Home mining Bitcoin is Punk Rock with @JonPDiGiacomo

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 slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole. Welcome back, everyone. I hope you've had a good Christmas.

I'm still so for surfing. I apologize for these slightly shitty audio in parts here. I've done what I can to make it as good as possible. But I just have shit everywhere. It's driving me around the bend.

But anyway, today's guest is incredible. It's John, PDI, Giacomo on Twitter. He joined The Mestadel a few weeks ago. And I've been reading through his posts, looking at what he's doing with home mining.

And this guy's awesome. If you are into mining and you'd like to learn more, this is definitely an episode for you. We go into other subjects as well, including punk rock, bootlegging, and a whiskey rebellion.

John is a really interesting guy. And if you're not already following him on Twitter, I suggest you go and do it now. I really enjoyed this chat and I hope to speak to him again soon. Before we start the show, I want to thank my sponsors.

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Enjoy the show.

Hey, John, can you hear me? Hear your Macs, yeah. No, of course not, because that would be too fucking easy, wouldn't it? Hello? Hello, Mac. Ah, there you are. How you doing? I'm doing well, how are you?

Yeah, really good thanks. Sorry, it was a few minutes late. I'm so for surfing at the moment, and just, I thought I was all snazzy. I had a screen set up, and nothing's fucking working as per usual.

Best laid plans. But yeah, other than that, all good. You were getting ready for Christmas? We sure are, yeah. You know, three kids, Christmas is a big deal around here. Yeah, well that makes it fun.

It's the kids that love it. That's the bit that makes it fun. It does, you know, when it was my wife and I, Christmas kind of got boring after a while. And then you have kids to experience it through their eyes, so that's nice.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, yeah, welcome to the show, mate. Thanks, man. Nice to chat. We have had a little bit of a conversation off air, and I knew this would be an interesting conversation.

I wrote to you saying, oh, you know, what any particular things you wanted to cover, and you banged over a list to me. You're like, oh, these are just a few things we could go into, and I was like, right, this is going to be awesome.

Just a few things. I'm going to need you to keep me on track. Yeah, I'm going to talk about American history. I'm going to talk about American exceptionalism. Let's talk about the First and Second Amendment.

Let's talk about the Whiskey Rebellion. Let's talk about home mining. All right, well, let's talk about this list. Where do you want to go? And I'm like, OK, John, I think you've covered 100 topics in about two minutes.

I like it. Well, so where should we start, then? Should we start with something that I'm really, really interested in is the home mining? You mentioned to me, as it's coming up to Christmas, and it's a bit colder, and we need to keep warm, you're heating your house with miners.

That's really fucking cool. It's something that I'd like to do. I'm getting more and more inspired every day from people like you who are doing it. So yeah, what sort of scale and how long have you been doing it, and what led you into the mining scene?

I'd say, as plebs, we kind of have this duality of lifestyles, don't we? You've got your normal lifestyle. You've got your fiat lifestyle. And everybody refers to, hey, yeah, my fiat job is XYZ, or in my normie life, I do this.

I guess in my pleb life, I'm a home miner. I'm a grunt. You've got a lot of these people who are intellectuals in the space, and I know you talk about it a lot, but you want to feel stupid.

Get on Bitcoin, Twitter, and start talking, and then you're just going to run into a bunch of incredibly intelligent people. And I can't compete in that space, but I can compete in the space of doing grunt work, doing electrical work, doing hands on kind of stuff.

So you're always trying to find yourself in this world. And I think I've kind of find myself in doing the home mining gig. Maybe someday I'd like to go on a little bit further. We'll see how it goes.

But yeah, heating the house with ASICs. I think I found my niche here. And I just do air-cooled ASICs, but I just do heat capture from air. I'm not quite into immersion yet. Definitely something that I'd like to do.

For a while, I've used S9s to just heat the garage. And then the summer with the exodus of ASICs from China, everybody got real hot this summer in a number of different ways. And I said, OK, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to go big. I'm going to get off the S9s. I was running six S9s. So you're talking about 9,000 watts of power for six S9s. And so I went with S19s because I was already familiar with Bitmain.

And the trick is to hawk those telegram channels and build up trust with some of those guys on telegram channels. It's very difficult. Yeah, Nick with Kaboom Racks is on there. Scott offered his on there.

I try to stick with American guys. Mine farmed by Joe Cryptak. You just kind of start to learn these names on the telegram channels and who's trustworthy and who's not. And so I kind of gained trust with somebody.

And I picked a certain guy and said, OK, I'm going to look at his offers for a while. And the trick on there is everybody has these minimum order quantities, you know, minimum order quantity of 10.

It's like, oh, geez, you know, I'm not going to buy $100,000 from the line. And then finally, there was a minimum order quantity of three. I was like, oh, this is perfect. Yeah, three. OK, let me get let me get on my finances in order.

Let me scrap together different wallets and, you know, compile them into one and see where I'm at. Finally, you're ready to pull the trigger and it gets, oh, that's minimum order quantity of five now.

OK, yeah. All right, I'm going to do it. If it, you know, go big or go home. So I pulled the trigger this summer and it's like all I thought about all summer. How am I going to do this? So, you know, I rip everything out of my garage.

I put a sub panel in there. I, you know, wire it up all. All perfect. I liked, you know, everybody does these PDUs, these power distribution units. Not me, I hardwired everything. Everything's got its own outlet.

What's the benefit? Just I'm not, I have very, very little knowledge on electrics. Like, what's the difference there? What's the pros and cons of having it versus not? You know, as far as having them all hardwired into that instead of going with one or two plugs and using PDUs, as I like to use twist lock plugs, it's in a garage, right?

I'm not going to sit over there and pull my tractor into the garage and bump something and have the outlets pull out or have the plugs pull out. So I went with twist locks. I'm in the telecom industry.

It's something that we use. It's something that I'm used to. I don't like to copy people per se. And that's kind of what everybody says. Oh, I'll just get, you know, one outlet and put a PDU in there and plug them all in.

I got to do everything overboard. You know, I got an EMT pipe bender and, you know, put the sub panel in and sweat them, you know, sweat the two outlets down and different outlets for all the miners.

And so the trick in summertime was how do I keep these things cool? So what I did was everything just exhausts out of the garage. They're all in there and they just exhausted out of the garage.

And that gave me some time to prepare for the winter. My design for the winter was to take just two, two S19s and have them inside a server cabinet. And having them inside the server cabinet, now their intake is outside of the server cabinet.

And actually, if you've seen any of my posts, but they exhaust into the cabinet. And that allows me to kind of harness the heat in there. Otherwise, if you just like have a takeoff of one of the A6 and you say, all right, now I have, you know, whatever my delta T, whatever my change in temperature is,

you're kind of stuck with that with the A6. But if I direct the heat into the server cabinet, then I can do something with it. And so that's been my approach is now that I have the heat inside the cabinet, I can take off of that with different ducks and inline fans.

So one of the inline fans goes into my sunroom and the other one goes near my laundry shoot to make it to the second floor. And I have a high velocity heating unit upstairs in the attic. And so I just keep that on recirculate all the time.

And it manages to keep the house warm. I have not had to turn on any supplemental heat. I are gas boiler at all. Okay. And so when it gets too hot, then what would you do? Do you then just think, okay, it's too hot.

And now I pipe a proportion of this heat out, just out of the garage. Or has that not happened yet? That it has happened yet. You know, November, we had a couple of nights that were sub freezing.

And then a week later, you know, it's 50 degrees outside. So, so far, it's been pretty rudimentary of just opening up windows, which is nice because you should be exchanging about 10% of your air in your home with fresh air.

So having the windows open and having my central heating and cooling unit constantly drawing in air, then I'm drawing in fresh air from outside. So it's worked so far. I have other designs to button this up.

But just now the server cabinet and the take offs has worked well for me. Yeah, it's really interesting. It seems to be such a nice workaround for people. Basically, you have this by-product when you're mining.

