EP98 Nik Oraevskiy founder of bitcoin reserve

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.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, 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 deliver to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Welcome back, everyone. Today's episode is with Nick, the founder of Bitcoin Reserve. I had a really good conversation with Nick. Sadly, half of it was off air because we had a little bit of a technical issue where we kept dropping out.

You can't hear it because I've recorded locally, but I was just losing sort of 10% of what he was saying and having to string it together. And it was a little bit frustrating, but nonetheless, really, really enjoyed this one.

And I think you're going to as well. Before we dive in, I want to say thank you to CoinLaw UK for sponsoring the show. If you are in the UK and you are looking to dollar cost average, pound cost average, you can do that with their service.

They've been around for a long time. They've got a great team. If you are going to go through a KYC exchange, definitely use a good one, and they are the only one I recommend in the UK. Next up is crypto cloaks.

Crypto cloaks, you all know from Twitter. They have such a cool team. They're putting out some amazing products. They have the blog made. They have personalized node cases and much, much more.

Make sure to check them out. They are Bitcoin only, and they are crypto cloaks.com. Enjoy the show. - Hi, Nick. Sorry about that. I don't know what was happening. You seem to be in the green room for an age.

- Quite alright, Max, how are you? - Yeah, really well, thank you. How are you? - I'm doing well as well. I'm enjoying the sunshine off the Adriatic Coast currently. - Oh, wow, beautiful.

We're about, so you don't want to doctor yourself too much. - Yeah, perhaps we'll save that for another time. (laughing) - Beautiful. You've got some time away from work or just working from a laptop.

- Yeah, I mean, I've been a digital nomad for quite some time. This is currently the region where I personally see as being the most favorable considering the conditions that are predominant in the world today.

- Hmm, yeah, well, we'll get into some of these conditions a little bit later, 'cause yeah, it's crazy, crazy times. But as we haven't spoken yet, first time we've chatted even from off air as well, I thought it'd be really cool to get a little bit of a rundown on what it is that you're doing

and a little bit of a background on the Bitcoin reserve why it started. Nish has told me a little bit, but yeah, for the listeners, could you give a little bit of a rundown on how it started and what you guys are aiming to be doing?

- Yeah, absolutely. So I'll kind of start with myself and I think it will naturally lead into where the business is today. My background is economics and finance and I've been following the markets ever since kind of high school equity sports, that kind of stuff.

At that point in time, I would've kitted more to gambling rather than trading to be honest, but it really was a passion of mine and I came across Bitcoin in late 2012. Actually, I originally came about it in 2011, but at that time, I didn't think much of it.

I had heard of EGLE and I didn't think that this was gonna be much different. However, in 2012, my friend really prodded me and said, "Hey, you know, just read the white paper. "Take a look, see what you think."

So I took the dive and I started to realize the paradigm shift that could actually be upon us. I still didn't know whether it was going to be successful, but the fact that you could securitize energy and make that as a means of store of value, that was something to me that hadn't existed before.

And frankly, the security system in place, how everything worked from a mining perspective, also differentiated it in my mind. But to me, again, my origin being trading, I definitely dove into it because of the possibility of a completely new marketing opening up.

So if you're into trading or anybody who's listening is, you know that in the retail space, there's something called the Bloomberg Terminal. And the Book Terminal gives you access to certain data that the average retail investor might not necessarily get.

So this is the order of book depth and some other metrics. Well, this data was readily available just as is, as a result of the platforms that Bitcoin was traded on at that time. Mom gocks me the predominant one.

So to me as a trader, I was like, oh my God, I'm going to watch him work and get born from absolutely nothing. And it's infancy. That's a once in a lifetime opportunity. And that carried forward.

And I started to fall deeper in love with the space itself. And I started to travel around to the various Bitcoin meetups back in the day I met with Paul Cooey. He's now running Edge, which used to be called Airbits.

And that was at the conference in Vegas, I believe. From there, again, the individuals involved in projects such as his, as well as others, really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what can be.

And then from there, I was like, you know what? I think this is going to be my full-time thing. So I threw myself into the technology. I threw myself into the business world. Through there, I worked at an exchange in Vancouver.

I set up an AIF in Liechtenstein with a couple of extra Wall Street guys, which did not go in the way that I was expecting. The 2018 crypto winter hit, as well. It was a lot longer this time.

So that was instead the most ideal setup. Let's put it that way. But it gave me an incredible opportunity to look at the regulatory infrastructure behind all this. And especially in areas where, well, frankly, there actually was a regulation that was relatively clear and understood and, of course, met with the individuals there.

From that point forward, actually, I had gotten back together with Yuri, who is the founder of the Corners over alongside myself. And he was working at a private brokerage firm, I mean, in Vancouver at the time.

So we got a talking, and we said, you know what? We've both had some experience in the past that we might not necessarily want to build off of, but the opportunities and the things that we have understood from those experiences should help us build a successful business.

At that time, he had a bit of a client list, and I had an incredible amount of knowledge with regards to infrastructure setup from various areas geographically speaking. From there, we said, OK, let's give it a try.

Let's try Bitcoin-only OTC brokerage. By the way, through my entire career, I was more or less focused in Bitcoin. I dabbled into the shitcoins. Not proud to say, but-- We will do it. We've had that itch, right?

Nonetheless, Yuri and myself, we decided that the thing that we wanted to do was build a business that was going to stand the test of time, really. And Bitcoin was the first and foremost thing that allowed us to have this vision for the company, for what we wanted to construct.

