Building for Bitcoiners

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, Show About Bitcoin. Today for episode three hundred and thirty three, my guest is Cory Klippsten. He is the CEO and co-founder of Swan Bitcoin. Now, Cory's been on the show before, but this time we're talking about building for Bitcoiners, and that's a range of things around Bitcoin advocacy as contrasted with crypto advocacy. It relates to Bitcoin- You know, ventures, jobs, and various other aspects around teaching Bitcoin and building products and services that make things work easier for Bitcoiners. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Now, Swan Bitcoin is a great place to go and buy Bitcoin and also learn about Bitcoin, and Swan are bringing back gifting. So if you want to be able to give the gift of Bitcoin to your loved ones, you can go to swanbitcoin dot com slash gifts, and that money will be sent to them, they will set up their Swan account. And then they will purchase Bitcoin with that USD once they've signed up. So this is a great way to give that gift of Bitcoin and give them the gift of Swan's world-class education and customer service and support. So this is a great way to help onboard your friends and family and get them started on the journey of Bitcoin. That's swanbitcoin dot com slash gift. Lend at HoddleHoddle is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform. This is Bitcoin DeFi, so you can lend or borrow stablecoins globally and anonymously using Bitcoin as collateral. So with Lend at HodlHodl, you now have that option of not selling your Bitcoin and still getting some short-term fiat liquidity. You can borrow stablecoins against your Bitcoin as collateral. You still control one key out of three throughout that entire deal. Now, on the other hand, if you hold stablecoins like USDT on the Liquid blockchain, you can use that to earn some extra interest by lending out stablecoins and defining the terms and the APR for your deals. Go and sign up, the website is Lend dot Hodl. Lendholdl dot com, that's L E N D dot H O D L H O D L dot com. If you wanna get started with Bitcoin mining, Compass Mining are making it easy to do this. If you're in the US, you can order a mining machine and have that shipped to your home and do home mining if you wish. There's Compass at home mining guides also to help out with this. On the other hand, if you don't wanna host that miner at your home, you can use a facility. The facilities have been vetted by the team and they've got them all around facility, you can see the power rate that they offer and the estimated online date for that facility. So go and check them out there. They've got all sorts of guides and resources on their website as well. They've got podcasts and the Compass Mining newsletter, which is filled with informative articles and topics there. So go to compassmining dot io. And now onto the show with Cory. Cory, welcome back to the show. Thanks to find. It's great to be here. So Cory, lots going on, there's been a lot of things, there's a lot of things we There's the world of VC and investment and what's going on in the Bitcoin world, as well as the world Bitcoin is going to create, and of course, we've, we've got a chat about what's going on at Swan. but I wanted to start with, what's going on in the regulatory legislative world and the halls of power, as it were, because it seems to me like there's this whole crypto lobbying group, and then there's like the Bitcoin people, and you've also been commenting on this quite a bit, so I know you'll- You'll, you'll have some interesting thoughts to share. So what's your take there?

Broadly, what I want to make sure of, in as much as I can influence things at all, is that Bitcoiners don't take for granted that crypto people have Bitcoin and Bitcoiners' best interests in mind at all times. Sometimes their interests align, lots of times they don't, and I think we kind of saw that, you know, flare up a few times this year, just like obviously we saw this, you know, with crypto people sort of, Having different views from Bitcoin people throughout the history of, of the Bitcoin space, it's going to be that way when it comes to regulatory, and you're going to see, you know, the kind of the regulatory version of "I love Bitcoin, buy my shitcoin," and a lot of, orange washing as they, as they say, you know, trying to wrap yourself in the Bitcoin flag while promoting your, your altcoins or whatever, so you'll say like, "Well, you should be fine with us because, you know, we're just like Bitcoin in this way." Or something like that, right? And, you know, I think it's just important that Bitcoiners separate themselves, which obviously some people have been doing a good job of that, is saying like, you know, there's Bitcoin and there's crypto, there's Bitcoin and there's shitcoin or whatever. that goes for dealing with legislators and regulatory agencies, et cetera, in the United States as well. Where it's necessary to have a voice or where we choose that we should have a voice, I think it's important that there's actually Bitcoiners that, that do that talking And that tees out the difference between, you know, lightning, for instance, or proof of work mining and some other thing that crypto people are trying to co-opt and sort of use for their own ends to keep their sort of, giant Ponzi thing going.

Of course. And as you rightly pointed out, this has been a thing in the space around, quote mark, quotation marks, "I like Bitcoin, buy my shitcoin," right? And so I guess you don't necessarily have to name names, but I mean, what does that look like historically in the space? What, what kind Do those people tend to take and what kind of lines of argument do they tend to use?

Yeah, I mean, I, I don't wanna go too deep into the name calling and, and calling people out and things like that because the fact is, like, in many cases, I actually believe that they think they're doing the right thing. this is some of the people that are actually like working in DC and, you know, they've actually, on occasion, done very much the right thing for Bitcoin, but it's when, it's when their interests have aligned. With what was good for Bitcoin and Bitcoiners, that they've done the right thing for Bitcoin. And, you know, I think we see with, you know, all of the ESG narratives going out there and, you know, so it may not be like the VC fund or the specific lobbying organization that directly fuds proof of work and promotes ESG-friendly proof of stake or, you know, proof of something else that doesn't require energy and therefore is basically fiat, but they're funded by- By those people, and they're tied to those people, and they're at their events, and there's people on the advisory boards of these lobbying organizations, you know, from those token projects, the non-Bitcoin stuff, and, you know, it's a bridge too far to think that there's not going to be some influence, and, you know, we've already seen the, you know, deliberate attempts to try to tie Bitcoin in buckets With, with crypto stuff for the purpose of legislation, and, you know, I just think it's really important to get out in front of that. You know, I, so I just- I refused to party down with the crypto people on the infrastructure bill last, last year, and I didn't wanna, I wanted Bitcoiners to take up their own fight, and, you know, it seems like a lot of people were kind of spurred to action, and there's at least three or four new- Kind of lobbying efforts that are Bitcoin only, whether it's, you know, Sat Center, there's a couple other ones, for sure that are, that are out there and kind of getting going. the one in Nashville and Sat Center is kind of a little bit more West Coast, but it's national, obviously, and has a bunch of participants. And, you know, I don't feel the need personally to get super involved. It's not my, not my thing. I haven't done any politics for twenty years, but, I, I'm really glad that

Get written, you know, have the input of real Bitcoiners, not just people that claim to talk for Bitcoiners, of course,

yeah,

claim to speak for Bitcoin.

