Preston Pysh (00:03:46):

Tell us your story. Tell us how did you find Bitcoin, what got you into this.

BTC Sessions (00:03:51):

I had the typical number go up attraction early on. I had a few touchpoints through 2013 noticing it and you see it one day it’s 10 bucks and then a few months later you see it and it’s 100 bucks, and you see it a few months later and it’s 1,000 bucks and every step of the way you’re thinking, “Oh, I missed the boat. I missed the boat. I missed the boat.”

BTC Sessions (00:04:11):

So I had very much that story. Right around that peak, I didn’t immediately, this is 2013’s peak of around 1,200, I didn’t immediately say, “I’m going all in.” I said, “Well, maybe there’s something here. I see they’re a massive ponzi scheme or there’s something more.” So I ended up spending two, three months trying to read and learn about it and everything. Then I got the guts to make my first purchase on a Canadian exchange and get it into a wallet. I bought the same week that Mt. Gox collapsed. So it was like gandemonium, and I was lucky enough that I took those few months of reading to understand what the hell is going on because, otherwise, I would have just panicked and left, but I had a good enough understanding at that point to realize, “Well, hey, this is just a poorly run company that didn’t know how to secure people’s money and nothing is changed with the protocol itself.”

BTC Sessions (00:05:08):

So I kept going, I kept learning, and I had friends making fun of me at the time. I spent a good two just on my own trying to absorb whatever I could. I noticed that it was difficult to learn basic concepts. I learned visually. So I was looking for videos of people saying, “Okay. Do this, do this, plug this in, type this.” There was very little, if any. Most of it was people were nice enough to write blog posts or put stuff on message boards with instructions, but it was effectively trial and error for a long time.

BTC Sessions (00:05:46):

At about the two-year mark, I was like, “Well, I have done some basic video editing for vacations and stuff that I’ve gone on. Previously, I used to perform. So I sang in an a cappella group and I used to teach little kids how to break dance for a decade. So that was my-

Preston Pysh (00:06:05):

I want to learn how to do a windmill.

BTC Sessions (00:06:07):

I’ll teach you a back flip. How about it? Yeah. So that was my background I had. I guess there was the element of education there, right? I spent 10 years teaching breaking down complex dance moves for school aged children, which is very, very similar to breaking down complex technology for adults. As long as you understand what you’re doing, you can then, if you have the ability to explain anything, then you can explain anything that you understand.

BTC Sessions (00:06:35):

So I figured, “Hey, I’m going to start a channel. I’ll make one video per week about whatever I feel like covering. I literally have not stopped for five years. I’ve upped the number of videos I’m doing. So here I am. The show has been around, yes, since June of 2016. There’s been about five million views across my various tutorials and stuff. So I’m just happy to be here and I’m very happy to say that this is now what I do full-time. I just do the channel and it’s great.

Preston Pysh (00:07:09):

It’s incredible. The thing that I’ll tell you is it’s not amateur hour. You’re there. It is so professional. It’s so easy to follow. Talk to us about running a full node because this is the thing that I’ve really grown to appreciate in a major way. My personal story, just to tell you, I remember in 2017 when we were going through this big debate on the SegWit update. The thing I remember I was following Trace Mayer at the time really closely. Trace just kept beating this drum, “You need to run a full node. That’s your vote. Your vote is the full node.”

Preston Pysh (00:07:47):

It just didn’t really make sense to me at the moment because you’re looking at the whole mining side of things. Then this guy is over here talking about a full node and I’m thinking, “Well, how is that different than a mining rig?” It just didn’t make sense to me at the time. So explain some of those differences for people that are maybe new to this space and then talk about the first time you stood up a full node and just what it meant to you.

BTC Sessions (00:08:13):

I’ll preface this by saying if you own Bitcoin in a wallet, even if it’s not with a custodian, if it’s sitting in your own Bitcoin wallet to your own hardware wallet, whatever the case may be. If you’re also not currently running a node, you’re trusting somebody else to run one for you. So you’re referencing somebody else’s node. So people have the question, “Well, what’s the benefit of a node? Why might I do that?”

BTC Sessions (00:08:41):

So a node basically hosts a copy of every Bitcoin transaction that has ever existed since the dawn of Bitcoin back in 2009 and a copy of the rules that effectively govern the protocol. So when you reference somebody else’s copy of the node, you’re trusting that the information they’re feeding you is accurate rather than running and hosting that information yourself, and you’re also trading off some privacy there.

BTC Sessions (00:09:09):

So when you call somebody else’s node, they can effectively see your transactions in some cases, depending on the wallet, your IP address, therefore your location, all of the addresses associated with said wallet, what software you’re running. All of those things get given up as you reference other people’s nodes. Hopefully, it’s not a malicious one, right? Hopefully, it’s not Chainalysis trying to track everything and keeping a record of it because that’s a honeypot as well. So you regain that privacy by owning, and running, and referencing your own node.