Alongside of that, we shopped around extensively for various regions and regulators that would be compliant with this long term, because Bitcoin reserve, at that time, called Layer 2 Brokers, is a business that we want to be here for decades on end.

We've experienced in our past all of those businesses that fly high and do a bunch of stuff that isn't really helping them have staying power. And as a result, like I mentioned, we did an extensive search for jurisdiction.

We settled on being in Estonia, and we started the OTC desk. The OTC desk had some clients from Yuri's book, and as we continued on it to the business, we really wanted to bring the value of what Bitcoin had to offer to not just high net worth individuals, because as the pandemic hit especially,

and everything started to change very rapidly in the world, we saw an increasing need for individual sovereignty and financial autonomy. And that needed to be delivered to not just people that are perhaps in a certain echelon of the economic system, but everyone.

So from there, we decided to launch our retail product, which is Fast Trade, and we just got that up and running about a week and a half ago. And it's essentially an automated OTC desk, if you will, for individuals to buy Bitcoin.

And we don't hold any custody. Not your keys, not your coins, so we're from believers in that. From our own experiences, not just from a business perspective. Kind of here we are today. So I'd love to get into any detail, or if you have any questions on any specifics of the journey, please.

- Yeah, well, a few. So I mean, firstly, it seems a lot of people choose Estonia. And my question is like, what is it that particularly makes it so favorable in terms of regulation? Because regulation is something that, you know, I talk about a lot on this show.

I feel it stifles innovation in many ways. It causes a lot of issues, too. To Bitcoin and people trying to build businesses. And it seems to be a constant cat and mouse game, trying to sort of comply enough that you can serve customers, but not too much so that you ruin their privacy completely, and so that you cause yourself a headache

and can't operate in the way that you want. Is it that Estonia is kind of a more lenient country that allows you to be a little bit more innovative? Or is it something else? - Well, first and foremost, I'll kind of bring it back to when we were looking to set up the fund.

And we looked at various jurisdictions from Singapore to South America to Isle of Man, Estonia, Liechtenstein, all over the place. And the majority of the answers that we got when we spoke to the legal teams there that were supposedly experts in their field was, well, you know what?

You can kind of do what you want. At this point, there's no firm groundwork. But in the next two to five years, we can't guarantee that you won't be going to jail. It's like, oh, okay, that's a bit of a turn.

And as a result, we started to realize that what was necessary was we need a defined framework within which to operate in. Whether that same framework is in country A or country B is less relevant than a clear understanding and the ability to interact with the regulators on a very-- not only just personal, but kind of an efficient basis.

So if you're talking about the regulators in the United States, I mean, I don't know if anybody has tried here to set anything up, but you have to first go through all the 50 state regulators, then you have to contact, whether it be the SEC or the other regulatory agencies.

And the response times are months and months, whereas countries such as Liechtenstein and Estonia in particular, Liechtenstein, you can literally go to their office, knock on their door, have a face-to-face, and similar situation.

Yeah, similar situation in Estonia as well. So from there, it's the efficiency of communication that really, I think, allowed us to make that definitive choice. And when you add the fact that Estonia has e-residency, which us being digital nomads allowed us to control and operate the company

from outside of the actual geographic region of Estonia, that was one of the biggest advantages. In Liechtenstein, unfortunately, there's nothing like that. So you have to get fiduciaries to do everything for you.

And that becomes a very cumbersome and expensive process over time. So that's primarily the reason why we settled on that jurisdiction and addressed your point of regulation in general. Personally, what we are trying to accomplish here and what I've always thought about regulation is that there needs to be a basic understanding

between the regulators and the industry. And then through those communications, and hopefully they are effective communications, then there could be something developed which allows progression but doesn't necessarily open up the space to abuse from nefarious parties, which during the ICO craze, I mean, that was the opinion of abuse.

All right, so you need to take those people and make sure that they have a harder time doing what they do while still allowing a business that must legitimately operate framework to do so.

But the reality-- that's a nice thing to think, but the reality of the situation is that regulators often over-regulates the stifle innovation, and companies tend to chump any jurisdictions that have a heavy hand in this regard.

So again, that comes back to our ability to communicate directly, for example, with the IFIU and the Estonia, which is a regulator, and get really quick feedback on whether something is appropriate or not, or whether it will work in the long term.

So that's where we're really headed to it, again, is being able to form these relationships, which will bring us 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the line, whatever jurisdiction that we have some chosen.

Yeah, that's interesting. And like that you said, you're taking the long approach on this, it's a low time preference thinking, and you want to be around for a long time. That's what I've seen with a lot of exchanges.

And like you're saying with this ICO craze and all that sort of crazy times, you just had a load of nutters just coming in, abusing everyone, and then disappearing. And also, even the big companies-- and a lot of people don't call them out, but people like Coinbase and some of these, they're really fucking annoying me,

because it's like they get people in the door with something fantastic. They say, oh, we've got Bitcoin, and people come for Bitcoin, and it's a chance for people to really have some real sovereignty and have something that really can change the world.

And then they dump a load of shit on them. They confuse them and have 50 different shit coins, all with basically no use. And it really irritates me, because you get such a small percentage of the population who will even think to look into something like this, and they have the opportunity to do well.

