Bitcoin Myths debunked

Bitcoin has been called a scam, a psyop, and “just another crypto.” Then the same world that mocked it started custodying it. So we brought on Tom Phillips, a long-time Bitcoiner and hands-on educator, to walk through the myths that keep smart people stuck on the sidelines and the mechanics that make Bitcoin different.

We get into the questions that actually matter: who invented Bitcoin, why Satoshi Nakamoto disappearing is a feature, and what “rules without rulers” looks like in practice. Tom breaks down proof of work in plain language, how it creates digital scarcity by anchoring Bitcoin to real-world energy, and why a blockchain without decentralization is basically a slow database. We also revisit the legendary early purchase stories (pizza, ice cream, and a painful “million dollar beeswax” lesson) to show how adoption and price discovery really happen.

From there, we go practical. We talk self custody and why “not your keys, not your Bitcoin” is the lesson people learn too late. We cover what you can actually do with Bitcoin, how US taxes work when you spend or sell, and why borrowing against Bitcoin is becoming a serious option for liquidity without giving up long-term upside. We even explore home mining and new heater and water-heater style miners that reuse heat while earning satoshis.

If you care about sovereignty, inflation protection, and real savings, this one will sharpen your mental model fast. Subscribe, share this with one friend who still thinks Bitcoin is “too late,” and leave a review with the biggest myth you want us to tackle next.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:50

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Peasant's Perspective. And we've got some guests with us today. We've got Lisa, who's always my co-host on Sundays with Liberty Lounge. And we have Tom. What's your last name, Tom? Is it Phillips Phillips? Phillips.

SPEAKER_03 1:05

Yeah, another Phillips.

SPEAKER_02 1:06

It can't be too Phillips in here. We've got Lisa Phillips and Tom Phillips. And Tom is a Bitcoin guy. So I'm so excited to have him with us today. Now, for those of you that are joining us, and I know that it wasn't showing up earlier, but we are, here is the link in the chats if you want to join live. If you have any questions at any point, and I'll post it a couple times because as people roll in, I don't know if you see the chat previously. But if you click on that, it's kind of like Zoom. You're going to come in, and uh then I can add you to the stage and you can ask your question. Please try to have your camera on in a good angle if it's at all possible. But if not, that's fine. You guys can enjoy the discussion. So we've got Tom on in the Liberty Lounge today. We want to be talking about Bitcoin. And Tom is Tom, I don't think I've ever spoken to anybody that is more of a Bitcoin expert than you are. And so the topic for today is not so much what is Bitcoin and stuff like that, but mostly Bitcoin myths demystified, right? Like some of the things Lisa, right, has always thought Bitcoin was ChiCom. It was some kind of like scam to take your money and stuff like that. And all of a sudden now you got the Federal Reserve's buying Bitcoin, the Treasury's collecting it, and it's like, uh, maybe it's not a scam. You know, where were we back when it was under a hundred bucks? You know, what were we thinking? So you were one of those guys back in the early days that was stacking Bitcoin. So that is awesome.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Yeah, yeah. I uh I started buying Bitcoin in 2013. Uh, I read an article uh earlier in 2013 from an old news site, a tech news site called Slashdot. And I was I've been an IT guy my whole career, and uh I'd go there for tech news, and I remember hearing, reading about the project. It was just a you know an informational article, and I thought that sounds interesting. And uh, and then later it showed up in the mainstream news. You know, they said, Oh my gosh, Bitcoin is headed to$100 a Bitcoin. And I was like, you know, it was when I first read the article, it was like$10 a Bitcoin, right? So I thought, wow, that's a that's a pretty big jump, you know, 10x in a really short amount of time. And uh I I bought a little bit. Coinbase, the the the US exchange had just opened up and in the US, and I bought a little bit and I started learning. That was kind of the the process of learning. And and uh ever since then, I've been studying it almost every day for since 2013. So well over a decade. Uh I've been studying it every day, learning more about it. I I I get excited to talk about it because once once it clicks, you realize uh the revolutionary idea it represents, right? It's it's hard money in a digital age, it's it's incredible. So the freedom it can bring, the the prosperity it can bring is is fascinating to me. So I love telling people about it because it will help anyone who learns about it and that starts adopting it, it can help anybody in their life, regardless of their circumstances, whether they're a sustenance farmer in Peru or you know, a multi-million dollar you know net worth person in the US, it can it can literally be useful for anybody. So it's great.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

So Lisa, you've always asked this question like, what is Bitcoin? So so Tom, who invented Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_00 4:18

Yeah, uh so the the those are two different questions, but let's let's uh let's take them one of those.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

Let's dispel the the the myth that it wasn't Jeffrey Epstein.

Proof Of Work And Digital Scarcity

SPEAKER_00 4:31

Okay. Yeah, that's a recent one, right? Uh so in interestingly enough, uh Bitcoin was was mentioned in the Epstein files, right? And when you when you kind of look at the context, uh one of the one of the early, I'll say startup companies that started building Bitcoin products uh called Blockstream was um was involved with Epstein and some of the other investors that were part of the what was the fund? It's like the Zoro Trust or whatever. That they were looking for places to invest money in crypto in general. And and I and crypto and Bitcoin are very different things, right? So most people that talk about Bitcoin on mainstream media and the news are saying crypto and they think it's interchangeable with Bitcoin, but but just to be clear, it is separate. But they were looking for investors. Some of the named folks at that worked at this company were on Epstein's Island and they talked about Bitcoin in the white paper, or excuse me, in the Epstein files, but Epstein was has nothing to do with Bitcoin. And even if he did, even if it turns out Epstein created Bitcoin and it's a massad, you know, trick to get into people's money, it's ridiculous. It would be like, what if you found out the discovery of fire was by some pedophile, right? Was Adolf Hitler. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter. Fire is now in the world and it's released, right? It's a discovery. It really is more like a discovery because it's open source, decentralized, no one can control it. It doesn't matter who invented it. The the inventor, to answer your earlier question, was was a person named or person or persons at that that went by Satoshi Nakamoto. And that's a you know Japanese name, but a completely pseudonymous entity, some person that published under this uh this pen name and interacted only for a few years publicly with people that were early developers of Bitcoin, early users of Bitcoin, and then he disappeared. And and he's never come back on the scene. There's there's very specific last few messages, last public message, last private emails that people have shared, you know, after the fact now that Bitcoin has grown significantly. But um, yeah, the good news is no one controls it, right? That was the second part of your question. Uh, who invented and who controls it? Nobody controls it. It really is truly rules without rulers. Where anyone can use Bitcoin, and as long as they follow the rules, anybody has access to interact and use Bitcoin in an open source, trustless way. Uh to use a hard money in the age of the internet where you can't teleport gold, you know, instantly to the other side of the world, but you can with Bitcoin, right? So that's that's the value statement.

SPEAKER_02 7:19

Now, one of the other things that you've mentioned to me is Bitcoin is different than other cryptocurrencies in the fact that there's proof of work. Bitcoin is the result of excess energy, right? So you have to have something real, energy, electricity, in order to create the Bitcoin, and it represents the excess. And the way that I have stated this is like if you wanted to be a gold miner and go out on the gold rush, well, you had to have enough food. There had to be some society there to sell you a shovel and a pick. So your labor to go get the gold was a result of excess societal energy to where you could do that to bring back the gold, which served as a hard money. And Bitcoin is that but on the internet. So explain that proof of work difference between that and other cryptocurrencies and how it Bitcoin is different than other cryptocurrencies.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Yeah, that's that's a great question. So um, something that is that sets Bitcoin apart is the proof of work, and that's Bitcoin is unique in that it has a physical relationship to the real world, right? Physics are involved. This this isn't something that was just created out of thin air and can exist. Even Satoshi, the first person who wrote the software, published the white paper, and and started running the software and mining, he had to expend energy to get Bitcoin, right? Now, granted, back then he was the only one expending energy, so he was getting a large portion of the Bitcoin that was being mined for the early days, but within the first week, there were other people mining it. And they were basically entering into a competition to expend energy and be rewarded for that energy expenditure with new, newly produced Bitcoin. Most other crypto, and most, and I say 95%, you know, is not based on proof of work. There are a few coins that use this a similar concept to that proof of work idea. But most bit most other cryptos are printed with nothing. And even ones that say, you know, we have a limited supply, they fix the supply and they use something called proof of stake. And that just means the people that have more have more voting rights, have more uh powers, they get more rewards. So the more you have, the more you can grow and you can and do. But there's no link to the real world. And in almost all those circum those situations, there's a single entity or a controlling council or a CEO or something like that that has more control than any other person on the network. That's what sets Bitcoin apart, right? Anybody that wants to participate is an is an equal player. And the resources they put into it from a mining perspective, if they want to generate Bitcoin, they have to expend more and more energy, buy more expensive computer hardware to bring more power to the network to produce more Bitcoin. So yeah, Bitcoin's proof of work is unique, is important to the value of the coins because it ties, it's what is it's what is behind digital scarcity, right? If you think about that in another way, if you took a picture of your cat, you know, cute cat picture, you could send that to a million people through a platform like Twitter or you know, or Facebook or Instagram. And you can copy that picture of the of the cute kitten a million times at next to zero cost. So the concept of digital scarcity didn't really exist until Bitcoin came around and introduced this concept of proof of work, which linked it to the physical world, and then a blockchain, which just represents the the ledger, which is an immutable growing log of transactions, starting from the very first one when Satoshi turned the network on to today when I sent some Bitcoin to pay one of my bills, right? So every single transaction is immutable on that ledger, and that is linked to the proof of work. So you can't update the ledger without expending energy, and and it's this ever-growing kind of ledger of increasing amount of work.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Okay. So one of the other one of the other things that has come up when I've talked to people about Bitcoin is they're like, well, the blockchain is just a blockchain, and there could be other blockchains, and you know, it's no big deal. So the so the real secret there is that tied to the real world with the electricity, but the blockchain itself is just a ledger. Like it's like basic computing for software programming 101, right? Yeah, that is not like the secret sauce.

