I don't know how I got my wires crossed. And then my missus was like, oh, my God, that's my opening night. Can we please go? And I was like, I fucking hell. So, yeah, I appreciate you moving it.

No, I know the struggle. I'm lining up schedules with the wipers, and I'm always easy. Yeah, yeah. Oh, look, it's... It's weird and surreal having you on. And I've had so many questions I wanted to talk to you about.

And I've gone very much down, like, the last few months, really down the privacy side and, like, the devs and really getting into the weeds with all that kind of stuff and trying to better my knowledge on it all.

But really, with you, like, I really wanted to just have a general conversation about where you see things going because you have more conversations with more smart people than probably almost anyone else in the space.

And I always enjoy listening when you go a little bit more cosmic. I always enjoy when you allow yourself to sort of consider what could happen in the future and not be too tied down by, like, the technical side of it because I very much believe if you have a dream, there's someone out there smart enough who's going to make it.

It certainly seems that way anyway at the moment. Everything I can dream of or thought about two years ago is basically here now. And, yeah, it's interesting to hear your thoughts on where you see things going over the next couple of years.

Yeah, it's something going back and forth. Like, we've been talking a lot about, like, the potential for munchen and munching butts as we commonly refer to them. Another, so attempt to handcuff Bitcoin here in the States and have, like, a really big battle with regulators in the state

over the future of Bitcoin and individual's ability to access the network and use it in the way it's meant to be used in a self-sovereign fashion. But then, so that makes me pessimistic to an extent.

Like, all right, we're going to have a big battle in front of us. These guys aren't going to go down without a fight. And then, more recently, yesterday, talking with Harvard Out and we got into the conversation about what we're doing at Great American Mining, which was waste gas, and you see the pure economic incentives

to just play the game, even from the perspective of the state lying before you, and it's hard not to be optimistic, especially when you consider the state of the U.S. dollar, the global financial system.

Like, the incumbents have to be thinking, like, all right, we've backed ourselves into a pretty big corner here. How long can we sustain this, whether it be the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency of the world or just simply the facilitation of finance globally via the traditional banking system?

And the part of me believes that they have to have an idea or just like something whispering in the back of their minds, like, "Bitcoin is like a good little pressure valve, pressure release valve, and maybe a safety net that could work out for us."

So, last week, I go back and forth, as you know, I'm a rabbit hole recap. Matt and I focus on adversarial thinking as much as possible and preparing for the worst, but the last 24 hours, particularly, we're very optimistic about the pure economic incentives that the network provides for individual market players

to just cooperate and go along with Bitcoin because you can make a lot of money, a lot of wealth, a lot of stats, if you do so. And as we're saying today, new all-time highs. Bitcoin has proven time and time again to brush off hurdles and keep pushing forward.

So, yes, I'm very optimistic. I think moving forward, I mean, I do think Bitcoin fixes this. I think, say, fix the money, fix the world a lot. I truly believe that, and I think we're on the path to doing that.

I think more people around the world are waking up to that. Probably a product of today being the day we hit an all-time high, but I'm very optimistic of the future of Bitcoin right now. That's good to hear.

Like you said, it's these incentives that just make it hard to see that they're not going to become more and more involved and hard to see that more and more people aren't going to be drawn to this thing.

Another reason I always enjoy TFTC, probably one of the main reasons is I like the fact that you're not both you and me. You're not doing this clearly, not doing this just for money. Obviously, you want to get rich, but I can tell that this is about you want to change the world.

I, too, get very fucking angry a lot of the time about the bullshit that happens in the world. And maybe there's only a small proportion of the planet who will see Bitcoin for fix the money, fix the world and that side of things.

But even if they don't see that, they're going to have to get involved because of the greed and therefore it's only going to help everyone who does want to make these changes. Yeah, you're going to need a Bitcoin.

And it's becoming more obvious by the day. It just had the announcement this morning of roughers. Is that the investment fund? I'll be honest, I haven't heard that news. I've been dog walking today.

Yes, so they bought $740 million worth of Bitcoin. This is a very well-established money manager in the United Kingdom. Yeah, a rougher investment and billions under management. It's just becoming common knowledge that you need a Bitcoin allocation and people coming in now are people with a lot of money

and a lot of sway over the discussions at the regulatory and political level. So it's becoming Bitcoin as an allocation in a well-diversified portfolio, even though I'd recommend to go all in Bitcoin to a lot of these people.