Yeah, there's definitely a few parts in that. So it's this idea that sometimes, quote unquote, crypto people see Bitcoin as, "Oh, see, Bitcoin is, you're just part of our broader industry, and you little Bitcoin people need to play nicely with the altcoins because, you know, whatever, whatever reason." And to the point you were saying is that people have conflicted interests in some instances where maybe they taken funds from a shitcoin VC or a shitcoin fund or something, and now they are a little conflicted. And then the other aspect of it is that some of the shitcoins will have marketing budgets, and they will market themselves by attacking Bitcoin. They'll say things like, "Oh, don't use, you know, we use less energy than Bitcoin." And so obviously that then takes a little bit of time to go and disentangle, "Wait a second, no, there's a reason Bitcoin uses energy, and in fact, that's part of Bitcoin's..." Strength, that's part of Bitcoin's neutrality. So I think that's perhaps part of the, that's the challenge for Bitcoin advocates and educators out there, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's one of many challenges out there, but I just think it's important to-- Anyway, I think we've, we've beaten this one to death.

Sure, sure. Yeah. So I think, yeah, there's definitely that aspect of it, and I think it's funny with, like, even with all the venture capital stuff in general, like, it seems to me like it Now of course, none of us have a crystal ball, we don't know when, it could be five years, ten years, fifteen years, and so on, and that's really gonna change the world in so many different ways, and I think it will really change the way we invest, we act, we save, we spend, all of this. And actually, you touched on this in, your recent piece for Coindesk, it was "The World Bitcoin Will Build." So for anyone who hasn't listened or hasn't read that one yet, can you just give, give

a bit of Really, I wanted to present how I actually think of the future for purposes of, you know, planning my own career, my company's path, and my own family's life and finances. So just kind of, this is actually what I think is gonna happen, like the most likely outcome. That doesn't mean that it's ninety-nine percent, doesn't even mean necessarily that it's over fifty percent. It just means I think this is the most likely outcome of, if I were doing some kind of like Monte Carlo analysis, decision tree- Saying like, "I think this is how it's probably gonna go, more, more than any other way." and so we just took kind of, you know, moments in time and, you know, taking a look at like where we thought we'd be in twenty thirty-five, and then again, you know, kind of where we'd be in, in twenty fifty, and, you know, we're A lot of it's gonna seem kind of familiar, so some of the fun is kind of in the details and kinda, you know, digging into some of the language and some of the specific examples that I threw in there, so I do recommend reading it. But, you know, broadly I say like we're, we're obviously still kind of early in the development of Bitcoin as store of value, but after you get, you know, a couple more cohorts, so people that came in in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, and, you know, they've been in Bitcoin for eight At that point, you know, let's say people that come in in twenty, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, once they've held for eight to ten years, there's a good chance that lots of those people will have, you know, over ninety percent of their net worth in Bitcoin. And somewhere in there, somewhere in the, you know, two having cycles after the twenty seventeen cohort and that twenty twenty one ish cohort, you know, I think there will be a lot of people around the world that wanna spend Bitcoin, and you'll really start to- To see kind of medium of exchange reaching the level where we are kind of now with store of value. So Bitcoin will be really well established as a store of value and we'll be looking at as a nascent medium of exchange. You'll see a lot of people just demanding to pay for things in Bitcoin and so an explosion of services from legacy companies that add Bitcoin services, much easier to achieve, you know, venture scale revenue profiles for startups in the next, you know, from five years from now into, into the next decade, for people working on medium of exchange. And so this kind of results in something that I've been saying a lot, but never actually put in an article, which is that I think, after MOE, then you're gonna have kind of prices on price tags for goods and services on the internet and in stores or whatever, you're gonna have sats on those price tags in most places around the world, for most goods and services. And I think that'll be really exciting too. So basically, I sum it up by saying like, you know buy most goods and services around the world denominated in sats. It doesn't mean that will be the only price, there will probably still be a dollar price and maybe like another local currency or something like that, but you'll be able to pay for things in Bitcoin, you know, pretty much Most places around the world by twenty thirty

five. Right, and that's, obviously a far cry from where we are today in twenty twenty one, where maybe you need to use some in between way, like, say, Bitrefill, or you need to use, or you need to basically sell some sat or borrow against it and that, etcetera. So I guess that, that, that's that aspect of it, and I really believe we're going to see big, big shifts in just the way financial services operate, right? We will see potentially community banking And we might see, obviously, self banking, right? Set up your own node and your own keys, all of that, and it might be more like each family sets up their own node and things like that. So that'll be, it'll be interesting to see that whole gamut of options there that's out there. So that's really interesting as well. And I think the other part is just that broader shift, and I mention this all the time, is like that shift between debt and equity. And I, I think, I really do believe we're just, we're gonna be shifting a lot

Applications, do you think that has for, say, an investor?

I mean, it's not gonna change my world that much because I've been an early stage guy for so long. In fact, you know, other than dabbling in some public equities here and there a long time ago, you know, I've been focused exclusively on kind of angel investing at the seed, a, maybe B round stage, for a decade now. So it's not gonna change what I do much. I do think that there's just gonna be this massive explosion of new things that we've never thought of Before, you know, and that's what I'm really excited to see. You know, I'm excited to see, you know, value for value media explode. I'm excited to see, you know, messaging over Lightning, almost anything that relates. I, I, it's just so early, it's hard to conceive of, right? Because we just don't know what's gonna be popu- what's going to be practical and possible as the infrastructure gets better and, you know, people just build on top of pre-existing innovations and, you know, everybody benefits from all the stuff that's been Four or five years. it's gonna be really exciting. I'm, I'm super bullish on getting in as early on as many of these things as possible. a-as you know, I mean, you're, you're my partner in Bitcoiner Ventures, and, you know, I wish we had more time to cut more checks, but at least we've gotten five deals done. and I'm looking at other stuff, you know, when I, when I have the time, which isn't often. But, yeah, super bullish. I mean, we're obviously You know, I have a background in payments long ago, before getting into Bitcoin, in my, in my like consulting private equity work, and, you know, I'm, I'm super bullish on this stuff. It's just really, really early. These companies are really small, they have tiny revenue. You know, I don't think there's maybe any of them that are actually making money other than the ones like, that are working in, in like probably Bitrefill and, and Paxful that are kinda have hit scale. But, there's been Entrepreneurs starting sort of, let's call it like MOE businesses in the last couple years, and, some of them are gonna take off, you know? They're gonna hit, and they're gonna be really big, and they're gonna be in a good position, and even when the legacy companies get around to it, they're never gonna understand the advantages to building on Bitcoin and building on this monetary network the way that the native Bitcoin companies do, and a startup already has massive advantages over any project team or product team at a big company, 'cause those people just don't care, not gonna put in the hours, they're not gonna be thinking about the problems on the weekends or like taking their kids for a stroll in the park. Only the people working on startups actually have that kind of creativity to do that sort of stuff, and so, yeah, I'm, I'm really bullish on Bitcoin companies over the next decade.

Right. And so for some of them, it may be that they take some time to, to fruition, maybe a few more years until the market size is big enough to actually- Actually make that a workable company, and some of them might be more infrastructure related or security related and things like that. So those are different ones out there. So any listeners out there, if you're interested, you can check it out, it's bitcoinersventures dot com, and we've got a few Telegram, we've got a Telegram chat room as well for people to share ideas and get access to some of the companies that we've got.