And then just at that last minute, the people who are supposed to be looking after them are dumping on them. And yeah, so that was nice to hear that it sounds like you are Bitcoin-focused and that it is a long-term play, and that you want to be there for your customers, which is cool.

Yeah, I mean, it's funny that you mentioned Coinbase and shit coins in general. If you look at what the business model is of most of these ICOs, and it's incredibly disingenuous, what you tend to have is an originating group of creators, if you will, and their financiers.

With those, they usually create what is known as a SAFT agreement. It is a version of the SAFE agreement that was created by Silicon Valley Incubator, I believe. And with that, those investors pile in, right?

They pile in early, and with that, they go, and they create basically a white paper, and again, this was back in 2017, 2018. It's a bit more difficult now, I assume. But nonetheless, with that money in hand, they go, and they literally shop it around to various exchanges.

Exchanges, I remember back in the day, they had it just a fee. OK, million bucks for listing your coin, $500,000 for listing your coin, whatever the case of you pay it, we list it, that gets liquidity, and then you do your ICO.

As soon as you do your ICO, and you do the public offering, that's literally what the people that got in early with the SAFT agreements liquidate. And then they do it again, and they rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

And this is the reason, actually, why Ethereum shot up early on in 2017 is because that was the only way that you could participate. It was not possible for those companies to get banking relationships because, well, it's an unregulated security.

And the only way you could do it was through Ethereum. So people bought Ethereum regardless of the price because they knew they could flip it in these types of private circles. And the exchanges are complacent in it.

And they were just pushing this onto the unwilling public who just saw insane amounts of returns very, very quickly, but then have the rug pulled from under them. So I'm not a fan at all of that type of discontinuity within the ecosystem.

And that is one of the other reasons why we focus on Bitcoin and Bitcoin only because it allows truly for something to be delivered from us to the individual that's not just a product. It is, for lack of a better word, financial freedom and autonomy, especially what's going to be happening with central back digital currencies,

the surveillance states that's been following us and then the world at large. Financial sovereignty is going to be one of the most important topics, I believe, of the century. I completely agree with you is certainly why I'm here.

It's not why I originally came here, I came here because I saw something going up in value and I thought, "Oh, wow, I'm going to be rich," and it drew me. And that's just being honest is it was completely about the money.

And then, you know, as you stay here for longer and you see the innovation, you see the people who are working in this and you start to understand what a massive impact this can have on the world.

It's pretty damn addictive and impossible to do anything else. Do you remember a time when, you know, you said you were there in the beginning and seeing this new market emerge and that was what was fascinating to you?

Are there specific points that you can remember along your journey where you just sort of stopped and thought, "Okay, no, this is more than I thought it was," or things that really hit you and changed your view on the world?

Yeah, and I wish I could take credit for these revelations, but in all honesty, they came from the community. I, myself, was just like you. I saw a number go up and it fit with my trading model at the time.

I saw good returns and I used those returns to meet amazing people. And I think that's really when my perspective started to shift, right? You had a lot of the libertarian crowd that was mixed into it and, you know, I like to stick away from that label because I don't think it's very appropriate,

but individuals who are focused on self sovereignty and freedom and those who are truly trying to establish themselves as global citizens within the world. When I started to interact with those individuals, that's when I think my mind started to change just to wait a second.

How can this particular technology and its ability to carry value through time despite what's going on in the global financial ecosystem? How can that truly impact me as a citizen of the world?

And what does that provide anybody else here? And when I started to address those questions, that's when I had that aha moment. And I can't pin it to any one particular interaction. It was almost as if you're filling up a glass drip by drip, and then all of a sudden the glass just overflows.

And when it overflows, that's when you go, aha, but was it the last drop or was it the first one? It's hard to judge because they're all kind of coming from a lot of different places. That's a good way of putting it, actually.

Yeah, it is like that. It seems that's a common theme of like most people that I speak to have a similar feeling. It's like, "Yeah, I can't really put my finger on it." It's just a really good way of putting it, a drop in a glass, and you don't know when it goes, but when it goes, it's just mind blowing.

And you're like, "Holy shit, I've just stumbled across something that is so big." And it's so important that I don't know if you're the same. Like, every day I get up now, like, hyped. I'm just like, right, I'm part of something that is going to change the world.

I'm doing something that is so exciting. And like previously, I was so bored, like, with all the work that I was doing. And I thought, "Ah, like, didn't the '60s look cool? Didn't the '70s look cool?

Didn't the '80s look cool? Wasn't it cool when not everything was so regimented and boring? And people working in offices and everything seemed corrupt around me. And everything just seemed like, "Ah, everything's just getting worse.

I'm bored." And then this hit, and it's like completely the other way, it's just, like, yeah, the most exciting thing. I couldn't wish to be born in a better time. I couldn't agree with you more.

I feel that so many people on myself included back in the day was focused on, you know, for, like, the better term, the rat race itself. And that provides no value to yourself internally, doesn't feed your soul.

But I feel that what we're doing here actually has a effect on the future, a realistic change that we can provide this opportunity for people to, well, grab hold of whatever wealth they have now and perhaps even generate more in the future and carry it through generations.

Like, this is not just for me, this is for my children, this is for their children's children. I mean, this is something that is fundamentally different from an economic perspective than the world has had in a very, very, very, very long time.

I mean, we always talk about the similarities between gold and Bitcoin. I think there's definitely a lot to draw upon here, but what advantages Bitcoin does have over gold in particular is its ability to be a modern version and one that is transmittable across time and space instantly.