It's just becoming, and after thoughts, like, yeah, we should be investing in Bitcoin. It's crazy to see that we've hit that point. It'll be interesting to see if these institutional investors really grok what Bitcoin is about and understand the liberating nature of the technology that it has on individuals

and institutions and companies alike. Yeah, it's happened so quick that tipping point, like, it feels like yesterday that it was just constantly being laughed at. No one was really paying attention.

You were never hearing any of the sort of news. And now it's like almost every day there's some crazy news or every week. There's some crazy news of these big players coming in. And like you said, it's just, it seems normalized now.

So, yeah, I don't know how quick this moves. Like, it's, I mean, all I've ever seen is bear markets since I've been involved. That's all I've seen is just pain and suffering and loss and questioning myself.

What does it feel like this, what is inevitably going to be a bull run? What's that feeling like? I'm pretty numb to it at this point. This would be my third all-time high witness as I'm paying attention.

Yeah, it's the other thing. It's, I mean, I think this is, I don't want to say this time is different. But I mean, it's from a fundamentals perspective, it's definitely different like you have the infrastructure at the exchange levels, more robust, even though Coinbase is still falling.

You got to just give up your coins and work on being able to stay up all paper, trying to trade. But beyond that, other exchanges will come to market at the protocol level. Say what's been adopted.

And then in terms of from a fundamental macro perspective, Bitcoin is on the stage as something that's not taken lightly anymore. It's taken very seriously. So this time around, it's very different to me personally, having been around to witness a couple of previous all-time highs before and remembering how exciting that was.

Don't get me wrong, this is certainly exciting. We have a long way to go from here if Bitcoin is going to do what it has done in the past. So I've actually been mentally preparing over the last few years of the bear market, just not to get my emotions too.

I've been involved with the price swings. So it is volatile. It's going to be crazy. I'm going to see some crazy price movements from here on out.

But for me personally, I just want to focus on what we've been focusing on on Tales from the Crypt, which is people building in the space and helping individuals who are looking to learn about Bitcoin better understand Bitcoin and why it's important.

Really get to the why and how of Bitcoin and not necessarily the what of the price, even though it's fun to watch the price go up and certainly helps the balance sheet. But then, yeah, I think Bitcoin still has a long way to go in terms of building out infrastructure, software, hardware, and becoming more sufficiently distributed.

So as this price run up happens, I'm going to be focused as much as possible. And what we're doing a great American mining and trying to plug into as many oil fields as possible. So Bitcoin's hash rate productions as distributed as possible.

And the network becomes more robust and you just integrate more big stakeholders in the form of the energy sector. I think once we get the energy sector sort of bought in and invested significantly in the Bitcoin mining infrastructure space, it's going to be game over.

No turning back. Bitcoin will have cemented itself as something that humanity will be interacting with for the next many centuries, potentially millennia.

It's been really interesting seeing what's happening with great American mining and hearing little snippets through the podcast because I remember I must have been a couple of years ago hearing Steve Barber talking about this kind of stuff like very early days.

And I remember thinking like, that sounds cool. That sounds like an obvious, just the basics of like, there's something that's going to be wasted anyway, people have to pay to get rid of it and it's bad for the environment.

Why the fuck would you not use it like it's the most obvious because not everyone would think of using it. But like once you once it's thought of, it's so obvious. Then you guys are talking about using all this waste gas and I think it was a couple of episodes ago, maybe on TFTC, you were talking about even normal non waste gas.

If you put it through an efficient mining operation is four times more valuable than just selling to market. Back at the napkin maths I'm just like, holy fucking shit, that's enormous, like enormous.

Can you dig in a little bit more for maybe someone who's listening and hasn't been following this? Obviously you see this is probably one of the most interesting things within Bitcoin, otherwise you wouldn't be doing it.

So why, like what's going on? Yeah, so what we're doing specifically in the oil and gas throughout the oil and gas value, production chain, if you will, whether it be upstream, mid stream, potentially downstream like you.