A lot of people would just like, oh, let's pump it out. It's, you know, you just have to get it out away from the machines. Obviously, if you can offset the cost of your heating against using, you know, running these miners, then it makes it a lot more affordable, especially for people who have these higher energy costs.

Like we have in Europe, it's like, it's absolutely fucking ridiculous. What we pay here, compared to what most people do in the States. And so you have to get creative. You have to start thinking about squeezing every single penny you can, where you can to be as efficient as you can.

And the heating, you know, in the colder countries, like England's fucking horrible. It's so cold here most of the time. So we spend a lot of money on heating. So it just makes so much sense that you would say, well, let's try and use this heat.

Let's try and do something useful. And I'm starting to see it's a trend where more and more people, like you, are just being creative with it. And it's a trend that I'm really excited about, because it does seem to me like this is going to really help decentralize things.

Because I don't really like this huge miners coming in, just buying warehouses full of them. I mean, they're going to do what they're going to do. We're not going to stop them. It's profitable.

They're going to do it. And we're not going to compete against them either. Exactly. We're not going to compete playing the same games, because economies of scale and big contracts and all that sort of stuff.

But I kind of think like if we're really creative, we're competing in a different way, because it's like you get the KYC free sat, you're heating your home or jacuzzi or whatever it is someone decides to do.

And yeah, okay, maybe you're not quite as profitable, but you can still mine at a better rate. I think if you're smart about it, then you can buy on-base or anywhere else. And also you're learning loads, and you're meeting loads of interesting people and fucking around and supporting the network.

And it seems like a really fun, interesting part of Bitcoin, an area of Bitcoin that is only really in the last six months, where I've seen the sentiment change, I think, where more and more clubs are getting into it.

And it's something that I think where a lot of the rest of the stuff I'm seeing in Bitcoin is going a bit more corporate, a bit more suitty. It's kind of pissing me off, to be honest. I'm just like, "Oh, fuck off."

And then you've got this other little group where people like you were just going, "Yeah, I'm just heating my house. I'm just building this heating system out of these five miners that I've got."

And I've stretched myself and I've just yoloed, and I'm like, "Yes, this is what I love about Bitcoin. This is the fun part." You're not only keeping it decentralized, but you're kind of keeping the punk and cypherpunk.

We want to be decentralized. We want to be DIY. We want to do this on our own. We don't want to depend on all the... Aren't we all kind of in a way like, damn the man, kind of anti-corporate type folks?

Exactly. Well, certainly the people I respect are... Oh, mining spits right into it. Sure. Home mining fits right into that. And in heating your house, at least here in Western Pennsylvania, we're a good seven months out of the year, chilly, chilly where you're going to turn your heating system on during those seven months.

Does everyone say, "Well, you can't really make any money mining at home." Well, you can if you invest in the right machines. But if you're doing all this stuff with S9s, okay, your margins are a lot more narrow there.

But when you go with good equipment, you could say, "Okay, well, let me get on what to mine. Let me get on the brain's insight." And use those tools and say, "Okay, well, here's my cost per kilowatt hour.

Here's my cost of the equipment. Here's Bitcoin price at the time. Here's my estimate based on the current difficulty." Oh, I'm only going to make X. All right, well, here's some X factors in that.

How much did it cost you to heat your house in January and February? And how much do you spend on useless hobbies? If you go fishing, how much do you spend on fishing? If you have a sports car or something, you build engines.

How much do you spend on that? You kind of make home mining fun. For the most part, they just run and make noise. But you can do some great stuff with it. It's so interesting because it's very fast changing as well, in certainly in the home mining space.

Like I keep seeing new projects, like someone's building a box to suppress noise, and then someone's iterating on that. And then someone else is piping the heat to do something new. And then someone is starting with immersion.

And it seems like it would be hard to get bored in this space, especially when you're hobby, you're looking, and you're just watching Sats roll in. Like I can't think of a better hobby, where you combine those two things.

Yeah, it's just such an interesting space. And I really hope that it continues. I really hope we start to see more people piling in. And the thing that I find is maybe a bit of a stumbling block, I would be interested to hear your opinion on this, because it sounds like a lot of other people maybe would have backed down in your situation

where they've gone, right, you can have three, then they change it to five. A lot of people would go, "Fuck, this is a lot." I mean, it's a lot of money to be putting down.

Do you think we can ever get to a stage where we could have some type of club agreements where you could have, you know, five, 10, 15, 20, different clubs who say, "Look, we all want some S-19s, or we all want some What's Miners."

Like, "How many do you want? Oh, I want five, I want 10, I want 20, I want whatever." And come to some sort of agreement where you're buying in bulk, but the shipment goes out. You do think that could happen.

There's no question about it, you know, and it doesn't even have to be local. You could have some kind of, you know, let's have a joint multi-sake wallet. You know, let's make sure that we're trusted people known each other a long time on Bitcoin Twitter.

We're not so regionally disparate. Yeah, let's get together and have an M.O.Q. of 10. And that's the normal one that I've been seeing lately on the Telegram channels is a minimum order quantity of 10.

So, you know, that's 100,000 dollars. Yeah. That's a lot of trust. But we as Bitcoiners, we have ways of handling that. I'm not a wallet expert by any means at all. So I don't even know how somebody would configure, you know, a 10 of 12 multi-sig.

You know, maybe you'd know more about that, but there's a lot of smart people in the space that could easily figure out the logistics of-- Yeah, I think it's doable. I mean, we talked loosely about this in The Mestadel the other day, but it was more about funding small projects and how to do that and using multi-sig.

And I mean, this is very similar, because what I'd really like to see is closing the gap on this advantage that these big corporations are going to have. And they're always going to have an advantage.

But if we can close the gap slightly where we can say, and, you know, if you can perfect it, I mean, let's say you have it with 10, and it's like a group of people in The Mestadel. And we say, look, I want one or two, and you want three or four, and you want a couple and whatever.

And you put your Sats in that they get banged out to the address that you agree. Well, if it works for 10, why can't it work for 100 or 1,000, or 10,000? And then we start to be competing.

We start to be on this level playing ground, where it's like, it means that it's going to centralize less. And it is important because we are seeing it. You know, there's a lot of cheerleading going on with these huge miners.

And it is a little bit of a concern to me, because it's not hard. You get a lot of fanboys. Yes. For certain mining corporations, and I don't get that.

It is weird. It's very weird. I mean, like, I do like some of the business models, like the one, like the Compass business model, if they hadn't completely raped me as much as they do. Like, they literally had a sandpaper dildo.

And a little sand in it. A little sand in it. Sand trillos, sand in the Vaseline. You just sand everywhere. Throw sand in your eyes. Pretty much. It was rough. It was very rough and not very enjoyable.

Did you ever get a miner online through that? I did, finally. Yes. I actually have now finally got it online. Congratulations. You can stop bitching about it. No, no, I can't. I've never stopped.

I'll never stop. No, you shouldn't. My point is that the business model there, I actually think is pretty cool. And I thought it was really cool when it came out. And I almost built the trigger myself on it.

Yeah, it's great. I mean, like, regardless of what's happened to me, the idea works. The execution of the idea was terrible. But the idea is really good. And what it does, especially if done right, is it funnels people in who would never really consider mining.

And they go, well, I'll dip my toe in. I'll buy one. I'll try it. I don't have to host it. I don't have to work out how to wire this thing up. I don't have to worry about the electricity costs.

I don't have to worry about the noise. My wife's not going to leave me because of that. Like, I'll just dip my toe in. And I think it's really addictive. Like, I've seen as I go on and I see my sat streaming in, I'm like, this is fucking awesome.

I'm doing the real DCA now. This is amazing. And what it's done is made me go, OK, I'm not going to do that again with Compass, but I really want to do it myself. And so would I have gone straight to that point of, like, addiction without it?