Pizza Bitcoin And Painful Early Buys

SPEAKER_00 11:50

Oh yeah, I one sec, sorry. Yeah, I uh uh I totally agree. A blockchain, now that we now that the inter the concept has been introduced, a blockchain is just a slow database, right? So there are very few use cases for blockchain technology. If you don't have all the other components, I like to kind of refer to them as Bitcoin superpowers, right? Bitcoin has incredible superpowers that are unique to Bitcoin and that don't exist for other cryptos. And one of those things is the immutability of the of the ledger linked to the proof of work to update it. But if you don't have, and the decentralized nature where there is no central entity that can just say, we need to update the rules, right? We don't like the monetary policy, we need to tweak it for the modern times, or oh, a bank needs to be bailed out, we need to inject more money into the system. None of those things are possible with Bitcoin because there is no central authority that can do that. So the combination of the decentralized nature, the energy expenditure to update the ledger, and the slow propagation time, right? There's only one update to the ledger approximately every 10 minutes. All those things combined make Bitcoin a unique proposal that can't be replicated, right? The organic growth, the organic nature of how Bitcoin started cannot be replicated because somebody that is aware of how it works can't duplicate it with in that same kind of grassroots organic fashion that it grew up from nothing. Right? The first year and a half, it had no monetary value at all. Bitcoin was traded at like a collectible amongst geeks, just testing out cool technology. And these original cypherpunks that were involved in this were sending it to each other until the first famous transaction, which was the pizza transaction, right? Uh to some somebody that had a lot of Bitcoins. He is actually the guy that kind of was the first to use GPUs for mining instead of just regular stock computer CPUs. He he adapted the software to be able to mine faster with GPUs, with graphics processors like graphics cards for playing games. And he had a large amount of Bitcoin in a very short amount of time because he was the kind of the first to find this new technology to mine Bitcoin faster. And uh and so he made an offer and said, Hey, I want to feed my family. So if somebody's willing to send me two large pizzas and I want them delivered to my door, I don't want a gift card, right? I I want pizzas delivered to my door, I will send you 10,000 Bitcoin, right? Now, today that's that's like mind-boggling, right? Because one Bitcoin is somewhere around$70,000 today, but 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas, and somebody took them up on that alpha. And that was the very first time that Bitcoin had a dollar association. And since then, right, we've been growing and growing and growing.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

My my neighbor, her daughter-in-law, got some Bitcoin early on. So I don't know how she got it, but she had hundreds of Bitcoin, and she thought, this is so stupid, and I've got to keep track of these codes. And she went to an ice cream little vendor that was selling ice cream, and would they would accept Bitcoin? She paid 119 Bitcoin for an ice cream cone.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Oh, gee, you know, that looking back in history, that stings. And I have a story just like that, right? So I bought my first Bitcoin in 2013. Bitcoin was less than$100, and I used my my uh my allowance money, right? My my wife and I had a strict budget, but each of us got a small amount of money every month that said, this you can use this for whatever you want. You know, you want to go out, eat out, you want to buy some book or go to the movies or whatever. So I spent my allowance, so to speak, on on Bitcoin that month. And uh and and later that year, Bitcoin went from you know just under$100 to over a thousand dollars. So we had an amazing Christmas that year, right? I we made we homemade a bunch of our own Christmas presents. I bought beeswax from a vendor I found online. It was it was a family in Utah, uh a dad and his sons that kept bees. And they would sell the wax and the honey and they'd make candies and stuff. So I bought uh what I thought was going to be 10 pounds of beeswax. I didn't understand the divisibility of Bitcoin. So they priced it in Bitcoin, not dollars. And I ended up buying a hundred pounds of beeswax on accident. So I talk about it like the million dollar beeswax. Luckily, I still have most of it because I use maybe 85 pounds of it. Hey, can I return this? Yeah, can I get the Bitcoin back, please? Not the dollar value at the time, right? Because that was next to nothing. But uh, yeah, that was that was my story. It's similar to the ice cream story you've got. Uh you know, the thing is now I've learned my lesson. I spend Bitcoin every day. I buy and spend Bitcoin. I I use Bitcoin as my as my money. I don't I don't use dollars. In fact, I use dollars as little as possible. So I I buy and sell Bitcoin, but I always replace. So I spend Bitcoin and I and I and I replace it with my income. So spending and replacing is the is a current strategy to continue to grow your stack of Bitcoin as you go and and build your pray the Rosary Daily says, is it too late to invest, too expensive?

Is It Too Late To Buy

SPEAKER_02 17:04

And a lot of people when they see these opportunities like, oh, I could have bought it when it was a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks, and now it's 70, it's too late. Where is Bitcoin going ultimately? Yeah. So I think this this is one of those when you get this, when you understand Bitcoin is money and it has better qualities than gold, silver, land, cash, treasury notes, every other definition of money you can think of. The way I mean, I've been reading these, uh, you know, the fiat standard and stuff like that. It's like the they're going to print money to buy Bitcoin. Yeah. Right? Like the treasuries role. So what I mean, where is Bitcoin going? And is it too late to get in? Have you missed the the the bus?

SPEAKER_00 17:46

It's a great question, and it's probably one of the most common questions I get, right? And I've had people when Bitcoin was under 10,000, I had big I had somebody sitting in my living room saying, uh, it's too late, isn't it? It's too late, isn't it? Right. And people will say that when it's a million. They'll say, it's too late, isn't it? It's too late, right? Where is it going? Uh it's going to infinity, right? And and that's that's because we in the US, and if there are any international folks listening, anybody that's on a fiat currency, right? If you if you live in Italy, you use euros. If you live in the United States, you use dollars, right? Every country in the world is using a fiat standard. And when measured in a fiat standard, the value price is truly infinite. And that's because there's a fixed number of Bitcoin that will ever exist, right? There can never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. And there's nobody in the world, even if they want to, even if the demand skyrockets, they can't make more. Because of the combination of that and the infinite nature of fiat, right? Every time somebody borrows money to buy a house at a bank, money is created out of thin air. That money didn't exist like it used to in an old savings and loan in a black and white movie, right? That there used to be m other people's money that were being used to build houses, and that was how savings and loans. But then we broke the the link between the paper money and the hard money that it was supposed to represent. And when that break happened, now we have unlimited fiat. So what happens when you have, when you measure something that's fixed supply in a unit that's unlimited, it will go up forever, right? The scale at which it goes up is really based on how fast they print. How fast they print. And that's usually tied to government spending, right? Government spending is the number one way that money is created out of out of thin air. And so, either way, the the money printer is endless, it's on and running all the time, and it goes faster sometimes and slower sometimes. But because of that, Bitcoin is has unlimited upside potential in dollar terms.

SPEAKER_02 19:52

One of the things that I've you know realized, and I've understood what money was for a long time. I didn't quite get where Bitcoin fit in until you know more recently, really since I got out of prison. But the thing that really okay, when we talk about the national debt, there are no solutions. None. You can't pay off the national debt with more fiat. You can just refinance it at a different interest rate and pay less interest. But it's this, it's this endless hamster wheel that you cannot get off of. And so, but because of the way Bitcoin works and there's this new thing, and it allows peer-to-peer, sovereign to sovereign transactions, right? I mean, look at the hubbub that was created when I ran was like, we'll take payment for oil and Bitcoin. Oh my gosh! Yeah, that's a challenge to every fiat system on the planet. And so when treasuries, which is happening now as we speak, you know, they just announced 17 billion dollars in Bitcoin, you know, held at the treasury, and we're not selling, they're going to print money to buy Bitcoin at a discount before the inflation hits the price of eggs and the price of steak and the price of stuff in order to capture that hard money. So the answer is there's no like Bitcoin's going to a hundred billion. It's going to a cajillion. It will it will come to a point where if you have one Bitcoin, you will be one of less than 19 million people, 20 million people on the planet that have a Bitcoin. You'll be a chic, you know, you'll be a Saudi king. It is there is no, it is not too late to buy. It isn't it is the good time to get on a Bitcoin standard. It insulates you from the money printer. And what's happening now with that Clarity Act and all this other stuff is now governments are onto it. They are going to inflate their money to buy Bitcoin out from under you, right? I mean, because then they're going to base their new currency just like gold. They're going to base whatever new standard on a Bitcoin standard that they'll hold in treasury.