Just alluded to there. Yeah, we're basically permission a game is threefold one, we want to be profitable liners while we do that. Two, we want to make sure that we're helping in the geographical distribution of hash rate production.

Number three, we want to solve a very big problem that the oil and gas industry has in their flare invent problem. That's only getting more significant as more oil wells are being drilled and as less pipelines are being built alongside those oil wells.

And so Bitcoin mining presents a perfect opportunity for the oil and gas industry to get as much value out of that gas. So we break it down into three types of gas stranded, which is just literally out there underground unable to be accessed or isn't accessed because there's no way to break it to market wasted, which is gas.

Going out on the well pad, that's being either vented or flared because there's no pipeline to send it anywhere, it's coming out of the ground anyway. So you got to do something with it, most people flare it.

So that's wasted economic opportunity and then undervalued, which is what you described, which is gas you're sending to the grid to to market, but you're not getting as much value as you otherwise could get out of it if you mind Bitcoin with it.

So while we focus on the first two very heavily and the second one, mainly helping producers reduce flare, we are having conversations with other stakeholders throughout the gas production chain who are weighing the opportunity

cost of sending their gas to market versus mining Bitcoin with it. And that's a conversation that many people are starting to begin to have with us, particularly said, Hey, you can get more value for our gas.

Like, let's figure it out. And what kind of effect does this have a market? Like, we're going to raise energy prices for everybody.

Now what you do is you, there's going to be an equilibrium that's hit at some point in the future where you just have a stable energy production and grid system where all the harnessable energy that you can possibly access is being harness utilized,

whether it be via Bitcoin mining or people using it to to warn their houses, run their electronics and go about their everyday lives and Bitcoin mining is the first thing to ever exist that creates an incentive to harness all this wasted stranded under

undervalued energy ever before. So it's, it's pretty crazy. Very, very, very early days. We're still educating the wheel and gas industry about potential opportunity.

They're still trying to wrap their heads around Bitcoin mining Bitcoin and the Bitcoin mining more specifically. Some are getting it, but it's a long journey from here. This is decades long build out. It's not going to happen overnight, but we got to start somewhere and if you extrapolate

what we're doing, if we're successful and what we want to do into the future, you get close to closer to humanity being a type one civilization here on earth where you're being as efficient as possible with every energy source that exists on this little rock that we're flying

flying on space. That's the heady, long winded version of what we're doing. It's such a game changer because there's so much of this wasted gas. There's so much wasted energy. There's so much energy, whether it's from solar or from gas or whatever it is that's just stranded and it's not possible to use for much

else. It's been talked about for a long time. Ever since I first started really learning about Bitcoin, there were these talks about it, but it seemed a bit far out or far away. And now it seems, again, like month and month, I'm seeing more and more information coming in.

It kind of just seems like it can't be ignored anymore. It's very difficult to put this across to like a non-Bitcoin or if you were just like, "Oh, yeah, you want to do this mining thing?" and they're just going like, "What the fuck is that?"

I don't know about this stuff, so it's going to be weird to sell, but presumably there does come a tipping point with this where every single person who's in that industry will know a few people who have already done it and the people have already done it will be like, "Yeah, we're fucking killing it. We're doing really well."

"You should do this as well." And presumably when they make a shitload of money, they're going to also want to look into Bitcoin, so it's this snowball effect.

Yeah, and it's snowballs even beyond just getting everybody into Bitcoin on the oil and gas industry. Once that happens to get these mining operations operational, it's a pretty significant capital outlay from beginning a big investment,

and so the incentive to protect that investment increases significantly as Bitcoin mining becomes more prevalent throughout the wheel and gas sector, which works in Bitcoin's favor, where you have one of those powerful industries in the world, arguably the most powerful.

The world doesn't go around without energy, like you need to get these energy sources out of the ground and to market, and if Bitcoin becomes a very integral part of the energy sector in terms of an alternative revenue stream

and consumer of last resort that provides that alternative revenue stream, then you're going to have the strongest, most important sector on the planet defending Bitcoin, and that's part of the beauty of the incentive.

I don't even know if Satoshi understood. I don't think Satoshi understood, at least at the onset of when he first launched a protocol, the impact that proof of work would have on the energy sector specifically.