BTC Sessions (00:09:43):

There’s a couple of other things to consider, too. You just referenced 2017, and those that have come in since that time may not be privy to SegWit2x and what was effectively an attempt to whether altruistically or maliciously, it’s relevant, overtake the protocol, right? It was 80% of the miners. It was the top 50 companies in the space, which was effectively everybody. All came together and said, “Hey, we’re going to change the protocol in a non-backwards compatible way. We’re going to say that this Bitcoin. If you don’t upgrade, you’re not using Bitcoin. We’re going to actually boot out the team of developers that has been voluntarily maintaining this protocol for years now, and we’re going to install our own set of depths,” which actually was just one dude. They said, “Well, this is what it’s going to be.”

BTC Sessions (00:10:42):

The reason that that failed so spectacularly apart from some financial futures markets that were tracking what the value of said coin would be was also the fact that people were running nodes and in running a node, when you have what I consider an attack like that where somebody wants to change the protocol, your node effectively ignores that. It ignores that change.

BTC Sessions (00:11:08):

You get to say, “This is what I see Bitcoin as. This is the software I’m running, and if you try to change that protocol on me, my wallets are all referencing my own node, and it will ignore anything that you try to do.”

BTC Sessions (00:11:23):

So Trace Mayer, the metaphor of that’s your vote was true, but it’s better than a vote because in a vote, if you’re in the minority, you can still lose. With my node, it doesn’t matter if 80% of the network wants to change. It’s like voting for my favorite political party and them losing and I still get to follow their policies moving forward.

Preston Pysh (00:11:50):

That’s a great way to frame it.

BTC Sessions (00:11:53):

That’s what 2017 established was, “Hey, running a node is important because it prevents attacks of all kind whether it be state or whether it be corporate or whatever the case may be. You get to decide what Bitcoin is and it is consensus. It’s a consensus mechanism amongst everybody.”

BTC Sessions (00:12:12):

My first foray into running a node was in 2017. It was much more difficult back then. I wasn’t fully understanding what I was doing. I wasn’t understanding that I needed to connect wallets, and that was hard to do. It has become incredibly easy in these past couple of years. It is insane and the innovation.

Preston Pysh (00:12:33):

Which is still difficult for some of us.

BTC Sessions (00:12:38):

I’m sure we’ll get into Lightning later, too, but the difference is night and day from the first time I tried Lighting to today, and the same thing can be said of running a node. Now, I currently run a node called Umbrel. You can buy some cheap parts on Amazon. I think I put together for 200 bucks. Then you put some software on an SD card and you plug it in. You’re running a copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. Every transaction that’s ever occurred it’s on a little device that takes next to no power. It takes a little bit of bandwidth initially when you’re downloading the blockchain, but then after that, walk size is minimal and you’re going to reupload to peers in the network, but it’s really not that much bandwidth and cost to run. Then you can link all your wallets to it. So you’re eliminating trust.

BTC Sessions (00:13:29):

For those that just buy Bitcoin and they just hold it, I think it’s such a great learning opportunity to actually truly understand what you own because you get to see, “Oh, I can run this thing. I can put it on a little computer for a couple of hundred bucks and connect my wallets to it,” and not only am I self-sovereign and holding the keys to my money, which if I store them properly my wealth can’t be confiscated, but people can’t even screw with the protocol that I’m using. It’s truly liberating.

Preston Pysh (00:14:03):

I got to tell you the story. So today in Twitter, most of the people that are listening to this are listening to this from the future. So Twitter just recently rolled out this tipping portion on their website where you can click the button and then you can provide a tip over Bitcoin to whoever has it enabled on their site.

Preston Pysh (00:14:22):

Well, the way that Twitter is rolling this out is it’s only been enabled on a few people’s computers, anybody who’s stateside that can use the Strike application on the receive side. So the little icon is not showing up on just tons of people’s accounts on Twitter. Most people. I would say 90% plus don’t even have this.

Preston Pysh (00:14:41):

Well, I made a comment about how powerful this is, how it’s instant settlement and finality and all that kind of stuff that we talk about. I got a bunch of people in the comments that said, “Well, not here in London,” or “Not here in New York where Strike is not enabled,” and all these comments from all over the planet.

Preston Pysh (00:15:03):

So I made the comment, I said, “Well, how about this? Download your Muun wallet or download BlueWallet on your smartphone and post the invoice, take a screenshot of the invoice and post it here on Twitter. I’m going to show you that it works on Twitter.”

Preston Pysh (00:15:17):

So these people who are posting and I don’t know how many I paid today, probably 30 or whatever, there’s these people posting these $1 invoices with their wallet on their smartphone. Here’s the beauty. I was just scanning it with my smartphone or my desktop computer and I was pushing send, which was linked to my full node where I’d open however many channels based on all the videos that you taught me. The feeling to know … Then people when they were receiving it instantly, the $1 that I sent to wherever, it could be have been five cent, it could have been one penny, it could have been one penny, and then they’re posting the receipt and they’re like, “Oh, my God! You just paid me a dollar. I’m in London. How did that happen?”

Preston Pysh (00:16:02):

In my mind I’m thinking, “This is coming off of the node.” I need nobody’s permission, absolutely nobody, no bank, no Bank of America. I have no idea what the bank is in Europe or wherever it even went. I mean, the person could be in China. The person could be wherever and they posted an invoice on Twitter in the comment section and I was able to pay. It’s crazy, crazy what you’re talking about when you say self-sovereign.