SPEAKER_00 21:49

Yeah, I think there's a there's a there's a likely chance of that happening. And I think we've already seen one country do it, and then the IMF applied pressure and they kind of reversed it, but El Salvador actually. declared Bitcoin as legal tender. So there there have already been movements at the at a at a sovereign nation level to start.

SPEAKER_02 22:07

Nigeria did too.

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Yeah. So it's it's incredible because the fact that we can buy Bitcoin for dollars means we're still early, right? The what you pointed out is once that it there's an effect called the Canteon effect, I believe it's how it's pronounced. And it's essentially the concept that people closest to the money printer get the most benefit from it. Right. So the first sovereign nation that basically says we're going to start printing money to buy Bitcoin is going to beat everybody to the punch, right? They're going to win because that won't be able to last very long. As soon as the inflation catches up, the the price of Bitcoin will skyrocket it because again it's it's an unlimited supply that's being printed and a fixed supply. So there are more than 40 million millionaires in the United States, right? Alone just in the United States there are four more than 40 million people that have a net worth greater than 1 million dollars. There are only 21 million Bitcoin. So if every millionaire just in the United States decided to buy one Bitcoin tomorrow they all couldn't have it.

SPEAKER_02 23:14

There's not enough to go around right this this this is going to turn the who has and who has not on its head. It's going to completely flip our world upside down. And this is the other thing I realized too Bitcoin doesn't just replace a gold bar it eliminates the need for the Swift system for Visa and MasterCard. It eliminates for private bank it it there'll always be a place for private banks but it's going to eliminate the the uh um fractional reserve lending system it's going to eliminate mortgage markets securities markets it solves and there's a book that you you recommended to me here let me pull it up real quick so people can see it this is called the Bitcoin standard and this is a really really good book. Oop what happened here what's going on okay so this is a really good book Lisa I'm going to pull you down um this this book right here the Bitcoin standard kind of describes all of the uh the elements that go into Bitcoin and it doesn't talk deeply about the technology itself but it cut talks about a real hard money standard and it takes you through beads seashells silver gold and now Bitcoin and how this is what every sovereign nation has to have and every sovereign person has to have it. I do believe it's like you're not really sovereign unless you have money and money is not dollar bills it's gold right and so this isn't a way for you to actually be sovereign you can go peer-to-peer transactions with a nation state if you have Bitcoin and it eliminates all of the corruption because the ledger is for everybody to see we know exactly how much money the US Treasury has in Bitcoin right and they it it eliminates fraud there's never going to be a time where Somali pirates in Minnesota are getting our money if we have a Bitcoin standard and it really the more I understand this I'm like this is this is inevitable. Like you cannot stop this it is a ball rolling and it's going to take out nations that don't get on board and there's going to be like I like you said those 40 million millionaires that 40 million dollars when Bitcoin goes to a 40 million dollar valuation you know it it's going to turn the entire world on its head. Yeah I do I agree that I think Bitcoin represents the largest potential wealth transfer in in keep talking memorable history right people that are oh sorry did I disconnect I gotta mess with this little oh no no worries yeah I think because people that that are are are getting into Bitcoin early like this there the fact that they're able to trade dollars for it it's it's gonna be it's gonna be uh life changing for the people that that get in I and just to to kind of go back to your question where's Bitcoin going I really do think that within 10 years one Bitcoin will be around a million dollars right so people that think oh it's too late I I can't get in you know this early this is too late you know it isn't too late right so I got got 400 moving things on my screen here yeah it's not too late no not at all that that is i i suffered from that you know oh it's when we and I first talked it was 124 I remember you sent me five dollars over zoom you know put up the QR code and oh my gosh it was it was my first bitcoin Tom thank you so much yeah a couple satoshis and I sat and watched it go 124 126 60 you know I was like wow yeah but that that volatility is actually on our side because it creates the buying opportunities you can buy the dip you should never be afraid to buy bitcoin ever when you understand the Bitcoin standard but right now is an unbelievable buying opportunity even just forecasting out a year or two and if you forecast out five or ten oh my goodness I mean yeah again the way I understand the way that the Trump administration and the world is now addressing Bitcoin again it is no small thing that Iran tried to charge their tolls in Bitcoin that is not a small thing that makes sense and Marco Rubio talked the other day about we we're not even going to talk sanctions in five years because countries can go business to business. They don't have to settle those gold and dollar treasury accounts through the Swift system that we control we won't be able to sanction anybody. And that is like when you get that it's like oh my goodness like the one of the biggest tools we have to be an American empire is the dollar and when the dollar becomes negated right through the Bitcoin network you cannot compre the world is going to have an upheaval over this and at the end of it is going to be prosperity and peace.

SPEAKER_00 28:01

Yeah I I 100% agree you know Bitcoin is not sanctionable. So when when they started charging tolls in Bitcoin to get to get through the Strait of Hormuz that was the the death knell of the petrodollar system right the petrodollar system has been used as a as as a means of control because the world operated on a dollar in order to buy or sell or trade oil and that started breaking down recently with bricks and and things like that and and the threat of it. But this was the first real world example now it's still a headline right it's still a quote from several news sources um I I want to see the the actual transaction on the blockchain for the first uh you know Bitcoin toll for for moving oil through there but um that was a huge headline right if if that actually comes to fruition and they start actually requiring Bitcoin uh that's incredible that that could be the beginning of the end for the petrodollar system. Well Trump put a stop to it oh did he I see I'm not up to I'm not up to date lately he put a stop to it but the just the threat of that right to understand the significance of it Iran is in a weak spot to do that extortion but the moment a country like China says hey by the way to buy our goods and the whole world's hooked on China goods we're only accepting settlement in Bitcoin yeah they can enforce that oh yeah and and with the rise of AI just go ahead pick choose choose your own AI platform you like the best and ask it if you if you were independent and had to use any form of money currently on the planet what would you use? Every single AI says Bitcoin right and the and the reason is it understands what sets Bitcoin apart from crypto right lots of crypto make claims that are similar to Bitcoin and none of them hold water compared to Bitcoin. So uh yeah that's it's incredible once once more and more people as adoption grows which it grows over it just continues to grow it never shrinks right it continues getting bigger and bigger the adoption of it we'll see the price follow suit.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Yep so a couple things before we continue on yeah at present perspective we are running a a contest okay so if you look on the page here there's a little link where you can send tips and there's a rumble wallet that is a crypto wallet that also has Bitcoin and a couple other cryptos we love Bitcoin so we want Bitcoin. So between now or April 9th which was a couple days ago and May 9th in that one month period of time we're going to add up all the tips that come in and whoever gives the highest tip is going to get a 10% rebate back to them. So if enough people tip that rebate that jackpot will be pretty good so we've already got at least one tip in I know we don't have the biggest show but consider getting yourself a rumble wallet which isn't hard to do you can just download the links and do it and you can buy bitcoin there. You can also use River which is our preferred way to buy Bitcoin uh what I like about river it's a they hold whatever you have in there they're holding actual Bitcoin they're not hypothecating or anything like that. And uh Lisa put the link in there river.com forward slash invite and all that that's our referral code so feel free to go there to start a river account and I do recommend everybody do it. Now aside from our promotion right Tom you're going to be teaching a class at 1776 live that goes over this now that class we're gonna we're gonna introduce it in Spokane on the 25th when we're there we're doing a live event there stop starting over and you guys can go to 1776live.us and get links and you can register it's$49 for a ticket um but when we do that class at 1776 live you're gonna go over not just the contrast between money and fiat currency not just the difference between Bitcoin and crypto but you're gonna be explaining some of the technical stuff you'll be explaining how to use a hot wallet how to use a cold wallet what happens if your house burns down and your cold wallet melts how do you get access to your Bitcoin so you don't lose it because that's the other big concern right Lisa what if I lose the Bitcoin so you're gonna be going into all those kind of details anything else you want to share with that class and again always a good time to buy Bitcoin but if you're kind of like I don't this is just such a new technology the you can't think of it like well I'd rather put the money in Bitcoin than take the class the class is the education that will set you up for a future of being a multi multimillionaire through Bitcoin and without it you do run the risk of losing your keys or putting it in like you know FTX was one of those ones that people had a bunch of Bitcoin or they had ETF I don't know exactly how that worked but it collapsed and they lost everything because they weren't in self-custody mode. Yeah going over all of that.

Not Your Keys And Real Self Custody

SPEAKER_01 32:46

That's huge and in terms of this this episode being focused on the myths I have a very dear friend who is all poo-poo Bitcoin because he lost all of it in one of those.