I think once Lazlo launched GPU miners, it sort of began to hop into his mind like, "Oh, this is going to get more specialized and take on a lot more energy," but the potential, obviously we can't know for sure whether unintended consequences or not, but I would guess that there are unintended consequences

of launching Bitcoin with the proof of work and sense of mechanism, helping us get to a Type 1 civilization that helps us get to a monetary system backed by energy that's been envisioned for well over a century now by some of the greatest minds to ever walk this earth.

I don't think Satoshi could have foreseen that, but that's what's happening, at least in my mind. Yeah, it definitely seems that way. It's just going to, like, is why I think everyone who gets involved with this and gets to a certain point with Bitcoin, just can't literally do anything else?

Because you get so hyped, like, I got to a point where I was just so obsessed with what could happen and so excited with what could happen, and I couldn't concentrate on anything else.

I had to drop all my other work. I've had to do nothing else because I cannot stop imagining what is the world going to look like in 100 years, and for someone who was very, very pessimistic about the world before Bitcoin, to now, I'm really optimistic now.

And, like, I don't want to jinx things, but I'm so fucking excited about the future. If we take out the fact that we're kind of going into the authoritarian bullshit and, like, they're going to try and fuck us up. I know they are.

And, you know, it's why I don't do video calls hardly ever, but it felt like the right time today and all of this stuff. But I think they're going to fight us, but I think they're going to lose, and they're going to lose because of their own greed. And that's really beautiful.

Yeah, they're going to lose. It's Bitcoin's inevitable. And the people who would put up a fight against the entrenched incumbents that control the financial and political system and corporate governance structure monolith that monolithic sort of amoeba vampire squid that many have described in the past.

It's a dying entity. It's filled with a bunch of very old people who cannot compete in the, in the me more fair, the internet providing individuals with the ability to communicate directly, even though apps like Twitter getting more and more censorship driven

the ability to converse publicly with others around the world and avoid the party line from mainstream media or the political class, the expert class and sort of decide amongst ourselves what's true.

It's false is incredibly empowering and will drive large tectonic shifts already has in the way humans organize and interact with each other. We just so happen to be born at the inflection point.

We are experiencing and will continue experience the crazy volatility that comes with a transition to a new way of organizing. We are winning. Bitcoin is proof of that. They will lose. They do not have the ability to keep up with the individuals or fighting against them. I don't think it's too distributed.

It's like, I would describe, like, trying to control the conversation on the internet or the flow of information on the internet. As somebody standing in a stream during salmon mating season and the salmon flying by and just trying to catch them all your hands.

It's literally impossible. They can kick people off Twitter. They can censor content and YouTube and put the effects of those actions will be temporary. People will route around. People are routing around.

Bitcoin is a tool that helps us basically take power from these people, arrest power over the most important tool that we use, which is money and it's becoming more apparent by the day that more and more individuals.

Some very powerful individuals are recognizing this and bending the knee to Bitcoin's inevitable success in hopping on board because, again, due to the incentives of the system, that's the only winning move, the only winning move to play in Bitcoin.

The only winning move in Bitcoin is to play. Everybody's hopping on board, getting in the arena. Again, maybe it's because it's all time high day, but I'm very optimistic about Bitcoin's future. I just think the incentives are so strong.

You mentioned all of the social media stuff and all the censorship. I think I'm on 3.0 with my Twitter now. I keep getting banned for a wrong thing. Everyone who's saying anything against the bullshit that's going on seems to get blocked.

I know a load of people are going to probably attack me for talking about this, but there was one interview you did a while ago with BSG about this thing called Erbitt, and I know everyone fucking bangs on about it being a shit coin and all that.

It probably is, but I remember listening to that and being like, I'm not that technical, so I can't understand exactly how it would work. But I remember listening to that. And I was like, on the face of it, this thing sounds really cool.

The idea of everyone effectively having their own server and having some way that we can organize. Maybe it doesn't have a shit coin token. Maybe it can be done with SATs and lightning.

And someone like Paul who's got Sphinx and these kind of boys can work, so I'm clever way out where this can happen. But what's your thoughts on that kind of side of it? Can Bitcoin help us get to a point where we can fuck off all these weasels who get in the way of us communicating and try and censor us? Do you think that's possible?