BTC Sessions (00:16:30):

It’s unbelievable. Like you’re saying, as we’re still on that node idea, when you’re running a full node, you can then also run all these great applications alongside your full node like you just referenced, a Lightning node, which allows for instant settlement for basically no fees or very negligible fees. You can send micro transactions.

BTC Sessions (00:16:55):

The beautiful part about that, again, you’re running the protocol yourself. You’re holding your self-sovereign wealth, which is unconfiscatable, and you’re sending it in a millisecond across the world with liquidity lines that you yourself established with peers, and it’s doing six-degrees of Kevin Bacon and landing in London in an instant. It’s insane.

Preston Pysh (00:17:20):

It’s insane. So it’s like, “Hey, Jack Dorsey has not rolled out the interface, but it’s already plumbed. It’s all there. You don’t need him to roll it out. You can do this right now with just screen capturing, whatever, a QR code and posting it on Twitter.” It’s crazy.

BTC Sessions (00:17:39):

Beautiful.

Preston Pysh (00:17:40):

It is. So talk to us about layer two. So what we’re talking about is layer two Bitcoin. So people that are hearing this are thinking, “Okay. Well, how’s it happening instantly?” I’ve heard it’s 10 minutes, right? So talk to us just about the basics of layer two Lightning. We call it Lightning Bitcoin. What’s going on here?

BTC Sessions (00:17:59):

I guess let’s talk about what a Lightning channel is and then we’ll extrapolate out to how that then has liquidity around the planet. Effectively, if I were to create a Lightning channel between myself and you, what I’m doing is I’m locking up capital. I’m locking up Bitcoin between myself and you, real Bitcoin, stuck between the two of the us in effectively what’s a multisig. So two keys to unlock that money, but it’s locked up and every time I send you a payment, what I’m actually sending is a pre-approved transaction that could be executed at anytime and settled to the Bitcoin blockchain.

BTC Sessions (00:18:40):

So you receive effectively let’s say, just for easy number, let’s say, this would be a massive channel, but we have a 10 Bitcoin channel between us. I send you a payment for one Bitcoin. What I’m doing is when we establish the channel if I’m the one who opened it, I have 10 Bitcoin on my side and there’s zero on your side. If we close the channel at any point, which either of us can ought to do, that results in me getting my 10 Bitcoin back and you getting nothing back.

BTC Sessions (00:19:07):

Then when I pay you a Bitcoin, I’m sending you the pre-approved signed transaction saying, “Hey, if you want to at any point, you can now close this channel and have one of the 10 Bitcoins sitting here and I’ll be left with nine,” and either of us can do that at any point.

BTC Sessions (00:19:26):

So we’re able to transact back and forth with these pre-approved signatures and transactions, these settlement transactions without ever interacting with the Bitcoin blockchain beyond the initial setup of that channel.

BTC Sessions (00:19:41):

So it removes the need to constantly refer to the main chain and put data on it, and log it down with all of that information if we’re going to be transacting with each other regularly.

BTC Sessions (00:19:52):

You can extrapolate that out. So let’s say you have a channel with somebody else, with Jack Dorsey. You have a channel with Jack Dorsey. If I’ve got a 10 Bitcoin channel with you and you’ve got a 10 Bitcoin channel with him, if I wanted to send one Bitcoin to Jack Dorsey, we can effectively, again, in this case, not six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but the same idea. I can plunk a Bitcoin over to your side of the channel and you do the same to Jack so that you end up with the same amount of Bitcoin. You still got 10 Bitcoin sitting there, but you’ve also pushed one out of the other side of the other channel so he gets one. So I’m using you as a relay to reach Jack, and we’re using these liquidity lines to bump Bitcoin down the line.

BTC Sessions (00:20:36):

In my video where I show how to set up a Lightning node, there’s a cool graphic. It looks like beads on an abacus. You see it slide along and bump in to the next node, and then the next Bitcoin slides along and bumps down to the next art in the line. So it shows how you can have these lines of liquidity and find pathways to peers.

BTC Sessions (00:20:59):

Now, if you imagine that every person has multiple channels open to multiple other people and you’ve got thousands and thousands of Lightning nodes with I think it’s up to, I can’t recall how many Bitcoin are now locked in the Lightning now, but it’s a lot.

BTC Sessions (00:21:15):

So you’ve now instead of having these difficult to find pathways to people, it’s just this giant pool of liquidity that can be split up and can flow wherever it needs to flow. It’s pretty amazing because you don’t need to close channels. As long as they’re functioning and capital is flowing to and fro, you can leave them. You can earn small fees from doing it. Although right now it’s negligible, but you can effectively provide liquidity to other people in the network.

BTC Sessions (00:21:49):

It’s pretty incredible what has been established there, and it prevents us from bogging down the base layer of bitcoin and having too high of fees or at least putting that off for the time being.

Preston Pysh (00:22:03):

The example in your video that just really made it click for me was the abacus example. It’s like if you and I want to open a channel and I’m the one that initiates it, I set up an abacus between you and me and basically all those balls that are sitting on the abacus are over on my side and as I spend to you, then they move over there. You could open a channel back to me for the same amount or even more or whatever, and then those are yours to spend.

Preston Pysh (00:22:29):

So it’s this whole network. If everybody just thinks of each node with a bunch of abacuses between them in order to settle this instantly is, for me, it just really clicked in my mind as to what was going on whenever I saw that visual representation that you had on your channel.