SPEAKER_03 32:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:00

So that's one of the reasons why we did our due diligence to recommend a place that you can buy and hold your Bitcoin until you may want to get a cold storage.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Yeah yeah there's a there's a famous concept uh in in Bitcoin is is uh an early educator in the space and he said not your keys not your bitcoins you know that and that was a part of the small quote and what that really meant represents is when someone else is holding your Bitcoin for you, you don't actually have Bitcoin. You have an IOU for Bitcoin right it's kind of the closest analogy for modern day is having a$100 bill in your hand is not the same as having a$100 balance at your bank account right because if you suddenly become uh you know a person of interest by the government they can shut off your bank account right yes persona non grata right it suddenly you don't have your bank account anymore they can't take something that's out of in your physical hand without applying pressure Bitcoin is unique in that even applying pressure they can't take it from you so yeah Bitcoin is truly uh represents the essence of property rights right this is this is the one thing that this is the one asset in the whole world you can own and can't be taken from you even if they kill you right so it's it's unique in that way one of the phrases that are one of the ways I understand this is it overcomes the warlord dilemma which this is something we used to study in political science you've got a you've got a gold bars if I bring enough big big enough army give it to me or else or else what?

SPEAKER_02 34:26

And then I go take your gold hey I want your land you have a really nice farm oh I don't want you to have it well the law says you can't have it okay I'm taking it right Bitcoin it's like give me your keys no well give me your keys no I'll kill you if you don't okay then the Bitcoin's gone forever. Yeah it removes the incentive for removes the incentive for force and war and violence because I'm better off putting energy into trading with you or creating a positive commercial interaction instead of being a warlord and just taking it which you know we live in a little safety bubble the last couple hundred years nation states have been able to defend their Fort Knoxes and you know there's commercial you know trading but when a country gets weak Libya Iraq Afghanistan Iran right then the warlord comes out and we're gonna take it from you and so the the crypto keys is not something that can be taken like that.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

That's right it because Bitcoin's private keys are just information you can literally memorize and it's not complex it's 12 English words or 24 English words depending on your wallet setup you can literally memorize those and carry billions of dollars of spending purchasing power across a border and nobody knows that you did it right it's it's literally in your head now if you only had it in your head that could be risky because if you get bonked in the head right now now your family's left high and dry right but uh yeah I did see a couple of questions that I'd be happy to to answer from the chat or if you want to you know pick a few out or go go for it. So I saw you know I saw somebody said is it too late? Is it too expensive? We talked a little bit about that but just to just to talk about that a little more you don't have to buy a whole Bitcoin at a time. So one thing that some people may not realize is Bitcoin is divisible. Just like a dollar it can be divided into a hundred cents Bitcoin can be divided into 100 million smaller units, right? So you can buy a fraction of a Bitcoin in fact I buy Bitcoin every single day I literally have an automatic purchase set up to buy a little bit of Bitcoin every single day. And that allows me to live without caring what the price in dollars is because I'm buying a little bit every day and I pay my bills in Bitcoin and we will talk more about that at the event in Spokane. But because of that I don't even care what the value in dollars is my goal is to have a little bit more Bitcoin every month and by buying on a regular basis whether it's every time you get paid, every day however you want to set it up you can accumulate that. So it's never too late it's not too expensive because there will always be Bitcoin enough for everyone it's just a matter of how soon you get in and what price you pay to get it.

SPEAKER_02 37:05

So the other thing too is because Bitcoin is real savings it's it's a weight and measure it's it stays the same if the if they print more money which they will right the daily value of Bitcoin back and forth it it kind of you know you mentioned it looks like a tech stock to some people don't think of it like a tech stock. Yeah when you save that Bitcoin right if you're trying to set aside a hundred dollars for retirement you're contributing to a 401k or an IRA stop yes buy bitcoin if you've got money that you're setting aside for a rainy day in the future you should hold it in Bitcoin you will not lose right and so that that is that is one of the things I was like oh my goodness even you know I'm seeing all these charts where people are calculating the retirement amounts and you know if you're like an early adopter and you've got 75 Bitcoin or you've got a thousand Bitcoin you're a billionaire great awesome we love it but for a lot of people they're trying to get a half a bitcoin they're saying I retire in 15 years and I'm trying to get a half a bitcoin that's saying I'm trying to save$35,000 and that's going to be enough to sustain me indefinitely through retirement in 10 or 15 years. I in the Ignite presentation I show that chart with how much you need to save and the crazy thing is in the beginning when I first started showing that chart 20 years ago three to five thousand was a good retirement for someone on a fixed income in eastern Idaho you go to that same community in eastern Idaho and it's$7500 to 10 000 to$12,000 a month for the same house the same grocery bill the same electrical usage. Bitcoin sets you out of that completely so that's one of the things I've seen a lot of these Bitcoiners they're realizing you know it might be really difficult for me in the next year or two to save 70 grand and buy a Bitcoin because I can't buy it today. But they're like if I can just get a half a bitcoin or it between now and retirement that's enough yeah yeah it it's true and and it's it's enough no matter it's enough no matter what price you buy it. So even if Bitcoin continues to go up you still keep buying if Bitcoin's a million dollars a bitcoin it doesn't matter then then the amount for retirement goes from half a bitcoin to an eighth of a bitcoin okay so another myth buster let's let's this myth the people that are out there saying go buy stocks put your money in the stock market like the stock market's doing gangbusters you can make so much money it's all reflected on inflation like that's the they're they're actively right now go look go look at what Scott Bessant wrote in the Wall Street Journal. They're actively right now allowing that to pump because they can liquidate and move it into Bitcoin before the little guy figures it out right they want to acquire thousands of Bitcoin when I'm saying you don't I mean we're central bank you need to acquire thousands of Bitcoin but for us little guys man if you can get a couple Bitcoin you'll be a Saudi cheek by the time this is set in place. And but if you could get if you just get onto the Bitcoin standard it's the first time in my lifetime because I was a real estate guy 2007 2008 real estate's the only real money right it's the only thing that's going to hedge against inflation and it was mainly because the price of real estate goes up because of inflation rightcoin doesn't just match inflation it beats it by a mile because of this adoption period and this adoption period is going to last 15 20 30 years. Yeah right so it's there there is not it it it's like you have to read the Bitcoin standard it will warp your mind because it puts you back into this place where gold makes sense again the difference is I can sell my gold I can buy an ice cream cone with it whereas with gold what are you going to a pawn shop you know what I mean like there's it's it's become non-use useful money.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Yeah even if you do go to a local uh precious metal broker you're paying a 20% premium to sell spot right you can buy maybe a five percent premium but you're you're pay you're losing 20% whatever day you need to sell it it's always down the worst day it's the worst day and that actually is a great segue into it into one of the other questions um and the question was if you buy one Bitcoin for$70,000 are you able to spend$70,000 and and that's a that's a great question. When you buy some Bitcoin regardless of the price in dollars you're getting a fixed amount of the total amount of Bitcoin that will ever exist. So to so for example if you were to buy one whole Bitcoin today for$70,000 or whatever the price is somewhere around there you now have one 21 millionth of the entire wealth that the world represents right one 21 millionth of all of the Bitcoin that will ever exist and there can never be more. So in the short term, let's say Bitcoin goes from$70,000 today and it drops to$60,000 if you were to immediately try to sell that Bitcoin you're only going to get$60,000 but you need to flip that equation on its head and say once I've purchased the Bitcoin it can never be debased. It can never be devalued the amount of Bitcoin you have which in this example is one full Bitcoin or another way to look at that is 100 million satoshis which is like the equivalent of a penny for a dollar you will always have that same exact amount. So in 10 years when the price of one Bitcoin is worth one million dollars you now have the purchasing power of a million dollars in 10 years from now not just$70,000 right if you did that same relational ratio of what you have to what is possible is the key to the it's value.

SPEAKER_02 42:45

And that's the thing it is not that you the Bitcoin doesn't earn interest when you think of it like a stock that's when you are like well what's it worth bitcoin is Bitcoin there's gonna be a day where we say well what how much dollars we're gonna we're gonna flip the script and we're not gonna say how many dollars is a Bitcoin worth we're gonna say how many Bitcoin is a dollar worth and it's gonna be a fraction of a satoshi or nothing right or nothing yeah or nothing yeah and and there you know the more I understand this and uh with my political science background this changes in an instant just like when there was the Federal Reserve was created and they started sending a lot of money into the 1920s there's a lot of speculation because all this money was floating around it was inflated but if people speculated with it they took a hit by 1933 they confiscated bullion in the United States and around the world they've basically done the same thing. And then in 1973 they said oh and by the way it's not redeemable even by nation states. Yeah and so when things happen like if they say hey by the way now we're backing our currency with Bitcoin that moment is going to be an a a talk by a president and all of a sudden the whole world Will shift out from under you and you either have it or you don't.