Yeah, it's actually very fitting that we're having this conversation right now because earlier, sporting, I interviewed Matt Hill from Start9 Labs, and they're building basically a self sovereign computer for individuals to hold their data on their own server and their own house.

We discussed Bitcoin really incentivizes people to think about that much, that scenario and that way of interacting with personal data much, much more because you have to protect your own private keys.

And so you don't want to hold your private keys on the third party server. You want to make sure that you are able to protect them yourself and take self custody.

And then once you do that, like I'm protecting this Bitcoin, like what else should I be protecting in a world in which data breaches and breaches of trust from centralized third parties are becoming more and more rampant.

And it's just going to be a natural migration to be self sovereign self hosted server model and products are coming to market. Again, Start9's embassy operating system and computers they're building are evidence of that.

It's going to be a no model, but Bitcoin's just one tool in these potential self sovereign suites, you know, P2P messaging, access to our browser, self sovereign file hosting your files and your servers of the Google cloud, the Google Drive.

I think I think we will win. I think there will be a transition to the self sovereign data models. It's already happening. It's just a very, very beginning.

But you see things like we were talking particularly about nest cameras getting hacked and people being able to talk to their children while they sleep and creep them out and change the temperature in their house.

That's just going to be untenable. It is untenable. I don't have any cameras. I don't have a monitor because it has took up to Wi-Fi. But once you have these self sovereign servers that allow you to have confidence that your data is not being breached or accessed by any third party because the computer is physically in your house.

I think we'll see people adopt that in mass. Me personally, they start nine. I could say this because Matt just told me they're working on a camera system that only interacts with your server.

And so I'm not going to buy one until that product comes to market. I'm not going to buy the surveillance system from my house until that type of product comes to market and I can be confident that that data is only interacting with my server, my house.

So yeah, I do think it's coming. I think, again, the fact that we're born in this inflection point of human history, particularly around the onset of the internet. And now Bitcoin, you're going to interact with these new tools in the wrong way in the beginning, only until we make huge mistakes.

We have on a global scale of allowing these third parties to hold all of our data and hold it in securely. More importantly, it'll change habits and actions from individuals, and we will see a transition to that self sovereign model.

It's the only way forward. We either do that or we all become the Chinese Communist Party State where you have your social credit score. And if you're wrong thing, you get sent to the Gulag. And I don't think many people want that individual strive and lust for freedom is too powerful for that to happen at a global global level.

It feels that way. It's really weird here in England. You often talk about like a cut mentality and fucking hell. I look around here and like 90% of people I speak to have got a complete cut mentality. They are bending over backwards. They are excited about the vaccine.

They are just like, I honestly get messages like, Oh, isn't it great? We've got this vaccine. It's so awesome. I'm like, fuck off. Don't be dumb. Just stop being dumb.

Like you can send them whatever data you want. And they just, I don't know, like my only concern is that there's too small of a group of the population who will not be dumb.

The only hope is that once it becomes like we have these tipping points that then they'll know someone who's doing the Bitcoin self sovereign thing and they're actually thinking rather than just regurgitating information they've seen on the BBC.

And at that point, then it's like the cool thing to do and they follow the crowd. But I'm really pessimistic about British people. They need to fucking man up. It's so embarrassing. Yeah, I agree.

You agree British people are fucking useless. No, no, no. You're an example of an example of the fact that not all British people are useless. It's your, this year particularly they have been a bit docile.

Americans too. I mean, we're a lot of the country I live in is very docile. And same with some of my family members upon the vaccine. I just have to look at them like you've got any fucking kidding me.

But, okay, it goes back to the, the, the rule of the intolerant minority. We are part of the intolerant minority that will not let the Orwellian surveillance state panopticon happen to us and our children.

And it just takes a small minority and that minority is growing stronger as more people get access to Bitcoin. Even though some people may just be accessing Bitcoin for the games right now they're inherently going to want to learn more and it sends them down the rabbit hole that you and I have

found ourselves in and they're, again, this is just the nature of the protocol. It is getting us back to a state of objective truth. And once you understand that objective truth, it's hard to deny this is a better way of organizing and living on

this planet. And it is not only a better way. It's imperative. And going back to what we're saying. Do we want to be enslaved? What do we want to live free? I think most people want to live free. Most of them don't realize how to do that now in our brainwashed.

