BTC, Crypto, and Tokens

“First one is, you have to be young or in college. Yeah, I think there's, college students are more available than those who are married with kids and with high demanding jobs. So maybe it's a little easier to go after, but it's definitely not just for college students. So college students may have a little bit more time, may even be able to disciple more people at the same time. But if you've got a lot of young kids at home, if you're in a job, and you can only engage with maybe one person over a number of years, great. At the end of the day, it's not about production primarily, but about faithfulness and moving forward in relationship.”

“Number two, you don't have time. But we all have the same amount of time, right? No matter where you live, no matter what culture you live in, no matter how many kids you have, you have the same amount of time. So that's a little bit of a tongue in cheek answer, but it's profound as well. It all comes down to how we prioritize and allocate our time.”

“You do have to have been discipled to be able to disciple someone else. That's wrong. That's the misconception. If it was true that you have to have been discipled to disciple and the discipleship is just getting back into the church, then we would all sit back and no one would be discipling anyone. Most of us would have an excuse.”

“You have to wait until someone asks you to disciple them. It can be a real encouragement to someone else if you were to take the initiative. At the end of the day, that's what we have to offer, is the initiative. Oftentimes, that's what God's love even says. It takes the initiative, it takes a little extra risk to initiate with someone. We love because He's loved us first, so we've already been initiated with because of Christ's love for us. So the burden's on us to initiate. And when you initiate, even if someone's not available or they say no, that's fine. It's still success, because you've taken a step, and you've risked.”

“So I remember my first discipling relationship where I asked someone if they wanted to meet with me. I drugged my feet for months and months and months. I was afraid. I was scared that it was gonna be awkward, that I wouldn't know what to do. And once I finally asked, his name was Kyle, if he wanted to meet with me, it was a little awkward even in that moment, but it wasn't too bad. He said yes. And so I remember our first meeting when we started meeting. It was slightly awkward. I told him, I'm not quite sure what to do. And he said, me neither. And it was a little awkward. And I think I said, this is a little awkward. And he said, not too bad. And so we pushed through it.”

“Number nine, you have to meet in a coffee shop. Misconception, we're not even in a coffee shop right now. Lizzie shared a couple weeks ago when we preached on this, when we talked about this, she shared how her first disciple-making experience was going grocery shopping, I think she said, and that that was great. Great conversations happened as it went. That's awesome. A lot of folks go for a walk or a run.”

“And a lot of times, it's people like to follow those who are leading with a limp. And so if you try to come across, if you have it all together, that's really hard to follow, and it's off-putting. So let people know your weaknesses and express that you need help too, and lead with a limp.”

“Number 12 is, it's gonna be easy, and you'll be really successful. Unfortunately, this is not a foolproof program you're taking someone through. You're engaging in real relationships in real time with heart-level stuff. Sometimes people will walk away like nothing ever happened after meeting with you. Other times, they'll turn around and blame you for ill in their life. Some even will eventually walk away from Christ, and that can be very difficult. So one thing that might be helpful here is to remember to look for micro movement.”

“Number 13, you gotta do this alone. No, that is a misconception. So, one thing that can, I think, trip people up here is the, I think, very Western American idea that we have to be hyperly private. We wanna keep the circle with things as small as possible, but there will be times when you need help. A lot of traction can be made in that one-on-one discipleship relationship, but everyone needs a team around them.”

“It looks like they're charging tolls in the millions of dollars for ships to go through the Strait Of Hormuz, which is still a significant impairment to oil prices if that continues. But things have stabilized, and it seems like it's in everyone's interest for things to stabilize. But the markets are not fully buying it, and you see it in the oil prices as well. Oil prices have rebounded quite a bit from seeing that Iran is not really playing ball, and they seem to be insistent on controlling the Strait Of Hormuz as a way of, quote, unquote, you know, getting recompense for the war.”