Yeah, no, probably not. So there's definitely something there that, you know, it needs to be refined, but I think it is good. And why does hosting have to be through a large corporation? I mean, you could go back to the, to the original Meshedel theory of, you know, your group, the people that you interact with

on the Meshedels with Solax and Chishi and some of those other guys, why wouldn't it work where all your Meshedel group could say, OK, Chishi, you're in America. You're in XYZ place. Your, your cost per kilowatt hours is, is five cents kilowatt hour.

Yep, we can be profitable there. You got a little, you got a little garage. Hey, there's our M.O.Q. of 10 right there. You get 400 amp service to that garage. We'll kind of figure out how we do the costs.

Maybe you went up front the costs and you, you charge a hosting fee. Whatever's similar to what Compass is doing for the hosting fee, X amount of dollars a month or, or they take X amount of Sata.

I'm really not sure how they can figure that. You, you'd be better to speak for that. But sure, that's, that's a, a very workable model with people that you trust. You know, set, set up a little camera on there.

You, you want to, you want to watch your minor get, get some microwave popcorn and look at your minor for 10 minutes. Go ahead and do that. Yeah, a large minor. There's my baby. You can, you can have somebody put some stickers on it.

So, you know, which one's yours. Yeah. No, I love that. And you can, you can sort of dot it about a bit. You can spread the trust. You can say, well, you know, she, she's all right, but he might fuck me over.

So let's make sure that we have, you know, him, an economist and, you know, Tarantula Hoddle or whoever else and split it between, you know, you have, you have the pleb network and you have a few different options.

So, okay, if one scams, exit scams, which I think is very unlikely with the groups that we deal with. But, you know, just, just thinking,

what's the, what's the word I'm trying to think of here? Can't think too dumb for it. But, yeah, if there's. I know, I know, I know you're paying. But yeah, so I think there's definitely something there.

And I'd love to continue that conversation with the Mashedel and keep these groups tight and keep plugging away and trying to fight against that creep of the suits. And you mentioned punk rock and you mentioned a few other things in our messages.

That feels punk rock to me. That feels like, no, you've got the money, you've got the power, but fuck you, we'll find a way around. We're not, this is not traditional finance. This is not where the suits should be.

They can go fuck themselves and we win. And so, I wanted to ask you, like as soon as I saw you mentioning punk rock, was that sort of an idea or an ideal, and a sort of way of living that you had before Bitcoin?

It was not, but it was as a child. You know, I'm a kid in the 80s. I was kind of a weird kid. We moved from Pittsburgh to Florida in the early 80s. And my parents are kind of like inner city Pittsburgh, I don't want to say white trash, you know.

You could say, they're rough around the edges. Especially coming from a working class town, like Pittsburgh, you know, Pittsburgh is Steeltown. I don't, you know, as far as the UK goes, Birmingham, that was a steel town.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last town. So we moved to Florida and we were just fish out of water for a long time. So as a kid, I kind of gravitated towards punk rock. I was a skater, I was a surfer.

I really did well with punk music. And especially the hardcore scene was something that really spoke to me as a kid. You know, kind of punk starting in the 70s and stuff. You know, you had like your Urege pops and velvet underground and Ramones and stuff like that and sex pistols.

I think sex pistols were kind of, you know, a little bit corporate, a little bit contrived. I don't think it was the whole natural essence of DIY punk, but whatever, there's still something to be appreciated in that.

But then you kind of get to the early 80s and, you know, like on the West Coast, you have Black Flag. On the East Coast, you have like Bad Brains and Minor Threats. And that was kind of the beginning of the hardcore iteration of punk rock music.

And that was really, that was my jam. That's where I kind of found my groove. You know, it bands like Youth Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Chromags, Warzone. And they were kind of like more like your working class guys.

You know, there was an aspect of some of those bands, you know, like Youth Today or Gorilla Biscuits, where positivity was a big thing. You know, because punk rock was kind of a reaction to the hippie movement.

Oh man, there's peace and love. No, not for a lot of these working class folks. You know, peace and love. That seemed like a suburban, rich kid kind of thing. Well, hey, I'm from the inner city.

You know, that suburban, rich kid thing doesn't quite work out for me. So being so kind of anti-hippie, you know, there's a lot of violence. There's a lot of drug use, kind of, you know, a lot of seediness to the punk rock scene.

Well, in the 80s, that hardcore scene kind of flipped the script. And a lot of those people were super positive. Hey, I'm going to be healthy. I'm going to be fit. I'm going to get up every day and I'm going to do something.

And a spin off of that was the straight edge. Kids weren't doing drugs. I'm totally straight edge. I'm clean. I'm pure. I mean, some of those kids were so pure that they even got into like the Harry Krishna scene.

That's how pure they were. But you can see a lot of these same themes in the Bitcoin world. You know, I'm going to do it myself. Hey, you got a base? Oh, yeah, I got a drum kit. You got a guitar?

Yeah, I can scream real loud. Guess what? We're a band now. And isn't it kind of that simple, you know, to be into Bitcoin? Do I have to be an Alex Gladstein? Nope. Do I have to be a, you know, a tech genius?

It seems to be like an economist or do I have to be a Steve Barber? Nope. I sure don't. I can just be a guy who loves this stuff and wants to do it. Go out and get me a $400 S9, start mining.

I just think there's nothing more punk rock than that. It just kind of flows that that mindset's kind of always been in me. I don't know how I got it. Yeah, right. How I got from being a punk rock, you know, skater, straight edge kid to the Marine Corps.

I don't know. But you know, that spirit kind of always, you know, been in me. You know, in the punk rock scene, you had zines. I don't know how old you are, Max, but you know, back in the '80s and '90s.

'64. All right. I've aged since coming into Bitcoin. No, we're about the same age. I think you've got a couple of years on me. Okay. So that scene, you had your own magazines. Now kids would write a two or three page flyer.

And guess what? I got my own zine now. I got my own magazine. No. You know, the biggest one at the time was maximum rock and roll. And you'd flip through the pages of maximum rock and roll.

And you had all kinds of viewpoints. You know, kind of like you scroll through Twitter nowadays, and you've got all kinds of viewpoints. But the overarching thing is, hey, we're punk rock.

We're different. We're not going to do it like everybody else. And I feel that same spirit in the Bitcoin world. Well, it's like history is repeating itself, because as you said, like you had then you had the hippie scene and the piece and the love and all that sort of stuff.

And then you had the punk rock and they're clashing. Now I see you have like the woke who are sort of fluffing around, drinking lattes, preaching to the world about how they're going to fix it.

And you know, all this stuff, but they're not actually doing anything. They're not getting the hands dirty. They're doing fuck all. They're just sort of fluffing about and just telling everyone how they should be changing things.

And it's quite annoying. And so you do have this rebellious streak, which is coming through with a lot of the Bitcoiners, which I'm saying, which is like, listen, you either build something and change something and get off your ass and do something or shut the fuck up.

And we don't want to listen to you. You're boring. That's something that I really respect with. Bitcoiners is like, they do stuff. Oh yeah, okay, it doesn't always work. But at least they're trying, at least they're, you know, it's not like, oh, the world's so shit.

And, you know, there isn't everything terrible. And oh, we want to save the polar bears. It's like, okay, how? What do you like, how? It'll, if I care enough, it'll change. Exactly. And that's the thing is like, we're just going, okay, all right.

So someone like me, I'm not technical. Well, I know some technical people. So if I want to build something, then I reach out to them and I go, all right, how do I do this? And then someone like open arms or Q&A will go, all right, I know you're a retard.

I'm going to help you with this. And you know, you need your hand holding. And then I speak to someone like you, who understands the electrical stuff. And you've already built something. You actually have a working prototype of how to heat your house.

So when I get a house and I stop sofa surfing, then I have another friend that I can reach out to. And I go, look, I want to get my hands dirty. I'm done. I don't know how to do it. Can you help?