Yeah, I mean, just to put a little meat on the bone there, I mean, when we started in twenty twenty, like the very first deal Company that we've done a deal for, but because we only had like fifty to seventy LPs, we were like, you know, I was basically calling people and having to like rope people into it, and it took, you know, five or six weeks to do a check for like two hundred grand or something, versus, you know, I think, you know, Galloy, we raised that entire round in like four hours, we just did a deal for a great Bitcoin startup, and it's just, it's just getting easier and easier 'cause we have, I think 460 LPs now around the world on the Angelus Syndicate and other syndicates know us and will send people our way, like if they didn't do the deal, they'll just, you know, send our deal to their people, that kind of thing. So it's just getting, it's getting easier and easier, and I think it's really important to have, you know, there's so many benefits to having like a hundred people around the world who are super fans of your product that now get to own a piece of it and tell their friends about it and, you know, join your

It's kind of the same pitch that you would get for crowdfunding, but it's better, because these are like real Bitcoiners that are actually cutting like a decent sized check, not just buying your album or something.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a really cool way to think of it. I mean, it's, yeah, we're seeing a popularization of that even with the likes of Kickstarter and things like that to fund a book project and things like this, but obviously this is, you're getting equity in a company here, so it's a different, obviously a different ballgame here.

Around getting access into some of these deals, like maybe historically Bitcoin companies were sort of crying out for capital, do you think it'll reach a point where it's actually, it might be difficult to get into the deal because you, you know, you need to know someone or you need to have the right access?

Yeah, I mean, it already is. I mean, there already are hot deals that people can't necessarily get into, if they're not paying close attention or don't know somebody. I mean, that, that's, that's how it happens. Some of these are happening really,

down by one investor or something like that. So I think we're already kind of there. Two years ago, there wasn't a single Bitcoin only fund, you know? I think Folger has become Bitcoin only, but they were looking at other stuff a couple years ago, and I think Elise at StillMark maybe wasn't just super public, even if she was doing it already, like I don't think we were all kind of aware of her, efforts two years ago. So, you know, when we started Bitcoiner Ventures, there wasn't a committed capital fund focused exclusively on Bitcoin Now there's like ten thirty one, there's, the Bitcoin Venture Fund with Chris Calacott and Dustin Trammell and that team. Obviously, Elise has made a huge splash and is, like the queen of ass-kicking on stage, when she talks about Bitcoin. And, you know, I think there will be more Lightning ventures, which is, you know, cutting-- I think working on committed capital but doing syndicates right now at least. Plan B Ventures with, with Han Hua is, is a syndicate on AngelList that's been doing a bunch of deals in basically every good Bitcoin startup that's raised lately, so that's pretty cool. So yeah, I mean, it's-- the future is bright, the future is orange, and, and we'll see more and more capital committed here, but, you know, the numbers are staggeringly small. Compared to, you know, crypto VC funding, you know, there's, you know, twenty-one billion deployed just this year for crypto stuff, and I think about thirty-five billion of LP capital across all these like Andreessen funds and, you know, whatever else is out there, Paradigm and all these guys, and that's, you know- That's who's sort of working with these lobbyists and drafting legislation and kind of doing all that stuff. So like, they got a lot going on, and I, I-- it depresses me sometimes to see that, you know, let's say seven hundred x multiple versus the Bitcoin only funds that probably have about fifty million dollars of committed capital, but We have like the better product by far, the one that matters. We have way more, you know, die-hard, die-hard supporters and fans on Team Bitcoin than all of the rest combined, you know, by at least an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude. Like nobody's going to the mat and like dying for Solana or something, right? Nobody actually cares unless they're making money today, unlike Bitcoin. so it's good. And the other thing that, puts me at ease is that massive companies work with Bitcoin. And so- So you don't necessarily need the, the VC funding if it's really important to Square and it's really important to, you know, payments companies like Visa and Mastercard and, you know, investment banks that, you know, have groups that see the light or whatever, like, Morgan Stanley, Supply and Capital, and Nidec that they can then use for Bitcoin backed loans at Unchained or something like that, right? Like that's, that's something that's actually happening and is a big deal. So. Yeah.

And speaking of, Nidec had a big one recently,

Yeah, they just raised one on seven, which is amazing and huge. As exciting was this morning, Leden's announcement, Bitcoin Mortgage, like massive valuation, almost half a billion dollar valuation, I think, or maybe slightly more than that, like, was I sleeping on Leden? That's huge, it's amazing. Anyway, it was so funny, Mario Gibney texted me this morning or DM'd me this morning and he was like, "What do you think about having, you know, one of the Leden co-founders on Swans?" Signal live, and I was like, "Sounds great, like just hit up Brady." So humble, so nice, didn't send the link. I didn't find out about the fundraising for like four more hours, and then I was like, "Brady, yeah, did, did you just get those guys on immediately?"

Yeah, I mean, I, I saw it as well, and I was like, "Okay, I need to, I need to get them on, get one of the guys on to talk about, you know, Bitcoin mortgages and stuff." I, I, it's really interesting

You know, it's, yeah, it is in some sense a bit, I guess, sad or unfortunate or weird that, like, people-- the world doesn't kind of see this yet. But in fairness, it's also, I think a lot of the crypto stuff is really, like, really-- a lot of it's leverage play and gambling sort of related things. And, you know what? Maybe for now that's more popular than just saving with Bitcoin. And of course, in the future, medium of exchange, you know, directly spending things, et cetera. But I really do think And people will look back and think, "Yeah, you know what, the Bitcoin only position was really essentially correct about a lot of these aspects of where the market was going to go. And okay, look, maybe, fine. It, it depends if you count like stable coins and whatever as, you know, is that not Bitcoin only or whatever, but I, I think essentially the future is going to be Bitcoin only, and yeah, maybe some stable coins as kind of like a bridging aspect of it. I guess that's high level how I'm, I'm seeing it. What, what do you

Nobody ever checks in a stablecoin. It seems like once they're minted, like I've never seen the Tether market cap go down. Does anybody ever cash in Tether? I don't know. And like, what's the other one, Circle's coin, USDC coin, like it's, it's massive. It's like forty billion dollars now. I just did it myself. I added up, I only went down to like the top fifty just looking for the stable coins and, and like the, the actual asset backed ones, not like, Dai or something like that. And it was, it was one hundred and fifty-six billion dollars. In the top five or six, you know, kind of actual asset back stable coins. Pretty funny if, if the dollar flipped and if the crypto dollar like flipped to ETH.

That would be cool to see. And I think it's just growing at a phenomenal pace, right? So I obviously would prefer the world just huddle Bitcoin and we all just go straight to Bitcoin.