SPEAKER_00 44:03

You know what I mean? Yeah, if they do another executive order 60102 when they when you know what is FDR made gold illegal to hold by individuals. If they did something like that with Bitcoin, uh you better you hope to have had it before that happens, right? Because at that point it'll get a little more difficult. Today we can just log onto a river and buy some, right? And there's lots of exchanges. If that scenario happens, you're gonna be having to do peer-to-peer, which is still amazingly possible with Bitcoin, right? There's nobody that can stop it, there's nobody that can get in the way of it.

SPEAKER_02 44:34

So I you know and even with people say, well, what if they block it on the internet, right? Like a totalitarian country blocks all the Bitcoin. It doesn't matter. At this point, they've already got it going over radio waves.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02 44:46

You can do peer-to-peer just with a walkie-talkie.

SPEAKER_00 44:48

Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah, there's there is no stopping it, right? In order to actually stop Bitcoin, you'd have to shut down the global internet indefinitely. Indefinitely. You can't stop the internet around the whole globe. Sure, one country can shut off the internet in a localized area for a short amount of time, but now you can literally send Bitcoin via text message. There's a great app that Jack Dorsey China China's been unable to stop it, and they tried. They've they've been just just search on the internet for China bans Bitcoin, and it's happened like 17, 18 times now, right? They keep trying, but they can ban everything. Yeah. And with the great wall, the great firewall, right? If anybody could, it would be them. They can't. They can't stop it. So yeah, it really is uh unstoppable, unconfiscatable at this point. It's it's the only thing I'm interested in, right? That's I I've said a couple of times, I live on a Bitcoin standard, so I literally have negative dollars at any given time. Bitcoin is my money, just like I'm a citizen of the internet.

SPEAKER_01 45:49

So another another myth. I have Bitcoin, what can I do with it? What can I buy with it? And you're the first guy I've ever met who doesn't use dollars, FRN's history.

SPEAKER_02 46:01

You convert it at the point of at the point of sale through an app.

SPEAKER_00 46:04

Yeah, and and I use it direct as well. So yeah, I'd be happy to talk about that if that's if that's where you're heading.

Taxes, Spending, And Borrowing Against Bitcoin

SPEAKER_02 46:10

Yeah, how let's let me ask answer another question. B man says, Are you taxed when you spend the Bitcoin or when you convert to Federal Reserve notes? Great question.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

Yeah, that is a good question. So as of the current tax law that I'm aware of, uh, Bitcoin is treated like uh an asset, and so it follows traditional capital gains rules. So no consequences for buying it, uh, no consequences for borrowing against it, no tax consequences. But when you dispose of it, whether it's selling it, spending it, trading it, you have to report a capital gain at that point or capital loss, depending on if Bitcoin is up or down from when you set your uh cost basis. So as of as of now, that's how it is in the United States. You are meant to report capital gains taxes when you dispose of it. So you can buy as much as you want and put it away in cold storage for savings and don't have to even there's a couple caveats to that.

SPEAKER_02 47:09

One thing you can do, and this is something I've explored quite a bit, is borrowing against it, which yeah, that's how wealthy people do it. It's treated like a commodity, right? So and it and it but it also there's lenders that will lend on it like it's a stock portfolio. So very, very wealthy people, they put all their assets into stock and they borrow against it. They never sell, they never sell.

SPEAKER_00 47:28

There's actually a company now in the United States that's rolling something new out called a Bitcoin line of credit. So it works just like a credit card, but instead you provide Bitcoin to back that loan instead of just off of your social credit score, right? Or whatever. Um, so there are more and more products. That's how I bought my house.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

Carry the lead on that. What you just said, say that slower. That is huge because we have a program that we offer, and you can find out about it 1776 Live having to do with equity, that could affect one's credit score. So this is an alternate avenue to build credit.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

Absolutely. And and here I can give a personal example. So I recently retired from my kind of nine to five job and I underestimated the requirements for getting a mortgage. And we had we had sold our house. I bought Bitcoin with the equity in the house, by the way, with the proceeds of the house. And we rented for a few years because I saw this very good opportunity a few years back when Bitcoin was at its previous cycle low. I turned all the equity that we had in the house, sorry, different equity than you guys normally talk about, but I the value that was stored in my house, I liquidated that, I bought Bitcoin with it. And then we rented for a few years.

SPEAKER_01 48:49

Lucky, son of a bitch.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

The thing is, anybody can do this, right? No, this was yeah, this was this was this was a decade of or and more of studying. But uh then when I was ready to, I had already retired while I was still renting. I had already stopped my traditional nine to five job. And when I went to go buy a house, I wanted a mortgage, right? I don't care, even if it's a seven or eight percent interest rate, it's still cheaper than spending my Bitcoin. I don't want to spend my Bitcoin, right? But nobody would give me a mortgage because I couldn't show any traditional income, right? And Bitcoin isn't quite yet recognized by traditional finance systems, like, you know, large lenders, you know, mortgage lenders as an asset that they can see. So I borrowed against my Bitcoin. There's several platforms now where I can basically post-collateral in the form of Bitcoin and get dollars in return. And I bought my house with a Bitcoin-backed loan, right? And so with a combination of products like that and this new kind of concept of a Bitcoin line of credit, you don't have to have a credit score. It doesn't even matter. Nobody checked my credit for these loans because I'm providing valuable collateral, and they're just giving me half as much money as I give them back in the form of you know dollars that are just like a melting ice cube and constantly losing value, right? So within less than 10 years, I'll be able to sell a very small fraction of the collateral I use for that loan to just pay it all off, and I'll just, you know, not have any debt at all.

SPEAKER_02 50:22

So yeah. The other thing too, B man, uh there are some strategies to roll that capital gains through trust. And we talk about that 1776live.us all the time, right? You can put your you can put your Bitcoin into a trust. One of the things we'll be exploring when your class goes live is a private trust that does not require an EIN to hold the Bitcoin, which then allows you a lot more flexibility and it's all enforced by law. So we'll be we'll be talking about that in the class. Pray the Rogery Daily um had another question here. She says, What would make the price of Bitcoin go down?

SPEAKER_00 50:56

So Bitcoin is the purest form of the free market, right? So the simplest answer to that question, it's a comp it can be a complex question, right? But the simplest answer is there's when there's more people that want to sell Bitcoin than there are people that want to buy Bitcoin, the price goes down in dollar terms.

SPEAKER_01 51:16

So, it's true economics, right? The economic like the the stock market doesn't work, PE ratio and all of that doesn't work with economics.

SPEAKER_00 51:25

But Bitcoin goes back to pure economic strategies and yeah, because it really is, like I said, the purest form of of that concept of supply and demand because there is a fixed supply. It's literally the only asset in the world, not counting collectibles like artwork, right? There's a fixed supply of Picasso paintings and there will never be more, but that can't be used as money, right? Bitcoin is the first commodity that has a true fixed supply. We think about logically, there's a fixed supply of gold on the planet, right? But we haven't even scratched the surface on these underground gold mines. There's an asteroid in space that has more gold than the entire earth has in it, right? Nothing truly is scarce compared to Bitcoin. Because of that, when when people want Bitcoin, if they buy it and take custody of it, it's taking it out of circulation in a way that's not possible for anything else. It with stocks with even mostly gold, unless you're taking physical possession of the gold, it can be traded like paper, right? There's promises made against those things. They can trade derivatives of the stocks, not even just the stocks themselves. When they decide they need to raise more funds, they just make more stocks and dilute the existing supply of stock, right? None of that's possible with Bitcoin. Because of that, it's it's volatile in the short term, right? If you look at one year period, the price can go all over the place, up and down, up and down. That's why I say spend and replace. Buy Bitcoin, use it to encourage that circular Bitcoin economy, but replace it, right? So if you're gonna spend some Bitcoin, buy enough to replace what you spent so that at the end of the month you're you have a little more Bitcoin than you did last month.

SPEAKER_02 53:09

But yeah, it's it's the only way that's that this cannot it's almost like once you see it, the light bulb goes off, and we could spend hours trying to explain this. And until the light bulb goes off, it'll be like Yeah. It's the only way to actually save. Okay, it's the only way to actually save. If you even save an ounce of gold, they're mining more gold. Yeah, right. And even if the currency they print, yeah, the value of that gold goes up, but you have a spending problem, there's all kinds of issues with physical metals, which I'm a I was a silver guy forever, right? But Bitcoin, if you can just spend less than you, everybody tries to do this, they live on a budget. If you can just spend one satoshi less than what you put into satoshis every month, no matter what happens with the value of the dollar, the price of eggs are gonna be the price of eggs. It's gonna match up the right thing on the satoshis, but now you're actually saving. Even if you save$100 a month and you're budgeting, every month when they print more money, that$100 spending capacity goes to$97, to$92 to$85. When I graduated high school, gold was at like$250 an ounce. It's just shy of$5,000 an ounce right now. It wouldn't have mattered if I put$1,000 a month away every month. If I saved it in dollars, even if the bank was paying me two or three percent, I don't even I can't even buy the same amount of gold with that savings now as I could have just buying it in gold in high school. But what and and I would have a spendability problem with it all along the way. With Bitcoin, this is why the Bitcoin standard, actually using it as your standard. Everybody here is using a fiat standard. If you use a Bitcoin standard and you just simply save one more satoshi than you spend, right? That budget you have, if you can just spend one less Satoshi than you put in, you will be miles ahead of 99% of the population. And here's the other thing there are some serious structural changes right now. They are allowing Bitcoin to be purchased by people's 401ks. So people are not gonna want a mutual fund when they can buy Bitcoin. They're allowing they're allowing it to be uh bought in IRAs, they're allowing um they're allowing a lot of these stock companies that are buying Bitcoin and then selling stock on the company that buys the Bitcoin. People think that's a good investment. Maybe it is. A better investment is to own your own Bitcoin right now.