“Iran announced that they were willing to take payment in two forms of currencies, one being Bitcoin, the second being the yuan, right, the Chinese currency. The fact that Iran is willing to accept not just Bitcoin, but these two currencies tells you something about the role of Bitcoin internationally, which is that it is the kind of sanction resistant alternative payment system, but it's not the only one. I was thinking more what it meant for China. Because I think China is thinking very deeply about how geopolitics is changing very rapidly, especially as Trump is threatening to withdraw from NATO.”

“Mythos can identify and exploit zero day vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Many of these bugs are subtle, decades old, the oldest being a twenty seven year old OpenBSD bug. Engineers with no security training inside of Entropic have asked Mythos to find, bugs overnight and have woken up to working exploits. In the words of Haseeb here, actually apocalyptic in the wrong hands.”

“I think the multiclient architecture for Ethereum will probably go away in a post AI world. The reason why you have multiple clients is you assume that errors are uncorrelated, that it's just really hard to have the same kind of exploit on one thing versus on another thing. This assumption gets a lot weaker if basically there's exploits everywhere and, like, everything is Swiss cheese. If everything is Swiss cheese, then probably you can find with enough time, with enough compute, with enough tokens, some way to halt the network by doing something on this thing and doing something on this other thing.”

“I heard from Justin Drake that they are now getting one meaningful vulnerability in Geth per day from just random people, not using Mythos, using just cloud code. Just vibe coding normal analysis of security of these things. And these are from amateurs. These are not from security engineers or from bug bounties. These are just normal people running a cloud code and saying, hey. Can I find find me a vulnerability in Geth?”

“I think the right mental model for quantum is it's kind of crypto's y two k. And I think it's actually a really clean analogy because y two k was a real problem. It was a huge coordination issue across the entire tech industry. It really would be catastrophic if unaddressed. And, it's really obvious how to fix it is that, you know, you just go and upgrade all the all the Unix time slots to be, you know, larger integers so they don't overflow at, the year 2000.”

“I sort of think this is gonna be a little bit like a government shutdown thing, where everyone's gonna be like, oh, no. Oh, heavens me. No. We can't do that. Oh, no. No. No. But then, like, right at the eleventh hour, people are gonna be like, oh, well, okay, fine. We'll we'll block all those coins, and then we'll all move on. And we'll never talk about this ever again.”

“The silometric analysis that they originally ran was inconclusive. It said that there were many people who were, consistent with the sort of silometric distance from Satoshi. Adam Back was not even the closest. And Hal Finney was equivalently close to Satoshi's stylometric analysis as Atterback. But then at the very end, the the author runs it again, but he kind of, like, picks the particular parameters that he uses to create this decision tree. Basically, they, like, p hacked their way into their own answer, which is that, oh, it must be Adam Back.”

“Bitcoin is kind of this secular religion and very intentionally so. And this this, creation myth that we have that Satoshi Nakamoto appeared. He asked nothing. He kept no coins with him. He disappeared, and he left it to us to govern among men, this thing that could only have been created by the gods. That creation myth, it's so perfect. And if you found out that, like, oh, actually, it was like Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, and he was a businessman who made a bunch of money from this, it's kinda like, oh, shit.”

“I think the real argument is that it's going to affect their profitability. That's the real argument. That is not a very that's not that that argument is not gonna be very politically successful. Nobody really cares that much about the margins of the banks. They do care about the collapse of credit, or they care about the crushing of community banks. Those are very sympathetic arguments to make in public. It's not very sympathetic to say, well, we don't want margin compression. We like our margins.”

“People index way too much on day one, month one of chains. There's no chain ever that has been successful on day one or month one. It's true of Solana. It's true of Avalanche. And if you look at the ones that have had breakout month ones, like you think about like Blast or something, doesn't really seem to predict much of anything. The reality is that it takes time to build a chain. These things are, you know, ecosystems, they require breaking the cold start effect and or the cold start problem.”