BTC Sessions (00:22:46):

It’s impossible to establish. It’s impossible to have money on Lightning Network that does not exist on the base layer of Bitcoin. So that’s important for people to realize. This isn’t like a representation or a PEGS token or anything. It is actual Bitcoin locked in channels between peers that is verifiable at all times on the base layer. It’s just locked up in a way where you can easily spend back and forth and be sure that the capital is actually there.

Preston Pysh (00:23:17):

So the investor in me when I hear locked up gets very excited. When you say it makes sense to keep a channel open forever as long as the liquidity is flowing back and forth, then I think about El Salvador using Bitcoin as legal tender for transactions that require immediately settlement. You’re not doing layer one transactions when you go into a McDonald’s or a Burger King in El Salvador right now. You’re using layer two Lightning Bitcoin that’s using this IOU abacus type thing that’s immediately settling.

Preston Pysh (00:24:00):

So when we pull the thread on that idea and we think about, “Where is this going as far as locking up coins?” What if another country adopts it that’s larger and doing more transactional throughput?

Preston Pysh (00:24:14):

Here’s the one that just really makes my mind explode. What if MasterCard, Visa, and whatever major credit card company out there says, “You know what? We don’t want to use the Rube Goldberg machine of clearing anymore that currently exists within our confined networks and we want to actually harness the power of this technology and we want to open up a billion dollar channel wit Amazon or we want to open up a whatever channel with you name it like other large cap billion dollar company.” In order to do that, based on what you just said, we have to lock up Bitcoin on layer one to open the channel.

BTC Sessions (00:24:55):

It pulls liquidity from exchanges, obviously. It’s interesting because they could do it, too, as the market cap of Bitcoin grow. Yeah, it could support that, but just in terms of infrastructure, let’s say the market cap supported them coming in like we hit such a point where there was enough capital in it where they were like, “Yeah, we could just buy up and lock up a ton of Bitcoin and establish this.” There would be no issue with them routing payments because the limitation on a transaction per second, which I love this because it eviscerates the Altcoin where faster and cheaper narrative.

BTC Sessions (00:25:39):

The only limitation on them using the network is bandwidth. It’s effectively millions of transactions per second. It blows everything out of the water because you’re using real Bitcoin. It’s locked in these liquidity swaps or these liquidity lines, and it can be settled at any time. Provably, one for one, it’s not debt-based. It’s amazing. I love it. Yes, you’re right that if they’re using that as capital just to lock up back and forth, yeah, there’s less on the open market for people to purchase.

Preston Pysh (00:26:17):

I just can’t imagine, so when you’re looking at, and these are 2018-2019 numbers, you’re looking at how many transactions in a day are going through the Visa, Union Pay, MasterCard, and the rest. In 2018, the number was 368.9 billion on an annualized basis. So that’s always a billion a day in liquidity that’s flowing through the pipes for micro small transactions, and then when you think about the fees that are on top of that, the fees, they’re out of this universe relative to Bitcoin, which is pretty much free. There’s a fee, but it’s so small. It’s way less than a 10th of a penny or something like that, right? So it’s meaningless. You don’t see it.

BTC Sessions (00:27:02):

There’s an interesting dynamic here, too, contrasting base layer and Lightning as to how the fees are equated because on the base layer, the scarce resource is data, is how much data are you using in a particular block of transactions. There’s only so much data that can be put through the network every 10 minutes on average. So that’s the scarce resource. If you’re doing a lot of stuff on the base layer, it’s not how much economic value are you transmitting because we’ve seen billion dollar transactions for a dollar. So we’ve seen that happen. It’s how many transactions are you putting, how much data are those transactions taking up.

BTC Sessions (00:27:45):

Well, with Lightning, it’s the opposite. The scarce resource is liquidity. So if somebody, like you said, is locking up their Bitcoin to provide these liquidity lines and you’re draining channels in one direction or the other so they need to go and tinker and rebalance and do things with that liquidity, there’s a cost associated with that.

BTC Sessions (00:28:07):

So on the smaller side of transactions, it’s very, very cheap to do tiny, tiny transactions on the Lightning Network, and then if you want to do very, very large transactions, right now it’s still not bad, but that’s where the fees come in there is if you’re going to drain a billion dollar channel in the future, then, yeah, there’ll be a fee associated with that. At that point, it may make more sense to transact on chain.

BTC Sessions (00:28:38):

So there’ll be this trade off back and forth of, “Okay. Are we going to be utilizing more liquidity or are we going to be utilizing more data? What makes more sense on which layer to transact?”

Preston Pysh (00:28:49):

Talk to us a little bit about how you think about opening up channels. So for a person who’s listening to this, let’s say they just downloaded an Umbrel full node, they’ve got it set up, and they’re like, “Okay, I’m going to open a channel. How much value should they open? How many channels should they open for your common person who’s just wanting to tinker around with this?

BTC Sessions (00:29:09):

Yeah. So it depends on what your goal is with the node. If you’re looking to make payments, then your main use case is, “Oh, I want to go and pay for things, and this is my spending cash that I’m going to be using for my node,” well, then you’re probably going to be looking at just opening a good handful of channels probably with larger nodes, like larger merchant type nodes, things like that, and not having a lot of inbounds, people connecting to you to bring in liquidity. Reason being is your use case is, “I want to spend money.” It’s going to be mostly outgoing.