Well, Stephan, before you, before you go further on this, I think it's actually a bullshit crypto- fund and crypto founder narrative that the dollar is this medium, the crypto dollar is some medium of exchange thing, that stablecoins are gonna be this big MoE thing, it's not It's just leverage trading, that's all it is, it's crypto traders. It's because they're fiat minded and their unit of account is dollars and they're going to use stablecoins for all their trading activity. That's it. And DeFi is all run on dollars, but this has nothing to do, like, it's not like a bunch of people in Turkey are hoarding stablecoins, they're not. Right.

Yeah.

Like they're getting dollars when they can, actual US dollars, or they're buying real estate. Yeah, yeah. Or Bitcoin.

Actually, let's touch on that as well. I know you obviously, you know, you go spend some time in Turkey, your wife is Turkish, you obviously have Turkish friends and associates, and you were chatting a little bit about the inflation story there as well. Do you wanna shed some light or give us a little bit of color on that?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, I occasionally tweet about it, you know, just 'cause I sometimes have things that are relevant for a Bitcoin, Bitcoiner audience on Twitter that I know about or just hear stories from friends so yeah, when I first went there in 2010, it was, I think it was one point seven or one point eight lira per dollar. It was fourteen point eight three today, lira per dollar, and yesterday it was like thirteen point eight. So I think this is the first time it's jumped like a full, a full lira, you know, adding like thirteen point eight to fourteen point eight in a day. So it's pretty runaway, you know, it was, it was sub ten thirty-two days ago. It was nine, you know, a month ago, a month and a couple days ago, it was nine, and now it's, you know, fourteen, fourteen point eight or something. So we're watching it in front of our eyes, and it's a really large economy. So certainly there's never been anything like this since the birth of Bitcoin. It's the number seventeen economy, it's eighty million people. Istanbul is bigger than, you know, a hundred and fifteen-- just the city of Istanbul is bigger than a hundred and fifteen countries, you know, including like Portugal and Greece and Norway and like all these European countries, like Istanbul's bigger than that, just the one city. And, you know, they have every industry that you can imagine. you know, it's the, the second- largest exporter of TV entertainment behind Hollywood globally is Turkey, which is crazy behind the US. So it's, it's a lot of people, it's a lot of diverse stuff. I mean, shoot, like half the food products in Trader Joe's are from Turkey. Like, I think there just has always been like a nice connection between Germany and Turkey for trade reasons, and then I think Trader Joe's was started by the son of one of the Aldi founders, which is a A big German chain, if I recall, so maybe that's kind of the, the genesis of that back through the years. But, I mean, so these, these, they've been through it before, but not this generation, you know? They, they had multiple, multiple of these in the '80s and '90s, at least three, I think, major devaluations. you know, my, when my wife used to go back to Turkey, she actually grew up, outside of Turkey for the most part, but she would go back in the Like one zero versus last year or like three zeros versus the year before, and, you know, she was really buying gum for like, you know, millions of lira in the nineties and stuff like that. So she's seen it before, isn't really that phased by it. How they cope mostly is if you have any excess assets, they do own a lot of gold in Turkey, but, they're also just like, they store it in real estate, in Turkey and, and outside of Turkey. And so, you know, I, I always make the joke like, Turks So stacking sats isn't a far cry for a Turk, they're used to stacking flats.

Yeah, yeah, right. It's a really interesting perspective. And so, I mean, from what I've read and seen in, in high inflation scenarios, it, it becomes like hot potatoes, right? You, that's like towards the later stages, people just try to spend straight away, but before that, people are looking at stock market, property, even art and gold, and they tend to just try to buy those things and hold those to save themselves.

Yeah, they do, they do, and options too, you know? So like, I put a couple of these in a, in a thread, and I wanna add to it as I come up with more examples or people send me things and kinda make it one of those threads. So if you just search my handle in Turkey, there's five or six things in there. I'll keep adding to them as we watch this, 'cause it's-- this train isn't gonna reverse. It's gonna be worse and worse, and, you know, I think we'll be at, you know, fifty lira per dollar in a few years if they

company and, she was doing great and it was like career track, blah, blah, blah. Inflation goes nuts, you know, they can't give her a raise to keep up with it. A European company steps in, that's a competitor to the Turkish company, and, you know, it doesn't cost them anymore 'cause their balance sheet is in euros, and, and they just offer her, you know, the same salary they would have last year, but it's, you know, a fifty, sixty, seventy percent pay bump for her. So she jumps, and the Lose that skill, right? You know, we're actively poaching Turkish employees from spectacular companies when they're paid in lira and paying them in dollars. We've got, you know, one engineer and hoping to add another one here, soon. You know, it just, it makes sense, like, that's just how the world works. So

back to the show in a moment. My favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet is the Coldcard. So if you are still holding your coins on an exchange or a brokerage service, make sure you learn how to pull them off. You can use It's a cold card, it's easy to use in a single signature setup, and you can even use it as part of a multi-signature setup if you want to get more advanced. Now, you can use it very easily with wallets like Specter Desktop, Sparrow, or Electrum. You can directly plug it if you're a beginner, or if you're intermediate or advanced, you can use a micro SD card to move that information back and forward, whether that is the wallet xPub info or whether that is a transaction that you want to move back and forth to sign using the cold card. The You can plug it directly to the wall. So go to coinkite dot com, use the code livera to order your cold card. Brains are a Bitcoin company through and through, and they are true pioneers in the Bitcoin mining industry. They are the creators and operators of Slush Pool, which was the first Bitcoin mining pool. They've mined over one point two five million bitcoins. They also offer Brains OS Plus. This is firmware that you can run on your ASIC machine. And also, if you use Brains OS Plus and you point your hash rate to Slush Pool You actually get a zero percent pool fee. And also, Brains are pushing forward adoption on Strato v2. Now, this was done in conjunction and collaboration with Matt Corello. This is a next generation pooled mining protocol, and this will also improve the resilience of the Bitcoin network, as well as bring some security fixes. So Brains are a great company, and they've also got all sorts of material that you can learn from if you go to insights.brains.com. Now, their website is brains.com with two eyes. Back to the show with Cory. Yeah, the brain drain factor, and I think there are lessons for all of us anyway as Bitcoiners in looking at what happens in high inflation countries, because obviously we're Bitcoiners, we're very concerned about inflation, and so I think there are lessons to be learned out of looking at what goes on. And so that's important to see, and you might maybe eventually you start to see importers having problems, right? Because now they used to be able to buy something denominated in US dollars, but obviously as the lira just keeps tanking, And their revenue, their income is in lira, well now they're struggling to get their imports in, right? And so then people in the country now might be struggling to get the products and services that they normally are used to being able to get, right?