And that's what I see is really so special here. It's like, yeah, people are abrasive. And yeah, there's a fucking culture. But as long as someone's trying and they're working and there's that proof of work, everyone wants to help.

But as soon as you sniff out a lot or someone who is just here, to sort of, yeah, literally just preach, then they very quickly get cast out. And yeah, it seems very, very similar to what you're describing in that punk rock world.

Bitcoin Twitter is a trial by fire, isn't it? Very much, though. And so you mentioned, did you say Marines or you said special forces? No, I was in the Marine Corps. You were in the Marine Corps.

Not even a combat role. It was what I am today, a telephone man. OK. Can you talk me through like what that role entailed? So it was communications electronics. And my role was to repair the telecom equipment related to to wire line stuff, so voice and data from a phone or a computer

to a switchboard to a multiplexer, two fiber optics, back to another multiplexer, back to another switchboard, back to the end user. That was my role in the Marine Corps to repair and maintain the equipment.

And when I got out, that's what I did and kind of what I've done ever since. Right now, I'm in telecom construction. So for the Bell telephone system, I don't know what the equivalent in the UK is, but whatever the incumbent exchange carrier is.

The British telecom, go ahead. OK, yes, yes, of course. Yeah, that's what I do over here. So I'm in telecom construction, I put the poles up, put the fiber optics together, I connect A to B.

OK, and so when you were doing this for the military, was this on US soil? Or were you doing this abroad? What was the score there? Sure, the Marine Corps is very small. So we only, you know, generally have two bases here in the United States.

On the east coast, we have Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. And on the west coast, we've got Camp Pendleton in San Diego, and then a couple other things, you've got 29 palms, California for desert training and you've got Quantico.

But everything overseas is pretty much in Okinawa, Japan. So I did my boot camp in Paris Island, just about how half of Marines do. And did my school in 29 palms, California, it was a year long.

So I had to do a five-year stint because the school was so long. And then went to Okinawa and from there went to Korea, Thailand, came back here to Camp Lejeune and from there, I went to Norway for a spell and got out and went to work for a long distance company that no longer exists.

But it's always been pretty much in this same industry. And so was that, I'm just trying to piece now together how you then get into this Bitcoin scene. So you've got someone who, as a kid, is feeling like, I don't know whether I completely fit in here, fuck the system, I'm into my punk rock staff,

you then go into the military, you're in telecom, you're then traveling more than probably the average American is, you're seeing the world more than the average American is. Do you think that that's something that shaped you as a person to the point where

this made sense for you? Or is this something that you have to be bashed over the head with to understand? How did you come to find this path from military and telecom to Bitcoin? I certainly didn't need to be bashed over the head. I wished I had been bashed over the head

earlier. I was familiar with Bitcoin. I actually had my wife a brand of business on our second floor here. And this was in 2011, 2012, 2013. And I had heard about Bitcoin. And I think everybody kind of initially gets in it for

the greed. And isn't that one of the wonderful things that Satoshi built into it? Hey, people are going to be greedy. Let's make this an element of it with the number go up. So for me, it was money. Hey, somebody said that if you put this thing on your computer,

I didn't understand mining at the time. And it will just generate these Bitcoin. And then what you do is you go and you can go on Silk Road or something like that. And you can buy not in the drugs, still pretty much straight edge. I have a little tiny glass of wine on occasion,

but not into that lifestyle whatsoever. And so I think this was, I want to say like late 2012, 2013, people asked me this and I can't recall when, but I did have some sort of mining software on a computer. And let me get deeper into this. They used to sell

these like gold coins with, with it was like the public key on the outside. And then PlayStation coins. Okay. And I saw these things, man, I really be into that. And everyone that I saw in eBay, it's like, well, this has no Bitcoin on it whatsoever. It's just this collector's item.

It's like, Oh, that's kind of jive. All right, I'm not down with that. And I, by nature, am a skeptical person. I'm I'm very, I wouldn't say very anti government, but but kind of all we are as as big ones, we're very anti authority, at least, and especially coming from that,

that Marine Corps lifestyle, just about every Marine that gets out has a real strong skepticism of the government and authority. And they kind of bring that into you that the Marine Corps is a different organization. And so I'm a skeptical person. And I said, you know what, I don't know

what this Bitcoin thing is doing. If I had only read the white paper at that time, you know, if only I honest, I uninstalled it. I don't know what this is. I don't like it. I don't even know where that hard drive is. I don't think I had generated very much or if I had hit any blocks at that time.

All right, that's 20, 20, 20, 12, 2013, fast forward to 2017. And now you're seeing Bitcoin go up. What was the high in 20, like 14,000, I think it was like $17,000 or around that, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And I said, okay, that's it. I'm I'm back in. I'm back into this stuff. Bitcoin would enter mixed with shipcoinery at that time. Everybody has to admit to this. Yeah. You're telling me you were you were a maxi from from get go. I'm going to call you out on

it because there's a lot of people who claim that. Yeah, the truth is the only ones who get away from it is having a hardcore Bitcoiner who's a maxi who literally pounds them into submission and abuses them if they even think the word shitcoin. But other than that, everyone does. I dabbled.

I got wrecked. Everyone does. The maxis are like the drill instructors of the Bitcoin community. They'll put your ass right back in the shape. And I and I love it. And I love them for it.

And I just want to be just like so this was probably you know, 2017, 2018. Okay, greed is still my my primary motivation. You know, I we had two kids at the time. My wife works sometime. You know, our main goal has always been for her not to work. Sometimes she goes to work. She does hair

just to get out of the house kind of thing but never depend on her her income. And at work over time was probably kind of short at that time. I said, Okay, I'm going to get back into this.

And you discover him in at that time, you couldn't really exchange fiat for any of the shitcoins. You had to first buy Bitcoin and then get separated from your Bitcoin into the shitcoin. And you know, everybody's going, well, you know, Bitcoin's only going to go up by by, you know, 2x but

shitcoin, you know, w is going 10x, man. You got to go to the moon, brother. So I said, Okay, now let me watch this shitcoin. Nothing. Nothing's happened. But wait a minute. Look at Bitcoin. Look what it's doing. Look how steady it is. Look, look at its adoption. Look,

look at its, you know, people revere this thing. And I'm exchanging my precious Bitcoin for this shitcoin. Now fuck that. I'm, I'm done with all this stuff. And then when you really start to understand proof of stake and proof of work, I really think that's kind of one of the easiest

things to, to purely orange pill a shitcoiner is just the proof of work concept. And now I'm not talking about all these, these copycat proof of work, you know, cryptocurrencies, the real one.

So I'd say my maximalism probably started 2019 to where I became a real maxi. And that's when I started mining with S9s. And I've just been going ever since. And my journey to Bitcoin Twitter probably started this summer because you get to the point where nobody wants to hear about

Bitcoin anymore. But I want to talk about Bitcoin. Where do I find these people? And I always hear, you know, it's the guys on TFTC talk about Bitcoin, Twitter, Bitcoin, Twitter, this Bitcoin, Twitter, that's okay. Well, I got, I got to get down with Bitcoin, Twitter. And I'm so glad that