BTC Sessions (00:29:49):

If you’re looking to be routing payments, it’s trickier, and I’m still learning around this. I should be clear. Don’t take me as gospel at this. I’ve been tinkering for a while now. There are incredible people out there that are way better versed than me at this. I just happen to be in between explaining some of this stuff, but the tricky part is finding out where you can place channels and liquidity that are most useful.

BTC Sessions (00:30:20):

Connecting nodes and pools of liquidity that weren’t previously connected or that were more difficult to route through. So if you can find those areas while, “Okay. A connection is needed here clearly because I see money flowing to and fro after opening that channel,” then you’re finding those sweet spots of where people needed routing.

BTC Sessions (00:30:41):

So it’s not typically in your best interest if you want to be routing payments to just connect to a whole bunch of big nodes because those channels, if you’ve got people connecting to you, if you’ve got inbounds, people that have made channels to you, inbound liquidity so you can receive payments, if you’ve got large channels with large nodes that are very, very well-connected, those ones are going to drain super fast because anybody that’s connected to you, and this is one of my tough lessons as I set up my node is I make this tutorial that’s like, “Hey, if you’re a newcomer, here’s how to set up a node, and if you want to, you can open a channel with me.”

BTC Sessions (00:31:25):

So I basically got a newb factory on my hands where I’ve got a ton of people, which is super awesome. I got a ton of people that connect to my node just because they saw the video and they’re like, “Okay. I’ll try this. I’ll open up a channel.” Then any channel that I had with some of the bigger players like Wallet of Satoshi, Bitrefill, Async, all of those straight through, it just drains. It drains.

BTC Sessions (00:31:49):

So there’s a few things you can do there. You can look and you can say, “Well, I’m going to try and find more mid-tier nodes that have a good number of connections with various people, but it’s not Wallet of Satoshi that I’m connected to. Okay. That’s one aspect.

BTC Sessions (00:32:06):

The other thing that you can do is you can say, “Hey, this channel to this giant node, because there’s a lot of inbound liquidity in my instance to my node,” I’m looking and I’m going, “Okay. Well, Wallet of Satoshi, it’s like a six million sat channel and it just drains within a day or two every time.” So I’m like, “Okay. Well, let’s start tinkering with the fees.”

BTC Sessions (00:32:27):

Typically, you see they’re set very, very low, effectively nothing, and then you can tinker and play with them. So I start lifting the fees on that more and more. So I’m making some fees on my node as people utilize that channel, and then you try to find that sweet spot where people are like, “I still want to use this. It doesn’t matter. I’m willing to pay the fee and you just keep eking up until you see the amount of routing start to dip and you reach that equilibrium where you’re making optimal fees for that particular channel.

BTC Sessions (00:32:57):

So that’s the game that you’re playing of like, “I don’t want my channels to drain, but I want to keep them established. I want routing to happen through my node, and I want to make a little bit of fees while I’m at.” That’s the game that you play the whole time.

BTC Sessions (00:33:11):

So I would say for people just starting, there’s a few things you can do, but establish a few node. Here’s one of the things I did at first, and this is my Wallet of Satoshi channel that I made. I made a big channel with Wallet of Satoshi and I said, “I want inbound as well. I want to be able to receive payments right off the bat.”

BTC Sessions (00:33:33):

There’s a service called Loop and what Loop does, yeah, you can basically … A Loop is from Lightning Labs, and what they say is, “Hey, if you send us,” and you can do this vice-versa,” if you send us a lightning transaction, we’ll send you an on chain transaction back.”

BTC Sessions (00:33:53):

So what I did is I made a six million sat channel with Wallet of Satoshi, then I went over to Loop and I said, “Hey, can you send me three million sats back on chain if I send you three million sats via Lightning Network?” You get charged a fee for that. It might be 1% or a little bit less or a little bit more, depending, but what that ended up doing is that channel half drained. So three million sats was on the Wallet of Satoshi side and three million on my side so I can now easily send and receive payments through that channel and I got back the three million sats on chain so that I can then use that liquidity to open different channels.

BTC Sessions (00:34:34):

So I basically set a balanced channel in one go, got back sats. I balanced it myself through Loop and then I have the leftover sats, the three million to go, “Okay. I’m going to go open another channel here.” There’s a lot of good ways to do it. The other one I would say is the website.

Preston Pysh (00:34:53):

So going back just to conclude what you were saying there, the fact that Lightning Labs inserts themselves to basically complete as a closed loop system between, Wallet of Satoshi, Lightning Labs, your liquidity never runs dry. Is that what you’re getting at with that? Channel never gets completely set, all the sats are pushed over to Wallet of Satoshi, it’s constantly balancing itself in that closed loop system?

BTC Sessions (00:35:19):

It’s not constantly balancing itself, but what it’s establishing is a lot of people initially, the toughest part is getting inbound liquidity, convincing somebody to open a channel with you so you can receive payments. So when you start up a Lightning node, you have no channels, you have some Bitcoin. So then you start opening channels with other people. Great. You can now make payments, but you can’t receive anything.