Most people are sheep, but all it takes is a small group of people who were driven to bring the change they wanted to see in the world into the world. I mean, it's the, what's his name.

Here's to the crazy ones. The astronomer, forgetting his name. Escapes me. Escaping me to the pale blue Doc guy. I'm going to look to stuff real quick so I don't sound like. Yeah, go on. Like here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the people who think they can change the world.

Those are the ones that do. And they're a very small minority. And people probably go, you Bitcoiners are so full of yourselves. Well, fuck off. Like Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan.

Yeah, I can't believe I forgot his name. He's the one who said here's to the misfits, the crazy ones are the ones who believe they can change the world. They're the ones that do.

Yeah, everybody else just sitting on their couch eating shit, jerk it off. Support hub and taking the line of the day from the mainstream media. They can have fun doing that. They're not going to change the world.

They may not believe that we can do it, but we're out here building. We've got our own media. We've got our own developer community that's globally distributed.

We've got people who are really driven for this cause that are out there on the front lines fighting every day, and only more and more people are joining. So, well, it may seem the day's darkest before the dawn or the night is darkest before the dawn.

And this is a pretty dark year. I wouldn't be surprised if we see the pendulum swing back very aggressively towards freedom and self sovereignty because the abuse of civil liberties in 2020 has been disgusting to the point where, like I mentioned,

some people you speak with are like welcoming the vaccine and will to ride you for not wearing a mask and social distancing and for traveling and for meeting with more than 10 people. But I think there's another contingent of people are like, all right, the shit's gone away too far.

We need to start pushing back on this. Something's terribly wrong here.

Definitely. And yeah, the people who say, oh, yeah, you Bitcoin is you, but you're arrogant thinking you can change the world and I've come across quite a few people who have said things like that. And I've had people literally take me to one side and be like, look, I'm really worried about you.

You know, you had a good job. You had a career. You had these things and like, what are you doing? And this thing's a scam and this there's, you know, they're doing it trying to be helpful.

But my argument has been for a long time as I could be wrong. I could be wrong. But if I'm on my deathbed, I want to at least say I gave it a fucking go. I want to at least say I tried to make the world a better place.

And even if I fail, at least I've tried something where, as like you said, everyone else is just everyone else here is just whinging about Brexit. They're whinging about whatever political shit that they want to win about for the day.

And they do fuck all. They do nothing. They absolutely do nothing. All they do is winge. And I just think you're an oxygen thief.

I mean, the NPC meme's very strong. It's very real. It's very illuminating. They like it or not. Most people don't want to admit it. They're NPCs, non-player characters just blowing along. That's something obviously you just mentioned. You don't want to do that. Yeah.

I'd rather die and have to live that life of quiet desperation that most men live. I lived that way. That was in the same way. I could quit my cushy job at a fun getting about us. Left. Went to go learn about design was out of a job for a few months. Got a new job. Did that for two years. Hate of that. Left was unemployed for two years.

People very worried about me. I really to mid 20s. But again, when you believe in something you go after it, it's going to take time.

But it's going to work out at the end. You'll be much happier than the people in your life who stayed in the cube pushing pencils and excel sheets who are balding miserable and can't do anything but wait for the weekend so they get blackout drunk and forget about the terrible week they had.

Yeah. I see it everywhere and I've lived it. I remember when I was younger, all I wanted to do was earn money because I was like, when I have that I'll be happy because I was not happy.

And then I was like, when I get this car and I get this bike and I have this or I have a house or I was always a goal. There was always something and I think, oh, then I'll be happy. And then I got those things and I was like fucking miserable. I hate my life. I hate my work. I hate the people I work with.

I hate what we're doing. I don't see anything interesting going on. The whole world's boring. And it's just, it's such a depressing way to think about things. And then it's not until now. And I'm just like, fuck, we have a chance. Like we have a chance that all these arrogant dickheads who are in power are going to lose.

And there's nothing that excites me more than just proving them wrong and getting them all to fuck off and just having people who actually want to make the world better, having some power back.