“Another fact I was reminded by in the course of writing the book is that the dollar hasn't been the dominant currency in The United States for the entirety of this country's history. So Alexander Hamilton, famously created the US Mints in the early eighteen nineties, but there was such a shortage of gold and silver in the country before the California Gold Rush and the Nevada Silver Rush that the dominant unit used for transactions were Spanish silver coins, pieces of eight, you know, Spanish pesos or or dollars that were cut up like a pizza in eight slices. It was legal tender in The United States as late as 1857.”

“The Byzantine Empire gets short shrift. In my view, it was characterized by fiscal prudence. One of the things that was important was that, for many centuries, despite having hostile rivals and enemies on all borders, it basically lived within its budgetary means. So the pressure to debase the currency, issue more coins of less value in order to divert more resources to the government and the military. That pressure was not so intense. So that enabled, if you will, the solidus to retain its value for a long time. It circulated around the Mediterranean, but also into Asia and and India and elsewhere.”

“So I used to say the the recipe for an international currency was size, stability, and liquidity. Big economy, stable economy, liquid financial markets, but I would add security as a fourth ingredient. Military security, first, the ability to defend your own borders. Secondly, the ability to protect your trade routes.”

“The exception is Florence, whose florin was probably the dominant currency in Europe from the late thirteenth century into the early fifteenth. They were not a first class military power. They were too small. A city state in Tuscany with modest hinterlands and no natural resources to speak of, but a lot of commercial prowess and the first, crew international bankers. They used finance to project financial power and encourage use of their currency despite the fact they that they weren't a dominant military.”

“I am reminded of what famous international economist Rudy Dornbusch said about currency crises that they'd always take longer to arrive than you thought they would, and then they occur more violently than you ever imagined they could. So, you know, it's like who who said there are two ways of going bankrupt slowly and then rapidly. So I think we are seeing the beginnings of the decline of the dollar as a global currency as central banks are trying to hedge their bets, moving out of dollar US Treasury securities into gold and other nontraditional reserve currencies. The analogy I sometimes use is, like an iceberg, which melts very slowly until a whole chunk big chunks calve off all at once.”

“Interest rates would be higher than otherwise because the treasury would not have kind of automatic insured market for additional treasury debt from foreign central banks and governments, so they would have to offer higher interest rates to place that debt. And we wouldn't get that automatic medic insurance when a bad thing happens. In 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, we did the bad thing, but the dollar strengthened. So I think those effects that it would become harder for us to import and export, interest rates would be higher, and higher treasury interest rates spill over into higher mortgage rates for your Ohio truck driver.”

“I do worry worry about excessive financialization. I think we saw its pernicious effects during the global subprime crisis and the global financial crisis between 2007 and 2009. And I worry about private credit and and and AI investment in the present present context. But I I I I don't think it's the dollar's international role that is primarily at work here. It's simply that our highly developed financial markets are attractive places for highly compensated people to play and concoct new financial instruments in in in in ways that may be channeling resources into activities that don't have the highest possible payoff.”

“I think the renminbi can come into more widespread use among countries that are geostrategically allied with China, but not globally. The problem is not that China trades too little. It's the leading trading partner, leading trading power around the world. But there are those political constraints that Chinese authorities can change the rules of the financial game tomorrow morning. The People's Bank of China is not independent of the government. It is required to take marching orders from the executive branch.”

“If you worry about being the target of sanctions, you put that gold on a boat and you bring it back home. You vault it at home where it's safer from sanctions than our dollar deposits or US treasury securities. But if you bring it home, you can't use it for anything. It become it it's hard to use for payments. It's dense and and if you've ever picked up a gold bar, you know it's dense and heavy, and it can't be lent, pledged as collateral, whatever.”