Yeah, yeah, and so then you try to control the inflation with price controls, which is like the road to tyranny, and you blame the bankers, and you try to like, you know, make sure that people can buy the smits, which is like the, you know, the daily pretzel or whatever, and, you know, try to keep that at one lira or whatever it is so that people don't notice. But basically what happens by trying to keep these prices low, it's artificially low, and so Bulgarians have been driving across the border with like huge trucks and buying up everything, That's sad. Yeah. Right? And then you've got, basically almost every rental is rent controlled to some degree. So it might not be like, you know, one percent or whatever it is in, you know, certain pockets of New York where the millionaires live in two bedrooms and stuff, but, you know, there's some degree of rent control on basically everything. And so you have people that just can't leave their apartment. They just can-- they can't go 'cause you can't afford the market rate, 'cause they can charge the market rate when it New tenant. So people are just stuck. They can't change jobs. Like if they have a, you know, if they have a job offer on the European side and that commute is an hour and a half because they live on the Asian side, remember it's split half and half basically, and people, you know, try to minimize the number of times they have to drive across the bridge or hop on a ferry. You'd rather, if you can, live and work on the same side, you know, but you can't move. So now your, you know, your prospects are chopped in half ' Over in Badajoz or whatever the nice neighborhood is on the Asian side. so it just starts causing all this friction, you know, and it just slows everything down, and the capital allocation is all messed up, and your life gets all messed up, and you can't travel, and other countries start to like mess with your passports 'cause you just aren't like as good a trading partner anymore, and, you know, little by little, the places that you can go and do things just starts to reduce, and you just- Yeah, it's just, I mean, I've got a lot of Argentinian friends and have kind of watched that country, you know, my whole life for whatever reason, I just always been kind of aware of things that have happened there, but, You know, they haven't had a big one since, you know, kind of twenty years ago. It was kind of a blip, another one kind of after that, but not, not really since '01. And, you know- The Cyprus crisis was like such a tiny little country, so like we were all kind of aware of it, you know, but nothing like this, nothing like a top twenty economy with eighty million people.

Yeah, it's, shocking to see and definitely some lessons out there for bitcoiners out there. And I think, you know, I like to think a lot of the, you know, savvy bitcoiners are those who are learning about this and using Bitcoin obviously as an important tool to protect themselves and retain access to, say, products and services and/or get freedom by getting out.

I would say, like, just in case, in case you are Turkish or have friends in Turkey, Turkey is one of the places where a lot of the intelligent class actually doesn't speak English. There are a lot of people that, because it's such a big economy, they can, they can choose to just speak like Turkish and German or Turkish and Arabic or just straight Turkish, 'cause you can have a really good career and not bother. But, you know, you need some Bitcoin and you need to be able to speak English, like, it is the international language of business and- And I think it's, you know, it's a good hedge. It's a good hedge. I wish that I had encouraged, you know, some of the friends and spouses of some of our network to go harder at it, you know, over the last ten years, 'cause I foresaw that and I s- I've suggested it, but I never like really beat the table for it. And it would be so much easier for them to just like grab a company, grab a job with a Western company and work remotely and be making like, you know, dollars or pounds or something if they spoke anyway, I think that's a really important thing if you're in a country, or you're a citizen of a country that, you know, inflation is one of the possibilities over the next ten, twenty years, like just start now.

Yeah. And, just bringing back to, we were talking a little bit about leverage and people who are, and perhaps that's what drove this recent drop, so there was a high, you know, futures open interest as an example, so potentially a lot of people were having- Hubris or starting to feel that sense of, "Oh, I can't go wrong, I'm just gonna lever up on Bitcoin or one of the cryptos, so to speak." and so that's really a shift in the mindset, or at least- Being a stacking Bitcoiner versus the sort of crypto leverage type of person. And so I think that, that also bears out in what we see in some of the Bitcoin platforms, right? So for example, like Swan as a platform, what was, going on on the Swan platform at that time? What was the buy percentage?

Oh, I mean, we're always like ninety-nine point nine nine or a hundred, because you have to call us or email us to be able to sell. So yeah, I mean, I think we're, I think less Less than one in ten thousand trades, all time have been sells. So yeah, that's, that's a pretty easy metric. But yeah, I mean, people stack the dip crazy hard, you know? It's, it's been really good business. Bitcoiners know a good deal when they see it. Obviously, most of our users have a, a DCA plan where they're kind of automatically stacking every day, week or month, but, you know, you can also smash buy and, you know, it turns out a lot of these people aren't all in. It turns We do have some fiat on the sideline for, for buying dips, so, yeah, it, it's interesting. We do really well when the price is down. That falls off if the price goes sideways for a long time after going down. We prefer it to like go down and then back up again, for, for our volume. But, yeah, I mean, it's, I certainly feel fortunate to have come into a little liquidity myself and being able to pick up some Bitcoin, you know, sub fifty K. It's crazy that that That feels really cheap now, by the way. Like, oh my god, it's less than fifty thousand dollars of Bitcoin. It was super cheap. Oh my gosh, that's, you know, a couple years ago that would sound pretty ridiculous. Yeah,

yeah, for sure. And I, also, I think there are times where you see family and friends who get caught up into this idea of trading, and I think that's such a-- Ninety-nine point nine percent of people will fail at this, or maybe, maybe ninety-nine percent, but still, it's just insane how many

They just think, "Oh, I can trade this thing, I can make money out of it." And it's just like, for some people, they, they can lose a lot of money if they're really not careful and because they, they come into it with this idea of a trading mindset that they're gonna try to dance in and out rather than just humbly stacking. so that's something I've seen, and I think it is something to make sure we're also, we're talking about that when we're, you know, teaching people.

Yeah, I mean, one of the you s- like whoever you're talking to, it's like, let's assume that you've gotten to the place where they kind of like, they'd like to have more Bitcoin, and they're thinking about using trading to get there. And it's like, well, trading is a profession, right? It's something that people can be really bad at or they can be really, really good at, and people who are really good at it, work at it really, really hard for a long period of time. Like they, you get good at trading. There's, there's science to that Really good trader, and traders that have been trading for fifteen or twenty years are much, much better than people who've been trading for fifteen or twenty months, right? And so if this is going to be your vocation, your profession, fine, cool. But if all you want is more Bitcoin, then you shouldn't just pick the thing that's like right adjacent to Bitcoin. You should look at the universe of ways that you could make money and think about, you know, what's actually sustainable and what are you like- likely to be good at, because most people aren't gonna be good at trading, like that's, that's just a fact. And it's not even necessarily that you, you don't even have to say like, "Oh, you couldn't be good at trading," it's like, "You're probably not gonna stick with it for ten or twenty years to get really good at trading." Like, I'm friends with a lot of these guys that are good at trading, 'cause it was like my professional and social circle in Chicago, the last time there was getting this good was like the options trading boom

And we're open to retail, and the people that really knew what they were doing were, you know, were just doing it with black boxes, and they would make fun of click traders. A click trader is someone that actually uses their hand to click a mouse. Like a good trader would never actually be a click trader. They make fun of those people. And a lot of those people are now in, in crypto, and they're running the desks at Jump and Cumberland. Most of these firms, you know, are either in Chicago or have huge offices there, or they're in New York, and it's They're doing, they're doing because they've been doing it, you know, for twenty years, and they have incredible machines and AI scientists and ML people, and they're setting up algorithms and they're ripping your face off. And like, if you don't know any of what I'm talking about right now, and you aren't friends with those people, like, you're the mark. So I just think people are just like incredibly naive going into it and thinking that it's gonna work out for them, and it's almost a curse if they win a little bit early on because it could just like ruin you for the next five years or the next decade because you're just looking for that hot streak again. You know, there's almost nobody gambling in Vegas that, didn't win a lot in their first year.