And being involved in Bitcoin is a great way to tell them to fuck off as price continues to increase. People tell you for seven or eight years now that you're wrong and you're stupid. And in the face of all that, you've continued to stack sets and increase your fuck you money stack.

And be like, all right, like in the face of all this duration. It seems to be working out. And that's, I mean, again, I don't want to come off as two pompous or anything here, but it is, it is.

You don't have anybody to turn to other than like a few people in a closed circle or Bitcoiners who you're not geographically close to it can be in person. Bitcoin, the network just succeeding is a great little little buddy to talk to like, yeah, you're doing okay, buddy.

I'm doing okay. I'm just going to keep producing blocks and people are going to keep buying sets. So, as long as that keeps happening, like you can have confidence that even in the face of family and friends telling you you're stupid, you're not stupid.

Here's proof. Yeah, it's, it's powerful and having that network, having that group of people who think the same way is quite nice, because I've never really experienced that before.

There's always a bit of an outsider in the way I thought and being anti establishment and my certain quirks and, and then now I speak to people all the time, who it seems Bitcoin has seemed to have a very similar outlook of like, I'm going to do what I want.

Anyone else who doesn't like it can fuck off. I want to be honest, I want to be a good person, but just I'm going to do what I want and I'm not going to play the games that everyone else wants to play.

Now I've got fuck you money so fuck you. It's nice.

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's not, I think, it is, it's very, it's nice to be proven right, especially over a long time horizon when there's a lot of stress over like is this going to work out is it not, and having been through a few of these cycles.

And it's, if they're being able to be like, hey, fuck you, I've been right. But that's not really like, I don't say that. My uncle comes and I'm like, fuck you, I've been right. It's like, hey, he's like, Bitcoin's doing pretty well.

Yeah, I told you so. But these people are slowly, slowly converting to the fact it's, it's undeniable at this point. It's succeeded for almost 12 years now at this point producing blocks almost nonstop prices continued to achieve new all time highs as is evidenced by today and it's a certain point.

Once that keeps happening, it gets impossible to die. Maybe we're getting close to that point. Again, like I said earlier, I think once you have the energy sector completely invested in the space.

That's when it's game over, so that's the most important industry in the world. But we're getting closer to that point where it's undeniable that Bitcoin is here. It's here to stay and that's something that you're going to have to deal with, whether you like it or not.

Yeah, bringing it back to that energy stuff. Do you have an idea of how much flared gas there is globally at the moment? And has someone done a conversion and working out what that would equate to in terms of Bitcoin hash rate and how much money that would actually pump into the industry?

Like, have you got any sort of idea on that? Because I might imagine it's huge. Yeah, so this is looking up a tweet from September 8th.

One of our chemical engineer at Great American Mining Read, he ran the numbers in the back of the napkin based off of reported figures of flaring globally from the Energy Information Agency here in the United States.

He believes that there's around 59.65 gigawatts of consumable gas if he used to mine Bitcoin and if Bitcoin miners consumed all that gas, kept it and consumed it to mine Bitcoin, the network hash rate.

On September 8th would be 7.35 times higher, larger than it is than it was then. So we're talking a computational dedication to the network that is seven times larger than it was in September.

I think we may be hovering around that point right now too anyway. Shit to me and is that is that globally or America? It's globally globally. I believe America potential is like 13 gigawatts of that around 60.

Could be wrong. That's huge. And that's just that's just flared. Yes, based off reported figures of flaring so we're not even talking vent and then other gas that's going through a pipeline to market.

And that could some of that gas could potentially use to my Bitcoin as well. So yeah. And this is based off reported numbers back the napkin mass yet to take into consideration the cleanliness of the gas, the BTU content.

So there's some nuance there. But if you're just trying to do. All right. What's the ballpark? That's that's what read read is defining as the ballpark. Yeah, that's massive. It's huge. And it's not just going to be oil and gas presumably there is going to be other forms of energy that are stranded that are going to be using this as well.

I can only see that growing year on year as well because there's more and more people entering that market. And like you say, it is the biggest is the biggest in the world. It's like the most powerful people in the world.

And once they have their teeth into this and want to protect it and like you say, the hardware that's out laid and all that money. It's not going anywhere because they buy all the regulators anyway.