Why The 21 Million Cap Stands

SPEAKER_00 55:37

Yeah, right. Exactly. You can there are lots of ways to get exposure to Bitcoin. Like you you listed off a few. One example, Fidelity has an a Bitcoin ETF and the symbol, the stock symbol is FBTC. You can buy that and you get direct Bitcoin exposure, but you don't get any of Bitcoin's superpowers, right? This is this is why I come back to that.

SPEAKER_02 55:57

BMAN 1791 says, What will prevent the Bitcoin production cap from being expanded in the future as in stock spitting? This is a great question. Why will it never go above 21 million Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_00 56:10

Yeah, so so at its core, Bitcoin is a protocol. And a protocol is just a word to mean a set of rules. And because there's no ruler, there is no board of directors, there's no CEO, there's no president, there's no central anything. Bitcoin is literally a distributed system around the world. In order to change the rules, which the the total amount is one of the rules, in order to change the rules, all of the holders of Bitcoin, all the participants, would have to agree to this. And simultaneously, right? And then a minute period. Yeah, it could happen over time, and that's a social thing. I I shouldn't let me let me rewind that statement. It can you can never increase the cap. Changes can happen to Bitcoin over time, but it's a very slow, laborious process that takes people adopting the change voluntarily. No one can ever force a change. Use your chess example. That's a great example. Yeah, chess is a good chess is a great example of a protocol that most people don't even think about, right? So the the game of chess has been played for over a thousand years as we know it today. And it even goes back to 1,500 years in earlier versions that had different shapes, pieces, and things like that. You could go back in time 100 years, sit down in a park in a country where you don't even speak the language, and you can have a game of chess with a person and know that you're both playing fair because you both understand the rules. So if a person moves the pit moves a piece in a way that isn't allowed by the protocol of chess, you they're cheating and you stand up and you the game is over, right? You can't play a game that's not fair. Bitcoin is like that in that all the participants of the network are agreeing to a set of rules. And the the mechanism for that participation is the software that you can run on a node, and anybody can do this. That is your sovereign control over the rules. Now, if you try to, if I take that software, it's open source software, and I just decide I'm a software developer, I'm gonna just update my code to be 40 million Bitcoin instead of 21 million, I'm gonna give myself 10 million Bitcoin. No, everybody, just like in a game of chess, the moment I connect that node to the internet and somebody says, hey, this guy changed the rules, I'm booted off. I'm I'm a cheater, nobody will play with me, right? Bitcoin is that decentralized protocol. So no one can cheat and produce more. It's a fixed supply. There's a great quote from Satoshi in in you know the first year or so where he made a comment. I I couldn't quote it, I'd have to look it up, but he made a comment that when he released version 0.1, the very first iteration of Bitcoin, he said, due to the nature of this thing that that I've just released, the monetary properties are now fixed and can never be changed because no one would vote again would vote to devalue their own money.

SPEAKER_02 59:00

That's the thing. The Bitcoin standard book talks about that. Yeah, let's let's let's double the value of Bitcoin. Well, first of all, it's divisible out a million ways, so it's like a dollar now has a million pennies, so it's not gonna be a problem. Like that's the other thing, too. It's not that there's only 21 million Bitcoin, it's that there's 21 trillion satoshis, okay, which is enough. And and it in the book it talks about one dollar is sufficient to run the entire world's economy if it's divisible enough. So that it works on the divisibility, and but the divisibility is fixed. But the other thing too is it resists any kind of changing, it also resists hacking because the moment someone hacks it, it's not worth anything. So, what was the point? The moment that you change the rules, you just devalued your own savings account. It's like, you know, we don't vote for more printing of money. That's the politicians because they're getting kickbacks somehow, right? The people don't vote for that, and it's it changes the incentives, it goes along with it, eliminates the warlord dilemma. The central bank can't just go decide they're gonna do uh uh an extra printing this year or we're gonna have a trillion dollar bailout. That's what started Bitcoin was the 2008 bailout, right? Yeah, they can't do that. It's the way they built it and decentralized it. In order for Bitcoin to have a stock split to do that, Tom would have to agree. And Lisa would have to agree, and I would have to agree. And guess what? It all has to happen in 10 minutes, and we're not gonna agree to that all together at the same time in 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:28

In the book of the millions and millions of people that own it. No, it's not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:32

There have been multiple attempts to update the protocol, and even with some of the guys that were there early on that were that were emailing Satoshi Nakamoto, right? They have been unsuccessful in getting even things like speeding up the ledger to pass, let alone adding adding Bitcoin to the ledger. Like it's not happening.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:53

Yeah, it's it's incredible to follow those discussions because there have the the process to to update or change Bitcoin is is a process called the Bitcoin improvement proposal. And so anybody that is a software developer and understands Bitcoin can write a proposal to make an update to Bitcoin, right? One of the things that's been talked about uh in the in the news, Bitcoin-related news, is the threat of quantum computers, right? What would happen if somebody built a quantum computer and and pointed it at Bitcoin, right? Would it break the cryptography uh that Bitcoin uses? Well, my answer is maybe, but it's okay. That's a that's an update that everyone would agree to, right? If someone approached me and says, hey, we've got this proposal that will make Bitcoin safe from quantum computing attacks if it ever even materializes, we're not in any rush because it really isn't anywhere near being real, even though the articles sound like it.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:48

But let's just say that's out by Ethereum, the biggest competitor to Bitcoin, right? Like people who've been trying to run their own cryptocurrency.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:56

So, yeah, then that's a type of change that everyone would, of course, agree to. If quantum computer suddenly actually is real and it could actually be a threat to Bitcoin, uh we all it takes is a software update and we're quantum resistant, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:10

So the other the other thing, too, and this is what is kind of one of those, oh yeah, if you're worried about your Bitcoin being hacked, that's the least of your concerns. Every field system is going to be hacked, every central bank is gonna be hacked, every government energy grid system, every energy grid will be hacked. It it is yep, they might turn off the electricity, you know what I mean? Like there is if Bitcoin can be hacked and all the best hackers in the world that can hack into FBI and CIA databases and China just had their database hacked. If they can't hack Bitcoin, right, it's not gonna happen. In the book, The Bitcoin Standard, it talks about well, isn't Bitcoin used by criminals? It's like uh the FBI loves it when when drug dealers use Bitcoin because it's like this easy to find them, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

That's but the other thing is it says in there the only time the only thing that has successfully happened is hackers will hack your system and ask for a Bitcoin ransom, which actually just goes to prove Bitcoin is better than gold, silver, dollars, everything else. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:09

If they ask for dollars, their bank account could be shut off. If they ask for Bitcoin and somebody is gullible enough to pay them, you can't get that back. There's no customer service hotline or there's no CEO to say, hey, reverse this transaction. No, that's that's it.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:22

Which that is part of the You guys, we are already at an hour or past our hour, and we have one more question in here. Everybody's got to come to Spokane. Meet Tom, geek out on it. We're gonna be there April 25th. The link is in here to find out more.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:37

I want to prep people for the class, right? The investment you make to learn this, to understand it inside and out, how to hold a cold wallet, how to run a node, maybe a minor, all those different things, it's money well spent, right? The the the idea that it's you know, Tom, you've struggled this, and I, you know, all this information is public source. I know. But like what Tom just said, there's no hotline to call. If you lose your wallet and you don't know how to restore it, if your house burns down, if you know you want to run all these different things. Tom's the hotline, right? There's very few people that are going to spend the time and are passionate about this and want to share the freedom it brings that will help educate you so that you can know how to do it, so that you can have confidence doing it, because it is a scary thing. We're asking you to move from gold to dollars, and now we're taking gold to Bitcoin, right? And it's like, but what if, what if, what if I can't call the bank if my card gets hacked? That is one of the great things about Bitcoin, is it's truly sovereign. And so, you know, please, please, please take the class once it's up and running, come to Spokane with us, spend the investment to learn, right? From someone who's done it. That's the thing, Tom. You've been doing this since 2013. Yeah, so you're you're not like, hey, I just found like me. I just found it last week. It's so great. You know, I'm I called Tom and I'm like, Tom, what should exchange should I use? What cold wallet should I get? You know, how should I do this stuff? And I'm excited to take the class myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:08

Yeah, I'm I'm I'm excited. I I get really passionate about educating uh people about Bitcoin because I I've realized, I think I said it earlier in in this call the potential to help anyone on the planet. It doesn't matter your circumstances, where whether you're a sustenance farmer in in a developing world or you're you know a billionaire here, it doesn't matter. Bitcoin is a solution that we've never had a solution for. People diversify their investments to reduce risk. But that's a so that's a problem that can now be solved, right? You no longer need to diversify when when you've already solved the problem of the risk that comes with having these these companies. One C one CEO tweets out something controversial, stock prices tank, right? There is no representative for Bitcoin. It's Still a subject to the market forces, right? That that causes you know surges and and declines, but it can't be modified in in that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:10

And even silver and gold is being manipulated. Their values are being messed with. And Carlitz asked a fantastic question. Yeah.