“My view at this point is that plain vanilla cryptos are still volatile, and, therefore, they're least likely to be used in actual payments on day to day basis. And if they're not used in payments that will limit their use for other things, that stablecoin the case for stablecoins is yet to be proven. I think central bank digital currencies are coming. So I would put my money, I think, on combination of central bank digital currencies and tokenized bank deposits, not on stablecoins and Bitcoins.”

“I would tell them read more history. I would tell them that the shift from one dominant currency to another is rarely smooth. It comes with disruptions, and we all know that the best defense against disruptions is diversification, not putting all your eggs in in in one basket given all the stuff that's going on in the world at the moment. I think sometimes the obvious advice can be the best advice.”

“It was sidelined so we could solve scalability. So kind of like before we actually had any l twos and charts and what whatsoever, Ethereum composed marvelously. Right? Kind of like when there was just one Ethereum, we didn't have these problems. And we but we kind of we ended up in a place where transactions averaged $50 a piece. And, obviously, this is extremely unfeasible for majority of use cases. So we ramped up scaling via l twos, and that broke the composability between those individual domains. And until recently, it also seemed unfeasible to do it from a technological angle, but this has very much changed with recent advances in real time proving.”

“Chains that are part of the EEZ settle simply every block. So every twelve seconds. So every twelve seconds, they make a I mean, they can make smaller blocks that can be faster in between, but every twelve seconds, they synchronize or settle with Ethereum. And so with every Ethereum block, they, yeah, settle with Ethereum. And those settlements allow for, yeah, for transactions, between Ethereum and those chains.”

“It can be retrofitted onto existing tools if you are willing kind of like the the main concession that kind of you have to make as an l two is that you kind of have to acknowledge superior that you have to acknowledge Ethereum as your superior. So kind of if Ethereum reorks, you have to be willing to potentially re og too. If you're willing to do that, you can become part of the Ethereum economic zone regardless of what kind of roll up you are.”

“I think to some extent, it will probably be the somewhat smaller ones that start first because they have more to gain. Because to some extent, the basis and or base and and yeah. I think it's really just maybe maybe base Arbitrum and Polygon that really have their own ecosystem that's still smaller than Ethereum, but but they have basically, they have DEXs, they have lending protocols, they have Oracles, they have essentially the full stack. All all other chains, smaller chains are trying to do this as well, but but are somewhat struggling. So they usually have their niche and then they have other things where they basically can't at all compete with with Ethereum.”

“Kind of we're we're aiming for kind of for for this coordination layer, we're aiming for less than a thousand lines of code. At least the kind of like this is what what what Jody kind of is has in his mind. But kind of it's it will be it's free open source software kind of. It's published by a new association in Switzerland. It's all it's, yeah, it's all free. It's in the public domain. It doesn't belong to anyone.”

“The the good thing is that all major block builders, that's currently Titan, BeaverBuild, and Flashbots, already opted into this. We we we have the people. So kind of they see they very much see the upside of this for Ethereum and also for themselves. So kind of they they are on board and they will support this from day one. So it's it's not this kind of Martin. It sound a little bit like an uphill battle, but kind of like it's it's kind of the we are already kind of pretty pretty high up on the on the peak.”

“And and to be fair, kind of like it it fully does. So kind of like even if you kind of if you wanna do something on one chain, you wanna kind of deposit something in Aave, borrow against it, use that liquidity on a on a third chain, that still works even if Aave does nothing. So kind of the the but kind of but what kind of what brings it to the next level is if Aave understands that kind of it has all of this at its fingertips and kind of that can make it even better. But even if dApps do not adapt to this at all, which which, I mean, they will, but kind of even if they wouldn't, it would still make the the the state of affairs immeasurably better than it is today.”

“And that's in the summer. So it's it's not it's not kind of a multiyear project kind of we're well underway, and it's it's coming it's coming very soon.”

“It's one of my favorite quotes from Charlie Munger is you always wanna understand the other the opposing view as good, if not better, as as their view. And so that's some of the work that we've been doing is really understand both sides of the equation and then sort of lay out what we think the probabilities are moving forward here.”