BTC Sessions (00:35:45):

So what I did is I said, “Well, I want half of this channel to go over to Wallet of Satoshi side.” Basically, I’m spending three million sats to get back just about three million sats to open other channels, but I can now receive payments as well with that single channel that I opened.

Preston Pysh (00:36:03):

You got inbound liquidity at that point.

BTC Sessions (00:36:06):

Yeah. Exactly. So you can establish it that way. There are services that will open inbound liquidity for you for a separated time that you can pay for. So if you’re a business and you’re like, “I just need some open channels so it’s going to be worth it for me to pay a fraction of a percent to have this open. Great. I’ll take it,” or you can do it with peers. So this is where websites like the one that you’ve been tinkering with called Lightning Network Plus is effectively you yourself or other people can say, “Hey, we’re going to create a liquidity swap, a channel swap where we’re going to get three, four, five people to link all together with channels of X number of Satoshis, and we’re going to lock it up, and we’re going to create a circular economy amongst us.”

BTC Sessions (00:36:57):

What that does is rather than just having a singular channel between you and one other peer is you now have access to the liquidity of the five people potentially in that loop of liquidity and all of the connections that every single person in that loop has. So you get just this massive pool of liquidity all at once by only opening a single single and each other individual opening a channel.

Preston Pysh (00:37:23):

I can honestly say when you pointed this source to me, I mean, you just pointed me to this source a couple of days ago. It’s been insane.

BTC Sessions (00:37:33):

You’ve been hitting it hard. I keep on seeing you. I’m doing another one.

Preston Pysh (00:37:38):

It’s been crazy how much inbound liquidity I’ve received and how well it’s balanced with my outbound liquidity. The node is, I mean, it’s crazy. It’s crushing it. Now, what I want to emphasize for people that are listening to this, so if no one’s ever had their own node, they don’t even know what we’re talking about or this just sounds very techy, they might be listening to this and saying, “All right. I don’t think anybody, I don’t think there’s any way this scales for the common person to have to go through all this.” That’s what they’re thinking.

Preston Pysh (00:38:12):

If you have a newbie who’s listening, they’re just shaking their head and they’re saying, “There’s no way your 40-year-old person who knows nothing about finance is going to be setting up this node at their house and doing all these activities and everything else.” Obviously, this is true. Talk to us about what does this look like five years from now for the common person who’s not going to set up their full node at their house and they’re just going to trust something, some other person in order to just use Bitcoin. What does that world look like? Then talk us through the mechanics of how that’s enabled.

BTC Sessions (00:38:46):

Yeah. So I mean, number one is you don’t have to run your own node. I highly encourage people to. The important thing is that you’re able to, that should you decide to, you have the option because that’s what keeps Bitcoin decentralized and resistant to attack. Running a node is a selfish action, right? It’s a self-interested action of protecting you and your own capital from attack. So that should be established out of the gate.

BTC Sessions (00:39:16):

Let’s say you’re an individual five years from now and you have no interest in running a node. You just want to use Bitcoin. Well, you can still use a wallet. Let’s talk base layer. You could still use a Bitcoin wallet and hold your own keys. Your wealth is still unconfiscatable. There’s a degree of trust pushed off for somebody else to host a copy of the blockchain, verify the transactions, and enforce the rules of a network. Will you be okay in that situation? Odds are probably and if really started to hit the fan, you can always dive in to running a node. That could be a possibility.

Preston Pysh (00:39:54):

There’s videos on that.

BTC Sessions (00:39:56):

Yeah. Exactly. I heard there’s a guy who makes a bunch of videos on this kind of stuff. What about Lightning? Can you do that in a noncustodial manner? The answer is absolutely yes. Now, again, there’s some trade offs, degrees of trust there, but what effectively happens is when you’re running a noncustodial Lightning wallet on your phone and it depends on the wallet, but they can use things called Trampoline nodes, where the wallet provider, effectively, you’re running an actual Lightning node on your phone, but they establish a channel, a liquidity channel with you and you front the cost of the on-chain transaction to set that up when you receive your first transaction, and then after that, you get all the advantages of the Lightning Network.

BTC Sessions (00:40:50):

Effectively, you’ve got a channel between you and that wallet provider, and then their node has tons of liquidity going to and fro. So you’re really well-connected via a proxy through them. You’ve got all of the liquidity that they do, and they just open up channels with you and you just front those costs.

BTC Sessions (00:41:10):

So you can do it. You don’t have the fine tuning if you wanted to set up your own liquidity and take those fees and so on and so forth, but you’re still using it in a noncustodial way. You’re still able to get all of the advantages of the low fee instant settlement environment of the Lightning Network and that’s just fine.

BTC Sessions (00:41:33):

You can even as an in between if you didn’t want to, and this is some of the stuff that’s coming down the pipeline, if you still wanted to host your own node for some of the abilities and features that that gives to you, you’re starting to see hosted Lightning nodes, where you can have a service that hosts a Lightning node for you. Voltage cloud comes to mind. Blockstream is starting to do that. They started to dabble in that space.

BTC Sessions (00:41:58):

So there’s going to be service providers where, yeah, you basically have a cloud-based Lightning node where you have final say in everything. You have the keys to the money, the liquidity allocated to it, but whenever Blockstream, when they talk about it, they would on their end be looking at liquidity and best actions for opening and closing channels, and then you would get a recommendation, and then you would have to approve that with your keys and say, “Yes, I approve closing this channel and opening a new one. That’s fine by me.”