That, that right there, that value capture and that proposition is so incredibly powerful when you have to consider that in this day and age of social surveillance and where we're going with the bio, the bio-digital paradigm where you have the self, the human self merging with the digital self, you are going to come to a point in time

where your presence online is going to dictate what you can and cannot spend your money on because that's going to form an ecosystem where you're going to have merchants who have to either pass or not pass certain regulatory frameworks in order to be able to be on that payment system.

So, effectively what you're doing is you're creating financial censorship through that infrastructure and Bitcoin is your escape. It is your escape, it is your ticket out and providing that to people and waking up doing that. Yes, like that's actually what we're doing here.

Yeah, I wake up with a smile. At least on days that I don't see some crazy shit news in the morning about this or that. Absolutely. And like you were saying, like the people that you get to meet in this industry, firstly they're like completely different to everyone that you meet in traditional systems.

They're just, they're freedom lovers, they're thinking outside the box, that there's just a certain vibe with something about meeting Bitcoiners and speaking to Bitcoiners where you're just like, "Ah, this person gets me, we're on the same page."

You know, there's the infighting and lots of crazy shit that goes on in the Bitcoin world as well, but there's freedom loving aspect. And for someone like you who, you know, you've said you're a digital nomad, so you're already sort of living in the future.

You are far ahead of the curve, ahead of the trend because this is what I think if we can get rid of this whole COVID bullshit stuff that's going on and all the craziness and everyone can just wake the fuck up.

What will happen is more and more people will go towards that lifestyle. More and more people will think, "Well, what am I doing?" Like being tied to one location where there's a beautiful world out there.

There's so many different cultures, so many different people, so many things to see. And to be able to take your wealth, you know, you're talking about gold, having similarities with Bitcoin and the differences there.

But, you know, one massive thing is just you try and walk across a border with a bar of gold, you know, how quickly you're going to be stopped and arrested and interrogated. And, you know, how quickly are your freedoms going to be taken from you?

Whereas if you are to have Bitcoin and you're smart about it, you can go anywhere in the world and you can take your wealth with you and you can take it securely. And that is like a dream, I imagine, for a digital nomad.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's a really good song. It's by Bitcoin Baron. I highly suggest you guys look it up, whoever's listening. I think it was released in 2014. And one of the lines from the song, "I got my whole net worth in my laptop bag."

And that is very, very true. It's so advantageous, I believe, in this day and age where you have to look for work in not just your geospatial area, basically, not your kind of like your backyard or your city, but you have to look wider to what connects us all currently and that is the Internet.

And it's trying to find a way to be able to translate freely within that ecosystem, I think, is just as important as the type of work that you end up doing. Absolutely. And do you have any kind of tools or projects that you're particularly fond of?

In terms of securing, and you said you guys don't hold people's Bitcoin, you make sure that they hold their own keys. As someone who is moving around and living as a digital nomad, are there any projects, node packages, or hardware wallets, or software wallets, or mixing services, or anything that you particularly like at the moment?

Yeah, our predominant, I guess, my personal preference and I don't want to kind of go too deep into the weeds from a business perspective, but co-card, electric, and transverse. Those are some of our favorite devices.

Now, you mentioned one interesting thing, and that's mixers. Here, I'll give everybody a bit of an understanding of how the regulatory framework is currently constructed, and this might help people in the future navigate to these ecosystems and exchanges that have to comply with certain standards, and abide by KYC and AML regulation.

So back in 2017-2018, roughly, that is when I should say, yeah, early 2017, I was actually at an incubator in Vancouver, and I happened to talk with a couple of guys, and the name escapes me of the company right now, but they eventually sold their tech to a three-layer agency.

That's all the kind of they could share at that point in time, but it was blockchain analytics specifically focused on being able to understand the routing of transactions. And I remember him opening up his laptop and kind of showing me this gigantic web, and he's like,

oh, here's a dark market one, here's another exchange, here's some wallet that's unknown, and then they can essentially track heuristically, here's the key heuristically, whether or not these coins are considered tainted, or whether they're legitimate, whether they're fresh virgin

coins, even though there's not really technically such a thing. And I asked him, well, what do you do with this information? He's like, honestly, to us, it's absolutely useless. There's so many ways that you can get around this, but for some reason, the three-letter agencies

are very fond of this, and they want our software. So I guess they were going ahead and providing them with that particular piece. And as a result, some of the regulators, particularly banks in particular, actually require this as a barrier, or if you will, as a precursor to opening a count

with them. Now, in reality, that is simply a result of the onboarding and the compliance process. In practice, first and foremost, people don't do not often recycle Bitcoin addresses. Even we, ourselves, simply because of how our infrastructure is set up, every single time

there is a transaction that is done, it's always going to a new address. That's not even necessarily for net-tech purposes. It's just a result of how some of the technology works. Just good practice. Yeah, yeah, right. And from there alone, when you try to do analytics,

they say, "Oh, can you please provide this wallet address that we can whitelist?" And we always go back and say, "You realize that we have hundreds of thousands of addresses. We don't have one address that you can whitelist. It doesn't work that way." And they just don't comprehend it. We just need

it. We just need it just to put a checkmark in a little box. That's what I want to get to at the end of the day, is that this is all that they're doing right now. It's just putting checkmarks in boxes. In order to communicate this information in a coherent manner, in a way that we wanted to,

if we were to go in that direction to be compliant with a regulator who requests that, they would need to have a technical understanding on the other side of what that information means. The fact that these are probabilistic heuristics of connectivity of point A to point B,

and not a direct linkage of, "Oh, this is terrorist money." Or it's supposed to be a term like that, and they just don't have it. So the entire ecosystem, as it stands from a blockchain analytics perspective, is a complete farce, if you ask me. It's just all checkboxes on somebody's excel sheet,

and that's it. Now, whether that's going to change or not in the future, I don't know. So, to those individuals who are particularly trying to investigate privacy aspects and how to really try to increase that within their own transactional capabilities,