“There's just seasons there's just seasons to this. And I just I almost think it's like biology, or, you know, the way the I live in the Northeast. We have seasons. It would be very odd to go through winter and then, you know, not have a spring. So I sort of view it as, like, this is just the way markets work, and there's there's data that we follow to track this. When someone says the cycle doesn't exist, you're kind of saying, like, there's this we're breaking some law of nature.”

“MicroStrategy has been been in the market as a large buyer of Bitcoin. So this is something we did not see in the last, last bear market. And over, you know, dollars 7,600,000,000 of purchases so far in 2026, and this is mostly related to their ability to raise capital through this new, STRC product. If you're a bull, you're pointing at that as one of the main sort of catalysts to say, this is not a normal bear market bear market.”

“We look at global liquidity indicators, things like this, and we think global liquidity has you know, topped and is is now in a process of rolling over. There tends to be about a six month lag in terms of how that impacts the traditional markets. There's a closer lag with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is much more sensitive to liquidity. So we've already seen this really impact Bitcoin, I believe.”

“We looked at some of those kind of cycle to cycle metrics. And while we have, you know, the price did come into the fair value zone, we have not hit any of the sort of what you would expect to see from a deep value metric perspective. Realized price, 200 week moving average, those types of indicators have not hit what we typically see in a bear market.”

“Partly because it's not a unilateral decision from him. And I think what I'm starting to pay more attention to is just how what are these other countries starting to do as as we're we're starting to see, you know, how is NATO? We've seen Trump come out and tweet, if they give them weapons, we're going to, you know, start tariffing 50% on China. So that that's an escalation now of the trade war, which is still ongoing, you know, in the background here.”

“Bloomberg has done some work on this in terms of just like the impact that higher oil prices have on consumption in the economy. And about a $10 increase in the oil price equates to about a 30, basis point decline in in consumption. And so if you have a $100 oil or so, and it just kind of stays at that level for a long enough period of time, that's likely to pull about, you know, 1% of GDP out of the consumption economy.”

“I'm sort of trying to hit the home run, and we've got a little bit more of, like, a a Warren Buffett approach. Like, I wanna buy capitulation. Like, we were buying in early February because the market was capitulating. And that's when I wanna be buying. I don't wanna be buying when I you know, everyone's starting to turn bullish.”

“I think it's really close. I've been trying to align my portfolio with my view on that, and I'm still of the mind that the probability still points towards that that Bitcoin hasn't actually hit its cycle low. It would be odd for me for me to for Bitcoin to hit that low as fast as it did as early in a cycle as it has, and also without being able to have any conviction on, like, a shift in the liquidity, you know, structure out there.”

“Oh, I think eventually it's going to 20,000,000, 21,000,000 a coin. I think it's gonna emerge as the dominant digital capital of the world.”

“So I would say probably the thing that's holding the price back is rehypothecation of the underlying crypto asset in the crypto economy. And the thing that will drive the price to the moon is people stop rehypothecating, and they call like, we call that asset back. We put it in cold storage, and then whoever sold it short has to buy it back, and the price moves north.”

“So we created a monthly variable rate preferred stock where the company, the issuer, has the ability to adjust the credit spread, in essence, adjust the dividend rate each month at its discretion. And then we pay the dividend as a cash dividend each month. So what's unique about that? That's the first time in the history of the world, guys, where anyone ever created variable rate preferred stock.”

“The real brilliance of the business model is you're acquiring a capital asset that you're holding perpetuity and you're never realizing the capital gain on it. If you pay the dividend by remitting the unrealized capital gain back to the credit investor, the dividend becomes a return of capital dividend, which means it is also tax deferred. So you could be a retiree, collect dividends for ten years, not pay tax, pass it through to your heir. They get a step up and they get ten years of dividends that are also tax deferred.”