BTC Sessions (00:42:34):

So there’s going to be in betweens. There’s going to be people that say, “No. Just hands off. Maybe I’ll just use a noncustodial phone wallet,” or a custodial phone wallet if you so choose. There’s going to be different levels to it, and there’s going to be people that run full nodes and establish liquidity. Yeah. It’s beautiful.

Preston Pysh (00:42:53):

I just look if I’m trying to demo it to a friend, I’ll just be like, “Hey, take out your phone, download Blue Wallet,” and they do it. It immediately hits their phone. I’ll say, “Okay. See this right here. Name what you want your wallet to be called and then click Lightning and then create,” and it creates. I said, “Okay. Well, type in 1,000 sats invoice, create the invoice,” and then I reach over with my phone and I scan the little QR code that’s there, and I push send and they’d get it, and it happened in a minute. I was like, “Okay. Now you got Bitcoin on your phone. There you go. You’re up and running,” right?

BTC Sessions (00:43:32):

Let’s up that ante, though, because you know what’s coming down the pipeline is there’s a new spec called Bull 12. What this is going to do is instead of saying, “Okay. Create an invoice so that I can scan it and send you money,” there’s some extra steps in there. You say, “What’s your Lightning address?”

BTC Sessions (00:43:51):

You say, “Oh, it’s preston@investorspodcast.com.”

BTC Sessions (00:43:58):

They’re like, “Okay. Right.”

BTC Sessions (00:44:01):

That’s your email address for money. That’s it. You type it in and you say how much you want to send. That is it. That’s where this is going. Five years from now, you won’t be looking at invoices or anything like that. You might have QR codes that are easily scannable that have all kinds of different features, recurring payments. You can scan a QR code and actually have it be a withdraw to your own wallet. There’s all these crazy things, and then you’ll just have Lightning addresses as well, where you can just say, “Yeah. Here’s my address. You can send me money anytime,” and it’s noncustodial. It literally just goes straight to your own node.

BTC Sessions (00:44:41):

So that’s the future that we’re looking at, and it’s going to be amazing because people still look at Lightning and say, “Okay. So what? I got to get a wallet, and then I create …” As easy as it is comparatively to what it was like in even 2018, it’s going to be even easier. It’s going to be so easy.

Preston Pysh (00:45:03):

I think in 10 years you’ll have younger generations. It’s just going to work, right? They’re just going to get used to it. They’re going to hear stories of vendors having to pay a 2.9% fee just to receive a payment. They’re just going to be like, “What? How? How is that possible?” This is wild.

Preston Pysh (00:45:25):

Talk to me about Lightning pool. So we talked about Lightning Labs and then looping, and opening a channel inbound to you, but talk to us about Lightning pool. What is this? What could it be used for?

BTC Sessions (00:45:37):

Yeah. So Lightning pool and I want to have it in front of me just so I’m not misquoting, but effectively, it’s you have a marketplace for channels. We we talking a little bit about this before where, again, you’re locking up liquidity to somebody for a certain period of time to provide them inbound capacity at a fee. So you can say, “Hey,” you can make an offer that you’re willing to give away liquidity and set your own fee for that or somebody can make an offer of, “Hey, I’m requesting liquidity,” or if you need liquidity, you can go to this marketplace and effectively say, “I need this,” or “I’m offering this.” There’s a free and open market of will you lock up capital so that I have access to incoming payments.

BTC Sessions (00:46:29):

So it’s a double-edged sword because the early people right now are probably looking and going, “Well, this is pretty niche and there’s not a lot of people doing it, and I could probably get some decent fees out of this,” but it becomes so accessible to anybody who has Bitcoin that if you’re starting to establish connections and you’re starting to get a decent-looking node, then all of a sudden, it’s anybody’s game, right? Anybody can dive in to this and say, “Hey, I want to provide liquidity for people that don’t have it.”

BTC Sessions (00:47:03):

It’s such a departure from the world that we live in right now, where just somebody, for people that are watching the video, instead of listening to the pod right now, literally I’ve got it right behind me over my left shoulder. I’ve got a tiny little computer lit up and that would be like I could be establishing and renting out liquidity to anybody from that tiny little thing just luring behind me on the shelf. It’s like a little Raspberry Pi computer. So, yeah, that’s what Lightning pool is. Basically, it’s a marketplace for Lightning channels that anybody can partake in. It’s amazing.

Preston Pysh (00:47:42):

What’s missing in the education space for Bitcoin right now?

BTC Sessions (00:47:48):

What I’ll say, well, I’m going to start this with, man, it’s so much better than it used to be. Diving in in 2014 it was difficult both from a perspective of just learning the basics, but even just podcasts and information and stuff to read. Now, you could listen to and watch things 24/7 and not even scratch the surface of all the great content that’s coming up. It would be all quality stuff to watch and listen to.

BTC Sessions (00:48:21):

So what’s missing? It’s tough because I’d say Lightning right now, the nitty-gritty of Lightning, that was a whole, and I put off doing those Lightning videos for so long. I had people bugging me.

