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In this episode, I sit down with my friends Tomer Strohleit and Nico Moran live at the Canadian Bitcoin Conference to explore what it really means to live on a Bitcoin standard.

We get into why Bitcoin restores optimism in a nihilistic age and why many see the future as Bitcoins or CBDCs.

Plus, how conviction and work shape real Bitcoiners.

We talk ETFs, Wall Street's role, and most importantly, why self-custody remains non-negotiable if you care about your sovereignty.

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And now, let's enter the Bitcoin matrix with Tomer and Nico.

What is real?

How do you define real?

You can't jump into cash.

Cash is trash.

What do you do?

You get out.

Hey, hey.

What's up, Canadian Bitcoin Conference?

What an honor to be here.

First, I want to thank our hosts, Daniel and Manuela, for putting this all together.

What a fabulous space and bringing us all together and connecting us.

I'm really excited to get into this panel with my good friends here, Tomer and Nico.

I hope you enjoyed the video that we just played.

Something I think a lot about is maybe the only things in life that I think are scarce are Bitcoin time and family.

And I started a podcast because I really couldn't even get that message across to friends and family in my real life.

And I'm hoping maybe we can get into what is it like living on a Bitcoin standard and how does it affect the things in your life that you can't buy or trade for or that, you know, that you can't really like use economic success or achievement to kind of bring into your life or how it affects it.

So I kind of want to open it up to you guys.

How does Bitcoin maybe affect these other things in your life?

Sure.

But we were talking a little bit about this beforehand.

And I guess the right framing is you work hard to attain your values.

And some values are values that you can buy with money.

It's coffee.

Everyone talks about buying coffee.

But there are values that money can't buy.

And if you think about it, some of them are internal.

They're like your own self-esteem.

You can't go to a store and buy self-esteem.

You can go to a shop and buy a Ferrari and a watch, a gold watch, but that doesn't actually make you feel good about yourself.

It maybe makes you feel good that other people are jealous of you, but that, again, is an indication of a lack of self-esteem.

So there are internal things that you have to work hard to earn.

And then there are other external factors like friendship, right?

Cedric, Nico, we're all friends.

we've earned that friendship not by giving each other money, but we've earned it by spending time with each other and being transparent and open and finding common values.

So there's lots of these things that money can't buy, and they're really valuable.

And it's hard.

You don't want to live without.

It's an empty life living without them, much emptier than living without coffee.

And one of the things that Bitcoin does is it puts people on a path that helps them attain these values that money can't buy.

So people come for the monetary gains.

They stay for the revolution.

And the revolution, we can go more into this, but I don't want to give too long-winded an answer.

The revolution involves doing things that establish your self-esteem, your intelligence, your integrity, your honor, your friendship.

And for many Bitcoiners, and I suspect many people in the audience here, they came for the money, they came for the gains, and the process of becoming a Bitcoiner, of having to study Bitcoin, having to study economics, having to learn things, having to put all that time and energy and making all these friends has given them some of the values that money can't itself buy.

And we'll get into family, I suppose, as well.

But you've put your time and energy into not just getting money out, but getting a lot of the values that you can't even buy with money.

Yo!

How are you doing, Canada?

You guys doing good?

I love Canada.

Cool.

This is my second time in Montreal and then I've been to Alberta, I think, earlier this year.

And it's fantastic.

You guys got a nice place up here.

And I'm coming from Miami.

So, yeah, it's really cool.

But anyways, yeah, like, look, most of the world is super nihilistic.

And they don't understand why they're nihilistic.

And it's really because, like, to put it bluntly, they're being stolen from.

And what Bitcoin does is it gives you hope.

It gives you your optimism back, which was stolen from you.

And by giving your optimism back, by giving you hope for the future, it allows you to plan for the future.

It allows you to think about the future.

It allows you to think about actually starting a family without going absolutely broke.

And I think that gives you happy.

I think that makes you happy.

It gives you peace.

It gives you serenity.

and most of the world is stuck on this rat wheel essentially of just this continued work harder work harder they're they're the fiat propagandists have even gotten to a point that they're literally telling you hey you're gonna own nothing and be happy it's really gotten that bad right um and Bitcoiners are saying, hey, that sucks ass.

Own Bitcoin and be happy.

And that sounds way better.