Home Mining And Heating With Miners

SPEAKER_03 1:06:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:18

How do you feel about Bitcoin mining systems for home use? Trade cost of electricity for fractions of Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:26

I love it. And I've done it. So um, and there's really exciting developments related to this. So just a just a quick example. Today, to mine Bitcoin competitively, it costs a significant amount of money to buy a really powerful server. And this is something that would normally run in a data center. Now, if you know an electrician, they can get you hooked up. But that's that's kind of pricey to get into. They sell small miners that are just a tiny fraction of the power needs. You know, it's it's less than a dollar a day in electricity, and it can give you small amounts of Bitcoin on the regular Satoshis, or you can use it to lottery mine, right? So that the concept of mining is really a really advanced guessing game, and your miner gets to guess millions of times per second. So there's it's like having this perpetual lottery ticket, right? Uh that you can run in your house for just hobby mining. But there's really exciting development in that manufacturers of heating products. So think water central air seating heating system. So I live in Colorado. I live in Colorado, and both my water heater and my furnace run on propane, liquid propane. And it is very expensive, even compared to electricity. And I pay a kind of a premium rate for electricity because I'm kind of remote. I can literally replace my water heater with a Bitcoin miner. It looks just like a water heater, and a plumber can install it. That is so instead of just burning electricity or or liquid propane to generate the heat, it mines Bitcoin. It takes the waste heat from that computer process that that generates heat, heats the water with it. Same thing with super exciting. Imagine getting a subsidy for heating your house, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:07

Lisa and I are both running, you know, floor heaters. And it's all the same thing. You can get one of these heaters that mines Bitcoin. I'm burning the electricity already. Now I run the program and I get to have the hot air blown from the computer onto me.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:20

It's instead of some hot ceramic coil. And that that heater that you just lifted up, there's literally a company called HeatBit that sells one that looks exactly like that. You plug it into the wall, you give it some credentials in a Bitcoin wallet, and you're mining Bitcoin and while you're heating your room, right? So you're already developing those.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:38

These these are the things that we're gonna go over in great detail in class. I I cannot emphasize this enough. Go get your Bitcoin, do what you're gonna do. Get in this class. It will affect everything we're doing. The Epic Trust, those of you that are participating in it, we're gonna be talking about this because we can borrow against Bitcoin. So those that have made exchanges, we can set that into Bitcoin, and now we can borrow the cash out of it to do what we're gonna do. But now you can be beneficiaries of that Bitcoin forever, right? So there are so many great ways that we can leverage this, and we have a window of time. Like I look at it, anything under$100,000 is like buying pennies. You know, it's it is a great value, and there is a moment happening right now where the institutionalization of this through 401k retirement accounts, when that clarity act passes, you're gonna watch banks because they're already announcing what their first buys are gonna be. They're putting billions and billions of dollars into Bitcoin, they will never sell. And, you know, as soon as that clarity acts pass, which could be later this summer, could be shortly, as soon as that happens, there's gonna be a jump going, you know. So, you know, we we want to be positioned well. Our whole thing is about sovereignty and freedom, and it's about the tools we use to get there. Trusts are powerful, equity is powerful because it can help you settle your accounts and get debt-free and all that kind of stuff. But Bitcoin is a future, right? And the other thing, too, with the Epic Trust, you know, I still believe in real estate. I know, you know, maybe you don't want to right now go buy a rental property when Bitcoin's sitting out there, but you can turn$10,000 into Bitcoin through the exchange and the trust combined with everybody else's. We can borrow against it, go do a deal. We've got one right now, we're looking at 170% ROI. That's pretty good. And then we can take it and put it back into Bitcoin, and you can be the beneficiary of that forever, right? So there's so many ways that, especially with the way the market's working out with borrowing against Bitcoin, that you can save it indefinitely, but still have the spendability to go make short-term investments like a fix and flip or a spec house or something, which right, Tom, the average is 30% return and it goes like this. But even if you do that 30% return, if you can get a 30% return and borrow against it and get 170% return, you know what I mean? It starts to be this incredible velocity that we can do as a community. It's just so powerful.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:09

Yeah, it really is. I kind of like to think about Bitcoin as kind of the new hurdle rate. So if you're a holder of Bitcoin and not counting the ability to borrow against it, and you're considering another investment, you have to say, can this other investment beat the cat the compound annual growth rate or the Kagger of Bitcoin? Not very many can, right? Bitcoin has been the best performing asset in the last five years, the last 10 years, the last 15 years. So it's like I'm hesitant to make risky investments when I know that the that the Bitcoin I'm holding is growing at 60% compound annual growth rate on it, you know, average over the last 10 years or more. So now you enter into the ability to borrow against it. You don't lose all the upside because you still keep it and you can do both. That's that's why I bought the house when I did. I wasn't willing to sell Bitcoin to buy the house, but I borrowed against it. Now I have a nice house.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:00

That is that is the greatest thing to be able to borrow against it. So you can still because real estate, listen, real estate is real estate. You need a farm, you need food, you need a house. It it is going to run parallel with Bitcoin, but just like right now, you buy real estate in dollars, you'll be able, you'll all, you know, probably in America for a long time, you're gonna have to still use dollars, probably probably the rest of our lives. But that Bitcoin becomes the asset. That's that stock account that's huge that you borrow against, which creates no selling of it, and now you can have double exposure. That's how you know that's how billionaires think. Yeah, right. That's how multimillionaires think is they use the assets they have to turn other assets and you just create that compound velocity effect.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:43

Yeah, Elon Musk doesn't have a bank account with seven billion or a hundred billion dollars or whatever his net worth is, it's all in his assets, it's all in the companies he owns, right? But to go back to the to the housing example, houses, I believe, because of Bitcoin, will fall to their utility value, right? Yes, people treat houses like Hurry up, yes, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:03

Not in Southern California. Here's the thing, Tom. I'll say this about that. Because of the way governments are currently starting to treat Bitcoin, they will not fall in value when compared to dollars. Yeah, they will accelerate. Yeah, you there will be not long, in very short order of time, a starter home in America will be a million dollars, but it'll be 15 satoshis, yeah, right? It'll go to its and this and this is something that you told me. Yeah, you said Bitcoin trends to zero, and so the value of the house will go to its utility value. And here's what I have to say it already is, it's just we're not dealing with a standard currency. One ounce of gold in ancient Greece bought a nice toga, or you know, and then one ounce of gold in Rome bought a nice tunic. One ounce of gold bought a London fog suit at the height of London. One ounce of gold today will get you a nice custom suit. The ounce of gold, that's the utility value of that custom bespoke piece of clothing that you I love that word that you see. Yeah, yeah. That's how a three-bedroom, two-bath house on a quarter acre has not changed. What's changed is the money. Yeah, I love it. The way I think is it's already its utility value. You just don't know what the money is worth. Yeah, which is why people like me who I graduate college, I could have bought a nice three-bedroom, two-bath house for$125,000. Now you're looking at a half a million dollars for the same dang house.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:30

Yeah, and the percentage of the average salary just keeps getting bigger and bigger to buy that house. So the problem isn't staying the same difference, it's getting worse and worse, right? And and I like the phrase your house isn't getting more valuable, your money's getting less value, right? And so switch to a money that doesn't lose its value, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:49

Switch to a money that's not like Santa Claus. Look at how happy he is. He's like in the North Pole with all the toys.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:57

That's right.

Halving Cycles, Volatility, And Buying Dips

SPEAKER_01 1:14:59

Oh my god. Okay, one last question, and then of course it's mine. When Bitcoin about a year ago was much higher than it is now, yeah. What happened?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:11

Yeah, so so uh the last all-time high was October of 2025. So October last year, and Bitcoin hit 126,000 per Bitcoin. What's interesting when is when you study Bitcoin's history, it moves in these four-year cycles. And these four-year cycles are related to something called the having events. It's not directly related, it's also market forces that are that come into play. But we'll talk more about this at the event in Spokane. But the having event reduces the issuance of the new Bitcoin that comes that didn't exist yesterday, that existed today, right? So we know the total supply. It will never exceed 21 million. But not all of those are in circulation yet, right? So they're being released every 10 minutes, and this is part of the protocol, and we'll talk more about that. But that that supply gets cut in half. So every four years, so far, right, Bitcoin's 17-year history, around a little bit after the halving event, when the supply issuance of new Bitcoin cuts in half, the price goes down a bit. And that partially because if you're a miner, right, you're expending tens of thousands of dollars a day in electricity or more if you're a large scale to participate in this Bitcoin mining competition. And suddenly the rewards that you've been getting all get halved. You might have to scale back your mining operation, you might need to wait, and the price will eventually adjust, right? It also follows business cycles. But essentially, like I said earlier in the call, the price of Bitcoin and the fact that this is a new monetary instrument that's being discovered by the world. Really, it's that we're we're still in this early discovery process. Volatility is actually a good thing. Volatility is vitality. It allows people, if they're dollar cost averaging, right, if they're just buying a little bit with every paycheck or buying a little bit every day, it allows you to buy the dip, so to speak, right? When it when it goes in price, I get excited because my dollars get me more satoshis per dollar, right? And and when I get paid or when I get, you know, when I when I charge for a service I'm providing or I sell a widget, I'm usually taking dollars because not a lot of people know about Bitcoin yet. And the moment I get a dollar in my hand, I convert it to Satoshis. So when the price is down, I get excited because it's like 50% off, right? Historically, Bitcoin has had bigger dips than this. We've dropped 80% sometimes from the previous all-time high. But if you look at Bitcoin's history from the lows, we're always setting higher lows. Every single time we have a dip, we're setting higher lows, higher lows, higher lows. So, in other words, the volatility is getting less volatile over time. And we're in this constant kind of 45 degree angle up until the right in terms of purchasing power of the Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:55

One of the other things, too, why Bitcoin dropped this last time, and you know, as a political guy, I'm like, it's also an element that the dollar did get stronger under Donald Trump, right? So the dollar buys more. Remember, when Donald Trump came into office, the price of eggs was off the charts. Now you get a dozen for 97 cents. Guess what? It's still the same amount of Satoshis to buy a couple a dozen eggs. So as eggs came down, the value compared to dollars did too. But so did fuel. Fuel came was at almost$4 a gallon where I'm at when Biden was unelected, and Trump came in within a couple months, it would drop down to almost$2 a gallon. And so, yes, it it follows the dollar did get stronger. The tariff thing affected the value of the dollar and its viability. So again, it just goes to reinforce. Do not think of Bitcoin like a tech stock. It is not, it is a reflection. If the value of the dollar goes up, if it becomes more in demand, because Trump is doing things to try to make sure the world stays on the dollar standard, excellent. Your wages aren't likely to go down. Buy more Satoshis because Donald Trump will be gone someday, and the next president will come in and he'll hit print, print, print, print, right? And so that is that was a combination of the having on top of the fact that the dollar and it's a fact, the dollar got stronger. Now, what's happening now with Iran and the price of fuel, what's gonna happen is Bitcoin will go up. I don't know if it's gonna go to the moon next week or whatever, but it's it is trending up, and it's trending up along with what the cost of energy because the dollar is weaker to the to a barrel of oil right now. And so those are the because a barrel of oil is also a barrel of oil, right? So some of those things factor into it too, and that's why month to month and year to year, there's that volatility. But like you said, that's also vitality.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:45

Yeah, I I really like it. And and I look at the at the history of Bitcoin, at the price of where we're at, how far away we are from the previous all-time high. And I truly believe we're in this deep value territory, right? It could drop a little more, and it and it's it's inevitable when I tell somebody about Bitcoin for the first time, they go out and buy stuff and the price drops the next day, right? It's inevitable, but just don't don't worry about that. I I tell people the only wrong position in Bitcoin is to have zero, right? So go use that river referral link and buy a hundred bucks today, 50 bucks, whatever you can afford just to get off zero. Then start learning about it, right? Read the Bitcoin standard. If I have a whole list of recommended books, but that's probably at the top of the list. It's one of the best books on Bitcoin and how it works, and it's accessible, right? It doesn't just jump into the technology, it really explains money first, and then it goes into the Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:36

Have you read the fiat standard, his second book?

SPEAKER_00 1:20:38

Yeah, the following.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:39

Oh my god, you want to throw up in your mouth. It affects food, it affects medical, it affects education. The fiat standard is, and we we've talked about this. Those of you that have attended our Ignite presentation, or you know, the different versions we've done, we've talked about this. The fiat in the non-sound money system affects our food, it affects the incentives for farmers, the cheap goods. It's the reason we don't have flying cars right now. You know, the whole thing, like it makes you want to throw up in your mouth because we're debt slaves. There's a there's a great United States, we are debt slaves.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:09

It's true. And there's if you want to see this visualized, all the ways our lives have gotten worse because of fiat money. There's a great website called WTF Happened in 1971.com, right? And the answer to the question is what happened in 1971? That's when Nixon kind of got on television and said, I'm temporarily suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, right? And vice versa. So WTF happened in 1971.com, and it just has doesn't have any explanation, doesn't tell you what happened. It just shows charts after chart after chart of things getting worse in the United States related to how we live. And it really is the introduction of fiat money, right? It's it's a it's a great way to visualize it.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:51

We became utterly untethered from the gold standard, and there's no going back. You know, I've I've been around circles with people who are like, we just have to go back to gold standard. I'm like, it's impossible. Yeah, it cannot be done.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:04

Yeah, the gold standard doesn't work in the internet age, it doesn't work in the internet age.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:08

Yeah, so you guys, thank you so much for joining us. Don't forget to join us on the podcast tomorrow at 6 30 a.m. Peasants Perspective. Also, please, if you enjoyed this, retweet it, re-exit, post it somewhere. If you're on Rumble, hit repost. If you're on YouTube, hit repost. YouTube, our views are dismal. It's just fine. I hate Google, anyways. Didn't want your business, anyways, YouTube. Okay, but please share this show. If you know anybody in Washington, northern Idaho, anywhere within striking distance of Spokane, tell them to get out to our event on the 25th of April. You can go to 1776live.us. We will be going on tour. We plan on hitting Wisconsin. We plan on hitting Texas. We need your help to put those events together. Maybe we'll even hit your hometown, Colorado, Tom. We'll see. Tom's like, wait, am I signing up for a bunch of travel?

SPEAKER_00 1:22:56

I love it. I'll do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:57

We are we are so excited to have Tom in our community. I cannot be more excited.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:01

Yes, he is in our community. He is a 76 Live. Yes, and you can you can actually talk to him there. And the class, like Taylor said, is gonna launch right after Spokane.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:12

Yeah, and and you guys, the investment in that class is gonna be worth every penny. You are going to set yourself every Bitcoin for every Bitcoin, every Satoshi, except payment and Bitcoin now. It is going to be worth every Satoshi, okay, because you are going to be empowered, you're going to understand, and is Bitcoin does this because it does this, you're not going to have any doubts. You're not going to be worrying about selling it. You're going to understand this is it. Tom, when we first talked, you said this isn't a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This isn't a once in a generation opportunity. This is a once in a millennia opportunity. This is like this is like walking into the American River in California as the first guy, and the world's already on the gold standard. Bitcoin's out there, and you're walking around the river picking up nuggets of gold with no excess energy. Right now, look at all the energy that goes into mining dust, gold dust, and trying to get it out of thousands of yards of dirt. Right. You have the opportunity right now at$70,000 of Bitcoin to pick up a nugget that in literally a number of years, two, three, five, ten years will be worth a million bucks.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:24

There's a guy online that said that it, you know, you were saying once in a lifetime. No, he calls it a once in a species event. Right. This is incredible. It really is. Uh, his name is Jesse Myers.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:35

He's on X, but when you understand what happened in the United States with the gold standard, that for the first time, by the way, in the United States, one of the really great things our founding fathers did was we they made gold and silver for all debts, public and private. That was the first time in world history that a people, the actual little guy, the serfs, the peasants, the citizens, had access to the real money. Because in Europe, the kings and queens just hoarded it all, and it was script and their little, you know, minted coins, and it was all their system, right? I mean, Rome played with sound money and shaving coins and you know, devaluing their currency by adding copper and bronze to the stuff. Okay. It was the first time that the people had access to sound money, and what it gave us was the Gilded Age. It gave us railroads, computers, radio, airplanes, everything. And the moment they stopped, and the moment we lost that sound money, we have stagnated on technology. Sure, we have more of it, but it's the same dang technology we've had for a hundred years. The the internet and computers were essentially invented in the 1800s, they've been distributed, but we have we don't have flying cars. You know what I mean? Come on, where's my jetpack? Yeah, so it is it. I love that. It's once in a species opportunity. So definitely come to Spokane. If not, 1776live.us on Thursdays. We do ignite and then do everything you can to get into Tom's class. It will be well worth it. Maybe we'll do a discount if you pay in Bitcoin. Maybe we'll do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:14

All right, Tom, thank you so much. And and Taylor, thank you for hosting us on Peasants Perspective. And thank everybody for coming. We so appreciate it. And we'll be back next week, but tomorrow morning, six thirty AM Pacific Standard Time for Peasants Perspective.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:29

All right, we'll see you guys.