I would say that, know that when that is requested from whatever third party that you are dealing with, that it is highly unlikely that it's actually going to actually change anything with regards to your account standing. Now, this is not financial advice in any way, shape or form. We're not

financial advisors. That disclosure, blah, blah, blah. I know even this can be construed as such at times, but it's more of an understanding that these technologies that we have, including mixers, are so far ahead of what the regulators can even understand if they wanted to,

that it sometimes is going one step too far to do it, then you're just putting yourselves into the crosshairs of a system that is going to just label you as a bad actor simply by a program that uses a heuristic association, right? And it's like, you would be better off actually just

not using it, going and doing that service, and you would have more ingrained security, if you will, than if you were to do that and go through a mixer. So it's like as soon as you're on board and into that ecosystem, unfortunately, you get put in with a basket of other not so positively associated

transactions, let's put it that way. So yeah, that's my blog story on mixers. I personally, I mix everything and that there's a few reasons that I do it. One is the idea of whitelist, blacklist, these regulators believing that they can come in and control this thing that is a

revolution and is going to provide privacy and freedom to individuals all around the world. I like to be part of whatever group they put to one side because fuck them, they have no place here.

Also, I don't want people to know my amounts, and I don't want people to be able to track things back. And although, like you said, you know, these regulators and these banks and all the people who are coming in are so far behind, what is on chain is on chain forever. And so everything I have,

I personally like samurai wallet, I use, I use whirlpool, I think it's very, very good. And from my understanding, from like OXT research, etc, they basically just take this bundle and they just put it to one side and just go, well, we know a lot of people went in, we don't know who

came out. We just put it to one side because if we put this in, it's just going to actually cause issues and make any of these assumptions that we have so difficult to guess that it's going to actually make everything else even more difficult to understand. So they just put it off

to one side, but I understand it. And I think everyone has to take these, everyone has to make their own decisions. And there's a lot of people who will be adamant one way or one way or the other, but it comes down to personal preference and sort of what people are here for. And it sounds really

childish, but a huge part of why I'm here is just being able to put a middle finger up and say, fuck you, because the people who were in control of the money and we're still are in control of the money and still are in control of all the rules and all of the things that control us and

enslave us as humans, they've really abused our trust. They've really taken the piss. They've really caused issues for billions of people on this planet. And all I want is to see their power go on. All I want is to see them no longer have control. And to have this system, which is fair

and true, to be what is in control on what people use and completely strip out these middlemen. But there is this weird time as we transition to this new world, where there's like a clash of the libertarians and the anarchists and the people who want the freedom. And then there's

the businesses that are sort of in between who have to be in between them and they have to be in between regulators. And then on the other side, there are the regulators. And so it just gets messy, you know, and it's going to be messy probably for a long time. But there's so much information

out there that people need to do their research, work out what it is they want from this system and then act accordingly. That's very well said. And I think you hit upon a more general context that I see evolving as it comes to just having your own privacy with your transactional history

and everything technically being on an open public ledger. And that is we are transitioning to a time where there is going to be two economies. And I'm not just talking about the Bitcoin economy and then the Fiat economy. I'm talking about an economy that actually includes everything,

including digital currencies and centrally backed digital currencies that are completely under the purview of the current purveyors of the systems. And this is actually going to include Bitcoin. So if you right now see some of the regulation going out in the United States, banks

can now hold your Bitcoin, but they hold your keys. So it's not really your money. And this type of narrative, I feel is being pushed further and further to the average individual where Bitcoin is bad. But if you're going to buy it from us and store it with us. And that's clearly one ecosystem

that is going to exist and continue to grow. While you have another ecosystem that's forming around freedom, around transactional capability without borders and intermediaries. And that requires a certain amount of technical aptitude at this point in time to interact with. Right. So

as you mentioned, there are several technologies which you can utilize currently. And if you do know that you then exactly like you said already put into a basket. Right. So when you're doing these transactions, you have to understand that that is what's happening. You are choosing a side

effectively. And by all means, know what you're doing and be accepting of it. And that's kind of, I think the main point here is you have to know the results of your actions, the repercussions of what you do. And there's going to be a time where it might be appropriate to do that. It's

going to be a time where it might be less appropriate to do that. But having that knowledge is the power. And you know, what we're trying to provide exactly, as you said, as a company that's kind of stuck in between this middle ground is this connection between the legacy and the future and trying to

make it as simple and as effective as possible for people to be able to make their own decisions. That's really what we're trying to provide. And then what they do after the fact, we can only hope and encourage a free and innovative society. But the end of the day, it's up to the individual

themselves. Hey, Max, I might have lost you there. Hopefully, I'm not hosting the show by myself at this point. Sorry. Yeah, no, sorry. It keeps it keeps cutting out. It's it's done it from the

beginning. But I get sort of 90% of what you're saying. And I can fill in, I can fill in the gaps. But there it just cut out for like 10 seconds. I lost you at being in the middle helping on board people in the most simple way. And I think I've got most of what you're saying. So I agree. I think

it's really important that people have access to onboard themselves and do it in a simple way. And once people do that, then they can then they can start to research, then they can start to learn.