Does it not?

So this is what we're fighting for.

And make no mistake, this is a fight because there's only two choices in front of us.

and it's either bitcoin or central bank digital currencies and i'll clarify what that means it's either bitcoin or slavery so don't ask what bitcoin could do for you ask what you could do for bitcoin and this is how we gonna win when it comes to bitcoin the rules are simple Run your own node hold your own keys and protect your seed phrase That where MicroSeed comes in Unlike bulky backups, MicroSeed is stamped onto a tiny steel washer.

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I'm kind of curious, though.

I think to a lot of people who don't have Bitcoin, it sounds like living on a Bitcoin standard is like winning the lottery.

And I'm trying to really understand how just being on a Bitcoin standard changes people from living on a...

We want to escape the fiat matrix, but what does that actually mean when you do?

Yeah.

Bitcoin isn't like winning the lottery.

Winning the lottery is gambling.

And I don't want to be too controversial here, but shit coining is like winning the lottery.

It's like, oh, I bought the right dog coin at the right time and I have a million dollars, but I didn't sell it at the right time.

So I lost the million dollars.

Bitcoin is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

Bitcoin is trying to understand how the world really works and to use things in the world that really work, energy, mathematics, social connections, technology, to create enduring store of value that you can then choose to spend when you want.

And being a Bitcoiner, especially during this formative stage of Bitcoin, is work.

So it's much more akin to building a company that's valuable for other people than it is gambling and winning the lottery.

Everybody here is showing up to do some work to understand Bitcoin, to help be more articulate about it, to help understand it better so that they can use it better.

And they're here for the long term, right?

Like Larry was just up here talking about how when the price went down, he doubled down.

And when it went down, he doubled down again.

And you can only do that with a conviction and understanding.

That's not because he's a degenerate gambler.

That's because he had a critical, objective, fundamental understanding of how Bitcoin worked.

And so like a company, everybody works for Bitcoin and they put in a lot of time and effort.

Unlike a company, Bitcoin doesn't have a founder, a president, a CEO, an HR department.

So we're all here doing what we think is best for us to do for Bitcoin.

It's not that we applied for a job and we got a job and now we have to perform according to somebody else's KPIs of what we have to do.

And there's no performance review we get either.

It's all internal.

So I think that's part of the beauty and magic of Bitcoin is like, come work for Bitcoin.

You don't have to apply for a particular job.

But you do have to figure out what job you want to do for Bitcoin.

So it's not like winning the lottery at all.

How has Bitcoin maybe changed the conversation about money in terms of like with friends and family and approaching them and sort of giving them advice?

Would you have given them, would you give your friends and family advice about money before Bitcoin?

Would you feel comfortable doing that?

um yeah i think you know i think once you transition to a bitcoin stand you're living on a bitcoin standard you know something that most people around you don't know so naturally you want your loved ones to start benefiting from this but they absolutely look at you like a effing crazy person but in reality like you want to help and it's been my experience you know it was a decade that most people you could show them the door but they have to open the door by themselves but that tends to work to your favor because they'll never forget that you told them about bitcoin in 2016 or 2017 and then you know the price runs up to like 120k they're like oh Maybe I should have listened.

So eventually, like, number go up does the convincing for you.

And, you know, your close ones, your friends, your family, they eventually take the orange pill.

And then they start to see what you see.

But I have never met someone in my life that has moved to a Bitcoin standard, not degen gambled or taken leverage or any of that, but just moved to a Bitcoin standard, hodled, and I've never met someone that their life has not improved.

And I don't just mean on a financial level.

I mean on a mental level, on a spiritual level.

I think fiat is not only corrupt economically, I think it's morally corrupt.

It's a money based on theft, right?

so think about it from like that perspective of most of the world is still living with that operating system and do you really want your family members you know i just had to say i just had a daughter time flies she's about two it feels like i just had her um but i know in my heart that she's going to live in a world where, you know, Bitcoin has won.

She's going to live in a world where she's going to benefit from not having to work this rat wheel type of lifestyle.

She's going to be able to focus on her craft, make some money, and that's going to be enough to live because how the current fiat system works is you have to become a part-time investor just to maintain your purchasing power, which is absolutely, absolute insanity.

Like, what if you're like a carpenter and you're like really good at like, you know, carpenting, I guess that's a word, right?