“What happens if the company can't pay that? Well, by law, you can't pay a dividend on a preferred stock that would create an insolvency event for the issuer. Like, the board has to approve the dividend. So you understand, like, it's literally impossible. It is literally impossible to create an insolvency or to bankrupt an issuer of a preferred stock.”

“You guys remember The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? What's on the back of the book? Don't panic. Don't panic. I think that, by the way, that was Douglas Adams, and that was, what, fifty, forty years ago? Very good words. It's okay to consider all these things. It's okay to even study them and think them through. I think that the real the real mistake the fatal mistake to avoid is panicking.”

“I think that the crypto market has really evolved into various segments. Ethereum clearly is the leader in that space right now, and and all of the other proof of stake networks are going to be competing, you know, to tokenize securities and tokenize currencies and the like. I say two years ago, the future was bleak. Now you just gotta you gotta fight for for the best future you can get.”

“And the answer is, everybody would just like a bank account that pays them more than the inflation rate. Like, how about give me a bank account that pays me 8%. Right now, your bank pays you zero. You know, what we say tongue in cheek is fix the money. We have a chance, in my opinion, to fix the money for a billion people. Not complicated. Just requires that one not get distracted.”

“His name is Gannon Ken Van Dyke, and he allegedly made more than 400 k trading on Polymarket on the basis of classified info regarding the timing of The US military operation to capture Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. He tried to cover his tracks after making the bets by sending most of the gains to a foreign crypto account, and he even asked Polymarket to delete his account. He's 38 years old, and he was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.”

“That's like Pete Rose betting on his own team. It's a little like Pete Rose. Pete Rose had kept him out of the hall of fame because he bet on his own team. Now if he bet against his team, that would be no good, but he bet on his own team. I'll look into it.”

“It literally was a hairdryer. It literally was a hairdryer. They've charged the guy. I mean, you could see a barbed wire fence. So, I mean, there's some sort of security protocols in place here. I'm not sure how much, but he made $36,000 by walking up to the weather sensor. It was a unguarded thermometer near a Paris airport runway. He just pointed a hairdryer at it, entered in with two k, and almost did, basically, a 15 x there.”

“Jerome Powell's in the news. US Department of Justice have now dropped its criminal probe of Fed Chair Powell. This is something I'm actually in favor of. I'm not the biggest fan of Jerome Powell, but to assume Jerome Powell's gonna know if a contractor's ripping him off on plumbing seemed a little far fetched to me. I don't think he was in charge of the the management of the construction of a building. I think he was more concerned about policy decisions, not construction decisions.”

“Bitcoin and dollar near in near perfect opposition. It hasn't been this extreme in almost four years. So for traders for Bitcoin traders, the direction of the DXY, this is the dollar index. The thirty day correlation here between the dollar and Bitcoin is now negative point nine. It's the most negative reading since September 22. A below zero reading indicates inverse relationship. So that means when the dollar weakens, Bitcoin gains and vice versa.”

“A DeFi cascade could be the linchpin that causes that final capitulation candle. And just to back up to what I said yesterday, that final capitulation from FTX was about a 25% candle to the downside in a singular week. And if we keep cooking, and it looks like we got some juice to keep cooking, I actually think that we're gonna be tapping around the 80, maybe $81,000 range, and a 25% move brings you smack dab back down to $60,000, creating a double bottom party time back on.”

“Look at this meme coin. Look at this meme coin. What if I told you it's a traditional stock of one of the largest companies out there in its space at least? This is Avis. Avis, the car company, the car rental company. This was a short squeeze. A couple hedge funds corner the market here, and there was it was one of those classic situations. There's, like, more floating shares than there's real shares. Short squeezed up, and now it's just the correction. It became worth more than all the other car rental companies combined.”