Yeah, right. That's an interesting way to put it. Because sometimes- Right. Because if you

lose a lot, you get turned off. You just

leave straight away. You get a bad taste in the mouth, okay, I'm done with that, never doing that again. But if you win a little bit, you sort of think, "Oh, maybe I was just getting unlucky those times I lost, and actually I'm skilled.

" Vegas is fun. Yeah. Yeah. Right

So there's this whole industry spawning around it of, you know, people teaching you how to trade and the exchanges who kind of encourage, "Oh, hey, let me show you how to do a leverage trade," and, "Oh, look at this, you can do a stop loss here," and you can-- and people get it into their mind, even if they're not a professional, right, that they're not, they're not doing arbitrage across exchanges using some kind of automated system, they're not, you know, using some kind of sophisticated approach, or maybe they're not, they're That's your pro- that's your professional trading reason that you're doing trading, and there's like a, an actual business model around it. It's just people who are just kind of looking at random crayon drawings on, from some influencer on Twitter and thinking, "Oh, look, see, it's gonna go up, I'm gonna go along now or whatever," and then people just get wrecked. But hey, I guess ev- some people just have to learn the hard way.

Yeah. I mean, this- it's so funny though, like I, I don't even come across

I think that, you know, maybe it's just because my own efforts and brand have just, you know, encircled myself with people that aren't about trading, and I think, you know, Swan, through our, you know, the megaphone that we've built, is just catching enough people and getting enough people to come to us who, who really see it as long-- see Bitcoin as a long-term savings technology. And so the conversation is just like basically about how much to buy. Yeah. that's really the one. I mean, you've been On a lot of these calls, like mostly people are just trying to figure out, you know, how much of their portfolio to allocate to Bitcoin, and they're kinda just looking for reinsurance that the government can't ban it tomorrow and, you know, some of the, some of the usual fud busting stuff that you just gotta go through. But, you know, it's, yeah, I mean, I, I'm not really having this conversation much anymore, unless I go on a crypto YouTube show and spread the word behind enemy lines, which I love to do. shout out Altcoin weeks, and it's, it's actually quite fun. Like they're, they're nice people trying to make a living, whatever, and, you know, you can still come with your Bitcoin message and, and then the most fun is like, I mean, they get insane number of views and comments on their YouTube, right? 'Cause all these crypto kitties are just like on YouTube all day and, just going and, you know, showing up, 'cause I doubt the other interview subjects actually show up in the comments, and I'll go through and answer questions and do retorts But, you know, ADA is fake and stuff like that. Yeah, no, that's cool.

That's great. And certainly I agree with you. A lot of the people who are, you've spent time teaching, they don't kind of go into this whole, "Oh, can I be a trader and stuff?" But there are maybe people who are more on the periphery or people who are just coming in and they sort of see this stuff, or you might have, you know, things like that. But I wanna switch it now to chatting a little bit more like a macro stuff and what's There's been some talk about potentially, you know, tapering off the asset purchases and, you know, but there's always this argument of, are they just jawboning? Are they just trying to say they're gonna raise the rates, but then really they might not? do you have any thoughts on what's happening with the Fed there?

Well, I mean, Jay told us today that the economy is fine, so we're good to go. and so they can, they can stop, the Fed can stop buying all the bonds and, and they can raise rates three times I'm glad we solved the crisis. This is fantastic. All clear skies from here. They got it under control. So, yeah, all hail. It's great. But no, I mean, they're-- Yeah, this is-- We're, we're recording on the fifteenth of December and, you know, the, the meeting was today and there were some comments and stuff like that and that was the message that was relayed, was, you know, gonna try to raise rates three times next year. I can't imagine that it would go any better than last time, really Either before or right after the first one, you know, that would, that would be like kind of my base case. The plurality of outcomes in your, in your possible scenarios would probably point towards something like that and not being able to get through three hikes. but who knows, man? I don't know. I mean, it's all short term stuff anyway. In the long term... Dollars in the toilet already and it's about to go down the drain completely. And, you know, Bitcoin's awesome. So For sure. Yeah. You know, have, have-- It's easier, it's much easier to be just sort of sanguine about this stuff. I think about it a lot more in terms of like roadmap for, you know, Swan and portfolio companies that I have like in and outside of Bitcoin, and just kind of charting a path for like when things will be hot and making sure you load up on, you know, cash for your next Markets are hot and things like that. So, you know, I guess, this, this incredibly overheated equities market of 2021 has been You know, incredible for all stock investors basically, especially in tech, and then it's been great for Bitcoin companies too. Like, you know, we've, we've benefited for sure, from there being like lots of cash around the world to wash and liquidity. Gonna try to describe a visual meme here that I saw on Twitter yesterday or the day before, and it was, it was one of those things where like somebody was explaining something to somebody else, it was just a two-panel one, and it was like, so how does trickle down work? Well, first of all, you print all the money and you give it to the one percent. And then there's like a blank panel, and they're like, "And?" And then the person's like, "And that's it." This is the world today. That's it. Yeah, you just print the money and you give it to the one percent and they're good to go. So yeah, I mean, it's just inflating these asset prices like freaking crazy, you know? So I, I'll give an example. so I used to work with a lot of, software as a service companies, post Google before getting into Bitcoin, and, It was very typical to do deals at like, somewhere between like a six and maybe a ten x revenue multiple would be kinda like where you'd anchor, and then you'd say, "Oh, but our growth rate's higher and our team's amazing," or they'd, you know, hammer back at you and say, "Like, well, that's a first time founder, and you guys only grew, you know, two x over the last year, and, you know, keep you down towards six or something like that." It's very typical right now to do a SaaS deal at a That was like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and it's very typical now that it's like a hundred X. So you can go be like a half a billion dollar company listed on Nasdaq, getting out through a SPAC or something, with like five to ten million dollars of revenue.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy when you really put it in those terms, hey. And so it just shows how far we've gone in terms of the, the system and where it's going with the money. And I, I just, to me, it just comes back to The government isn't gonna be able to make its payments if they let the interest rates go up. They're just gonna have to keep the rates low, and that's, that's probably the most important, most salient factor in this analysis. And so they may bluff that they're going to, or maybe they even do want a rate rise, but they won't be able to sustain. And that's, I guess, that's how I'm seeing it. And so obviously, that's obviously bullish for anyone who's a Bitcoiner, you're hodling and you're looking for that long term. So

Say they did do three hikes and so you added seventy five basis points to the Fed funds rate, like it's still damn near an all time low from the last five thousand years, right? So it's one of those things where they're like, you know, like it's like a store increasing the price by thirty bucks and then, you know, discounting it fifteen percent the next day, and, you know, that's what they've done. Like they, they dropped it below the historic low and now they're gonna bring it up to the historic low. It's only higher Than the last year, basically.