I did. My wife's not as glad. But I am glad. Yeah, I bet she's not. My misses is very similar. She can get quite bored with my, with my chat. But at the same time, you know, if you're passionate about something and you learn to reel it in a little bit, then it's manageable. I think it's the first,

it's like that first bit where it's really clicking that's hard, because you just can't shut the fuck up about it. And you can't go to a dinner party or we'll go anywhere without, you know, someone says anything. And you're like, I don't agree with that, because then you've got to go

into the whole fucking Bitcoin rant and have the whole world's fucked. And everyone's just like, Oh, who's this lunatic? So I think over time, you just have to reel that in and then go to garage and build for my family parties, my, my brother in law, he'll come right to me. And he

wants to hear me talk about Bitcoin. And he'll actually he'll actually nod and come back. And interestingly enough about him is he's a software engineer. So he kind of gets all this stuff. And he worked for this, he, let me think about his his career, he worked for like Raytheon, a defense

contractor here. And then he worked for Google in Pittsburgh. And then actually, because of, of kind of a woke culture there, he gets booted out of Google and goes to IBM. He realizes IBM is never going to build anything. Let me look around, he worked for Uber for a while, but this isn't,

this is an accomplished, you know, software engineer kind of guy, he gets recruited for this, this, I'm just going to say blanket like cryptocurrency type company. And they're trying to find use cases for shit coins. So at that time, I kind of, you know, I was already, you know, kind of a

maximalist and explained to him, here's shit coinery, here's Bitcoin. And he's like, you know what, I don't really understand any of this, but I don't have to because of the, I guess the things that he's programming, it wasn't very specific to, to any of that stuff. Well, his company gets bought

out by Coinbase. So now he works for the devil. It's interesting that, that me, just some dumb shit grunt, you know, was his kind of first introduction to, to this space. And now he is in a role at

the largest exchange in the world. Isn't it? It's Coinbase, the largest? I think it must be. I'm sure it still is. Yeah. I know that they hold a lot, especially with the institutional stuff. And I'm pretty sure they're still the biggest. And then you've got like the crackers and these kinds

of guys, but I'm pretty sure they're the biggest, the biggest into shit coinery, at least. Yeah, it's, I don't know, a lot of people say like, oh, they're really dumb, like, how can they not get this? They must get it. They just realized that there's a lot of money to be made out of the

shit coins. Sure. And that's kind of the thing that why none of us should trust in any of these institutions is because, well, that's their attitude. They're not maximalists. They have no principles. They're going to do whatever they can do to make money. Hey, which is fine. I'm the

capitalist have added. Yeah. But we don't live in a capitalist world. We live in a crony capitalist world. So they're going to, they're going to make whatever deals with, with ever, whatever government they're going to sell out whoever they have to sell out in order to survive. So therefore,

they can't be trusted. And the same thing can be applied to large mining institutions or large mining corporations. And you guys may have all be the most awesome maximalist dudes ever. But when the government comes knocking at your door, you're going to save your own skin. And that's

always the way it's going to be. You know, back again to history repeating itself. The little guy is going to be who they go after. And the big guys are going to be under the protection of the government, or whatever other institution. Yeah, and like you say, it's, it seems there's

quite a split in terms of there's a lot of people here who are here for the money. And that's fine. You know, that's part of the whole incentive model. Like you said, with Satoshi's laid out. He understands human psychology, obviously very, very well. It's brilliant. Like the way that it's

laid out is fantastic. But you have to accept that you are going to have these people who are here just for the money, the coin bases, some of the bigger miners. And they will just go along with whatever's easiest, the path of least resistance is what they will go for. And in many ways, like,

I agree with it. You know, I've said a few times here, like a lot of what Sailor said, and some of these guys say like kind of pisses me off. I'm just like, I don't know, I feel like it winds me up a bit. But at the same time, I do understand why they do it because they're here for the money.

And so they're going, what's the path of least resistance? Let's annoy us little people as I can. Let's get as much funding as I can. Let's play the game in the fiat world as much as I can to get as much Bitcoin as I can. I get that. But what I respect more is the small group of Bitcoin is

who are like, no, fuck that. Like, no, I will not bend at all. No, I'm not going to do the ESG stuff. No, I'm not going to play your games. No, I'm not going to pretend to be woke. No, no, no.

That I think without that group, this thing loses its soul. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's the engine that keeps it going. And Michael Saylor can go ahead and be a polished front man for the movement.

He can go there and talk to normies and talk their talk or institutional investors and talk their talk. Go ahead. Because if we were to go to these people, we'd scare the shit out of them.

Yes, true.

If you've ever seen that on Twitter, the crypto couple, they kind of do these videos where the wife acts like she's kind of the rational one and the husband comes at her all in this maxi talk.

They do a good job of kind of breaking down what we look like sometimes. And I can just see that being scary to a lot of people. Michael Saylor comes out, talks to Tucker Carlson, you get a few thousand people to go, hey, wait a minute, what the fuck is really going on here?

Because as we all know, Bitcoin is just a path to go down a rabbit hole where you're going to intersect other rabbit holes, which is why all of us are so anti-authority, which is why all of us are so anti-government, which is why all of us are so usually so anti-institution, we were kind of

who's anti-vax Bitcoiners, for the most part, not anti-vax, but at least pro-choice. Who saw through all the COVID bullshit? Who sees through the world economic bullshit? Who sees what China's really doing and who sees all these Western nations cow-towing to everything

that China is? We do it. We see it all. We are based. Did Bitcoin do this to us? Or did we gravitate to Bitcoin because we already had that kind of mindset? I think it's both. When I speak to someone like you and I hear your previous interests, the way you've gone through life, your path through life,

let's say, I can instantly be like, yeah, you've traveled, you've seen the world more for what it is than the average person, you've been interested in counterculture, you've seen the bullshit and the laughing, and then you've found this thing, and you've got an understanding of this thing,

and you've gone, that fuck you part of you is primed and ready to go, and I do see that in the majority of what I would class is like, Bitcoin is, I'd want to go and have a drink with. People who are like, yeah, they're cool. They're people who are really here down for the cause, and I respect

them. I think that it's like, yes, you're primed ready, then part of it is probably luck that we, at the right time, come into this, and we can understand it because of our life experiences, and then we stick around through the bear markets and the bullshit and the craziness,

because we're like, no, there's something not right. It's that like matrix thing, isn't there? You know there's something wrong, you feel there's something wrong, you're not sure what it is, and then it all starts clicking into place, and once it does, then you can't step away from it,

because you're like, I've experienced it in 80% drawdowns where I'm like, well, this is actually not very pleasant. It really is quite painful, but then after a while, you're like, I actually don't care, because what's the alternative? The alternative is literally slavery,

and I refuse to allow that, and so can I literally sell? Well, not really. What am I doing when I sell? I'm plugging back into the matrix. Yeah, exactly that. I know this isn't real steak, but it tastes so good.

Exactly, and you can't do that. You know, once you get to this stage where you start to unravel the cobes stuff, you start to unravel the world economic forum, you start to see a very obvious path, and you see that people are blindly walking towards it, and especially if you have kids and

you have family and you have loved ones, you're like, no, fuck that shit. If I was single and just thinking, well, I don't want to have a family, and I just was a bit tired of it, I can imagine, you know, some people would maybe say, I'm just going to fuck off to a desert island,

just be left alone, and just live out the rest of my days in peace, because it is tiring. I think if I were single, I'd be the most insane maxi in the world. Go off the deep. I would live on a homestead full of solar panels. I'd have garages all over

the place with, you know, filled to the ceiling with miners. I'd be insane. You know, my family, and who knows, I'd probably be bankrupt because of it in a short period of time. You know, having a wife, having kids, what does it keep things in perspective? But it also gives you

the will to fight, because you're not just fighting for yourself. Yeah, a lot of us would go to that desert island, just like, you know what, I'm out of here, I'll opt out. You want to do a fly over and me go ahead. I don't care. But you know, you're not just fighting for your wife, for your kids,

it's for your grandkids. And of course, when we completely destroy all freedoms in the world, you know that your grandkids are going to feel that. We all want to pass on the good things that we have living in previously living in relatively free Western nation. That's a hell of a legacy.

We have to be thankful for what we've had. And like, I do get annoyed, really fucking annoyed with what I'm seeing now. But I also think I've grown up in a pretty fucking good country. I've had a lot of freedoms. Like, no, everything has gone the word, want it in life. And, you know,

no, everything's been perfect. But, you know, I walk the streets pretty safely. I generally can get food. I do consider myself lucky the way that I've grown up. You know, I was still, when I was a kid, I was still running around and playing with sticks and riding a bike and like,

you know, I had a pretty, pretty like fun childhood, like just fucking around in the woods and stuff like that. And I think, you know, we have to be appreciative of what we had. But at the same time, we have to look back in history and say, well, when was the last time that we had a real fight?

