Straight, No Chaser
Understanding Freedom through Money, Technology, Economics and Philosophy
Straight, No Chaser
Monthly Round Up 5: Beyond The Bull Run
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
We revisit a live panel from Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town and argue that 2025’s flat price masked a deeper bull run in infrastructure, adoption, and freedom tech. Builders pushed Lightning, open-source mining, Nostr, and circular economies while institutions edged in.
• sideways price as distraction from real adoption
• Lightning capacity, routing, and L2 experimentation advancing
• Stratum V2 and open-source miners aiding decentralisation
• living on Bitcoin through retail payments and remittances
• circular economies scaling across Africa
• stablecoins’ trade-offs: familiarity versus control risk
• Nostr enabling creator payouts and censorship resistance
• top-down banking integrations balanced with grassroots
• practical sovereignty: self-custody, nodes, education
• open Q&A on co-option risk and resilience
https://x.com/abcptza
https://x.com/BitcoinEkasi
https://btcpay386617.lndyn.com/login?ReturnUrl=%2F
Links:
www.bitcoinforbusiness.io
X: @gavingre
X: @BTC_4_Biz
Primal: GavinBGreen@primal.net
NOSTR: npub12qv07tpwk8x8fy2uuqczghpappap395npuxvsx8pgksh97pezv7s8r7qta
Setting The Stage In Cape Town
SPEAKER_02Hey there everybody. Welcome back to the Straight Note Chaser Podcast. This is the show where we talk about human freedom through money, technology, economics, and philosophy. So today's show is a little bit different. This is actually a session that we recorded live at Adopting Bitcoin in Cape Town in January 2026, so just last month. It's the same panel of guys that we do the normal monthly roundup with. So it's Oaken, Harriman, Ricky, and myself. And the title of the talk was called Beyond the Bull Run. 2025 was pretty much the year that we expected number go up, price to the moon, and all that sort of thing. And it turned out that wasn't the case. But what was really interesting was to take a look and see what did happen behind the scenes in the Bitcoin space. From the technology improvements, adoption improvements, and just have a look at what really went down. At the end of the conversation, we we sort of decided that 2025 was in fact a pivotal year for Bitcoin, and the price is a distraction, and sometimes we can be blinded by that. So this was a great chat, and I know you guys will enjoy it.
SPEAKER_06Shout out to my dad. My response to him was uh that out of 92 talks that we have over this uh conference over the two days, not one of those talks are about Bitcoin five. Um it's all about building it's uh building economies, building apps, building uh communities, APIs, etc. Um, and I think this next panel is about to get into that um very soon. I think it's about to get quite loud in there. Just with Oaken 11, it will be loud. Okay, uh can we please get Hadman, uh Ricky, Gavin, and Oaken to the stage. Okay, so Gavin Hadman is uh Bitcoin Ecati. Ricky, I mean he's Orange and uh Bitcoin Open. Okay, and Oaken is the founder of a fellow Bitcoin circuit economy. Also easy set in Bitcoin mining memoria.
Tech Momentum: Lightning And L2s
SPEAKER_02Cool, okay. Um thanks for the introduction. Uh as you said, uh no one's spoken about the price yet, so the title is Beyond the Bull Run. So we are talking about we are indicating about the price, but we're not going to talk about it. Um so I decided to uh title this. Um the 2025 NoShow Bitcoin uh bull run was the best thing to happen to Bitcoin. Joined on stage? No, um I don't think it's necessary. Um the stuff's all available afterwards anyway, so uh uh let's hit off. Okay, so basically the expectation for 2025, as we all know, was uh to the moon. Massive pump. Uh everyone was talking about this big thing that was coming in. Uh the reality was that Bitcoin actually traded sort of in this frustrating range, didn't really do what we wanted it to do. Uh the failure that people are talking about all the time is that, well, this is you know this is volatile, we're gonna stay away from it, there's no 10x gains. Um but there's a victory here, and the victory is actually that while the price went sideways, fundamental adoption is really growing. So that's actually what we're gonna focus on, not the price. So um the thesis is that we've transitioned from speculative cycle to infrastructure cycle. Um and I'm splitting this little uh we're just gonna talk about a few aspects in the Bitcoin space. The first one being technology. So a couple of things that did happen. Uh Lightning network adoption went through the roof, volume went up, uh, adoption went up, it went absolutely crazy. And we had layer two techs being um developed at a rapid rate and expanding. We had BitWM, we uh had first ARC uh transactions going through. So there was a ton of stuff actually happening um on these. Now I've sort of separated uh Lightning Network from layer twos, but I mean it's kind of all the same thing. Uh but my question, Nicola, I'm going to aim this one at you is on the tech side, um is layer twos the space where the development is now happening? Is the base layer basically ossified? Is it stable enough? Can we do can we build our dreams on layer twos? Is that where we're going?
SPEAKER_04Uh that's a good question. Um I don't know why it's gonna need a tech question. Okay. Um do I think that layer one is ossified? No, I don't think it's it's it's time to think that Bitcoin has absolutely no way to still be improved on the base layer. I do believe that a lot more work um in development and even just the tension is is unlayered to use the side chains now. And uh, but I do think people are still looking at how do we do silent payments on chain, how do we do um moving forward something more private than what we are doing now. Again, it is the developers that will be doing that. So my attitude is no, I don't think that layer one has been authentic, and I think there's still a lot of work to be done before we we fully just only work on layer two.
Is Layer One Ossified
SPEAKER_02Cool. Uh one of the other things that was a uh that's been a hot topic in the Bitcoin space is minor uh centralization. Um I've entitled it to minor decentralization. I think 2025 saw some pretty significant changes coming out, stuff that had been spoken about for a while has come up. So Stratum V2 is out. Um I see demand pool actually launched uh in 2025. Brains have uh transitioned, they say, 100% over to Stratum V2. Uh and some of the other big pools, Foundry and FT Pool, are looking at that as well. Um there's also Ocean that have got their datum protocol as well. So basically, uh both of those allow the miners to build their own templates if they're inside a mining pool. Up until this time, with the current or the older stuff, the mining pool would decide what the block template was going to be. Uh but now this is it looks like we're making progress on this. And actually, uh Ricky, this is the question I wanted to ask you. Um is this finally the breakthrough moment that we've needed? Have we turned a corner, or is the do we still have a problem here?
Mining Centralisation Versus New Tools
SPEAKER_07No, I think we still have a major problem here. Like mining centralization is a is a huge concern. And you know, I don't think it's dramatically changed, even though Stratum V2 is out there, I don't think it's dramatically changed so much. Like the if you add up all of the pools together that are still using, sorry, a little bit of all the pools together that are um still using uh Bitman's templates, you know, you've got massive centralization in mining. Um the good thing is that I don't know if you guys saw this, but Gridlist released the the uh blueprints and templates for building an open source miner, um a cheap open source miner, which is amazing. This is the first time we've seen this. It kind of started with the with the Bitzax, which is like little tiny little home miner um for playing around with. Um, but now we're seeing proper miners that can actually pull some watts that are open source. So that gives me hope. Um but yeah, with the institutionalization of Bitcoin that's happening with the big institutions buying so much Bitcoin, you can best believe they're gonna try to centralize mining. So all this stuff is critical um and Stratom V2 is is great. Um, but yeah, there's still a long way to go.
unknownCool.
SPEAKER_02I just want to point out if anyone's got something to say on a topic, don't just uh just grab the mic and just go for it.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so I'm just gonna add on to what Ricky was saying. Um last month, the grid was actually launched, um not that they created a whole new miner, but they open source, but saying you would only need an open source control board, which is what they did, and then of course, with that it's speaking to the hash board. So now you can literally the same way that Jack Door, I'm sorry, that Block did with their miner, where you can literally replace hash boards. Um, you could go and buy a secondhand miner and use those boards with the open source um um stack that's on on GitHub. And the reason for this miner isn't to replace all other miners, is to say, let's say you have um solar running and you have an abundance of solar. If you're only using 80% of your solar, that miner will only switch on to take the additional 20%. Once that 20% has been taken, the miner will switch off so that the rest of your electricity is actually going to where you want it to be allocated. So it's a smart miner kind of um thing.
SPEAKER_07And just to expand on that, I think how mining decentralizes is where you are using miners in small home environments, small business environments to capture stranded energy or surplus energy. Like that's how we decentralize mining. Like the the if you think you can run a massive mining operation on your open source miners, like you're not really going to be able to compete. Um but that's not the world we want anyway. We want every home to have a Bitcoin miner for you know capturing surplus energy and producing excess heat, etc. etc. Heating water, things like that.
Open-Source Miners And Home Energy
SPEAKER_02I think one of the things I've noticed in uh the past year is the sort of almost plug-and-play stuff that's coming up for home enthusiasts to mess around with. Um you know, the umbrella, uh little home node and the start nine devices, uh token you mentioned in a talk earlier, where you all used to say get a Raspberry Pi, you'll be fine. Um we worked with what we had. Um now you've got these things, you just take them off the counter, you plug them in, and off it goes. Uh the little home mining thing as well. You mentioned the Bid X units. Um we've had uh solo miners winning blocks this year, it gets advertised. I think there was even one of the Bid X devices actually found a block. Three blocks. Three bit accesses last year with one mining block.
SPEAKER_07Get a bit access, plug it in at work.
Plug-And-Play Nodes And Solo Wins
SPEAKER_02Minor decentralization right there. Cool. Okay, so I mean that's just a snapshot on tech. Uh specific stuff that happened in the year. Um Freedom Money though. I think basically Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin is money and it's about the freedom. So I've entitled this UConn Stop. Um the headline here is in South Africa, we saw a shift from investing in Bitcoin to living on Bitcoin. We've had retail payments boom, we've had uh comments about uh what money badger guys have done, uh circular economies that have been working towards um the payments, and that's really gone through the roof. And I think that's probably a large part of why we see uh lightning network volume growing all the time. Uh the remittances as well, the payments, cross-border payments, that has had a fantastic year in 2025. So I made a quick note here. Um global cross-border payments has reached$428 billion in 2025. So that's a significant uh amount of money. South Africa and Africa in general, adoption is driven by cost. I put an amount here that in 25, the average cost to send$200 worth uh of value via Bitcoin was under 2% compared to 6 to 10% using traditional methods. So talking about freedom money, um Ricky, this is maybe one for you. Uh circular economies 2026. Uh do you think people need to know that they're paying on Bitcoin, or does it even matter anymore?
SPEAKER_07No, I think it does matter. Um depending on the context. But like I, you know, we own a company that does cross-border payments on the Lightning Network, and we abstract that away from the end user. So that's fine, that serves as a tool to move money cross-border more efficiently, faster, better than the traditional Rails. But ultimately, if we want to win this revolution against central banking, people need to know that they're using Bitcoin. You know, and ultimately sending fifths. So let's say sending Euros to South Africa and you're going euro conversion to Bitcoin and then convert Bitcoin to RAND and sending the oranges. That's all good and well if you want to send fifty. But ultimately it's way easier just to send Bitcoin to someone else. Like less and less steps and less enterprise, right? But it obviously takes adoption and people to understand that Bitcoin is superior money and you know people need to want to spend it. So that you know that comes with the adoption code, I guess. But I think the way that we win this is by people just accepting Bitcoin directly. Because if you accept Bitcoin directly, you define the state. That's how we win.
Freedom Money And Living On Bitcoin
SPEAKER_01Can I add something to that? Um without fail, when I talk to someone who's new to Bitcoin, um the first thing they have in mind is either one of these centralized exchanges unit or whatever, that's what most people see as Bitcoin. And when you tell them you want to pay them in Bitcoin, they're like, oh no man, that's a mission. Because I remember what it was like signing up for that account the first time. Um the only reason it's difficult is because it's connected to the fiat system. Um at the moment you don't have to bother with fiat, that's the easiest thing in the world. I mean, it takes less than a minute to download the app and another minute at most to receive a payment. Um so yeah, as grateful as I am for a lot of these companies, I mean uh money badger in particular has made it uh incredibly easy to demonstrate that Bitcoin is real money. Uh because if you walk into a campaign, you pay with Bitcoin and clearly it's not as cap. So that's all you need to do to convince someone to really accept it as payment, because if they know they can take that and go spend it there, then that's fine. But as grateful as I am for that, I I can't emphasize enough how important it is to don't stop there but to push further as far as possible until until it's just Bitcoin.
SPEAKER_02Speaking about that, one of the other developments uh was the first um stable coins on uh biotech root assets that happened last year.
SPEAKER_07Allegedly.
SPEAKER_02Allegedly. So the question is uh if if tether is moving onto the Bitcoin network or Violet or whatever the case is, uh do you think that's gonna help or hinder the stats only? Or is that the perfect gateway drug where I think Ricky you alerted to it? If you're gonna go and buy a stable coin and then send it to somebody else and it's gotta go through the Bitcoin network, or people eventually just go stuff that helps go to Bitcoin Reddit.
Remittances And Cost Advantages
SPEAKER_07I think if you stay into the abyss, the abyss stays into you. If we add stable coins to the lightning network, stable coins are just an extension of the system. Um you know it comes with risk. Um yes, maybe that orange pulls people, but like what happens when we put that full on the network? Um that's concerned. And I say that as someone who's got a vested interest in having stable coins on the Lightning network because it would mean that our customers wouldn't have to stuff around with header on Tron and Ethereum and Salon and other shit channels they just had on the lightning. Um but yeah, I mean the jury's still asked as to what that would mean um and what they just stablecoin to bring with it. Um does that then give the feds mandate to go off node operators because you're an unlicensed money transfer to what I call shutter. So yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um just to add to that, I think um it's actually very interesting the stable coin conversation. Uh twofold. Number one, I don't know if you need to do stable coins on Lightning, because you can already do them on Liquid, right? Liquid exists. You you can issue tokens on Liquid. So if you really wanted to do a stable coin, Bitcoin oriented, you could do it on Liquid and then you know just do it that way. Um second thing that I would say is Yeah, can I push back on that side? Of course you can.
SPEAKER_07So yes, but it means as a developer you have to have to integrate a second system now, which you've got to integrate liquid. And like that's fine, it's working like people are like.
Do Users Need To Know It’s Bitcoin
SPEAKER_04It's there, but but my point of it first was to say we could find a way to do this. Here's my problem. What happens when that coin loses its pegging? Because if I tell this person, hey, you should accept USDT and USDT loses its pegging to the US dollar, what do I tell that person about what they've lost? Now, if I tell them accept Bitcoin and Bitcoin's price goes down, they still have Bitcoin. It's still the same amount of Bitcoin, it's just the fiat equivalent or way of looking at that Bitcoin has changed. But if it's a USDT stablecoin that is pegged to something else, and that thing loses its pegging and they come back to me, that's a whole other argument. And then the third thing about the stable coins is they're basically, in my view, they're hidden CBDCs. They're central bank digital currencies because they are pegged to a central bank currency. So again, if the central bank decides certain things, the question is what happens? Like, what what do what is the question? The person that we're telling to do this instead of this, and they come back, what is your reply if the pegging's lost, if this and that and that and that. Again, there's no pegging for Bitcoin, so I don't have that problem.
SPEAKER_07So yeah, just to give some color to what Okin was saying now. I don't know if you guys heard about this, but Tether froze some of the Venezuelan USDT. Venezuela was doing oil trade in USDT, and that was done on their behalf, but they were doing it anyway.
SPEAKER_01And the advertiser on the website.
SPEAKER_07And the advertiser. But now on Tether, the feds just had to go to your tether and say freeze that account. No legal process. So you've got you've got a CPT. You got worse, you got worse than that, like in terms of having your money started from it.
SPEAKER_01And we spend the rest of the panel talking about stablecoins.
SPEAKER_07Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_01And I'm I'm asking Canby.
SPEAKER_02Can you? No, you can't.
SPEAKER_07Hijack the man's telecom.
SPEAKER_04We'll bring it back to stablecoins, Erma, don't worry.
SPEAKER_02One more.
SPEAKER_01There was a dude wearing a stablecoin t-shirt at a Bitcoin circular economy summit yesterday, that's all I'm gonna say.
SPEAKER_07Wasn't he one of the MCs?
SPEAKER_04Hey, I think you guys need to leave my MCs alone. Uh I think it was an accident. Um I don't think he was uh paying attention at the point in time. I didn't see the show till later, uh, but it was an interesting uh um thing to do.
SPEAKER_07Okay, we'll do touring feathering later this afternoon. It is the fence, it only said tether on the back. But you couldn't see it. It was not on the front.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Um I entitled I titled this one The Not of the Summer Explosion. Um and it actually ties into one of the earlier speakers was talking about Soweto BTC and just saying how the uh people are struggling to uh they're just excluded from the economy. Uh and there's just um a line I want to read here, actually two lines. Um before 2025, an African creator needed Twitter for the audience, strike PayPal, which often they couldn't get for money, and the bank to hold the value. On Nosda, the public key is the identity, the audience and the lightning wallet is the bank. It is the first time that the content and the capital have shared the same architecture. And then my favorite quote in that article just uh this is from an artist in Ghana, and he just said a single zap from a fan on Noster often exceeded the revenue from 5,000 streams on legacy platforms. So uh Nikolai, a question here for you. Is Bitcoin Freedom Tech finally the tool that is gonna allow rural economies to compete with urban centers?
SPEAKER_04Definitely is my answer. But okay, go on. What did you want to say?
SPEAKER_07I've got to go uh host a fireside chat on the other side. So you can go tore and feather that garment. Actually, what I'm making. So you can start the answer then. Excuse me. Uh no, I don't have an answer. That's my fault. I did the scheduling. Blame Max.
Stablecoins On Bitcoin Debated
SPEAKER_04Um so so just just to answer your question, I think um, yes, the time has come. I think it's it's been time, and Noster is the perfect um it's the perfect product at the perfect time. And the reasoning behind that for me is if you're looking at right now what's happening with TikTok, um, you you say certain words on TikTok and you just get deplatformed. Um with Twitter, there's certain things you can't say, otherwise, you're shadow banned. Noster, whatever is created, once it's relayed it's relayed you can't unrelay it. Um, but at the same time, for artists, I've always told people uh when when I did my first educational in Namibia, it was with the guy that quote unquote Orange pulled me, and he was an artist. He was actually our music producer. And when he was standing there, he was standing on stage saying, I've been a music producer for 20 years. 20 years people have paid me for my beats here and there to go and record on it. But once I put them on Noster, the amount of on well he used Noster, but it but uh it was he meant wavelength, but once you use Bitcoin as the payment mechanism for him to be able to receive as an artist, that he earned way more than he has over 20 years in one year because people enjoyed the music so much they could say, hey, I can't buy this song, but I want to I want this guy to continue creating. Now for me, what Noster does is if you're taking pictures, if you're just doing workouts, whatever it is, uh I I know an MMA champion I told him, dude, put all your training videos on. Let people know what you're doing and tell them you accept Bitcoin and that you're training kids for Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, you now have a different mechanism of trying to not just monetize the skills that you have, but also expose it to a different audience that didn't even know they wanted to support you. And I think Naster is the greatest mechanism of doing that for artists, for business people, for anything where you didn't have an audience before, there's a hungry audience looking for what they didn't know is there. So I'd stop there. I hope that's the right answer.
SPEAKER_02Um, Hermann, maybe a second follow-up question to you is um is this something that will I mean how do you think this is going to liberate the average African, South African, anybody living on the continent of Africa? Um I mean, Africa famously doesn't trade amongst itself. Country A doesn't trade with country B because they have different currencies, they don't trust each other, it's a whole big disaster. Um is this how could this impact that? Do you think uh this is maybe the future of the African economy?
Risks, Pegs, And Censorship
SPEAKER_01Uh Bitcoin or Noster. I mean, I suppose Noster is a little early to tell. Um I think it's very early in Noster. Um but in Bitcoin, uh yeah, I mean somebody else asked me the other day um why there's been so many circular economy economies um you know popping up, people saying I want to build one. Um the last year has been very busy. Um particularly because a lot of people have have looked to our project to sort of guidance is the wrong word, but I hate to put myself in that in that position. But the but or whatever you want to call it. The point is that there's a whole bunch of circular economy projects, and we tried to bring them all together at the summit um yesterday, um for the you know, for for this reason. Um, and I I I do wonder why why there's so much more interest in building circular economies in Africa than there are in the rest of the world. I mean, just sort of one indication um is that Bitcoin Beach, um, which is the is it's not the OG circular economy, um the first one was in in the Netherlands, and I'd always like to credit them because they really were first. Um but Bitcoin Beach was the first one to gain international uh recognition, um, and they do some small grants from time to time, and it's not a lot of money, uh, but they try to seed these circular economies. And in the recent round of applications that they put out, um, more than 50%, um I think it was higher than 60% of all the applications they received were from African projects. That means the rest of the world put together um accounted for less than 40% of the applications that they received. And these applications were open to circular economy projects from all around the world. And somebody asked me why, why do you think this is? And I don't pretend to know the answer, I can only guess. Um, but uh I I think it is because of that, and I use the how difficult it's to travel in Africa is sort of the same, same sort of how difficult it is to send money. You can kind of use that as an analogy. I mean, it's often easier to fly to Europe and then back down to Ghana, and cheaper as well, by the way. Yeah, um, if you're traveling within Africa, and it's people from Europe and other parts of the world sometimes can't understand, but how can that be? Like you're flying halfway around the world and then flying back to your own continent. Um, but that's the easiest, cheapest, sometimes even the fastest way to get there. And and uh money in Africa kind of works like that. Um and I think that's why there is such a high level of interest. So yeah, Bitcoin could um do that for Africa, it could liberate Africa, uh, but it's not a it's not a given. There's there's challenges uh that remain, and one of those obviously is using Bitcoin on a day-to-day basis. It's one thing sending money from anywhere in Africa to anywhere in Africa, but it's another thing entirely for the person receiving that bitcoin to actually be able to do anything with it.
SPEAKER_02No, 100%. I think the thing I enjoyed about the Nostru example was that uh you have the place where you can display your talent and then you have the mechanism to get paid at the same time, and that's uh can't be stopped by any board or any government. So I'm hugely hopeful about that. I'm gonna keep my eyes on that, and hopefully at next year's uh adopting bitcoin will have the update in 2026.
Nostr’s Creator Economy Breakthrough
SPEAKER_01Just a quick aside, actually, uh you know that the adopting Bitcoin Cape Town had its Twitter profile uh shut down three days before the conference last year. Um and so during the course of last year's adopting Bitcoin Cape Town, we only had Noster, um which was which was kind of funny. And I was I was pushing hard on the organizing committee to uh completely abandon Twitter and Facebook for that matter. Uh but I I think I was overruled on that one, and ultimately it makes sense because we want to get normal people in here too. Um but that was that was super annoying. I mean, I I'd never uh I I'd never experienced that before up until that point. Um and I was running social media for the conference last year, leading up to the conference, and I was sitting there and then one moment just boom, gone. And everything we'd posted for this conference, trying to promote it, trying to get people, yeah, all of a sudden you just put in the Twitter username and say, sorry, account suspended or whatever the case may be. I still don't know why.
SPEAKER_04Well, good thing for no, I just wanted to add, he literally was like, guys, we were deleted. Like, what do we do now? We should just all abandon it. And um, he was right again. If you're on a centralized system like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, any of them, um you can be deplatformed. My EasySats account on Instagram is gone. They deleted it. I don't do anything about that, but Naster, they can't take from me. I hold the private keys, uh, if I run my own relay. Even if I didn't run my own relay, you can't unpost, you can't delete on Noster. When it's out there, it's gone.
SPEAKER_02Well, what's interesting is that um they delete the account of the person organizing a conference, and what's he gonna do? He's gonna talk about his account was deleted and then just help spread the word. So Barbastrauss and defect out there. Um moving along, uh just onto institutions, uh, the silent takeover. Um so in two years ago, um we were talking about South Africa's gray listing, and there was all sorts of uncertainty. Uh, today there's been over 300 licensed service providers. Discovery Bank is now offering um uh Bitcoin trading uh in their app, certainly other banks are doing that sort of thing as well. Now I know Stafford spoke a little bit about that in one of the earlier sessions, so I hope you guys caught that. Um but it does look like South Africa has always had this, and I'm gonna pass this back to you, Harriman. You know, South Africa seems to have often been the grassroots center of the world in terms of uh Bitcoin adoption, but now we look like we're having some top-down approach as well. Um is this uh how is this going to advance Bitcoin in South Africa, do you think?
Rural Opportunity And New Markets
SPEAKER_01Um I mean we need we need both. Um I'm I'm not under the illusion that grassroots adoption alone um will will get us to where we want to be. Um so you need you need the top-down approach. Um, but I like the top-down approach when it's built by people who take the grassroots approach into account. I don't like the top-down approach when it's built by people who just don't care about what's happening at a grassroots level. You can build top-down um and still be building with the grassroots uh version of things um, you know, in the back of your head. Um I mean, look, it it you know, you want you want Bitcoin to be everywhere at the end of the day. Um and I I don't think everybody at the end of the day eventually not everybody is going to be using it in self-custody and what what there are going to be people who who um who do it the institutional way, and that's fine. That's that's it's just that we need to, I think the important thing is, and and this is I guess the bottom line for me, is that the people who really care about this and the effect that it can have on the world, they need to be the ones pushing as hard as possible to get that threshold um of grassroots adoption as high as possible. Um it's the same as it's the same as running a node. Um, you know, my my node doesn't matter. Like I can go home and I can switch off my Bitcoin node, it's not gonna affect the network. But if everybody does that, then we're screwed. Um so you need the node network, but it's not that one single individual node matters much, not at all, really. Um it matters for my own um sovereignty to you know to broadcast my own transactions and verify my own transactions, but for the network, my single node doesn't matter too much. That being said, you do want that number as high as possible. We'd rather have more than less. Um so yeah, it is going to help. The top-down approach obviously does help, and we do need that, but we need to push as hard as possible because I don't think the I don't think the top-down approach needs pushing. They they typically tend to take over as soon as they gain traction. It's the grassroots approach that needs constant pushing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that was uh one one thing I thought about is that when the the top guys get involved, massive marketing campaigns and budgets, and that just proliferates, and then you've got billboards everywhere, and Bitcoin is wonderful. So that is cool. But at the end of the day, it's about freedom money, guys on the ground. Um I'm gonna jump through just basic, just quickly to the end, just to wrap up. Um I'm gonna skip a slide on geopolitics. That's Ricky's department, and he's not here. Um But uh I think uh this whole idea of going to the moon might mean something different. Um so the proposal is that the bull run is really uh mental and structural, not just financial. So in 2025, although the price went sideways, the uh development, expansion, adoption behind the scenes was unbelievable. And um I think price is just a distraction. We talk about it all the time, and I think 2025 has proved that to be an absolute use case. Uh or proved that to be true, that price is a distraction because you you don't actually know the stuff that goes on behind the scenes unless you're involved. So I'd just like to open up uh to the floor. Anyone with a question to any other panelists?
SPEAKER_01I mean the price definitely impact our uh impacted our ticket sales.
Can Bitcoin Unblock African Trade
SPEAKER_05Any questions? Okay.
SPEAKER_00So I th I think we have a debate where we're saying, yeah, okay, we don't talk about value, it hasn't been mentioned at all. But value is important. I'm not sure uh where that line is. Is there is it important for a baseline? I mean you mentioned your dad saying it'll go down to 60,000, well, okay, that's not two cents, but twenty, maybe maybe tens of twenty, maybe thousand. I don't know. At some point it's gonna impact something, and I'm not quite sure what it is. And I do believe that the institutions are gonna try and get hold of this eye. I can't see them going down without a fight. And I think that's what also happened this year. I mean, if you see the value that they're gonna be losing or that the elite's gonna be losing when Bitcoin takes over properly, uh I mean it's like a game chip, they're not gonna let that go. I mean, you've got the major institutions looking at their profits and everything that's happening and let it go. I mean, they're not going down without a fight. So where is that fight? And I agree it is making sure that it comes at a grassroots level, but I don't know if that's strong enough. That's a concern. My concern suddenly this year was that I thought, gosh, I'm not sure if Bitcoin's gonna win at the end of the day. Because it's because it's right. And that's a big concern.
SPEAKER_01I'm not sure I understand your question.
SPEAKER_00Well, it it's not a question, it's an observation that could Bitcoin be taken over completely and that it doesn't work anymore? Because it becomes too institutionalized or too top-heavy, or it's taken over by the elite.
SPEAKER_01It could. I guess.
Deplatforming And The Case For Nostr
SPEAKER_04That's the short answer. Do you want me to give a longer one? Okay, so yes, it could. Um, and how how that happens is we stop being the driving force of Bitcoin. We stop coming to conferences, we stop giving our time, we stop giving our volunteerism, um, our ingenuity, and we just say Bitcoin's already won. If we believe Bitcoin's already won right now, it will be taken over. But here's the thing um the people in government, the people in central banks are people. They're all just human beings. And like with all human beings, if you're willing to have a conversation, a true conversation with them, you'd be very surprised that some of them, again, it's incentives. I've always looked at Bitcoin like an incentive structure. If I know the bank is gonna think I'm losing money, what if I show the bank how they don't lose money? What if I show them, you know, like Hermann was saying, not everybody's gonna want a self-custody. Some people don't trust themselves. They might want a community bank, but if you can act as a community bank in Bitcoin for those people, has it failed per se? Maybe self-custody for those people has failed, but the other people are still self-custody. So, how do we engage with the people that might want to co-opt Bitcoin? Do we let them attack it from their own sense, or do we go and sit with them and say this doesn't work and this is why not? This doesn't work, and there's a better way for you to integrate this into the living structure of your citizens without being the boogeyman. And I think it comes from not being afraid of speaking to those people in power and having a conversation with them and saying, no, that doesn't work like that. Because again, Bitcoin was banned in many of our countries until it wasn't, and it got unbanned because of conversations from people that were either in the grassroots or already in structures that understood the utility of this tool and this technology beyond its price um action. So I hope that answers your question.
SPEAKER_01Can I just uh I I don't mean to be dismissive because I thought there was a question, but I think I think you were making more of a statement um saying that there is a chance that it could be co-opted, if I understand you correctly. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I totally agree, and that's why it irritates me so much when I hear people say Bitcoin is inevitable. Uh but it's not inevitable, it depends on people at the end of the day. If everybody again, if everybody shut off their nodes tomorrow, then yeah, we have a problem. Um me switching off my uh off my node is not gonna make a massive impact on the network. Um and if our project disappeared tomorrow, we should be fine. But if all the grassroots projects disappear tomorrow, then then we have a much, much bigger problem. I think uh uh I mean we're over time, but just to just to kind of finish off that point, I think the the the point is that we don't know um at what point it becomes co-opted and how it becomes co-opted, but we do know what needs to be done to try and prevent that that doesn't happen. It's not a guarantee. Um we might do everything we can and still uh end up losing that battle. Uh but that's one of the reasons why I put everything I have into um, I mean, on an energy level, I don't put my own money into the conference. I mean, energetically, I put everything I have into this conference uh because that's one of the ways in which we fight back. Um, you know, if you if you if you looked at the scheduling this morning, um there was a reason why those talks followed one another the way they did. It's because that's that conversation needs to be had, and we should have that conversation.
SPEAKER_05Awesome. Um, shall we take one more or we do we call it okay? We are we are way above time, so please just go straight to the question, and that would be our last question for this session.
SPEAKER_03Maybe a bit of a hot take. We always talk about institutions taking over Bitcoin. I sometimes feel it's a bit naive that we think that. Bitcoin is gonna happen, and the more it lasted, and the more its value grew, and the purchasing power compounded, institutions are gonna come to Bitcoin. That was clear and it was always gonna happen, and Bitcoin is taking over institutions. Attacking Bitcoin so that it fails, it's of no economic benefit or incentive for anybody to shut off their individual node or for Michael Saylor to do something to Bitcoin that would impact his organization, his business, and everything else he's trying to build. Bitcoin is expensive to attack, and the more people get into it, the higher the barrier to attack becomes. So I'm yeah, I may have a different perspective on that.
SPEAKER_01Also a statement, not a question. Yeah, sorry about that. Sorry about that. I know that's cool.
SPEAKER_05Awesome. Thank you guys so so much.