“The real discourse and the reason why the dollar sucks so much and the reason why you have such hyper bias between political parties on a middle class and lower class level is because they're printing your dollar at an exponential rate, and you're losing buying power. So in 2022 when you bought a $600,000 house. Your interest rate made it so that it was a $2,000 payment. Now that same house is appreciated on average up to about $800,000, and your mortgage payment is now $5,000. So people are getting hurt. Their quality of life is diminishing if they're not outpacing this inflationary uptick.”

“When to buy altcoins is a very delicate situation, and what I did is wait for a bullish divergence to happen on the momentum waves. Wait for that secondary wave to come down on the Bitcoin momentum and print that green dot showing me a general nasty tide to the upside.”

“Now Bitcoin has had a hell of a ride to the downside. It has fallen by right around 50%, 51% to be precise, from that local peak at a 125 k. Now this situation is a tale of two cities.”

“DeFi giant, Aave, is bleeding TVL right now. When the fiasco with Keltau kicked off, AVE's TVL was sitting right at around $26,000,000,000. As of the time of this recording, we're at $14,000,000,000, a major major pullback for TVL in crypto's biggest lending protocol.”

“Now if we look at our current situation, if we continue to tap this top end of the range, but then experience a major washout from some sort of defy capitulation, a 25% downside candle on the weekly would bring us right smack dab back to the $60,000 level. If that were to occur, that would cause the momentum wave that's currently moving up to swoop back to the downside. And if I'm comparing these two cycles to each other in a way that rhymes, this actually looks like it'd play out sometime around August or September 2026.”

“Now what I did last bear market was wait for the flush out. And, obviously, I was interested in buying Bitcoin through this entire range all the way from, you know, $25,000 down to 15. I was buying this entire range and don't regret it one bit. But the key here is that I was only interested in buying Bitcoin spot during that initial phase of the bear market.”

“Bitcoin is relatively cheap. People that loved Bitcoin at a $126,000 should be over the moon that we're now working at half price. The adoption hasn't stopped. The use case hasn't stopped. It's simply people are shortsighted and cannot handle when things don't go their way immediately. But this is where diamonds are forged. This is where the savages buy the dip and ride it to Valhalla.”

“We are no longer a high trust society. What we now have is a grift society. I'm going to walk into that shop, I'm going to take what I want, because I don't care because there's no consequence. I think the easiest way to understand when people say, what is British culture? I say, we've gone from a high trust, civil, respectful society to a low trust, grift, take what you want.”

“I know the answer, the answer is freedom. Freedom is what brings the left and the right together, because it reduces the size of the state and the influence, reduces the malign influence of the media, it reduces the money printing, and within that, you have Bitcoin, which is a solution, which is great. But you cannot sell freedom to enough people, because when you sell freedom, you have to make compromises.”

“So the survey came out that we thought we were seventh. We are poorer than Mississippi, which is the poorest US state. There are things we outperform on. We do outperform like in certain measures that people are happy about, which is like health care.”

“I felt when I was on Bitcoin Twitter, and there was a moment in time where I was like the most popular character on Bitcoin Twitter for a brief moment. And now with AI, I think I kind of know why, which is that we were biasing the AI systems towards Bitcoin maximalism. Because most AI systems do lean Bitcoin Maxi because they scrape Twitter and things like that. And the AI is when you ask them about Bitcoin, they'll be like, yeah, I mean, obviously Bitcoin is going to millions of dollars a coin. And it's like, that was us biasing the AIs, right?”

“I said to him, I said, this is what you should do. Don't start a company now, take that role. Learn on their time. And what I'll do with you is, if I were you, is I would go in there in the first three months, run a secret project, don't tell anyone else, learn how to replace you in that company with AI. Then go to your boss, say to your boss, I'd like to have a meeting. And in that meeting, put together a presentation and show them how you've learned to replace yourself with AI.”

“Democracy just needs some tweaks. I wouldn't allow anyone under 25 to vote. And I wouldn't allow anyone who is a net taker from the system to vote. Because the incentives are wrong.”

“The American military is the real Lloyds of London or the high seas, because we underwrite all global commerce. And so that's why it matters. It doesn't matter if you guys anymore, because you're not the empire any longer. But we've been subsidizing Europe broadly through NATO, and that's why socialism has exploded in Europe, is because you don't have to spend on defense.”

“I've had it been doing AI on my website, SEO on my website. Okay. It went and screwed up five pages. So it went and did some optimization on the page, and decided to do it with the API. Anyway, I went on to the website and there were pages missing. So I said, did you delete them? They said, no. I was like, well, they're not there and you're the only one who's been working on it. It's like, no, it definitely wasn't me. It must be you. It's like, I think I'm a human. I think I would know it was me.”

“Liz Truss replied and said, well, this is a point with communists. You can't convince them. You have to defeat them. And so I was thinking about that in the lift, and I realized the only answer to this is we just have to go and kill them all.”

“Hard work doesn't equal reward. You're, you know, sort of what you think you're owed, what you think is fair. Those things don't lead to reward and they never will. That's just not how life works. Risk equals reward, right? So are you willing to risk something? Are you willing to put something up in order to gain something?”

“Where does quantum stand? I mean, this is the position that we take, which is that it will be around 2030, I think is a decent benchmark. If you're looking at where quantum resources are at right now, we've seen the progress that they've gone through the past three to five years. And if you follow that trajectory onto the curve, it seems relatively plausible that it could happen in or around 2030”

“You hit it on the head. I mean, that's been in its entire value proposition today, right? Which is that it's actually quite a slow moving machine. If you try to push an upgrade through Bitcoin, you're not going to see that happen overnight. Like you might see that happen in Solana, for example. Bitcoin's whole engineering apparatus is designed around stable and high guarantees that something will work. When it comes to quantum risk, that's the last thing that we get.”

“There's been two conflated ideas of quantum risk. One is to the signatures, the other one is to the mining of Bitcoin. Something that our team had done last month was show that the mining algorithm, the Shaw 256 proof of work that secures Bitcoin is actually very secure. We anticipate it will be secure long into the future, long into the quantum era. But it's really the signatures that are at risk.”

“I analogize upgrading cryptography to thinking about it like a set of pipes underneath the city, like a plumbing system where if you need to upgrade the pipes, you need to dig up the roads, and these pipes feed into different buildings, you need to upgrade, you need to go into different people's homes, into the bathrooms, and upgrade all of the infrastructure there. It's actually a very deep and non-trivial task at hand.”

“So, when it comes to Satoshi's coins, you know, optimist, I mean, there's been some recent VIP 361, which talks about, you know, perhaps sort of shaving it off, severing it from the existing supply. Some people have been talking about, you know, to shave it, do we sever it off? Do we print new tokens into existence? I mean, I don't think either of those are very plausible, just because it breaks sort of first principles in Bitcoin, which is a fixed supply of 21 million. So I think sort of the best way to think about it for now, the one that will likely prevail is just assuming that those will be lost forever and will be sort of susceptible to quantum attacks.”

“So sort of the best sort of or maybe not the best, but one approach there would be, okay, well, why don't I just sort of hedge my risks and whatever 1% to whatever hold in Bitcoin, diversify into quantum safe assets so that if Bitcoin doesn't get its stuff together and the value is ever adversely affected, you have basically a quantum hedge in order to offset that risk.”

“What we're building is, we call it a quantum canary network for Bitcoin, sort of alluding to the old canary in the coal mine, where these coal miners would send out a little bird into these caves and figure out which parts of the coal mines would contain toxic gases, and it would essentially serve as a future warning, future indication of risks to come. The same thing can be said about solutions. You deploy a solution, but you think is a good solution and you actually battle-test it in a live network, and you realize that it has some problems. How often is it that we get a solution perfect right on day one?”

“Yeah, we got 99 problems in quantum, probably the biggest one.”