But the simple truth is that if people don't hold any Bitcoin, yeah, they are way less likely to bother doing a deep dive and actually learning. It's such a massive incentive. Once you see, oh, I've got X amount of Bitcoin. And actually, you tend to think in dollars or euros and think,

oh, I've got this much. And you watch that go up and down. You don't initially. Yes, exactly. You don't initially think, Oh, how many sets have I got? But but given time, that is such a massive incentive, because you once you especially see the value go up, then you're like, Oh, my God,

the value's gone up. I need to learn all of lost you again. Uh, I lost you again there. I can hear you. Yeah, value go up. Okay. Yeah. And that's it. And so that's why it's so important to have have companies like yours where you're making it simple for people, making it possible

and accessible for people. And so when you think about that, what is your approach in terms of UX, in terms of support? How do you how do you think about making this simple for people and making it secure for people? Yeah, that's a, I think a great question to perhaps tie everything together

here. And it really is all about creating a system. And this includes putting together those regulatory pieces that everybody hates, such as KYC in a way and in a wrapper that just can be done without much friction, I guess you can say. So we're, we're integrated with a company called

SumSub for KYC. And right now from what we're seeing in our statistics, it takes about five minutes for a user to join the platform, then to be actually fully verified. This is, you know, identity verification, all of that fun stuff. Again, what we try to do is we are staying within

our boundaries for compliance, but essentially creating a process that allows as quick of a transition from potential clients to onboarded individual and transacting as we possibly can. For our UX and UI, again, simplicity is really the key here. And we're not going to try to say

that we are some huge company that can spend millions of dollars in R&D and A/B testing. But what we can say is that we are starting small and we're starting very, very basic and we're going to build from there. Part of that is listening to what the consumer has to say

and what our users have to say, what they like, what they don't like. That type of communication, I think, is critical. So if anybody ever wants to get in touch with us, if they have any comments or concerns, there's very quick and easy ways to interact with us and to be able to get a response

very, very quickly. So that applies for the retail side of what we're doing, and especially for the concierge where it's a one-on-one agent that you're dealing with 24/7/365 that you have access to, not only from a trading initiative perspective, but also from a knowledge perspective.

And as we continue to move forward, what we want to try to do is we want to capture feature sets and products that really help a broad range of individuals in the space. Chief among which right now is the volatility isn't very high and there are perhaps not many news coming out of them,

China, this, China, that. The market is pretty slow. So you're going to have somebody that might not get too excited about Bitcoin to want to take that first plunge. However, this is the time to be the most active. This is the time where you want to, for example,

dollar-cost average. So creating a product that fits this type of mindset and framework that allows people to essentially invest on autopilot, if you will, is one of the key ways that we're trying to position ourselves as we move forward. It's taking these types of, I don't want to say

unique offerings because they're not, but putting them in a package where it's accessible quick and you're able to onboard yourself into the ecosystem, not just Bitcoin Reserve, but Bitcoin in general within a flash. Yeah, that's key. I mean, this is absolute stack as paradise.

And like you said, people won't see or realize it. And a couple of years from now, people are going to look back and go, Oh my God, imagine if I could buy these prices. Oh, that would have been nice.

And yeah, it is just such a good time to be getting in. It really, I mean, I've, I don't know if Nish told you I've literally just sold my home to stack because I was just like, this is, this is just, I cannot, I cannot do anything else. I have to get rid of the house. I'm living out of cardboard

boxes now so that I can stack because I am that confident on this thing. And dollar-cost averaging is the way that I tend to do it because I don't think I'm smart enough to try and trade or try and time in the markets. It's just buy every day and stack it away. And I think for most people,

just that, that way to just be able to have something set up and know that you're just constantly trickling money into this thing, it gives you peace of mind. You don't have to be worrying.

You don't have to look at the price all the time and it frees up your brain to actually research and learn what this thing is capable of and the tools around it rather than constantly trading because that's what I used to do when I first came in. And I thought, oh yeah, I'm

going to be able to trade this thing and it's just going to wreck you. People just get absolutely wrecked. I mean, there's probably a small percentage of people who do okay, but it certainly wasn't me.

Yeah, trading is one of those things where it's a profession. And as you decide to go down that particular rabbit hole, you are doing yourself a disservice trying to time the market and do one thing that I will say with regards to DCA is that DCA is not for every single asset out there.

DCA has a very specific definition when it comes to specifically trading and investing. You should only dollar cost average into an asset class that consistently goes up over time historically. In this case, Bitcoin, as we know, is deflationary. So it matches that perfectly.

But for example, I know people that are like, oh, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm stacking this shit coin. I'm stacking that. It's like, no, no, no, that's, that's wrong because those eventually go to zero. You're just buying in at a higher price every single time over a long period of time.