Yeah, even that is just a crazy level. It's just trying to fake a society having low time preference when really it doesn't. So that's obviously going to cause problems for the world, but, you know, so be it. Also wanted to chat a little bit about what's going on with Swan. I thought it was interesting as well with the recent launch, Swan Gifts, and it really brought it back full circle for me, and that's how we, you know, we first started, right? That's

how we met. And it started, it Dot io was the original product, and we were just trying to figure out how to do things at the intersection of, of Bitcoin education and selling Bitcoin or getting people, getting Bitcoin in more people's hands, but making sure they understood what they own. And so yeah, that first product was, was gifting, and we ran that for holidays of '19, all of '20 through the holidays of '20, and Swan, you know, had been taking off basically all of '20, '20, and we made the decision to focus the whole team on just Swan for the whole year of twenty twenty-one, but in the background we still had like the code and the know-how to do gifting and, and then we built like another little piece of technology for one of our, one of our integrations with a partner, about three or four months ago, and we realized that that actually enabled a really slick way to do gifting inside of Swan. so yeah, the team just did a little sprint and we got live, I think, yesterday and relaunched it. In time for some, if you got some last minute shopping to do and you don't wanna go fight the crowds, you can, just use GiveBitcoin. It's very easy. it's, it's a good product for the US, I wouldn't, I wouldn't prob-- I wouldn't bother with the gifting product, probably outside of the US. You can certainly use Swan outside the US to buy Bitcoin for yourself. I think the gifting is a better experience just in the US right now. we'll see if we can do something better for

It was just interesting for me as well, because that was how, you know, I think that was when you and I first met, it was under this kind of idea of Give Bitcoin, you know? And so it was, it just kind of came back and really cool to see that.

So it was, it was day one of the Bitcoin Conference twenty nineteen in San Francisco, and I met you, Jan, and Parker at the exact same time, with, like, within three minutes of each other, either right before or right after I presented the idea on the, the peer-to-peer I can't believe that I met all three of you guys like right away and ended up working with two of you, and of course, you know, being an investor and advisor to Unchained and having like- An actual relationship with Parker instead of just admiring him from afar.

So yeah, that's cool how it came full circle as well. And, also, the Swan Advisor Services recently launched as well. I think that's an interesting one as well because it's like people in the advisor world sometimes might struggle to kind of do the Bitcoin thing just because of the way the structures and the ways things are. So it's almost like you have to create a structure for them to be able to talk about Bitcoin with their clients as well.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many ways that you can just be kind of an extended member of the team for an RIA, which is, in the US a registered investment advisor or an FA, which is a financial advisor, very similar. And they have all kinds of dashboards and reporting requirements and, you know, portfolio rotations, and so you kind of have to like listen to what they need and get to know them. And so we were doing this for like five months, maybe six months, like building the product, you know? Interviewing people and doing it like a software company would, interviewing FAs and like figuring out like what we need to build and stuff. And, meanwhile, we were putting together our board of directors, which, Lynn Alden is on the board and the, along with Jan and I, and the fourth member was supposed to be Andy Edstrom, and, he's, you know, former Goldman guy, he's been running WestCap Financial, he is a, a money manager out in LA, he wrote the book Why Buy Bitcoin, which is, you know A financial advisor for that audience, and it is a really good book. anyways, we were like about to have our first board meeting, and Andy hit me up, and he was like, "So?" I think I'd rather join full time and just run Swan Advisor Services. And I was like, "Okay, when can you start? " So, yeah, I mean, now, now, like, there's no requirements gathering. He just tells our team exactly what to build. Like, he knows, he knows it all cold. He knows all the, all the vendors, all the, all the partners, all the hooks that you need. And, you know, so that, that's a much bigger bet for us. We have a bunch of, you know, partners and owners of RI That have like a few hundred billion dollars under management across them. So it's like, we've got a lot of good, you know, sort of alpha and beta customers to test this with and to get into it. But there's a hundred trillion dollars of assets under management just with RIAs in the United States. So it's a huge pile of cash, you know, if we can go out and tackle that and get, you know- Half a percent of that or something like that, like it's, it's big, big money. It's, it's a big deal for Bitcoin, and there's nobody else doing it, Bitcoin only. You know, there's other platforms out there in crypto, they all sit on top of Gemini, and they all, you know, have a mixed message, you know, just like the crypto exchanges. They're, they're there just to like buy whatever the advisor wants, and we want to be there for the advisors that are orange pilled, or that have orange pilled clients, you With their financial advisor, and we're just gonna get really well known in that community. Andy has a big platform, you know, he writes in CoinDesk twice a month and goes on tons of people's shows, and he'll do a lot more of that. You know, I, I can speak this language pretty well, been, you know, I used to work in private client services for, for Morgan Stanley a long time ago. you know, Terrence Yang, who a lot of people have gotten to know through Clubhouse and Spaces, you know, that guy's a, you People, you know, the way they wanna be spoken to. So I'm really bullish on that, you know, I think it's, I think it's important.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's a whole other, you know, category, and we need to be out there trying to be involved in as many different, areas that we can.

Well, I mean, I can I just say, like, honestly, like, we've got plenty of bandwidth to talk to people. If you are a money manager, or you're someone that works with a money manager, and you wanna talk about this, like, you can straight up email me, like, c o r y at swanbitcoin dot com. Email me. We'll have a chat. Yeah, for sure. I'll introduce you to Andy. We'll get it on. Let's do this. So yeah, and I think we don't know all of you. You're not all A lot of you are probably not tweeting all day, you're probably busy. Yeah, for sure. But, you probably do listen to Stefan.

But I mean, look, and there might be listeners out there, maybe if you've got friends and family who are RIA's and you wanna get them onto kind of the Bitcoin only message, because remember, with Swan and the Bitcoin only message, they're, they're gonna really learn about Bitcoin, right? Instead of, I think where if you go for the crypto platforms, you'll get this kinda message of, "Oh, see, all the Diversify across the coins, like that's kind of more like their view of it, whereas if you come to a Bitcoin specialist platform, it's, no, it's Bitcoin only. Bitcoin is the message, Bitcoin is the answer. So yeah, I think that's an important distinguishing factor.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, you, you'll never understand any of this stuff unless you actually understand Bitcoin deeply. So yeah, I prefer that you stay with Bitcoin forever, but a minimum get started with Bitcoin.