They're the people who who are the best at buying regulators and anyone they want. Yeah. And beyond that, like once you cap all the gas, consume it to my Bitcoin and you start marching from there.

And that's the journey that Bitcoin miners are on at the end of the day is to drive their cost of power production down as low as possible. So once you consume all the waste gas and have plugged in all the holes and the gas value chain that exists, you move on from there.

And the next energy source that drops your all in power production cost is nuclear or reactors. And so Bitcoin mining will incentivize production of the warm reactors and bringing cleaner or abundant energy to the world.

And then then we start going to the stars. It's crazy that that sounds completely reasonable to us. And I know to everyone else that what you've just said there is that Bitcoin is going to change the world.

The way that we produce energy and actually push us forward beyond what anything else on the planet possibly could. But it's true. It sounds crazy, but it's completely true. And what a fucking unbelievable world will have if we have nuclear and have all these things working and effectively abundant energy.

What are we going to see? It really does blow my mind. It makes me very, very excited. And again, people look at you staring at you with open eyes like you just described a DMT trip to them and they don't believe you.

But again, the incentives are there. The network incentives are so strong. Yeah, I think Bitcoin is the most beautiful invention in the humanities ever encountered and it's going to do incredible things and very optimistic.

It's an optimistic Wednesday, all time high, December 16th. Well, cheers. And also, congratulations on your son. I'm hyped for you. It sounds like you're very much enjoying the father role and it seems to have changed you quite a lot.

Yeah, it's been a fun year. Highly recommended for anybody who's thinking about it out there. Definitely ground you and put things into better perspective. And it's crazy me, particularly my son's like a carbon copy.

It looks exactly like I did at this age and seems to have a very free spirit like I do. Man, it's really drives home. What's important in life and why makes what I've been doing around Bitcoin even more important to me and more imperative.

It gives me more drive to give me producing content and paving our way into the energy industry again, because if we don't do this now, like his future is going to be fucked, which is something I can't stomach as a father.

Somebody has brought somebody else into the world. Like what world are we bringing these children into? What world will they grow into? I don't want it to be the 2020 lockdown mask force vaccination world.

We need to get away from that. Bitcoin is the perfect tool to help us do that. Do you agree? Yeah, it seems it's our only shot. A lot of people say that, but I really think it seriously is our only and last shot before we go full on authoritarian, crazy shit.

It sounds really far-fetched, but I have nightmares about these concentration camps and things coming to the rest of the world, and it doesn't seem unreasonable if we just project out with the way that 2020 is unfolded.

It sounds crazy, but I really am concerned. And if we don't succeed, I fear that that is where this goes.

Join us back some sats. Yeah, but I think it becomes a more obvious decision and option. It's like, "Hey, what do you want the global panopticon with your social credit score? Do you want to truly live free?"

And again, like I said earlier in the episode, it's becoming glaringly obvious that the overreach of power by the authorities that be this year has been just

an egregious overreach. There are a lot of people who are just as angry that it's happening as there are docile people who are letting it happen, I believe. They may not be as vocal, but they're out there and quietly looking for solutions and they'll eventually find Bitcoin.

Definitely. Well, Marty, I just want to say thank you for taking the call. Thank you for seriously thank you for the last couple of years, because if it wasn't for you and for Matt, there are times I probably were close to a breakdown, not having anyone to talk to, not having anyone to listen to who thought the same.

But your podcast has done more than I think you appreciate for a lot of people, and it's been incredible to have the guidance from both of you, and just not to feel alone. And that's something that's really, really special.

So, yeah, thank you for that. Thank you for everything you do. And I will hopefully see you in America, or if you come to England at some point, we'll grab a whiskey or something or smoke a zoo and celebrate all time highs.

Yeah, that's definitely. Thank you. I'm just some dude with a mic talking about Bitcoin. Thank you for listening and for the kind where it's all in this together, if not us than who, so it seems like there's more people joining us so

even as the world seems to get crazier and crazier, there's lots to be optimistic about, and I think Bitcoiners are the perfect cohort to look at, like, all right, there's something optimistic in the world, bullish on Bitcoiners as Matt say.

Definitely. All right, thanks, mate. And yeah, I hope we will enjoy that whiskey or zoo at some point soon. definitely. Thank you for having me. Here's my touches. See you.