Carpentry.

There you go.

I'm from Miami.

I make up words all the time.

And, you know, what if you, what if you just want to focus on your craft, right?

Let's say you're a successful carpenter and you're making over, you know, a hundred thousand or $200,000 a year, you have disposable income, what do you do?

Do you invest?

What if you don't know anything about investment?

Okay.

You outsource that to a bank.

You know, they take a fee.

They're not going to give you a great return.

Bitcoin offers an alternative.

It's like, look, all you got to do is buy Bitcoin, earn Bitcoin, mine Bitcoin, put that Bitcoin to self-custody, and it's going to give you a 30 to 20% CAGR for the next 20, 30 years.

And you can go about your life and everything around you is just going to get progressively cheaper.

Like that sounds effing fantastic.

Most of the world hasn't got that message yet.

And it's everybody's everybody in this room.

It's your duty to propagate that message.

You know, one of the interesting things about the question that you asked, Cedric, is before Bitcoin, I certainly didn't give investment advice or monetary advice to people.

I didn't have anything to say.

I was very passionate about a lot of things.

Oh, you got to go see this movie, you got to read this book, you got to go to that place on vacation.

So there was a lot of stuff we talked about.

I came across Bitcoin and it was like the heavens opened before me and here's something the likes of which I've never seen before.

I got very excited about it I told a lot of people about it The lesson learned I didn really convince too many people in the outset right Like the discomfort about someone talking to you about doing something risky with your money makes people very suspicious.

You know, it's like this guy's trying to get me to buy this digital currency.

Why?

Like what's in it for him?

What's in it for me?

He's so excited.

Maybe he's really passionate about it.

Good for him.

But I'm unpersuaded.

And it took a long time before people started to come around.

And I think to your point, Nico, it wasn't until the price got really high a couple of times that people were like, OK, this is, you know, this is more than just a flyer.

There's there's something else to this.

And I think that that's probably the hardest thing that everybody who gets into Bitcoin finds.

It's like, how do I actually, first of all, convince myself, well, like, what are my objections to what's going on here or what are my concerns?

But once you overcome them, you get excited about telling people because you're Bitcoin is a salvation of sorts, right?

Like you're you're you're in slavery in fiat, which you may or may not realize.

And Bitcoin is freedom from that slavery.

It is a savior.

And so you want to help save as many people as you can.

But if you tell them you're going to be their savior and they're going to make a lot of money in something that's volatile where they might lose money initially by their calculus, they're worried that you're a scammer.

And this is the hardest part, I think, with Bitcoin.

Now, Bitcoin, it's overcome a lot of these objections, right?

Just take a look.

If you go to the third floor now, there's so many people who've written books about Bitcoin.

You don't write books about scams because it takes a long time to write a book and the scam works itself through the system and ends.

But the attempt to explain in detail and generate awareness of what's actually going on in the world and why Bitcoin fixes it is what so many people are so committed to that they're motivated to write a book.

And believe me, you're not motivated to write a book to make more money.

You're motivated because there's a spiritual thing there.

Can I answer your point, Tomer?

Like, I think most people have like Stockholm syndrome.

Like, you have to understand, like, if you live in if you live in fiat world or if you're in the fiat matrix, the matrix, you're in fiat matrix.

You are you're in the matrix.

Like you don't like something.

You're being exploited by the machine for your energy.

Correct.

And you're and you believe in it.

Right.

Like the way that they phrase it.

This is public money.

Bitcoin is private money, even though the Fed is completely obfuscated.

You can't audit it.

If you create dollars out of thin air, that's counterfeiting.

You go to jail.

Anyone could make Bitcoin.

Anyone could audit the Bitcoin blockchain.

What sounds more private and public to you, but people still have that conception that somehow this magic Internet money is private.

And then they rightly so have skepticism about it, right?

They're like, oh my God, this could be a scam.

But if you look at the data, the data speaks for itself.

You always hear this, at least in the United States, and I'm sure in Canada, there's something very similar, which is like the American dream is dead, right?

Or the Canadian dream is dead.

I don't know if that's a saying, but, you know, it's the idea of if you work really hard, if you get a job, you can get a house with the white picket fence and et cetera, et cetera.

That's that is dead.

A hundred percent.