Of course. Yeah. And yeah, I guess is there any other Swan stuff you wanted to touch Maybe some of the other community projects and things, if you got anything else you wanted to mention.

yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's always a good idea to plug, Bitcoiner jobs. I, I think that it's been a resounding success, you know, what, probably six months in, or I don't even-- maybe it's not even that long, might be four or five months in, but, you know, this was just, kind of on a whim, just fortuitous. I, I had just been getting so many people

piece of a bunch of companies and they always have hiring needs, and I started spending a lot of my time like trying to match candidates with companies and, and helping people, you know, I have a problem saying no to things. Except for yet shitcoin, I'm, I'm good at that. But, you know, I just, I like to help people when I can, and, a, and a VC randomly introduced me to, a, a founder who had a company that made it like a lot easier to stand up like a vertical focused, job board than anything that I'd seen before, and you could just pay a SaaS fee for it. so I did it and, posted on Twitter looking for somebody to help me with it. found Nathan Who was game and jumped right in, and he's a beast. And he actually comes, so he can code a bit, he can write a bit, he can design a bit, and he comes from like the HR, people management world, so it's like, oh my god. So we started doing this just like on the side, just like asynchronously coordinating on Telegram and trying to get people to, you know, post their jobs there, and it just took off, and he was just such a good dude, like we couldn't not hire him, so convinced him to come over and join Swan full time

You know, it's free, unlike, you know, companies paying seven hundred bucks a month for, pomp shitcoin jobs or whatever. you know, this is, this is a Bitcoiner community resource, and, you know, anybody that you would think is a competitor, swan, that's not how we think about it. You know, team Bitcoin for the win. Like, I help You know, help all these companies we feature. You know, doesn't matter, I don't care if it's, you know, Strike, Level, River, Casa, Unchained, Galloy, like, all these companies are posting there. Big companies are posting there now too, which is pretty sweet. And I think it'll keep expanding. we have profiles on there now too, so even if you're like an anon and you wanna post your profile, you can do that, and you can get contacted like through the platform. So there's, it's kind of two-sided now,

Everything else that's coming, there's a lot. Like there are a lot of things that we have coming out for Bitcoiners. I think Swan is kinda turning into a little bit of like, you know, a Bitcoiner focused company, even more than a Bitcoin company. it's just kind of our, our nature and what we find interesting and what we like to do. Like we like to hang out with Bitcoiners, that's why we hire all Bitcoiners and all of our people around the world go to as many meetups and conferences as they can and kick it on. On Twitter and Clubhouse and Spaces and Discord and Telegram with Bitcoiners all day, every day, and, it just lets us be very close to the community and listen to like what people want and what they need, and because we have a really good team of builders on the product and engineering and design side that can put things together, and then we have like enough of a megaphone to spark something and enough of a network to get people to try things, I think that was kind of what happened with Jobs, and I think it's gonna happen with, three or four- More products that we'll be rolling out over the next three or four months. So, stay tuned for lots more on that sort of like, Bitcoiner projects from Swan.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting for listeners out there who are maybe struggling in your fiat job, you're feeling like it's a bit soul-sucking. Well, take a look, Bitcoinerjobs dot co, you might genuinely find a job that even if it's like a slight pay cut, you might think, you know what, it's worth it for me and my own mental state to be able to work And chat and really, just really, feel that interaction and that connection of working in a Bitcoin company, which is really good, and the companies there are very strongly Bitcoin, focused, Bitcoin principled, so you'll find a lot of opportunities there. so Cory, probably time to wrap up there. So if you got anything else, any other thoughts for people as, you know, maybe a good one would be, you know, there might be listeners out there who are sort of weathering the, weathering the storm or feeling the drop. What's-- do you have any thoughts for them on, you know, stealing themselves for the longer term with Bitcoin?

Yeah, I mean, it's, honestly, I find that when the price is going up, I feel like I have to stay current on everything, and so when I was in my learning- phase, you know, so like twenty seventeen through like twenty twenty, and, you know, I, I, I was devouring podcasts, but what I would find myself doing when the price was like down or sideways or whatever, is I would take more time to go to the back catalog. 'Cause I didn't need to stay right on top of like everything that was going on right now. There's something about a price pump when Twitter is really noisy and like everything's super exciting on the podcast, and so you always are kind of like trying to stay abreast of everything in the now. And when the price is down or sideways, I think it's just, it, it's fun to like dive into the Nakamoto Institute or, you know, I, I started a newsletter a couple of months ago, called The Daily Bitcoiner, where the whole point is resurfacing Really good oldies but goodies, you know? So we'll find, you know, stuff from like twenty eleven, twenty fourteen, old YouTube videos and podcasts that, that have stood the test of time and, and kind of resurfaced those. So I think that one's a pretty cool one. cory dot substack dot com. Here come Cory, was taken. But, I'm just kidding. But, thanks, Greg, f you. But, yeah, so I think that's, that's probably one of the things that was a little different. I would try to like pick up books and stuff. So like, if you haven't read Digital Gold from 2014, like, read that. It's awesome. If you haven't read, you know, I'm trying to think of like, like, you know, The Block Size Wars, which, BitMEX Research put out, about ten months ago, like, pick that up.

We were all tweeting all of Parker's articles as they came out when he did, you know, fifteen or sixteen in a row in like less than a year. But like, there's probably people that got into Bitcoin in twenty twenty-one that don't even know that exists, you know? So like, look up, you know, gradually then suddenly Parker's series and read all sixteen of 'em. There's probably people that like only know about VJ's book and never read the original article, you know? I think that's kinda interesting. Or, you know, just go and like, search a podcast app for somebody that you, that you enjoy, and then go back and listen to the things that they talked about. 'Cause, you know, like a, like a first album, a lot of times somebody's, you know, first couple appearances is when they get, you get, you know, their life story and kind of like, the insights that they've built up from their whole life. And then after that, you know, most of the podcast hosts have had these people on, and they don't Cory, and so all you're getting is this person's comments on like the new stuff, but what you really want is like the first time that Safdean went on Stephane's show, you know, something like that, or you want like the first time that Brandon Quittam ever went on, on McCormick or something like that. So try to go find, you know, the first one or two shows that your favorite Bitcoiner was ever on, because that's when you're gonna really like get to know them as people a little better. Anyway, that's kind of some media consumption tips

That's really interesting, and it's a great point that a lot of the new people coming in might not have, you know, seen the same material, and of course, it's just the way it has to be, but, that's certainly an important point for them. so yeah, so listeners, make sure you follow Cory. Cory, where can they find you online? I like Twitter

more than I should. It's awesome. I love Twitter. so coryklippsten on Twitter. you can also find me in any of about forty-eight Bitcoin Address, so that's out there. But yeah, you, you actually can email me for anything that you think is, is relevant for Swan. it's cory at swanbitcoin dot com, c o r y. So that's probably enough to get you started. Oh, I'm also like, much more active on LinkedIn lately, so find me there. I'm trying to post every day about Bitcoin, so if you're like me and you're like, Gen Xer, and you wanna hang out on the Gen X network with me on LinkedIn, Well, thanks

again for joining me, Cory. Yeah, thank you, Stefan. It was great. Get the show notes at stefanlivera dot com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels.