Thank you, but I need to get my headset in.
It's so boring in crypto.
What are we going to talk about?
Nothing really going on at all.
Is that a 24-hour live stream?
Well, I don't know if my streams are censored or I've just become very unpopular, but it
seems like my last stream, when I got like three viewers the entire time, I was like,
man, I really fell off a cliff.
Well, you haven't paid for your $8 blue, but you're not allowed to either because you're
You have to be in the press or something?
I think it's only for sale in...
But they've withdrawn it from the market now because of all of the confusion over blue
What a crappy rollout that was.
But it was only in UK, America, Australia, a few markets.
Yeah, that fizzled out really quick.
Another reason that reputation on Hive matters so much, because you have all these people
It's like, well, how do you, without KYC, add reputation?
I believe they even had KYC, so I have no idea how it became such a shit show.
Well, because it wasn't really KYC.
It was just, can you put together a credit card transaction?
And I suspect you could probably, perhaps you could use one of those credit cards you
can buy in the, you know, you can buy temporary credit cards in America at the drugstore.
You get a $100 credit card, which you'll spend $90.
Yeah, that's, I have no idea what they were thinking then.
What did they think was going to happen?
That's exactly what they got.
And the thing, and to use the same blue check symbol as they've been using for something
All right, let me try and retweet this.
Not that I, I get no traction too, because, you know, my account got murdered, so.
Yeah, I think I went, I went live a few months ago, or a month ago, I don't know.
And I had put something like censorship resistance in the title, so it probably wasn't the best
And then I literally got one viewer the entire time.
And then he, and then he came on, it was supposed to be an open forum.
So I was just talking to myself.
And then he comes on, and then he joins.
It was actually a really great show.
I thought he was, he was very intelligent.
And, and then we had like one guest come in, and then they kind of stuck around.
I was like, yeah, either nobody wants to listen to me speak, or nobody's seeing my,
my, my, my tweet, my live tweets.
Um, we can send this out via three speed.
Maybe it's because I put Hive in the title.
The thing is if I, oh, well.
It's a shame because the milkshake has become dry, because it's like, you use these Web2 platforms
to try to promote, um, the awareness of Hive, and then you get, you get the lid put on
It, it's bizarre now, because, uh, I was listening to this, uh, FTX thing last night, or this morning
when I woke up, which has been going on, like, it's, I mean, if I look at the top of my screen
It's this, uh, uh, the FTX conspiracy conversation or continued, continues or something like this.
It's got 7,000 listeners, um, Elon Musk joined, they had Kim.com on there, um, and, and it
was just going on and on and on.
And they were all, you know what, what struck me?
They were all trying to say, keep your, they, there were like lots of them.
And it was quite clear that some of them have lost money.
And it was quite clear that all of them know that not your keys, not your crypto.
And all of them were chasing yield on FTX or trading or doing any of this.
And he was like, oh, and I, and I'll admit, I was on block fight until the AC, until the
meltdown of, um, you know, the last one, three arrows and, uh, and the stable coin thing.
And then I pulled everything off everything.
I think I've got $3 on block fight at the moment.
I mean, yeah, the crazy part was how he invested, he had his hand in so many areas.
Um, and then just to go belly up like that is, um, pretty bizarre, man.
It's like, he just came in like a bull in a China shop and just caused as much damage as he possibly
could in the shortest span of time he possibly could.
Cause he's only been around what a year, like two years, most, that's it.
She comes in two years and, and managed to implode pretty much every centralized entity.
Um, and then emboldened the one that we don't want emboldened fucking Binance.
Um, it's, it's, it's so bizarre how people look at Binance as a trusted entity.
It's like, that is a snake.
That guy will bite you and leave you to die anytime.
Like that's, this guy is not, it's not a good entity at all.
They're highly centralized, highly controlled.
It might speak a good game, but we know what words are.
And, um, he's in bed with Justin's son, which seems to have managed, um, benefited off the
Somehow talked him into allowing Tron on the site, like to be redeemed.
So like it went to over a dollar on FTX and then redeemed means you, as far as I could
understand on what redeemed meant was, if you had some Tron sitting in a wallet inside
FTX, I mean, and all coins on a centralized exchange are just lines on a spreadsheet, right?
They're just internal database numbers.
They don't have any relationship to the real external crypto.
If the, if the, if the centralized exchange is not trading properly, which these guys obviously
So what Tron was offering was that he'll just like cancel the line on his ledger inside
FTX and give you a new line on the ledger somewhere else.
It's like, he's running a big spreadsheet as well.
And the problem here is, um, people were, it was like, it was like a dollar on FTX where
it's like six cents everywhere else.
So people were just trying to get out any, any means possible when they redeemed their
Tron, they could only sell it for like six cents off the market.
So they literally lost 95%.
And then guess who profited off that?
He's, he's like a super villain.
He's, he's very opportunistic.
It just seems like any time there's any kind of opportunity to be made off of anything.
It doesn't matter what it is.
You just see him like peek his little head around the corner.
You're like rubbing his chin, just thinking of like, how can I benefit off of this situation?
And it's so bizarre that he's always trailing in the wake of CZ.
They're very, very obvious that they're, you know, they, they don't want to, they don't
want to seem too close together in public.
But, um, but it's obvious that, you know, behind the scenes, they're working very tightly
Um, God, they keep coming up in 10.
And I mean, the bigger of the conspiracy theories, if we're going to go down that on, on the
FTX side is, is that this was all that, that his entire rise, the entire rise of this guy
was orchestrated to cause destruction as exactly as it's done.
Um, because it was, you know, he's got these politically connected parents and he's got, he's
been inside Washington and he's giving vast sums to the Democrats.
And then all he had to do was implode like this.
And of course, now the, the screams for regulation are going to be stronger than ever.
And all of these, these centralized projects that he was investing in are going to just
explode with collateral damage all over the place.
Um, yeah, I mean, it's kind of, it's, it's too ballsy to just do what he did.
If we're looking at this from just a very practical point of view, the guy was using
customer funds to gamble.
Um, it's obvious that he was going to get caught.
I mean, to think that he could get away with what he got away with because everyone knew
it was just a matter of time before somebody spoke up because now you have employees saying,
Oh yeah, they were definitely doing that.
So I don't know, man, like either the guy's just insane.
Um, or it was just a belly flop on the industry.
I don't, you know, I'm, I'm not one to say conspiracy theories.
Cause if it's like, I don't have any hard proof, then it doesn't really matter because
we're just going to chase our tails forever.
But if I had to guess, it was like, well, you could say the Luna thing was out of just
But if you really look at how it was made, it was made to fail.
It was made to get really big and blow up.
Like you can't, if you really dissect it, you're like, this was made to fail.
So either they had no idea what they were doing or they knew exactly what they were doing.
Um, we'll never know, but, and then you follow it up with this.
They think it is a perfect storm.
And now of course, like not even within 24 hours, you got the white house talking, Oh,
we need, um, we need more regulation, more control.
Um, I mean, they're like Justin's son as well.
Any kind of opportunity to fucking pounce right on it, regardless if, um, you know, there's
any dealings behind the scenes, but yeah, it's all very, very funny.
Um, funny business in terms of all the connections, how it hurt the industry and how on these sweeping
regulations are going to come in.
And I've always, that's the thing.
People are all surprised.
I'm like, well, I've always lived as if this was going to happen.
Like I lived in a world where this, the regulation was as bad as it could possibly get.
And if you can survive that, then it's worth fighting for.
If you can't survive that, you might as well just break it up and look for something else
because that's inevitable.
Um, if it's not inevitable, it's highly likely.
So I don't, you know, I don't build on a foundation where there's a more than probable
chance it's going to collapse.
And that's why, um, you know, it's good that, yeah, you, people can say, okay, you
look at something like hive and, um, it has, it has some flaws in terms of, we do rely on
Um, we have people like Leo, um, Leo finance building bridges, you know, speak network or
working with honeycomb to do something similar.
Um, you can already spin up your own decks a layer too.
So like we have the infant it's there, it's breathing.
We can, we can now move on and just make sure we nurture and curate it.
Um, but that's a big, that's a big issue that we have to rely on.
Um, we do rely on a finance pretty heavily.
I mean, I must say I'm using simple swap, which I know is just, I'm using simple swap to, to
restock my lightning node with, with Bitcoin.
Cause about, I did the math actually, and I'm, I'm doing about 70% hive into lightning
and about 30% lightning into hive, uh, by value.
So it's not far off balanced actually, but, um, but I have to buy Bitcoin with hive and,
um, I'm doing that usually via simple swap.
But in the background, I can see it's just sent when I send it to simple swap three seconds
later, it sends it to deep crypto a, which is by finance.
But at least it means I just don't have to deal with the whole putting it on by finance,
whitelisting a, uh, a Bitcoin address.
And it means I can use a different Bitcoin address every time, which is, you know, good
And yeah, I, I, but I know I am using, I am.
And sometimes, you know, I do look at, at using, um, I have done a few times I can send
HBD through one of Leo's gateways, either on polygon or BSC, and again, finance, um, turn
that into, you know, the, their ERC 20 version of HBD, turn that into USDC.
And then do the conversion via, but again, buying, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's
hard to avoid, uh, even if I use a wrapper that takes a half a percent or whatever.
Hive's main issue, there's a chicken and egg situation here where, um, you can look at
Ethereum and people will go there because there's the liquidity from the VCs.
That's the, that's the egg.
Like now people are going to Ethereum to wrap their Bitcoin.
Um, that doesn't, that means Ethereum doesn't have to worry about cross chain shit.
So like people are coming to them and wrapping it and just using the DEXs that are native on
top of Ethereum where you don't have people wrapping their Bitcoin on Hive.
We really don't have, um, you know, solid enough tech for that yet.
Obviously it's being built and we have infant forms of it.
So one of the, where it's how Hive's just valuable outside of the liquidity because of
you build apps and all the immutable tech source, et cetera.
And then from there, um, bridge to where the liquidity, um, is.
So we have to be a little bit more humble and we have to sort of brick by brick, whereas
others like Ethereum sort of had it handed to them.
So it's, you know, people look around and it's like, why isn't this happening?
Well, we did, we do have a spectacular problem that we're, we're getting over.
And the only way to get over it is literally, it's like building a bridge as you're walking.
So you can, you know, you can only move so fast because you can, you have to plant the
Um, and the great thing is once you get to the Gems, you're pretty much connected to them
all because they pretty much forked most of the same technology.
It's liquidity can come and go.
Um, it's almost like chasing something that isn't permanent.
So I don't know if I'm like the biggest fan of using all of our resources, but at the
same time, it is a big centralized or it's a big single point of failure right now, as
we've seen when all the exchanges went down for the hard fork.
So we need to encourage things like Dex is on hive.
But most importantly, what most people don't know is I haven't used a centralized exchange
So I'm an ex poker player and inside these poker chats, we have OTCs where you rely on
If you're new, you need a hard voucher from somebody who's reputable.
And, um, I've been able to cash out all the, without having to worry about any centralized
Well, you can do that on hive because we have rep and you can do the account and all you
My whole value for value bridge is built on my rep.
It's like people are, you know, I'm only, I'm holding funds for between three and eight
In most cases, three seconds, if it's hive, I have to wait for eight seconds.
If it's lightning, I have to wait for, but my reputation is good.
If it's not good enough that, that people will do that.
Um, but yeah, that's the way I tell you, that is the way.
Uh, and, and the, the point is until you have this immutable reputation, you know, and cause
like, there's nothing, there's nothing in the non crypto signed world that you can trust.
You can't trust, obviously you can't trust a blue check from Twitter and you can't trust
that your account will be there tomorrow morning.
So that's completely out the window.
Now, and there, there's all sorts of other ways that you can sign stuff.
Um, uh, and the Bitcoin guys have got their fancy ways of doing it, but it's not, it's
not wrapped in a convenient and well produced and easy to view front end.
Like we've got multiple of on hive.
And that's the other thing is if, if you want to check my reputation, you can check it
on peak D and ecency and hive.blog now it will always be the same and people don't really
kind of understand that, but it's actually a real check.
It means that one front end displaying something different would be odd.
It'd be like, uh, you know, it'd be like, um, being a node in a block producer and, uh,
or being a node in a blockchain and, um, producing a, an invalid block.
The whole system will look at you funny with the same sort of concept.
They'll be like, Oh wait, every front end, but this one's showing something different.
It must be something wrong with the front end.
And what you touched on is very important.
That's going to be very, very important moving forward as people start to understand it.
So you have a reputation on, on Twitter.
Well, we don't know if that's your account.
Oh, you have a blue check Mark.
We don't know if that's your account.
We don't know if it's Twitter messing with your account and you've been silenced in the
There's a lot of things we don't know because it's all closed source.
Well, what if they open source it, then you have the unsustainability of no incentives.
You're still trusting on Eli for infrastructure.
So open sourcing will be a step ahead.
So you can at least sort of see if the person is who they say they are, but you truly do
Elon knows your account because you rely on Elon for the infrastructure.
Whereas Hive relies on a community for its infrastructure.
Therefore, we have much more control, much more ownership and censorship resistance over
our account than an open source Twitter without incentives would have.
That's even if they go that route.
They don't go that route.
Then it's just, it's not even, it's not even a debate.
You don't own your account.
You don't own your reputation.
We don't know who you are.
And that's going to be increasingly important as you move forward because we've already seen
And if you don't think that centralized sites are above that, then, you know, I don't, I
think you have to kind of wake up.
The point is, even if there's a 1% chance, that's 1% too much.
I'm not trying to have any kind of foundation that has a, that has a small, small hole like
Even if it is small, it doesn't have to be there.
If it doesn't have to be there, it shouldn't be there.
And if you can use industry's best practices, which Hive is using, I believe true censorship
resistance is the only way to protect yourself.
You can't trust anyone in this business anymore.
But now people are starting to really wake up, right?
They thought, oh, wow, this guy, you know, I mean, he did everything the opposite of what
He lobbied for regulation.
Like he really played this to a tee.
Poker faced the hell out of it the whole time.
Um, so yeah, it's very, it's, it was very, cause you know, he's on, he's on arenas.
You got Tom Brady talking about him.
Like a lot of retail got hurt from this.
This was, this was, if you wanted to gouge the eyes out of the retail market in crypto,
And it went off perfectly, regardless if it was accidental or not.
Yeah, I guess it's, I guess it must've been directed at the U S more than I, I, I was like
only dimly aware of FTX even quite recently.
I mean, like I watch formula one, so crypto.com is obvious and I've got my crypto.com card and
I'm wondering if they're as safe as they sound from, you know, the CEO's tweets, but you just
Um, you know, I just, but as far as tools to interface crypto to the real world, these
guys have just got it cornered because you need such a big reputation and such a big cojones
companies to be able to stump up and play in the world of visa and mastercard and these
guys, um, that, you know, but every time I turn on the TV and I see a formula one race
and I see crypto.com everywhere.
And I guess if you're in America, you know that, you know, they bought stadiums and stuff.
It's that scary because I just, I just know the cost of that stuff and I know how much they
have to be making from me and my credit card, you know, how much my credit card must be worth
for them and how much they have to recoup the cost of getting me as a customer.
When are they going to blow up?
I've got minimal, you know, I've got in just as much as I need to go on.
Um, but like I, I got a refund from in, in Amsterdam, I bought, I bought iPhones for
And, uh, I just got the VAT refund.
So it's sitting on my crypto.com credit card.
And the only way I can get to it is to actually just spend it.
So I'm going to have to find something to buy.
It's, um, it's a shame that there's such a detachment from the understanding of what
real crypto central resistance is versus just centralized infrastructure.
Um, one of the times I do appreciate Bitcoin maxis, um, because they really pound
the point, you know, Bitcoin versus crypto, Bitcoin versus, obviously we know hives in
that category and maybe a few others, but the point is you can, they're at least sending
the message out there that this centralized infrastructure is not crypto.
It was, if anything, a vampire attack at best web 2.5 and it needed to go anyway.
It's always darkest before the dawn.
And I've always like, this is something that it's, it's a shame how it happened, but what
do you expect in a wild, wild West industry where you can have basically print your own
token, um, get in cahoots with some good marketing and before you know it, you're a billionaire.
There's a lot of money in the hands of people who probably shouldn't have it.
They probably, you know, if crypto wasn't around, they wouldn't have had the opportunity
to do what they've done in terms of, um, vampire and industry.
So it's just, it's a, it's a weird time right now.
Um, I think that it was inevitable that this was going to continue to happen.
We need to really move to DEX's censorship resistant protocols and focus on the real mission
because now the question has always been when you feel like you're on your last ropes and
you feel like your legs are weak.
Do you think it's, do you think web three, do you think this whole idea was a fad and
we're just going to live in this, this centralized web forever?
Or do you believe that there is going to be censorship resistance and there's a point?
Which is that they take the idea of Bitcoin and the idea of, of, you know, of digital currencies
at, at the point of use and they, they create these perverted CBDCs, which are even worse
because there's nothing crypto about them.
They're just centralized control mechanisms a la China.
And, and literally the, the, the dollar in your pocket is now hypothecated and you can
spend it on this, but not that, or you can give it to this person, but not to that person.
And that's, that's the, that's the bastard child that they're going to create from this,
which is even worse than had we not even thought of Bitcoin in the first place, you know?
If you take a step back at the timeline and make the hair and back your neck stand up,
I mean, everyone got online, everyone started exposing all their data, everything they're
doing, all their political views, everything, all their privacy was gone.
They gave it all the way for the, the quote unquote free, um, all their images, everything
about them has been on for, you know, better part of a decade now.
And now you roll out something like a CBD and, um, you, you tie it to all the information
And now people are just stuck in this sort of life, especially kids.
They're all on social media.
TikTok is the absolute worst spyware possible.
And people still, um, do not care.
So we've gotten to a point where that, that doesn't matter.
So that means it's wide open.
The gates are wide open for this thing.
And people don't think that's a reality, but it's, it's look at the timeline.
Everyone's putting their data on.
Now they want to control the digital value flow.
They already seeing it in parts and like China where they're tying this thing to your real
And now it's like, well, you can't go to this store.
And at first it's going to roll out as a convenience.
People are like, oh my God, this digital dollar is so awesome.
It's so much better than this and that.
And the fees are lower and it's all, and people are going to love it.
And then they'll slowly roll out these sort of restrictions and you won't see it in the
major places, but then once they get away with it in one country, once you get away
with it in one notable country, um, people don't step up to protest or get it, get it
Then, you know, another country's taken another country and then before you know it's the
norm and people just sort of accept it as, oh, well that sucks.
You better tote the line.
And, um, the sad truth is I see that we're definitely going to run right into that future
that I've always, I've said this, I believe a couple of years ago.
It's felt like star Wars to me.
Like where it's going to be like, we are the bad guys in the empire, the good guys, but
it's a good guys by fear.
You don't want to say they're the bad guys because then you won't exist.
So it's going to be a very scary, uh, but I prepared for that future.
Like, that's why I'm so gung ho with hive and what we're doing.
Like I, I've lived in that future.
If it doesn't happen, cool.
Then I don't have to prepare for better times because if I prepare for those times and who
cares, if I prepare, if I prepare for Mount Everest and I have to climb a smaller hill,
well then that's no problem.
I'll have to prepare for the smaller hill.
So I think that we're going into the scariest of times and it's not going to be easy to be a
hardcore hiver or anything pro censorship resistance in certain countries.
And yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be something we have to weather and sustain.
And it's going to be a true Testament if, cause people just think, oh, we have it now.
Like you don't understand how hard this is to sustain how morale, just like liquidity.
The number of people it takes to keep one of these things going.
Um, it's, it's, it's, it is a cohesive force, but without that central leading, uh, controlling
point, it's really amazing how it works when you start to get on the inside of it.
Um, it's not that there are so few people, there's actually quite a lot, but everyone's
doing something slightly different and marshalling it all in one direction, uh, is an incredible
incredible achievement when it happens without that figurehead leadership thing that almost
It reminds me of those, uh, fish that swim close together and they look like a bigger
fish and they scare off sharks and stuff.
Um, that sort of reminds me of hive cause alone, you're just a little minnow, but if you can,
if you could be cohesive enough.
Um, so yeah, I'm also somebody who believes in a counterpoint.
I don't believe like star Wars would be a good movie if it was just like the empire and
And it was just like doom and gloom the entire time and left you very uncomfortable at the
I don't think, I don't know.
That just doesn't seem realistic to me.
I think at least there's going to be a heartbeat, a counterpoint.
And I've grown more and more every day to think hive's going to be that counterpoint.
Um, main reason is we don't have to worry about, oh, well, what if so-and-so dumps
or what if, um, what if, what the VC leaves that the company goes belly up or what the
SEC targets this, this company that's crucial for our survival or what if the centralized
Um, what if we can't scale the notes, like all of these things we had to do because of
I'm waiting to see next week, uh, which ones of the main lightning projects that are all
VC backed, I'm waiting to see which ones of them have got an up, up chain, you know,
dependency and an unrealized dependency on something that FTX had put money into.
Now, I, I, I had a brief look at the little, there's a, there's a graphic going around of
all of the things that Almeda research was directly invested in.
And it's like, it's every, it's every icon you can imagine.
There's always a, they are literally in everything.
And Binance, that's the one that hurts you, Binance is in everything.
I, I didn't see them in too many lightning things, but I didn't look closely enough yet,
but I'll start to hear next week.
You know, this one, you know, the $70 million they raised today, you know, it never goes into
the bank account kind of.
And if it went into the bank account, even with these Bitcoin maxis, is it really all
Did they put some of it in a stable coin somewhere?
You know, you just don't know what the treasuries are, how are they?
Because all of these VC things, they're wrapped and cloaked in mystery and secrecy.
None of them are ever open.
And you never see what they're doing.
You and I know the cost of really building code.
Like, if somebody handed you $17 million, what the hell kind of code could you build?
Like, it's the disconnect.
It gets away because the public doesn't know what it costs.
And the developers aren't going to say, oh, that's too much, because they're the ones
getting paid, and they're the ones that are building the code that no one understands.
So it's a gross conflict of interest.
But when you really have to build code in a scrappy way, you can get it done without needing
millions and millions of dollars.
I look at these big raises.
And listen, I've been involved in startups in Israel here, not always software and stuff.
And I know what the money goes on.
And it's really quite a sort of a diminishing trickle down to where it actually gets to something
useful that moves the product forward.
Because as soon as you get big enough to have to raise beyond your seed round, then you've
You know, once you start getting into all these other rounds, and you start having your
HR department, and you've got to hire more people, you've got to have your marketing people,
you've got to have someone to produce the next investor deck, and all of this crap that
just doesn't push the ball.
It doesn't move the ball down the field.
And yet, it costs a fortune.
We don't have that when we do stuff scrappy-wise.
Look, we have our problems.
I mean, it does rely, the way we're doing it now, to a certain extent, on certain amounts
But to be honest, with this stuff, I don't actually trust people who aren't at least
It's like, if they're doing it just for the money, I'm very nervous.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole morale, where it can come and go, because you're absolutely
One of the biggest reasons we're here, you've got to ask yourself, we were Steam, eight
cents, bottom of one of the worst bear markets.
Everyone's saying the same things they're doing now.
Oh, crypto's a scam, crypto's over.
You have some rich billionaire coming out saying, hey, I'm going to pump your bags, I'm going
to make everything okay, I'm going to pick you out of the gutter.
And for some reason, everyone said, no, you know, F off.
And it was because most of the people who are still here were like, look, man, we went
This isn't what this is about.
This is about censorship resistance.
That's where the real value is.
It does take, and, you know, Bitcoin thrives off that as well.
The whole, the same, you know.
I mean, we took a big hit.
Hive prices goes, drop, you know, we were at 50.
We were happily at 50 for ages, and we're down at 30, 35 again.
And, okay, it's like buying opportunity as far as I'm concerned, but not everybody looks
I'm just, once one's convinced that fundamentally there's a utility there that matters, that
you're doing something that can't be done any other way, and that all the other ways you
I mean, like this week, massive, massive Mastodon growth.
And I'm on a couple of Mastodon instances that other people run.
And one of the people I know who's like semi-technical, he's a big, big journalist in the podcasting
world, and he decided to set up his own Mastodon server for himself.
You know, he's successful at it, but he's written a whole post about how expensive it
is, because it's shitty software as far as I can see.
And, you know, every time it just, it pulls in images from all over the web and stores
them on your server, and you've got to constantly prune it and upgrade it and keep it running.
Look, running servers is a nightmare.
I'm running, I've got three boxes for my system now.
And I just seem to spend all day updating them, checking them for security vulnerabilities,
Yeah, that's not the way.
You can't rely on people.
This is not what people are going to be doing.
Well, what will happen is eventually somebody will run one node that's really big, and people
are going to like it, and they're going to be like, well, I need to fund it.
Give me a little bit of KYC, or so we do ads, or something like that.
And then, of course, it becomes a big honeypot, and so you have to have incentives.
That's one people, that's the big honey trap right here, because a lot of people are going
to think Jack's idea or this sort of tokenless social media or immutable platform is going
And it's like, well, what happens if you take the incentives away from Bitcoin?
It doesn't become so immutable anymore.
The banks, yes, some people will be miners, and it'll be the banks, and they'll run the
system, and they'll ask for KYC, and they'll take it over.
Because who else is going to take the risk?
But right now, it's still worth the risk, because you're getting paid.
Well, that's the point that I keep making to maxis, and they've got no answer to me,
which is Bitcoin has only got incentives for one class of people, and that's miners.
Nobody else gets remunerated by core products.
So all of this Layer 2 stuff, all of Lightning, all of that has to be paid for by other means,
because there's nothing in the protocol that will give you anything back.
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's built to be centralized.
Just like right now, you know, 3Speak is, by industry standards, the most decentralized
It's open source, the IPFS version.
You can download a desktop app.
You can upload without permission.
You can download other people's videos, et cetera.
You can do all of these things.
Well, we pretty much seed everything.
Because people aren't even going to host their own videos for free, unless they really die
We have a small portion that do, but the most part, they're going to rely on the entity
that's, if they can lay down and get cushioned somewhere, the masses, they're going to.
And there's always going to be a cushion out there if there's no incentives, because somebody's
going to be smart and think of some clever way to monetize you.
And they'll say, hey, come use our infrastructure.
It's a problem with Lightning Network.
It's a problem with Ethereum because of the high fee-based layer.
You can't have an incentive system when the fees are higher than the incentives being paid
Therefore, you're relying on centralized infrastructure because you're relying on people to do it
for free and or, and they're not going to do it for free.
They're going to do it out of their own business model.
That's why most quote unquote layer twos like Polygon, really layer ones with layer
They operate a lot like business.
They'll have like a CEO or figurehead.
They'll have their pre-mind.
They'll have a company backing it.
It's like, why would you, it's like, how is that?
How is that what you want?
Because people are going to interact with layer one.
They're going to interact with the layer two.
So if all the layer twos are centralized, it's the same thing with Lightning.
In the future, no one's going to interact with the Bitcoin layer one.
They're only going to interact with Lightning.
And if it's all centralized and you, you inevitably have a centralized system.
Um, so that's the, once the largest players have opened their gigantic channels between
each other, they'll just shuffle stuff around and it won't touch layer one.
They won't touch the, you know, Bitcoin layer.
It will just be shuffling around, you know, and I know that I can open up two different nodes
on, and connect them to different parts of the network.
And it's, it's a total shell game as to where stuff is.
Um, yeah, I mean, they've, they've, they've come up with a sort of an elegant looking solution
that you put stuff in at one place and it comes out another, but it doesn't really, it's,
it's not that verifiable.
It doesn't have, it doesn't have this element where the masses can all be verified without
giving away their own identities, real identity, real world identities.
You know, this business that we can be, we can choose whether we link our hive account
to a real identity or to a pseudonymous one, but yet you building reputation on that pseudonymous
account man, it's hugely powerful.
And it just, I don't see it replicated elsewhere.
I mean, one of the edges that we do have is in a lot of, um, places you said, us, um, you
have basically a credit score and then you can call the government or whatever, a community,
It's just, it's a group of, it's an, it's an entity that you opted in to be your go-to
And it's very important because a lot of businesses there, you know, um, or to get loans or whatever
your credit score is obviously important.
And going into this weird, why, um, this twilight world we're going into, we're going to see it
become way more important, but in other places they don't have that yet.
They don't have the infrastructure.
They don't have any of this built yet.
So Hive can, and if you look at what Hive's doing, because it's one of the few blockchains
with the, the fee-less method.
So the only way to truly bank the unbanked is to have no fees.
Um, even $1 per transfer is way too much.
So you're seeing that the governance coin is getting into the darkest, the craziest, the
hardest to reach places that you just couldn't get to with fiat.
And it's going peer to peer because, you know, some people get it here, you know, some people
get some in Ghana, they, they, they power up some of their rewards.
And before you know it, they're upvoting members of their community.
And little by little, you're seeing this network effect take root and grow in places where
If you didn't have this mechanism because of the fee-less mechanism, they don't, there's
no entry to barrier or there's no, um, barrier to entry.
So as these reputations become more and more important on Hive in these countries, in these
places, they're not going to need to build out.
These governments are more risk on.
They're like, ah, yeah, you know, we should probably do what the big people say, but if
we can do something that's better for us, we're going to do it in a heartbeat.
You know, there's a lot of countries that are scrappy like that and, and willing to
take risk on, on new innovation.
So if they can piggyback off of something like this, where they don't have to build the
infrastructure, they don't have to sell their soul.
They don't have to do anything in terms of, you know, just really plug in Hive.
A lot of their citizens are going to be on it.
They're going to love it.
That's a, that's a virtuous loop.
And we can really bypass this whole need for a centralized, um, identity system where it's
like, oh, cause people, it's weird.
You grow up in something and it's like, you grow up in a zoo and you think that's all
It's like, oh, well, of course I have to have some centralized identity.
That's very important to me.
And because that's what everyone does.
It's like, well, no, we're, we're, we're, we're going into a crazy world and we're building
other communities that are going to have their own reputations.
And those reputations inside those communities are going to be very, very important to the
people inside those communities.
And they're going to become increasingly more important than their government issued ideas and
government issued, um, reputation.
Um, the social credit scores on these centralized systems, because they're not going to be able
to offer what these decentralized systems do.
I mean, go ask somebody in Venezuela or Ghana, if their government has been able to do more
for them than, and they'll, they'll probably smile and say, no, I'll take high.
So where do you think their reputation matters more?
They, a lot of them are going to say, I'll, I'll take the risk on high, even if I'm reprimanded.
I don't care because this is treating me better.
I only see corruption, um, on the other side.
So we have a, we have a, it's an interest.
It's like, I always feel eerie because it's like you're playing soccer and the goal's open
and, um, football where on your side, but I just think we have an open goal here and we
We have to take it, um, because, well, I, I, I mean, I can see the use of, of my little
V4V thing and it's definitely stronger in South America.
Um, and that gives me, that's just so interesting because especially America, but even the rest
of the Anglosphere and even here in Israel, everybody, they just completely discount areas
of the world, like, like the whole of South America, actually Israel's got quite a lot
of close connections to Argentina and, uh, to bits of Brazil and stuff, but we, we, you
know, America just doesn't even think about how many people there are down there.
Now, India is a strange place because they're just desperately banning crypto all the time,
but this stuff will bubble up because it's freedom.
It's the modern, it's, it's digital freedom and it's the only thing offering digital freedom.
And it's not just, that's the, the other thing is that the, the, the sort of Bitcoin maxi
approach where you just fix the money and everything else is fixed.
There has to be the censorship resistance of the, of the information and the other stuff,
because you'll never ever explain Bitcoin to people without censorship resistance on
the information level, because now with this whole FTX collapse, you're going to get another
enormous torrential tsunami of hate directed at, uh, the whole idea of digital currencies.
Uh, and of course, Bitcoin will, Bitcoin's the biggest, so it will be tarred the worst, despite
what the Bitcoin maxis will scream about.
Um, one of the things with Hive you have basically is peer to peer freedom.
Um, you're, you're sitting here and you're saying, look, I have no KYC.
The government really doesn't know if I have an account here.
There's all kinds of technology because the government's always behind in that aspect.
They still haven't stopped torrents.
Torrents are incentivized, but people are incentivized because they like what they're downloading.
So that's why it hasn't been ever been stopped.
It never will be stopped.
Um, now if you, you crypto just takes that and put us on steroids because now it's like,
well, I could build communities.
We can print our own value.
As long as you add parameters, that's the key thing here.
And what I really want to see happen is have communities where you can join, no KYC, any
And then you can have parameters that protect the community from themselves.
Because a lot of people just run head first and say, I'll mint all the tokens and I'll
send them where it doesn't have to be that way.
You can do it where you add parameters, guardrails, and then they really, really have censorship
resistance on the community level on the layer two, which is just as important.
And it doesn't matter how censorship resistant your layer one is.
If your layer two has become centralized, then what's the point?
Because everyone's going to be using layer two.
The point is to be able to create communities, mint value, be able to have value around a
loop or around a niche, be able to spread awareness about your community's needs.
There's so many things that you can't do.
That's what you can't do.
On the Mastodons that I'm on, I'm on two Mastodons.
One is for the No Agenda show, the podcast, and the other is for the Podcast Index, the
work that we do on Podcasting 2.0.
And with this sort of everybody getting upset with Twitter, or at least the sort of left
getting upset with Twitter, they're all going, heading off and jumping on Mastodon servers.
But they're treating it like the general purpose mess that Twitter is.
Whereas the model that works with Mastodon is more of a community level model, a community
level sort of server event.
So this server is for Podcasting 2.0 discussion of technical stuff.
And when people arrive on it and start doing politics, it's like, no, we don't want that.
That's not what this is for.
That's not this is forum.
And, you know, I know we've got these tools on Hive.
Can I get everybody onto them?
But I can see the day where it's, I can see where we're heading.
And, you know, as you always say, you've got to look where the puck is going.
I think we've put the goal out there.
And it's just that the puck is going to take a little bit longer to get there.
But that's where it's heading.
It's heading to this community level stuff.
And I never, I never want there to be an entity like Twitter or Facebook.
Again, I want to see both of those destroyed by this.
I want this idea of one central thing that is social media for the whole world.
For the first time ever, we have an open jaw shot.
I don't think human brains are built for it.
I think it's bad for all of us being on something like a Twitter where you're, you know, we haven't evolved past the little community of a few hundred people.
And even that was a relatively modern invention in the last 10,000 years.
You know, before that, it was these little hunter-gatherer tribes.
I think, you know, we've socially out-evolved our brains.
Now, we've basically gotten away from the root niche community into like just a giant everything fest.
And now you've seen just like just nothing but loud noise and squawking.
It's but it's a point I want to touch on.
I was wondering what was going to happen when a lot of people exit the centralized platforms and they start losing places to go.
Because obviously the lefties aren't going to go to Parler or whatever.
Because basically every alternative site has been mostly known as right-wing because they were saying they were experiencing the censorship.
And now the lefties are saying that they are experiencing the censorship.
So it's like what happens?
So it's like, well, we're going to increasingly run – if you look at this social media landscape as actual land and just picture it dwindling.
We're running out of surface area because it's like, okay, I'm not going to use Twitter.
That's a large chunk of land you just eradicated.
It's like, where else are you going to go?
It's like now you're having to go somewhere in Mastodon, but you don't want to spin up your own server.
So you're going to like this lightning thing and you're like trying to squawk about your politics.
And you're like, no, go spin up your own server.
And people are like – they're like just jumping onto any land they can get so they can squawk.
And I can see this happening more and more as this tightens because they're going to either fall by the wayside or the politicalness of the owner is going to get too tribal.
And before you know it, people are just going to run out of area.
And that's why I've always said the hive was very valuable real estate because you're already seeing it.
They're jumping on Mastodon.
They're trying to still get their voices heard and they're running out of a room.
And they're like, well, how do you do this?
And it's like, oh, well, I'll run the server.
And it's like, well, why do you run the server?
You have this political view.
So I'm going to run a server.
Before you know it, you have fractioned versions of unaccentivized political tribal servers.
And it's like, yeah, it's better than nothing, but it is a much better method out there.
You can have a Leo Finance, for example, a community, a Layer 2 that can interact with other communities on hive.
And you don't have to isolate yourself and a lot of the infrastructures run for you.
All you have to do is, you know, power up a bit of the governance token, have some bandwidth.
So, yeah, it's interesting to see what starts to happen as all these people exit and like, where are they going to go?
They're going to create a left version of Twitter.
It's like, well, that's just, that's like a whack-a-mole with limited moles.
It's like, eventually you just get whacked and it's done.
It's like, are you just going to keep recreating Twitter or Facebook or whatever?
Well, that's what the writer's been doing for three years, you know, with your getter, parlor, gab.
I've been on all of them.
Telegrams and sort of different thing.
I'm quite, like I say, I don't want there ever to be this global centralized.
I mean, TikTok's scary as heck.
I mean, I had it on my phone for about an hour.
And then I thought, oh God.
And I regret even having had it on the phone.
You know, I really should have a burner phone for trying stuff like that.
The thing is, you've got to say, once you understand the true inner concepts of freedom,
when you've read Solzhenitsyn and you've studied despotic regimes of the past properly,
and then you look around today, and you understand, I, as I've grown older, I've started to understand, you know,
I understand how nations fall into those despotic conditions, because honestly, most people just want that.
But they really do want to be slaves.
And that's not too harsh a word.
They really want everything handed to them.
And they don't want, they want the illusion of freedom, but they do not want real freedom.
And it's terrifying, it's terrifying when you look at it and you understand what it is to want real freedom.
Yeah, I mean, any elite or powerful entity ever existed knows that the real power is in controlling the masses.
They're the ultimate, quote unquote, weapon.
If you can't pull the guys and have an illusion, then, you know, you can crumble overnight.
And we've seen that happen over and over again.
But the problem with, I guess you could say, you know, the mass majority of the population,
is I see a trend of us de-evolving.
I don't, if I've studied these last bull markets, going from the first one, right, it made sense.
You had Litecoin, people were like, oh, you know, it's a faster version of Bitcoin.
Like, these things kind of made sense logically.
You go to 2017, got a little crazy, people are tokenizing everything.
I was like, okay, a little bit dumber, I would say.
But, you know, you can see that we're at least trying.
And then you go to like the 2021 or 2020, the NFT meme.
And it was like, everything was just disconnected from reality.
Like, nothing made sense.
No one cared or understood what any of this was or meant.
And it's like, we have grown.
We've given this tool, and we've used it in the incorrect way.
Well, except, you know, I'll tell you what.
I did sort of listen, half listening to this long conversation this morning.
Kim.com was trying to say, I don't want to talk about NFTs at all.
It's just a complete load of rubbish.
And the NFT fans who were on the call were saying, they made one point that actually stuck with me a little bit, which was that, and again, and this actually also applies back to the ICO boom of 2017 that ended in the, what I would say is the Facebook Google crash when they banned advertising.
But they did both the ICO boom and the NFT craze did one thing, which is that they forced the early participants to self-custody.
And, okay, MetaMask might be a complete catastrophe of a UI, but if you can figure out, and this was the point, if you had to invest in an original proper ERC-20 ICO, you had to figure out how to get some ETH because you needed the gas fees.
Then you need to transfer the ETH to the ICO people you were buying your token from, and you had to do that from your own instance of MetaMask, which means you had to be self-custody, even if you bought your ETH on a centralized exchange, because you had to send it from your own wallet to get the ICO tokens or to get the NFT that you were buying into a wallet that you control.
Because you couldn't do all of that from a centralized exchange.
And that, at least, the trouble was that the UIs are so bad on MetaMask and these other Ethereum products that it didn't make you understand what it is you had just achieved in the vast majority of cases.
I mean, I had a cousin of mine from England telling me about how he bought some, he's a big football fan, and he bought some football NFTs, and he was describing to me the process of buying a little bit of ETH, spinning up a MetaMask wallet, and I was like listening to this thinking, oh my God, I can't believe you did this, and you didn't even call me.
So, you know, well done, well done, well done, you managed it, but you don't, you still, and I don't care whether it's worthless or not, it doesn't matter.
It's a status symbol that he likes having.
It's the same as a Rolex, it's the same as any of those other things, but it did at least teach or show what self-custody means.
But the trouble was, I don't think many people understood the message.
Yeah, that's a good point.
If you look at at least the progression, because there was progression, you look at the original ICO boom, it really taught self-custody.
I remember EtherDelta and just dealing with any kind of ICO back in the day.
You had to set up your MetaMask and all of that.
And then it also made crowdsourcing where people can participate without needing to be an accredited investor.
Why is the government able to say only people who are already rich should get rich on early stage investing in the most lucrative investments?
Okay, of course, many of them turn to shit, but that's the same as, you know, I can drop a pin anywhere in Tel Aviv and find you a startup that will be gone in a year and a half's time.
Yeah, startups are much, much riskier, in my opinion.
I'd have, I'd feel much, especially in today's environment.
But yeah, I mean, it's a monopoly, so they can do what they want because they control the startups and any kind of regulated security, whereas they don't control crypto yet.
So whenever you have a monopoly, you can make silly rules and people are like, well, where else are you going to go?
If they know you can't leave, then they'll just take, they'll do whatever they want.
You'll have silly laws like, well, you have to be rich in order to get rich.
And that's why we have such a disconnect in the United States.
Why are you trying to invest in startups?
So they couldn't control that, but people took it.
And of course, we were given a tool.
It's like, we were given the ultimate tool.
And it's evolving the use case and how we understand and how to use it.
And of course, most people used it in the wrong way for self-interest.
And it's like, well, no, this is one of the scenarios where if you give, you get back more.
Because if you're a part of a strong censorship-resistant community, it's sustainable.
But of course, everyone's looking at what's on their plate today and how much they can get on their plate today.
And they don't really care about tomorrow.
And we saw that in the ICO boom.
And then you can say we leap forward.
And NFTs are absolutely amazing in terms of giving communities identity, bringing people together, status symbols, which that's all life is.
I mean, life is about showing how cool you are to people.
People want to be recognized.
A lot of people say they don't.
But you have to be sort of a sociopath to not enjoy being praised for doing something good.
So it's okay to be humble to yourself and say, oh, thanks.
That does make me feel good.
And of course, a lot of people don't want to wear the Rolex or show like, oh, I donate to charity.
They're not going to do that.
But if they had a little badge of honor that they just got stamped and everyone got stamped that did it,
then it's kind of like they're showing off, but without having to show off.
And that's sort of what NFTs and communities can bring.
So I see the evolution of there.
And of course, that devolved into just the same thing, like just crazy.
And the monkey pictures are cool because you got the community and all that.
But it's like, you know, the raising of the millions and the greed really got out of hand.
And of course, it always does.
But we're slowly evolving in that way.
But I think that we're becoming more of the minority in terms of actually understanding how this stuff works.
A lot of people have their bets on Ethereum.
Ethereum is what, 75% censored right now.
That doesn't mean that there's a misconception.
People think, oh, well, technically, yeah, they can control the chain, especially if they have over 60%.
They can do whatever they want.
I don't think they're going to go forking bad people out.
I think that they're going to say, hey, have your little, quote unquote, what they're going to call eventually illegal blocks.
Sure, I could wait five minutes and spend a fortune and get my thing through without, you know, into one of these validators who aren't being compliant.
But the UX there, the user experience there is going to decline so rapidly.
And they know the masses are where it's at.
So if they can even just maintain the 75%, it's over.
It's only going to be used by illegal people.
And they're going to be able to say, oh, look, these blocks are all with illegal people.
And look at all the transactions.
We can track them or whatever.
It's like, of course, the only person who's going to pay 10x the fee and wait 10x the time are criminals.
Who else is going to, like, the other people are just going to use it on what they have.
So if you look at Bitcoin, the windling block reward, more and more reliance on Lightning Network, no solution there.
I don't feel good with my kids there.
You know, if I was to cash out today and my kids had this feature, I'd be like, ah, you know, I might not be around, but I know people who will be.
And when that block reward goes, it's going to be interesting where the store value of the world, what hands it goes into.
And then you look at something like Hive, where we can actually build decentralized layer twos.
We don't have one compliant block producer.
That's going to be a thing.
I think in a year, it's going to be like, who's compliant and who's not?
It's going to be like, that's when, whether they say, like, the emperor has no clothes or, like, the wave comes down and see who's naked.
Like, that's where Hive is really going to shine.
Bitcoin is going to be put to the test as well.
You know, are you compliant?
How many of your node operators?
How many of your block producers?
How many people who are validating blocks and putting them into the chain are compliant with regulatory forces and who isn't?
If Ethereum's already captured, what the hell kind of chance does something like a Cardano or any of these people with large foundations have?
It's only a matter of time.
The writing is absolutely on.
Lightning is controlled by, there's the two biggest groups writing software for it.
Lightning Labs and C-Lightning.
There's a one in France called Eclair.
They're all, you know, they're big corporates.
And right now, I think America already has enough laws to make running a node in America illegal.
Because as far as I can tell, running a Lightning node, if you allow routing through your node, which almost everyone does.
I was like trying not to root through my node that I use for V4V.
But it turns out I actually need to root because sometimes I want to move saps from one channel to another.
And the way to do that is to drop the fees on, you know, it's for me to like, it's like if you ever watch sheepdog herding, that's running a Lightning node.
So you kind of, you want to move some sheep from this pen to this one.
And so you open the gate here and then you get the dog and you whistle at it.
And then you kind of whistle some more and you get the dog to run into the pen.
And then if you're really lucky, someone will shove some saps from one side to another.
And then if you've done it right, you move them in the place you want to go.
And if you've done it wrong, then something comes from a different channel and just gobbles up all the liquidity you wanted to move.
But that process of moving saps, of allowing someone else to use your node to transmit their money through you.
This is money transmission by the American law.
And, okay, I've got the total amount on my node is $4,000 or $5,000.
So I can never move more than, you know, $200 or $300 at a time.
And the big nodes, you know, the big nodes have got 100 Bitcoin on them.
And those nodes can be moving big transactions.
And if they're transmitting $20,000, that's double the $10,000 that, you know, at the point at which you have to declare.
And if you're running a routing node, you have no idea.
You just know which channel it comes in on and which channel it goes out on.
And you can't figure out who sent it.
And why would you for such low sets, for such low fees?
Why would you even take the risk?
But, well, except that people do.
And the whole network relies on this.
You know, I'm connected to some of the bigger wallets.
Because I'm generally trying to connect to the things where people want to send money.
So wallet of Satoshi, man, I've got direct connections to them.
But sometimes people make a payment to something else that I'm not directly connected to.
And it goes out through one of those wallets.
And I know that they're businesses in America.
They're transmitting my transaction.
I can see where it came from and where it went to.
But, you know, even for me, it's coming to me from a Hive account.
I don't know who that is.
Yeah, so, I mean, it just, the only people that are going to want to do that are, like, Bitcoin whales.
They're like, okay, well, I'm only running this in an altruistic way.
Because I want to help Bitcoin's price by helping the Lightning Network.
It doesn't make any sense to do it any other way.
Because you're not going to earn enough fees.
Especially if you have a lot of Bitcoin in there.
And then, especially if you start getting heat, you're not going to want to deal with that.
So, that's the problem with no incentives.
And being heavily reliant on, you know, places like the U.S.
The best estimate is that you could maybe make 2% on your capital per year.
And I think that's possible.
But that takes quite a lot of work, I think.
It's definitely not like giving it to BlockFi.
But then again, giving it to BlockFi appeared to be safe until last night or the night before.
The problem with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the coins are only going to miners.
And I know that, or stakers, I know that Bitcoin isn't coin voting.
But still, you know, those who hold the coin are going to really shape the future of the network because they're incentivized to.
So, you know, a lot of these people are, you know, store value.
So, you're really reliant on, you know, high value.
A lot of people are just worried about the price going up.
That's basically, it's only utility.
And then you're looking at censorship-resistant value, of course.
But it wouldn't have that without, it wouldn't have the value if it didn't have that anyway.
And the same thing with Ethereum, DeFi.
So, when the liquidity goes away, it's really hard to spread the coin because, you know, people aren't trying to buy it.
The only people are buying it are the true hardcore, and they're usually doubling down.
And then you have, of course, the miners and the stakers who are getting it the whole time, even through down markets.
Where on Hive, when there's a down market, well, you know, the proof-of-brain process incentivized stakeholder distribution lives on.
And people are getting it in South America.
People are getting it in Africa.
People are getting it everywhere continually because there's an incentive there.
And people are going to keep distributing this coin.
I need to blog some more because I know that if I earn any rewards whilst the price is low, I actually wind up earning a ton more at Hive.
Yeah, with less people blogging, less activity, you're going to get a bigger portion of the inflation for that day.
I have a saying, you need to be able to survive the birth of your network effect.
But the birth of the network effect is painful on the price.
Bitcoin, cheap $10,000 or 10K Bitcoin pizza, giving it away.
People are getting five Bitcoins at a time for free at faucets early in the days.
Like, you know, it was distributed far and wide because it was cool enough to say, hey, look, I'm going to send you some of these digital coins.
It's cool enough to keep, but wasn't seen as valuable enough to, like, hoard.
So people played around with it.
Not great for the price, of course.
And then, of course, with Hive, you have the incentivized distribution where people are getting coins and people are like, oh, well, they could sell those.
It's like, oh, well, they could power them up.
And if they power them up, we have another brick in the wall.
And the bigger this wall gets, the stronger and thicker it gets, the harder we're going to be to take down.
But you have to be able to survive that.
And during bear markets, that's where Hive really starts to thrive.
Because I guarantee you, if you go and look at the network effect, how many new people, where the stake is going, you'll see Hive very high on the list of new people.
And if you look at the diversity of the countries that are getting it, we have to be number one.
I'd be shocked if we were not number one in that category.
So it's important for the strong believers, because that's the backbone of any censorship-resistant network, you call it the layer zero, to really keep morale high, make sure the distribution's on track, curate this thing.
Because you have to curate it when no one else wants to.
There always has to be a group willing to do that.
With any project, with anything, doesn't matter what it is in life, there's got to be somebody willing to say, hey, I'm going to do it when it sucks.
And I believe there's enough people on Hive to keep those lights on, to keep the motion forward.
Because we weren't all about the money here.
We're about a lot more than that.
Communities are really cool.
And Hive offers you a way to do it in a unique way.
And the peer-to-peer freedom is proving itself.
I mean, we're building boreholes in a bear market where other people are talking about crypto's dead.
All these centralized entities going belly up and people are confusing what Web 2.5 is from what 3 is.
So, yeah, it should be some resolve there for the Hivers to see how we're taking this on the chin.
Everyone's taking it on the chin.
We're on a risk-on environment.
We're going to be increasingly more.
People, where do you put your money?
Hey, you know, real estate in the most safest places is at an all-time high.
We don't know how far it's going to go.
Stock markets are crazy, really wonky.
Yeah, the dollar's been on a rampage, but that's been weakening all the other currencies.
And when that thing goes down, you're going to have trouble.
So, that's almost like, okay, are you willing to really put your reserves in any fiat currency right now,
especially in times of turmoil and possible war, world war probabilities, where do you put your money?
You could say gold, but it's not a digital era.
And how are you going to custodiate?
And, you know, if you're talking about being a country, you know, it can easily be taken from you.
We've seen that over and over again.
Like, crypto is really the only thing that makes sense right now.
It's like something that you can actually own and hold in a digital realm is going to be increasingly more valuable, I believe.
So, and when everyone's risk on, what happens?
And you're going to see more people.
I believe that, yeah, all this craziness going on, you know, any savvy investor is like, well, does it have a heartbeat?
It's like, there's a lot of craziness going on there.
If that's not the bottom, if there's anything, if there's, you know, anything among the ruck that's still alive, then there's something there.
I'm going to put a half a percent.
I want to diversify in that.
And we don't have that many entities in crypto.
A lot of people think we do.
But that's going to change, in my opinion, as we go into this more increasingly risk-on environment where it's not really clear where you put your money.
And the idea of what value is is going to be questioned because we're not going to really quite understand.
It's like, what is stability?
All of this is going to be questioned in the future.
What we've been taking for granted with a stable coin, it's going to be, I'm not sure our kids are going to quite understand that concept.
Because what are the fiat currencies that these so-called stable coins are linked to going to look like in 10 years or 15?
What stable coin is the West and the East going to agree on?
And once you have two, then, okay, well, that's when things get very, very volatile.
But when you have a lot of countries going into one way and then it's like, it's quickly turning into that sort of situation when the Swiss system was weaponized.
And we're gripped in this Western world with this ESG thing of literally thinking you can devalue energy, literally thinking that our modern society doesn't need as much energy as it's using now, thinking that you can just will away the reliance on energy and reliable energy.
And it's like, they decided they can print as much money as they want, which they can.
That's the system they've created.
But you can't print energy.
As much as you wish energy to just appear out of thin air, it doesn't.
And none of the ways that you can replace the coal-burning stations and the gas-fired stations,
you might wish that you can replace it with solar stuff, but it's dark sometimes and you want lights in your house.
This total disconnect between reality and the physics of the real world, that's what we're being led by, how we get across, how we get around that.
You know, I think Western nations, it is, it's the decline of the Roman Empire all over again.
Do we survive or don't we?
Yeah, we're pretty much relying on a digital era.
We're creatures of comfort now.
People are very, very comfortable in their lives and slowly having that become more of a luxury, you know, things that they took for granted before.
And it's just willing, you know, what people are willing to put up with.
They really, I don't want to say they, it's, if you just, I'm not, I'm not getting the conspiracy theories.
I'll just say, all right, look, it can last three or four years.
The biggest companies, the billionaires, who got poor?
The middle class got absolutely stomped.
It was probably the most brutal being a middle class has ever taken ever in my lifetime for sure.
So many businesses went out.
So many people I know have just gone belly up in their business and have to return to becoming a worker.
I know a lot of people that work at Walmart now that had businesses going to places where they have to work for the monopolies because they're the only ones willing to give jobs at this point because they were the only ones that were allowed to be open with all those crazy restrictions.
So, so many people are still staggered from that.
And what happens if you don't have a middle class?
Well, you have a two class system and it's very hard to then balance things out when you're so disproportionate and so polarized and people start just begging for what they considered, you know, taken for granted before things like power, energy, things that you can't print.
So, yeah, there's a disconnect.
It's very disconnect in everything, it seems from just awareness to reality and pretty much all aspects of life.
And I've found that out in pretty much every industry.
Like, yeah, crypto, you really see it because you understand like what censorship resistance is versus what people are spouting.
But it's there in the health industry.
I'll go look at somebody has like 10 million subscribers.
I know I know enough about it.
And like this guy is spitting garbage.
It's like, but so many people believe him because nobody, people understand it's like, as long as you're confident and, you know, halfway good looking, maybe you, you can get your point across and people believe you.
And it's crazy because there's so many confident sounding people and people just don't know what to believe anymore.
And it's in every industry and they go, you know, down and they start thinking bigger.
Oh, science and government, all this craziness is like people just, it's such a disconnect from reality.
I don't know where it leads.
I have an essay on way back in my Hive thing, which a friend of mine wrote and I republished on Hive because he originally wrote it on a blog that's faded away because he didn't keep it going.
But it's, it's this disconnect between people who, who think in terms of interactions with people, personal relationships, fashion, how people think.
And the other class of people is, is science, real science and engineering and people connected with physical items in the real world, like farmers and builders, you know, where, where you, you, you know, you just, you can't wish away the physics that affects you.
And it's, you know, and it's not that one or other type of people is good or bad.
It's that the world needs both.
But if you try and solve the problems of one with the ideas of the other, everything goes wrong.
If you try and build a bridge using the ideas of interpersonal relationships and, and who, who, who's more popular, the bridge will fall down.
But, but, but if you try and manage people with, with the sort of strongly engineering focus, that also doesn't work properly.
But what we seem to be doing in the West now today is we're run by these people who are just pure politicians, pure, you know, zero sum game people.
He goes, he goes, he goes, he goes down, I must go up.
That's, that's what we're ruled by.
And that, that's gripped every area of our, of our civic life.
And, and the destruction of science, because science has become ruled by, you know, this, this civil servant class that hands out the money.
So all science is subservient to the way it gets funded.
I mean, that's essentially why I, when I, when I got my PhD in physics and I left physics, I left because I saw me, I saw how the funding system worked.
And I realized it was just, and this is 20 something years ago.
And it, and it was pure physics.
It wasn't even, you know, medicine or any of these other areas that have become so contentious today.
I could see the way the money was being doled out was crap.
And it was going to go badly wrong.
And it has, um, yeah, the devil's in the funding.
Um, they're in all aspects of what I, I'm very, um, heavily believer of incentives, how I'm going to teach my kids.
They're going to learn, um, school.
They get, you know, I, I believe in school, they should be earning toys, right?
You learn something, you get a toy, you get this dinosaur and you can easily buy a lot of cheap toys.
That little, you know, little toddlers are going to love.
And if you, and people are just, they think that this altruistic thing, all human beings are greedy.
We have some nobility about us and we want, um, what's best for smart people understand.
Well, what's good for you is good for me and vice versa.
Like it's all, we're all in the same boat and there's a hole on your end.
I'm not, you know, we're, I'm going down as well.
So I would believe smart people with, um, a good conscience, that's, that's the way they want to live.
And then of course you have other people who are sociopaths and et cetera.
Um, so in all aspects of life, there has to be incentives.
And if there's funding, well, then it's not science.
It's whatever the funders want, because the people are funding it for a reason, not because they want what's best for everyone else.
They're funding because they want to make more money either in control or law, make whatever, whatever it is.
And sure, they could be altruistic, but I'm not somebody like, I look through everything through a poker lens.
It's, it's too low of a probability.
I'm not even going to take that chance.
I'm not going to take that gamble.
And I'm just going to go ahead and wipe it off and say, well, all of them are corrupt.
If there's some kind of centralized funding involved, because why else would they be funding it?
Um, yeah, so you need an assentos and you need a way for the community to agree because there's a tipping point.
And if there's enough people where it's dispersed, they're going to be like, because what's good for one person and bad for a hundred people, that's really good for the one person.
But what's good for 20 and bad for the 80 isn't as, you know, it gets watered down.
And the more you get there, the more watered down and then it gets to a point where there's a tipping point where it's not worth it anymore.
And then it's like, well, I have to negotiate with you because we're, we're at a stalemate and we have to sort of like both compromise to get what's best for everyone.
And that's the situation you want to get in.
I believe that's what we have on high.
But if you have such a small group that can make the changes, of course, it's going to get more and more disproportionate to there's, you know, a very small group.
Because the less people or the more people you can screw over and the less people you have to share with, the more you can make.
So anybody who's looking at this as that sort of game, that's the, that's the goal, right?
Screw over as many people as you can and share it with as few as you can.
So on high, it's the most, it's the opposite.
You know, you want to be able to negotiate with the community.
So everyone knows what's best for you is best for me.
And that's where you have to get, and then you get incredibly sticky at that point because it's very hard to then gain an overwhelming amount of power because you get pulled back down by the community.
Like, whoa, whoa, wait, wait, no, no, it's way too good for you.
It's pretty shitty for us.
So, you know, it's, you just have to stay on top of it.
Well, are we reaching a natural conclusion?
Yeah, it's been, it's been about an hour.
I don't think we have to go the two-hour CTT.
Matt can, we need Matt's structure pushing it.
Matt's structure, we're all over the place.
He's a refugee, he's a world refugee.
I mean, he was over here for a couple of weeks, so he's bouncing around everywhere.
Where he is, but I hope he's staying safe.
And he said, you know, possibly next week we'll have a CTT.
But I thought I'd at least get on and talk a little bit.
But I guess before you go, we could talk about this market.
And I know a lot of people are asking about that, at least asking me that question.
What do I think about the market in terms of just general, where it's going to go?
Is this the end and all these things?
I guess I'll let you go first and then I'll wrap it up.
Oh God, not financial advice.
And can I tell you something?
I'm buying Bitcoin all the time.
And I'm trading backwards and forwards.
I've stopped even looking at the price.
I know, I just need to top up some sats here and there.
I just need to, I've got like a number in mind of what value I want in sats on my node at any given time.
And the number in dollars is going down.
But I don't care at the moment.
I'm not, I mean, I'm fortunate that the DHF is paying me in hive denominated in dollars.
You know, it's paying HBD.
So, and I'm not particularly obsessive over whether I'm trade, whether the trading side is at a profit or a loss.
I think it's making a tiny amount of money.
But the point is, it's a service.
It's like you can, people can buy a little, you know, they can pay their bills in America, actually, with it.
They can do whatever they're doing in Venezuela with it.
And I know money's moving.
So, do I care about the market?
I just, I don't, because I don't think price is the ultimate arbiter.
I think if we have value, if we demonstrate a useful and a necessity, and, you know, 15% of the world's podcasts announce new episodes on Hive, that's a valuable service.
And Hive one day will reflect that value.
I'm not, I've given up, I just, therein lies terror and horror, for me anyway.
I tend, you know, if I'm converting HBD into Hive, I tend to just hit the three and a half day thing.
Because then I know I'm going to dollar cost average over the next three and a half days.
In the end, I'll get some.
Yeah, I mean, I pretty much feel the same way.
When people ask me what I think of the market, I've always said that, you know, I don't, it's very difficult to play the VC game where you try to invest in these random coins that are backed by companies because you never know when they're going to go belly up.
And you don't know the precede, all these things that, you know, they have edges on you at, and it's just a tiresome game.
So, I just take a step back and I say, well, what's going to be standing in 10 years?
And, you know, I look at a Hive and I'm very comfortable that it will be.
You know, a lot of people thought, oh, you know, FTX, of course, it'll be around in 10 years.
A lot of people put these bets on entities where I put a bet on a community.
So, you know, yeah, there's going to be turbulent times.
Do I look at centralized entities going belly up as the death of Hive?
Doesn't, you know, Hive wasn't even listed on that exchange.
And I'm not, and people, my goal is I've never said I was the best trader.
I'm probably, you know, what gets me through, I guess, is my biggest thing in the bear market is I try not to become a distressed seller.
What that means is sell assets that you don't want to sell.
Of course, no matter what, you know, every bear market, I become a distressed seller at some point of some assets that I'd rather not sell.
I think, you know, most people have that situation, some more than others.
But I also know how to play poker and I have a side hustle and people like to laugh at that.
But the goal for me is to keep what I have and find a way to pay bills on another way where I'm not having to become a distressed seller.
And, you know, whatever happens, happens.
I don't know how long I'm going to have to weather it.
But as long as I can keep what I want, right, because it's all relative.
Some people might want a small amount, but it doesn't matter.
What you said, oh, well, this is what I would like to keep.
You know, if you can survive with that, or at least most of it, I think that, you know, you're going to be okay because there's always cycles.
I'm not saying, you know, of course anything can die.
I'm just a big believer that there's going to be a big need for censorship resistance.
And I think very few are going to be able to offer that.
And as you see people climbing on Master Dawn like crazy zombies trying to get on and just squat, I think it's going to be the same feeling for this immutable digital land.
Obviously, none of this is financial advice.
Don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.
But I'll just talk about what I'm going to do.
And what I'm going to do is I'm going to do my best to hold on to what I got, of course, and not become a distressed seller.
I will hopefully be here.
Now, you know, I look at the price of, to me, the fundamentals that matter to me.
And now, you know, I started my own witness on high, which I'm not doing it.
I really am not even looking for votes to be that much.
I just, I needed the witness for technical reasons so that I could send queries to my own witness and not have to, just to see both sides and to understand that.
And it's a $50 a month thing to run a witness.
And if you're not making enough money from it, it's $50 sunk cost.
But $50 is not that much, really.
And I can see that as soon as you get, you know, somewhere towards the top 50, that's paid for.
And even at the lower prices, the infrastructure to run Hive is affordable, especially if you're doing something with it that's external.
So I just, I just, as long as I can see to the fact that the incentives line up, that there will be enough incentives to keep the lights on.
And I know the system is good.
I know it provides this censorship resistant tech service that is just unfindable anywhere else.
There's nothing that, where you can just put text in and get it out for you.
And, I mean, you know, I'm doing the law thing with Andrew in Australia.
We, I can't, I can't really say a great deal, but I can tell you that there are two very prestigious law firms in Australia who have both had, who have both been, had paralegals and junior lawyers pouring over Hive posts.
And we've had big debates in court over whether, because a post appears on Hive.blog and because the same thing appears on peak.peakd.com, whether we have to submit them twice to the court.
And we had to actually go through and explain how Hive works.
But I know that those lawyers are now going through the Hive record.
And they're starting to understand that it's a notarized record, that we can't change it, that it's uncensored.
Not only is it uncensorable, it's uneditable.
And so if we point to something that was written four years ago and five years ago on Hive, they've begun to understand.
They cannot call it into question.
Whereas, you know, this is Google and Facebook.
You can't look at anything on Google and Facebook five years ago and trust it, because it can be edited.
And we'll see how people value a mutable database.
People, I think that's just one thing that we've all taken for granted is the fact that we literally have a mutable database where it's like we have a table of truth that can't be edited.
We haven't had this before as a human species.
What we've done with this so far is pretty funny.
We got a lot of LOLs and a lot of shit posts.
But we've also got a lot of important posts.
There's some very valuable stuff on that.
And it's not going anywhere.
No, you know, I spun up a new copy of it this week.
And it doesn't take very long to make a copy of it.
I mean, one of our quips to them was they wanted to know, you know, they asked us to turn over some documents.
And they asked us to turn over every document.
So we said to them, here it is.
And we gave them a link to the block log.
Or alternatively, you can use either of these front ends.
And that, you know, they didn't like that very much.
Yeah, it's cool seeing these ancient entities interact with something like Hive.
And they're like, whoa, what is this?
Hopefully, we'll put up an update on that soon.
I think this is a good time to call it.
Thanks to our victims who've stayed this long.