That really, really mattered. Like, one where we're talking about freedom or slavery. And I think, you know, maybe some people will say that's hyperbolic to be thinking that way. But I think, actually, it's pretty realistic. And we've been calling it for a couple of years now. And

it's all played out the way we've said. So I think it would be reasonable to say that we're right on the way that the world's going. And so then it's okay, be thankful for what you've had.

And Western civilization has allowed us to have these freedoms. But now, I'll be fucked if my kids aren't going to have it. And so then comes the fight. But the fight has to be smart. You know, you can't, you're going up against the most powerful governments, militaries in the world.

They've got unlimited resources. You have to go about this in a really smart way. That's what Bitcoin's done. It's got an incredible incentive model. It's set up in such a way that it's resistant to a lot of the trickery that they would try and pull. And I think that was all in the

design. But what I am seeing and it's concerned me about myself is recently, with all this COVID hysteria, it's distracted me, really distracted me for the last six months to the point where, literally yesterday, I went through and I just blocked all the keywords, you know, I blocked.

People saying, I'm going to, I'm blocking all that COVID vaccine I'm done, I'm blocking it all. Yeah. And do you know what? It's so much better. Because for the last six months, yeah, it is. Because we know, like, I've got to the point where we know, we know the game they're

playing, we know what they want, we know it's wrong, right? We know we're not going to comply. So what I found is, I got to like 80% of my scrolling, my doom scrolling was just like horrific shit happening in Australia. Exactly. And I'm looking through all of that and like 80% of my

feed is that. And then I just thought to myself, no, we have a tool here that genuinely gives us a chance to beat all this bullshit. We didn't have it before. We have it now. We spent all this time trying to wrap our heads around it and understand it. We spent all this time building communities

of people who can work together. And now we've got to fight the beast that's funded by the system that this destroys. So we're going to just doom scroll and say, Oh, fucking hell, this is terrible, blah, blah, blah, like there's not a lot we can do other than just not complying and taking our

economic capital, our time away from that system. Let's continue to build. And so that's why I've now blocked everything. I'll still continue to talk about it. I still argue with people about it.

I still refuse to wear a mask. I still argue with every security guard every day, because I would never comply. It no matter how annoying it is. But I do think that maybe it's we're on that edge, like a dangerous tipping point where some of the smartest people in the world who are working on

Bitcoin are starting to get distracted. They're starting to lose focus on what really matters. And I would like to see that flip the other way a little bit. And maybe that's controversial to a lot of Bitcoiners, but it is what I'm seeing. And I do see it as a bit of a threat, actually.

I don't think it's a bad idea. You have your sanity to worry about. But you also have in telecom, we've got this term called signal to noise ratio. I don't know how widespread that term is in other industries. It's very Bitcoin. Yeah. But yeah, so you're adjusting your signal

to noise ratio with filtering all that stuff out. But you also don't want to lose the fire in your belly to fight that. And sometimes I need a little bit of a reminder. I had said something on Twitter to Spectre. It's like I9 Spectre or something. He had posted a lot of the riot stuff in Europe.

And that's something, if you're following normy news, which I don't really, but in the states, that you're not seeing all these riots in Denmark or London or the whole Green Pass stuff in Italy, or even the Australia stuff, even though it seems like they've done a pretty good job of

nailing a lot of that down. And it keeps me going because I'm fighting my own fight here. Well, it always says, well, how come we don't have riots like that? And I said, well, we don't have the Green Pass. We still go into the store without a mask, just like we've done pretty much

this entire time. I live in southwestern Pennsylvania. It's a relatively suburban/rural community. No working man. Nobody on a construction site. Nobody working out on the road. No farmer has been wearing a mask or worried about any of this stuff whatsoever. So not only do you not have

normy news reporting on the fight against it, you've got a bunch of people out here saying, well, I'm going to live my life. Whoever I want to live in. And sometimes I need that little bit of reminder to the fight that I'm in. Because I also don't want to feel alone in the fight.

The organization that I work for, they had a Vax mandate. They said, yep, Biden administration doesn't want federal contractors. We do federal contracting with the government. We're going to have a vaccine mandate. Now, my union, take it or leave it, whatever the hell they're worth,

they had a couple meetings, went golfing a few times and came down and said, yeah, everybody's just going to have to get vaccinated or you're going to submit a religious exemption. And I can go into that here in a little bit. And I said, no, I'm not doing that. You can go ahead

and get rid of me. I'm not telling you I'm Vax or not Vax. I'm not submitting a religious exemption, even though I do believe it comports with my personally held religious beliefs. I'm not doing it. So it's kind of nice to be reminded that there are other people around the world.

My brothers and sisters resisting this kind of tyranny. So what happened is the state of Georgia and a few other states had sued the federal government and in the Vax mandate. I said, okay, yeah, we're going to drop it now because there was a court

case and they had deemed it illegitimate, let's say. And I want to say that was like two weeks ago. It's like, okay, I got a new lease on life. Listen, Max, I'm nine years away from retirement.

And I'm talking about a good union job retirement where I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the United States pensions, that's kind of a thing of the past. They'll give it like a 401k contribution, but having a straight up pension. I still have a pension. In nine years,

I leave with my pension, my medical, the whole nine yards. All I got to do is make it nine years. And you're damn for sure that I'm willing to give that up for my own autonomy. So it's nice to be reminded why I do it, keep a fire in my belly. Does it increase the signal to noise ratio?

Yeah. Should I take advice from you and kind of maybe filter it out? I should, because I can see it affecting my mood. Well, I respect that. I mean, the fact that you've stood up and risked it for what you believe in, that's what makes someone a real Bitcoiner for me.

But yeah, like I said before, I'm not saying ever stop doing that, ever stop holding your ground, ever stop fighting. But I just think that with me, I was having like, what really put me onto it, I was having a conversation with open arms the other day. And like he's vastly more technical

than I am like, you know, he's God like technical. And I'm just like, it's a fucking smart and a lovely guy as well. And he's talking about, you know, we're chatting away. And I was like, I've always felt dumb speaking to you open arms, but today I feel at least twice as dumb. And it's

either that you've got twice as smart, or it's because I've been not trying to catch up as hard as I normally do. And so it's like, I was thinking, all right, when I used to dedicate my time, where would it go? And it was like almost 100% of Bitcoin keeping up with the technical staff,

what's new, what's happening with lightning, what's happening with multi-sig, what's happening with this project, what's happening with that. And I was like, freakishly obsessed with it to the point where like, I might not understand exactly how to do something, but I would know the person

who would, and I could work it out, you know, whatever it was pretty much. And then I realized that like the last six months, probably rather than 100% of my time going to Bitcoin, it was like 20. And the rest was going to arguing over COVID, you know, trying to get all the facts of how it

was wrong, and how this doctor has said this, and this scientist has said that, and then trying to argue with normies. And I thought, I've done this for years with Bitcoin, I've argued with normies about Bitcoin, and tried to get them to buy the years, and they've ignored me. And it was a

fucking waste of my time. And I've said on the show so many times, I wish I had just not bothered, I should have just gone and earned some money, ignored them, let them have fun staying poor, and stacks that. And now I'm doing it again, about a virus. And no one's going to fucking listen to

me about this either. So what am I doing? And so I'm trying to now make a conscious effort to be like, right, try and keep up with these people, try and understand more, like improve my security, learn more about mining, find ways to use Bitcoin as the tool to win. And I do think it's our best

tool, like, you know, and all the things around it, open source software, you know, changing to Linux, using messaging apps, so that we're not surveilled, like all these things are, in my opinion, more important than me speaking to my brother-in-law and trying to tell him, don't get a jab,

because he's not going to fucking listen anyway. No, you can't save them all. No. And a lot of times, I'm not even, I don't even want to save anybody. I just want to argue. Sometimes I just like that. But what you're right, you need to find that kind of zen enlightenment, you know, it's like the

clouds part, and there's a sun, and there's Bitcoin, and, oh, you know, yes, I can leave all that behind me and be a free man. Yeah, I'd like to do that. And perhaps the potential of me losing my job, and in Vaxmand, it's maybe that's what I need to to achieve that kind of zen enlightenment.