Certainly no value. But some people, they, they just don't get it. They, they see the, you know, the kind of the quick games in the market and they have a very high time preference. I guess you can't change everybody. But if there's only one thing to take away from Bitcoin that I

have personally is it has completely changed my perspective with regards to time preference. I was always get that money, make it quick, and then I can coast. No, that's just very, very rare outside of winning the lottery or some other type of rare financial event, windfall income,

as they call it. That just isn't realistic. You take what you create in this world, in this earth, and then you make sure that a portion of that effort goes to continually securing wealth.

And wealth, in my opinion, it's not just Bitcoin. It's fresh and good access to food, water, air. That is what's also going to allow you to live for a very, very long time, not just your financial wealth. And Bitcoin allowed me to think about all that. It's like, okay, well, now I'm starting to

think about what truly wealth means to me. And when you take that perspective and you realize that the time horizon is really what's important to focus on. It changes your outlook on life.

That is such a good point that you've hit on there. This idea of, you know, thinking about all the aspects of your life and true wealth, as you, as you so rightly said, is not just about money. It's time and being able to spend time with your family and your friends and have good food

and have experiences. And yeah, it's amazing how Bitcoin opens people's eyes to this. It's amazing how people begin to think about what's truly important. And I think a lot of it is just taking that step back is just taking a step back and thinking about the way that we go through life.

And the thing is, once you realize that this is going to be around probably forever and that it's that you're able to actually put your value into something and it's not going to melt away, you start thinking, well, I do want to look after my body. I do want to make sure that I'm

going to be around for a long time. I do want to make sure that my family are not eating fiat food. They're eating real good quality stuff because the further down the rabbit hole you go, you go, well, hold on. They lied to me about the money. They lied about education. They lied about

food. They've lied about everything. So where's the truth? And then you go searching for that truth and you realize I could do so much better than I have been. I could really make my life better.

And it's an exciting journey. And there are so many other Bitcoiners with so much knowledge who are happy to share it. That it's just like, it's it's the perfect classroom. Like Bitcoin, Twitter, especially is like the perfect classroom for this.

Yeah. I mean, you said that Bitcoin opens you up to life, really, to what life really can be for yourself. Hi, Nick, you there? Yes, I am. Okay. All right. Sorry. I don't know what's happening. It keeps just showing you as offline, like constantly. And then I get it goes through patches. Sometimes

I get sort of 80, 90%, but sometimes 30% of what he's saying. And so I don't I have no idea what's happening now. I'm also sat on the router. Yeah, that's very strange. Hopefully the platform itself is able to capture everything. It will do. Yes. This is why I use this is because it records

everything locally. Then I sort of patch it together afterwards. And really, it sounds fine. But it's just it's difficult to get all of it. So we were just talking about outside of financial wealth and being able to learn about these other important aspects. Yeah, that's right. And I truly feel that

Bitcoin opens you up to really evaluating your life for what it can be. And that's not just a 95. That's not just waking up trying to make money that is going to disappear, whether on a consumer's type of lifestyle, or whether it's going to disappear through other means that are

uncontrollable to your own, such as monetary inflation. It allows you to refocus really and build something that's truly going to stand the test of time, your family, your legacy, your businesses.

And it's truly a future that I want to be in. Is there any particular rabbit hole that you've gone down since Bitcoin, you know, like health wise or something that's really changed? Yes, that's several. First and foremost, it's the nutritional aspect. I realized a fair bit ago,

even before Bitcoin, that it was critically important to understand what one puts inside their body. But I didn't understand how grossly misrepresented the entire commercial food system is and the education on what nutrition truly is. And one of my rabbit holes that I went down into

was exploring what does nutrition actually be? And I'll save everybody the journey because it is a very long yet interesting one. I settled on carnivore. And this is also part of the community I'm sure you know, and our listeners here today. But I have not felt so good in my entire life. I mean,

I grew up living on fast food, you know, hey, parents didn't have time to make a lunch before you go grab some McDonald's, go grab some Wendy's, go grab some Taco Bell. And I thought I was okay.

I felt what I thought at that time was fine. But ever since I started to focus on true nutrition and understanding not just, hey, put meat and put fat into your body, but what kind of meat, how is it raised, what is going into its body that is eventually making its way into its cellular

structure and eventually into mine. And then when I started to really dive deeper onto the sources of my food and what type of food I ate, that was another big aha moment in my life. And my wife joined me luckily for the journey. And we haven't looked back since that we've been the

healthiest that we've ever been in our entire life, frankly. It's amazing how many people are finding this. It seems that the two, the two big themes there are people in Bitcoin are fasting and going carnival. Are you doing both or are you just carnival? Yeah, I do, I do intermittent

fasting. Actually, it's OMAD. Technically, could be considered intermittent fasting. But that added with cold exposure. I don't know if you're familiar with Wim Hof at all, but that has elevated.

I am, but I'm such a pussy. I'm such a pussy. Don't do it in the shower. The shower is the hardest thing ever to do. Do it in an open body of water that has to be at eight degrees. Because I feel that if the water is 10, 11, 12 degrees Celsius, sorry for all you Fahrenheit guys,

not gonna happen here for the conversion. But if that water is in that range, if you're just cold enough to be uncomfortable, but you're just warm enough for your body's not to naturally kick in all of the brown adipose tissue and every other chemical process that happens in really cold water.

So if you're trying it for yourself, I highly suggest that you go to a really cold body of water, not shower, get your entire body up to your neck and ideally right up to your jugular vein, covered, and you will feel that it's so much easier. That's awesome.