That's dead.

If you're on a fiat standard, if you're on a Bitcoin standard, it's thriving because that house with the white picket fence, it's actually getting progressively cheaper over time.

Right.

Five years ago, that house maybe cost you 10 Bitcoin.

Today, that house maybe costs you 5 Bitcoin.

10 years ago, I met Marty Malti, one of the first guys that emailed Satoshi.

And he was making a presentation.

It was called My Bitcoin Pizza Story.

And he was talking about how he spent 10,000 Bitcoin buying a one-bedroom flat in Finland.

right so that's just to give you a perspective like on a bitcoin standard everything around you is getting progressively cheaper and i love the way that jeff booth puts it which is the natural state of the free market is deflationary and the only thing that could actually uh reflect that is bitcoin because it's the only thing that is immune from government manipulation and control so bitcoin is essentially freeing humanity from the tyranny of central banking that's what it's doing and it's giving people back hope and it's giving people back time that they could spend with their families in fact they can spend doing whatever the hell they want to do whether that's surfing or being a carpenter uh i don't know why i'm saying carpenter so much but yeah just the word carpentry is the word you keep looking.

I want to add like the natural state of the free market is that people try to figure out how to make more of something less expensively all the time and to innovate and to make it better all the time.

There's one exception and we want that, right?

We want more homes.

We want more cars.

We want more food.

We want more, more healthy food.

We want more quality stuff.

There's one thing we don't want more of actually, which is more money because money is just the exchange between other things of value.

That's the only thing.

And so whether it's the government that creates more money or a factory maker who invents more beads if you're using beads as money or the prospectors, I'm working for, who find more gold, they're all creating more money if that thing is money, and that creates inflation, and that destroys people's ability to save and purchase.

And I think this is the greatest thing about the invention of Bitcoin.

It's something that not only can nobody create more of than is the specified amount.

It's something that you can verify that nobody can create more of than the specified amount.

So it's money that you can actually trust to last over time and to experience that productivity gain everywhere.

And with money that can be created everywhere, the game gets played to exchange that easily produced money for power, political power, all sorts of other things.

And that's what's creating a lot of the ills in our civilization today.

It's like after 50, 55 years of fiat money now, we have governments and so government isn't inherently bad, but we have government that's been inherently corrupted by the money that it can print.

because what does it do?

It's two parties vying for your vote by offering to give you free money, which isn't really free.

It's just debasing somebody else's money and debasing yours at the same time.

And so the game of politics will change when we move to a hard money standard.

I think that's a big part of what many Bitcoiners talk about.

Larry was talking about it just before.

So to really understand the value of Bitcoin is to understand this is the first time in history we have something that can't be used for anything else other than money, but also can't be increased in supply.

And so the debasement of it is impossible.

And that's what we have to defend.

But it's quite easy to defend.

You just you run a node and don't change the code.

Yeah.

And think about the carpenter or someone making 100 a year A few years ago they could buy at least in their earning power 25 or 50 Bitcoin per year Maybe they couldn save all that.

Now that's one or two Bitcoin per year.

And at a million dollars per Bitcoin, they're working for 0.1.

And if they were lucky enough to maybe save over time 10 Bitcoin, and now that just is not a meaningful sort of increase to their stack in Bitcoin terms.

And thinking about salaries in Bitcoin terms and seeing how much they're getting cheaper, I think is interesting.

The other thing I think is that Michael Dunworth says, like, people are like private keys.

So, you know, we can't make more Bitcoin without a hard fork.

You can't biologically and, like, with resource limitations make more family.

We can't really scale it and you can't make more time.

So I really think about, like, if you think you need more Bitcoin, you're probably not bullish enough.

What you have now, if you've been stacking anything, will be enough.

And I think what I think about is we have to get our private keys, our UTXOs, and our family to 2032 in one piece.

And that's kind of what I've been thinking about with this panel is just what we need to do to go forward.

But yeah, I think I think that's very true.

Like one of the troubling things about this cycle specifically is with which was an inevitable inevitability, which is you're seeing the financialization of Bitcoin like Bitcoin is entering into Wall Street.

I think that plays into a part of the recent price action that we're seeing this year.

Bitcoin has changed since the launch of the ETF in January of 2024.

And it became, obviously so, the most successful ETF launch in history.