Because otherwise, I'm just going to be in the system for the next 10 years as an outcast, as a guy who's trying to exist in both worlds. And it's back to that kind of duality again. It's like, well, you got your Bitcoin lifestyle, and you get your normy lifestyle. Maybe I just want

that kind of zen enlightenment Bitcoin sovereign lifestyle to be me, instead of existing in these two worlds, where I'm on Bitcoin Twitter, scrolling for 10 minutes, and I look up and I go, Oh, yeah, I'm surrounded by idiots. So maybe the mandate thing is exactly what I need to kind of get over

the hump there, maybe. And you mentioned this whiskey rebellion, and, you know, again, history repeating itself, this kind of makes me think of that. Should we go into that a little bit? Yeah, we can definitely do that. And I'm going to be honest with you, Max, here, I wrote some notes

about about the whiskey rebellion, because I'm one of these people that I can memorize facts in my head. But then when it comes out of my mouth, I have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah, the whiskey rebellion was in 1217 in Florida. Why did you say 1217 of Florida?

Idiot? No, it's a fine. No, it's a fine. I won't be able to pull you up on anything anyway, because my knowledge is not true from like watching one film once. So, yeah. So let's go back to the founding of the United States, and the Battle of Yorktown happens,

and then you've got the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, and the United States is in serious debt. They're about $54 million in debt at the time, and that's about $2 trillion today, which seems kind of funny, because it will have a

$2 trillion bill here in the United States, at least, and if you're like, oh, yeah, that was third quarter. What was this $2 trillion bill that we had? And so, now they're trying to figure out how do we pay for this. Each state has it had its own debts, too, and they had like 25 million

in debts for all of the states. And Alexander Hamilton, who, after I'm done telling the story, you'll not think that the Hamilton musical is so charming, because the guy was a real prick.

I've heard, though. Yeah. A lot of the federalists were pricks at the time. Him, John Adams, they wanted a large central government that fight of states' rights or disparate peoples to rule themselves. It has been fought against, at least here in the United

States since its founding. So, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, come up with the idea. Okay. We're going to compile everybody's debt together, and we're going to issue bonds, and then we will pay for these bonds with an excise tax and tariffs, too. So, one of the excise taxes they came up with was

whiskey. All right. Let's move on to Western Pennsylvania. Western Pennsylvania, at that time, was more frontier territory. So, you got Pennsylvania, Western Pennsylvania, and then to itself, you have West Virginia and Virginia. West Virginia, at that time, was part of Virginia.

A lot of this area was frontier territory. The only city you had at the time was Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh was more of kind of still kind of like a frontier town. Not too long previously, it was actually a French fort and kind of headquarters for the fur trade along the Mississippi.

So, an excise tax really affects these kind of people here, because what they were doing is they would grow their corn, they would grow their grain, they'd sell what they could locally, and then they would convert all of their corn and grain into whiskey. Okay, whiskey. Now,

I can get whiskey to the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, I can get whiskey over the Appalachian Mountains and get it to some of the eastern markets there. And in addition to that, I can use whiskey as local currency. I'm not exactly going to go around hauling 100-pound

sacks of grain everywhere. So, this was an important part of the local economy. Now, you have an excise tax, and what they were doing was it was nine cents on a gallon of whiskey excise tax. At that time, a gallon of whiskey only cost 10 cents, so it was a 100% loss.

Now, it wasn't a loss for a lot of the larger whiskey distillers on the east coast. One of the largest ones was George Washington, as a matter of fact, because what they would do is they just pay a flat fee. Say, "Okay, a flat fee will just produce as much whiskey as we want."

So, of course, you can understand, here's a lot of revolutionary war vets and any soldier that's ever fought in a war, all they really want to do is go home and be a farmer. That seems to be a common theme throughout history. So, a lot of these revolutionary war vets say, "What did I just

fight for? Didn't we just fight for a no taxation without representation?" And yes, they were representative in Congress, a constitutional assured representative for public. But now they feel out way out here, even though they have representatives, that they're not being

listened to. Nobody will not understand that you're destroying our local economy. And whiskey rebellion wasn't the only rebellion at that time. You also had a Shays rebellion, and that was in Maryland. And that was a bunch of, once again, revolutionary war veterans who weren't getting paid.

As a matter of fact, they were getting taxed so hard that debt collectors were confiscating their land. So, this was a common theme to say, "Hey, we're pretty used to fighting tyranny. It just so happened that tyranny was previously King George. Now it's our own representatives."

So, the first thing they did was just not to pay the tax whatsoever. And so, tax collectors would come around and say, "I'm not paying the tax. Okay, here's your citation," or whatever. And they would go to local magistrates. And the local magistrates were like, "Oh yeah, I'm throwing

this out. I'm a whiskey distiller myself. We're not doing any of this." So, of course, that gets back to the east coast, and Hamilton is super pissed off about this. Come back here. Things are getting a little bit worse. They're taking tax collectors, and there was a guy named Robert

Johnson tax collector. And they tarred and feathered him and had him ride a pole through town. Another, they sent some cattleman out to do some tax collecting, and they tied him to a tree for like five days. It was getting pretty abusive here. So, this goes on for about two or three years.

This is from 1791 to 1794. And finally, Hamilton says, "Hey, George Washington, George Washington's president of the time. You've got to do something about this. We need to show a force. We just created this republic. We can't have it separate the second that we get it created.

We can't have these backwood rednecks out there in western Pennsylvania." And this wasn't just western Pennsylvania, mind you. This was in Maryland. This was in Kentucky. But a lot of the people from Kentucky, in those parts of Appalachia, they had relationships with the Spanish. They could

get on the Mississippi River. They could get their stuff down to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. They kind of had more of a way out. They resisted it as well, but you couldn't exactly go marching from Philadelphia to Kentucky at that time. It wasn't something that you could do. But you could

get to western Pennsylvania pretty well. We had the National Road from Maryland. It kind of cuts through western Pennsylvania. So, Washington gets together a 13,000-man army. This is about the size of the army that he fought the Revolutionary War with. This was no joke. And the reason he was

able to get a lot of support, at least from officers is because before this whole debt deal was announced, Washington, Hamilton, Clinton, the governor of New York, they all bought all these old war bonds previous from whoever. They comb the countryside and say, "Hey, we're going to buy the bonds from

you. No one damn well at these things. We're going to come to fruition and they were going to get these bonds for pennies on the dollar." So, now you're saying, "Hey, if we are able to initiate this excise tax, everybody's going to get rich off all these bonds." So, you get all these officers

together. They actually had to conscript the rest of the army. They had riots in Hagerstown, Maryland, because nobody wanted to go to western Pennsylvania and beat up a bunch of drunk farmers.

So, they finally get this army together. They're marching through the middle of Pennsylvania. There were actually some war crimes committed at the time and an Irish worker was bayoneted. Some kid was shot. Anytime you're going to march a lot of soldiers through something,

there's going to be civilian casualties. At the same time that they're marching on the way in western Pennsylvania, they're having more riots. They're going to tax collectors' houses, magistrates' houses. They're doing all kinds of rebel rousing, which is understandable.