That's the trick then. Yeah, because I've been trying, I've been trying it in the shower and it's just like the most horrible thing. And yeah, it's just horrible. Like I can train in a horrible way where I'm just absolutely go balls to the wall. I can do that. I can go through a lot of pain.

I can do certain things, but when it comes to that, I don't know what it is. I end up just like running out the shower basically, because it's so fucking cold. But yeah, I'll give that a go. I'll definitely give that a go.

It just doesn't hit the right spots all at the right time. Yeah, that's it. And then yeah, the sort of combining that with the intermittent fasting is definitely something that I've personally found has helped. I've not gone full carnivore yet.

I've tend to do like mainly meat and fish, but I'll have like broccoli or spinach or you know, whatever, I have like certain vegetables with it. But I keep getting told that that is not the way to go. Like what's your thoughts on that? Like what?

Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, we've ran the gamut and kind of experimented with different types of fruits at the very beginning, you know, before learning the concept of sugar and its toxicity and then vegetables. But then eventually we started to get into research where

specifically the human gut microbiome and it's very specific to every individual might I add is not very adept at breaking down the cellulose structure within the vegetables. So even though those vegetables are nutritionally dense in vitamins, those are not body soluble vitamins.

And if you do consume a lot of vegetables, you need to absolutely need to consume fat as well, because that's the only way that you're going to able to even extract five, two, six, seven, whatever percent it is of the nutritional content of those vegetables. And the issue for me personally

is I, for whatever reason, have not evolved the proper gut microbiome to eat lots of veggies. I mean for sorry for the graphic nature of this, but it looks like a salad bowl, you know, after I'm done going to the restroom sometimes. And that completely was eliminated when I started focusing on getting

my vitamins and nutrition from me. And by the way, it's not just like, hey, I'm going to go grab a tea bowl. No, it's organ meat. It's liver. You have to take that into consideration. And that's where the majority of your nutrients are going to come from. And when you have that, you don't,

I don't miss vegetables whatsoever. And so are you going to specific butchers or places to make sure you know you're talking about? Well, I'm eating this animal. Well, what did this animal eat?

If the animal's eating a load of shit, then it's not going to be so good for you to eat. So how do you, especially if you're traveling around, how do you find places where you know that the meat is good quality? And that is very, very tough, especially when you're transiting from one place to another.

I thankfully have my wife who is very sociable. So she'll go into a farmer's market and just start chatting it up and talking with people and asking, Oh, how does this happen? And where did you do this?

And so on and so forth. That's, I'm not that kind of person. I just have a difficult time doing that with strangers, perhaps. But she's the one that has allowed me to be able to connect with those types of individuals. And she'll drill down on pretty much, Hey, what's, what's, what's the cow's

name? Is it Betsy that we're going to be having? Where does she live? A machine is a green bed, green finish, green bed, grass bed, grass finished, all together, all of those elements. Where is the farm located? Oh, you know, what's, what's the ecology there? Like, what's the weather? And she'll

do that everywhere we go, right? She'll try her best in different languages. If that happens to be the case, but I'm very happy to have her in my life to do that for me. Otherwise, I'd be kind of shit out of luck. I probably trying to get a bow and arrow on my own. Yeah, that's true. It's

hard. It's hard to find where to go. It's a journey. I'm on a moment as well, just like making sure you get the best quality. And it's so expensive as well, like to eat well is very, very expensive.

I'm trying to find ways to like split with people, say like, Oh, you know, I'll go in and share a cow with you and you know, freeze it and do something like that. And because more and more people are going this way. Are you familiar with untapped growth or none? Yeah, no, I'm not familiar with that.

Oh my God, you have to you have to check them out. I'll give you some info offline. But yeah, they're doing some pretty amazing stuff around this. But yeah, it's so important. Well, listen, because we're having these technical issues, I could sit and chat to you all day. This has been

really interesting conversation. It's been very wide ranging and it's been cool to get to know you and find out a little bit of the personal side of you and why it is that you formed the business.

And it sounds like it's a fantastic business. I really look forward to trying it out. But I wanted to give a little bit of time if there was anything that we hadn't covered to go through and for people to find out about Bitcoin Reserve and where they go and how they use it.

Yeah, go to www.bitcoinreserve.com and it's pretty self-explanatory. We have both products available there for you. One is flash trade, which is the automated purchase option. And then concierge if you're dealing with anything over $50,000, you'd like to have a direct connection

with one of our agents. After that, the onboarding process is fairly simple for both routes. I think where I would like to leave off from the business perspective is we are the type of people you're in myself and the rest of the team that are very much aware

of what is currently going on in the world around us. And as a result, we're trying to build for that world. So while we might be a little bit slow on the uptake, rest assured that it's for a reason. And that reason is that so we can make specifically what we believe is going to be

helpful and valuable to the people that are going to be using our products in the future. Very cool. Well, like I said, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you and getting to know you.

I'd really like to get you on again. There are a few things that I wanted to get into, like the macroeconomic side of what's going on and all the crazy stuff that we're seeing in the world.

I'd love to know more about the diet side and all those kind of things, but I feel I wouldn't do it justice with the connection issues. So yeah, it would be great to do something again. But thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, open door policy anytime. Come on and

have a chat with me. I've really enjoyed it. It was my pleasure, Max. And I look forward to those future conversations. I think there's such a treasure trove of things that can be discussed between you and I. Yeah, yeah, fantastic. All right, then, mate, nice to speak to you. Take care.

You as well.