It is the most profitable ETF for BlackRock currently.

Daddy Fink is on our side.

Fantastic Bitcoin employee of the year, of the month.

Um, but to add to Cedric's point, right.

You know, you, what I, what I find troubling is people have forgotten the importance of self custody in order for you to truly become sovereign and for you to truly reclaim back your financial sovereignty.

if it's not your keys, then it ain't your cheese.

And what's concerning is that, again, this cycle, people, they see the ETFs and they're like, oh, the ETFs are convenient.

This is great.

This is fine.

But none of that replaces true spot Bitcoin.

And the reason I say that is because spot Bitcoin gives you a tremendous amount of power as an individual.

It gives you the power to vote with your feet.

So if you live in a hostile jurisdiction and, you know, we have the privilege of living in the West where perhaps, you know, the governments aren't so unstable.

But, you know, where I'm originally from, Venezuela, there's stories of people that literally the only thing that they can take with them is Bitcoin to cross the border, to go to another more favorable jurisdiction.

And before that was impossible.

The fact that Canada has five banks and the government has in recent years said the following people can't access their money.

There you go.

I mean, the Canadian truckers protest.

That's the one.

So, you know, if you have Bitcoin in self-custody, I love how one of the one of the Canadian companies responded to the Canadian government, which is basically like, look, we couldn't give you this Bitcoin even if we wanted to.

Right.

And that's the power of taking Bitcoin into self-custody.

You're reclaiming back your financial sovereignty.

And if you do that for you and your family, again, it puts you in a very advantageous position.

And I think people have forgotten about the importance of self-custody.

So even though there's these very convenient ETFs, even though it's never been easier to get exposure to Bitcoin through the treasury companies, I think none of that is a replacement to true spot Bitcoin and self-custody.

And I think that's going to provide the ultimate benefit for your family.

I think this is a good example to the earlier point that I was making about how incredible Bitcoin is and how hard it is to explain to people how incredible it is and how important it is.

We talk about the fixed supply and the verifiability of the fixed supply.

Talk about the self-custody, the fact that it is money that you can take with you and store in your head even if need be, and that nobody can stop you from spending this permissionless censorship position.

These aren't words that people know, right?

If you tell someone this thing is permissionless or it's censorship resistance or it's supply cap, they haven't heard these expressions before.

It's not common verbiage.

So Bitcoin is like this total invention of something that people haven't seen the likes of it before.

And so it becomes hard.

And you have to recognize then that in orange pilling other people, you have to go slow.

And the longer you've been in Bitcoin, the more you have these expressions like not your keys, not your cheese or one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin or whatever.

And that goes over everybody's head.

But to the question that you were asking, Cedric, what do you need to do to get yourself to 2032?

I assume it's just a year you're saying out in the future where Bitcoin's valuable enough and recognized enough that you've gotten there.

Because there's a lot of chaos between now and then.

That's a hard thing to know, right?

Like, do you hunker down?

Do you move into somewhere that's distant?

Do you just roll the dice?

And I think that's something that nobody can actually know, right?

You may want to take some diversification bets, like have different locations that you can get to.

But if crisis happens, at least if you have self-sovereign Bitcoin, you can take it with you wherever you go.

If your Bitcoin is in the ETF and there's a financial crisis and banks get shut down or there's controls as to how much you can withdraw or take out or how you can use it, you're not protected against that.

So I think understanding how Bitcoin works gives you more optionality.

It's not a guarantee, right?

If shit hits the fan, it hits the fan.

And if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time, that's unfortunate.

But you can't plan for everything, right?

And it is a chaotic world.

But you can plan for a lot of things that you need to be worried about.

And Bitcoin fixes a lot of the, you know, is the plan for a lot of those things, if you use it the way that was created to be used.

one last thing i'll say is guys at the end of the day remember bitcoin is a revolution if enough of us take self-custody we win and there's absolutely nothing they could do about it yeah self-custody your own bitcoin uh that is the key uh protect your seed phrase stamp it uh i it's about self-custody bitcoin i really think so uh we're out of time here i want to thank you guys so much for exploring this topic with me.

Thank you guys.

Thanks.

curious about Bitcoin.

And let's keep growing this community together.

Stay curious, keep stacking, and I'll catch you in the next one.