They're outside of Pittsburgh, and pretty much at the gates of Pittsburgh. What they wanted to do was to really flex their muscles here. We're going to march on Pittsburgh. The people at Pittsburgh send out barrels of whiskey and get them drunk and say, "Hey,

we'll give you this whole bunch of whiskey. We'll just let you march up and down the streets." And all the farmers are like, "Yeah, okay, we'll do that." At the same time, Washington actually didn't lead the troops from Philadelphia. He had handed it off to the light horse, Harry Lee,

which was generally of the Civil War's father, as a matter of fact. They get to Pittsburgh. Most everybody kind of goes to the winds. They get a couple people, try them. They end up trying to hang two guys, and Washington pardons them. A little bit later, a couple years down the road,

people failed at the Whiskey Rebellion, but they went to the polls and voted the federalists out of office. And the excise tax was repealed by Jefferson anyhow. So, no harm, no foul. Now, we kind of bring that to Bitcoin, though, and we bring that to sovereignty.

And you kind of have this comparison, like you were saying before, well, what do we do if we have to fight? Do we resort to violence? Or do we resort to something peaceful? Because they have the guns. They have the money. They have the resources. We do not. We're just trying to

protect our Bitcoin. We're just trying to protect our right to be involved in this. And they want to get rich up. There really is. And you could go all throughout history and see these same parallels.

You know, a lot of times we as Bitcoiners, we love Lord of the Rings. We love the Matrix. We love Star Wars. We love those kind of pop culture revolutionary things, because as humans, how do we speak to each other? We speak in metaphor. We speak in stories. It's just the best way to

communicate with somebody. And a lot of times we'll make all these memes with Lord of the Rings, and the Matrix, and stuff like that. But you don't have to. You can go all throughout history.

And you can say, Hey, this is us. And guess what? We want like take heed. It's okay. We're going to win. We really are the righteous ones. Is it true that they're called bootleggers, the people who are moving the whiskey? Yeah. Is it true that they were the first people to start tuning cars and

start adjusting them so that they could get away from the police, and this sort of forced technology to evolve in that regard? That is correct. Yeah. The the moon, the moon shiners and bootleggers, they had to make sure that they could out, they could outrun the cops,

they could outrun the feds. It's the inspiration for for for Duke's a hazard. It's the inspiration for for NASCAR. A lot of those early NASCAR people were were bootleggers and rum runners and moon shiners. You know, here's an interesting thing about about Appalachia is it's rugged. I said to

somebody on Twitter today, I can see why so many so many Scots and Scots Irish came to Appalachia. It's a miserable place in a way. It's very it's very mountainous. I imagine it's probably not as windswept as Scotland is, but it's a it's a it's a rough place. Yeah. So yeah, that that is the

inspiration. As a matter of fact, you know, you hear Jack Daniels and Kentucky whiskey and such. A lot of those recipes actually came from Western Pennsylvania and those people that it was running from from from prosecution from Washington took their recipes and went to Kentucky. It was an

easy place to go. As a matter of fact, one David Bradford was one of the kind of the more wealthy rebel browsers here. And he's the one that got a lot of these people up in arms and convinced them to do violent things. Finley, McFarland, some of these other whiskey or billion people, but they

weren't so set on violence because it really it really isn't the way you're going to get crushed. And isn't that the way that that we should fight as well? Listen, there's a time and a place for for violence. But for the most part, there let's not go that route. You know, you're talking about

when's the last time we had an issue like this to fight? You know, as far as you know, our generation and our parents and grandparents, you know, being being World War II. Hey, what what do they call the like World War II people in the United States? We call them the greatest generation. What do they

call them? What do they call them in the UK? World War II vets? Hmm. I think it might be the same thing. I don't know. I don't know what we would call them. Okay. I think it might be the same, though. All right. But you take the greatest generation. You know, who do they have to fight

the biggest bad guy that ever existed, the Nazis? That's a righteous fight, man. You know, in the 60s and 70s, the boomers, what was their fight? Okay, civil rights. Yeah, man, that is righteous. That's the way to be. Civil rights is the way to go. What's our fight for our generation?

You know, as kids growing up in the 80s, it was the biggest fight was getting the Nintendo to work. You know, blowing in the cartridge. We haven't had a fight yet. It was a real challenge. I don't know our struggle. You're right, though. I mean, it just hasn't happened yet, but we can see the

beginnings of it. Oh, I think it's here. I mean, it's here, but for a very small percentage of the population are awake to the fact it's happened because it's much less obvious. You know, it's not like you have the Nazis and you've got to hit them there. Okay, there's the bad guy. It's like,

well, hold on. Who's the bad guy? Because the bad guy is the one who's the good guy, aren't they? Or are they? I don't know. And everyone's confused. No one can put their finger on what the fuck is going on. It's like, it seems that one of their strategies is to just confuse people and throw

out different ideas constantly and get people to be fearful constantly, rather than just like a direct fight. It was quite interesting of what you were saying with this whiskey rebellion and what we're seeing with Bitcoin is like, well, you had a group of people who are saying, well,

we're going to get our hands dirty. We're going to fight. We're going to just do what the fuck we want anyway, because we know it to be right. And we're going to build these stills or whatever you'd call it in our garage or in a barn or whatever we're going to do, and we're going to work together,

and we're going to ship it out. Well, it feels quite Bitcoin to me. You know, you've got a load of mining rigs in your garage, you're mining away. I'm sure most of the government officials would not be very happy about that. If they could stop it, I'm sure they would. And we probably will get

to that stage. Yeah, I think we will. And you're saying, oh, well, I'm not going to have this jibby jabby in my arm. And fuck you, I'm not doing that. And they're not happy about that either.

And so it might be the beginnings of a fight and the enemy's not so obvious, but there's definitely parallels there. And it seems that, you know, technology was driven through necessity of we need faster cars, we need to hide the whiskey, we need to be smart about how we ship this stuff,

how we move this stuff. And so necessity forces that innovation. And that's definitely how it feels now is like there is necessity. If you want freedom, you have to start fucking thinking, mate.

And well, that's what I'm saying, you know, and you don't see it really anywhere else. So that's part of the reason it's so exciting. You know, another thing that people did at that time, and this was a kind of revolutionary war carryover, was they had something called a Liberty Pole.

And they would basically just throw up a piece of timber and people would come by and attach leaflets or letters or or ribbons with basically their gripes written upon it or their musings or their thoughts. And I kind of compare the Liberty poles to to Bitcoin's Twitter. Yeah.

Early social media, maybe by the end of this conversation, people will refer to to Bitcoin as whiskey instead of corn. It's it's really a better and a better analogy. Yeah, but you make whiskey from corn. You do. And you may and so maybe the corn is electricity.

Yeah, corn's electricity. Yeah, sat to the whiskey. And yeah, and we all have a great level or many of us have a great love of whiskey. So I think that works pretty well. At that time, whiskey was a poor man's drink. Could you sip some sats?

Maybe we need some of the smarter guys to figure that out for us. Yeah, we need to, yeah, we need some people to work that out. But there's something that throw it, throw an open dime and I get to get the essence of sats. Yes, yes, I can taste it. Yeah, definitely. Well,

look, mate, like I said to you before, I keep these to about an hour and a half. We've covered loads of different topics. It's been really cool to get to know you. And I could sit and do this all over again. And I think we probably will have to because there were some topics that we didn't.

Yeah, we didn't cover. But yeah, I wanted to say, you know, firstly, thanks for jumping on the pod. Thanks for coming and joining us on the mastodel. I'd love it if on our next recording, we're not recording our next, what's it called? Spaces, which is tomorrow. If you're about, yeah, I will do my best.

I'm on Christmas vacation, so I'm basically my wife's slave.

But I definitely would love to jump on there. I like talking to you guys. That would be awesome. And yeah, we'll have to get you back on. But you know, thanks for what you're doing. And I love this rebellious streak. I love this punk rock idea of you building

any garage. And I'll be reaching out to you when I finally get my garage set up. But yeah, it's been awesome. I really enjoyed it. I'll definitely give you whatever advice I can. It's been great talking to you. Cool. Take care mate. We'll speak soon. You do really. Bye-bye.