Preston Pysh (00:48:36):

They’re so good. I’m telling you they’re so good. They’re so useful, so useful.

BTC Sessions (00:48:41):

Lightning needs more. Lightning definitely needs more explanation just the basics of, “How do I use this?” I’m talking about the backend running a node, liquidity, how to use loop. I would love and, again, this is one that I’ve put off for way too long with BTC pay server. I would love to do a video on that, but it needs more of that hands-on very simplistic, and dare I say because it’s the opposite of what I do, very short form, easy to digest tutorial stuff. It just really needs that.

BTC Sessions (00:49:18):

It needs, “How do I do this?” and somebody clicks and there’s a five-minute thing, “Okay. Do this, do this, do this. You’re good.” I think that’s key. Also, I think in the education space, there’s something to be said for just having the user experience and the user interface be easy enough to just open and go, “Oh, I get it,” because it’s still, especially with Lightning stuff, even wallets, even general Bitcoin wallets that have Bitcoin and Lightning in them or back and forth, it’s not quite there in terms of being intuitive enough to be like, “What am I doing?”

BTC Sessions (00:49:56):

Muun is a beautiful wallet. It has Bitcoin and Lightning Network. It’s one cohesive balance the entire time, but there’s just enough friction on the receiving side where it’s a little bit like somebody needs to know the difference between Bitcoin and Lightning and they need to designate which one they want to receive on and then there’s all of these little things in between. If you go to Lightning, you’re creating an invoice and everything. It needs to be received and that’s it, receive and then you scan and it just knows what you want. It knows what you want to do. That’s where we need to get to.

BTC Sessions (00:50:38):

That largely makes the tutorials and the education front irrelevant. When UI gets the point like, “I can’t wait to be …” It will be a little bit sad, but, “I can’t wait to be obsolete,” because it means that Bitcoin is so good and so easy.

Preston Pysh (00:50:56):

It’s done well. Yeah. I agree with that. Hey, I’m ready to hang it up.

BTC Sessions (00:51:01):

Well, we’ll visit each other soon I’m sure.

Preston Pysh (00:51:05):

What apps or hardware are you excited about most right now?

BTC Sessions (00:51:10):

Okay. There’s some really cool stuff. Again, we’ve been on the node thing a lot, but all the node stuff coming on the pipe is amazing. Umbrel is knocking out of the park in terms of user experience.

Preston Pysh (00:51:24):

It’s amazing.

BTC Sessions (00:51:25):

It’s amazing. What they did is just, in my opinion, so far unparalleled. That said, there’s so many other great options out there, too. There’s myNode, there’s nodl, there’s ODL, there’s Start9 Labs, there’s Ronin Dojo. There’s so many different options out there and it’s amazing, which is great. I love seeing that.

BTC Sessions (00:51:47):

All the Lightning apps and stuff, there’s one that I was testing out the other day, ZEBEDEE wallet, which it is a custodial thing, but you get a plugin in Chrome, and it’s just in the browser. You can tip with that and that means that it actually … So you’re talking about tips on Twitter, it integrates with Twitter. So if you have the ZEBEDEE plugin on Chrome, then there’s a little Lightning icon at the bottom of every one of your tweets for anybody else who also has ZEBEDEE, and you click it, and it will automatically bring up a sent payment to this person on ZEBEDEE. It’s instant.

Preston Pysh (00:52:22):

Oh, my Lord!

BTC Sessions (00:52:23):

Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of that. I love that everything is just interoperable once you jump on Lightning. Already, you don’t need to have certain things. You can just do it. You don’t need Twitter to necessarily turn on your tipping function to use it as you quickly discovered, right? There’s always workarounds.

BTC Sessions (00:52:45):

The other thing that I’m excited about is the hardware wallet space and, man, do I have a collection. I’ve got everything under the sun. I’ve got this little box behind me on my shelf that’s just full of test devices. I’ve got the Trezors, and Ledgers, and the ColCards and the Keystones, and the BitBoxes and the Foundation Passports and all of those, but one that I just got that I’m going to do a video on soon is the SeedSigner.

BTC Sessions (00:53:17):

This is a do-it-yourself, build your own hardware wallet. You can put it together with 30 bucks worth of parts. It’s crazy. It’s like your little Raspberry Pi Zero, you buy the little Raspberry Pi camera, and then you but a little LCD screen that goes on the front, and then you get a little case for it. You put it all together. It’s about 30 bucks and then you flash, you get a little SD card and you flash just like you would with Umbrel the software on it, and you’re off the races.

BTC Sessions (00:53:49):

Then you can use that alongside all of the awesome software that you have on your node or any Bitcoin wallet that is any good. You can get Spåra wallet or Specter, whatever, and you can plug this in and use it as a hardware wallet with that. You’ve built it yourself from easy to access and easy to get parts for next to nothing, and you can verify the software release. It’s incredible.

Preston Pysh (00:54:19):

It’s amazing. I just want to do it for the fun of it. It sounds like a blast.

BTC Sessions (00:54:24):

Yeah. I’m headed to Miami this week for the Oslo Freedom Forum and Alex Gladstein is putting this on. One of the things, the people from SeedSigner are going to be there and they’re giving out a bunch of these things saying, “Hey, you can build these things yourself.” Again, just the ethos of that self-sovereignty like don’t trust, verify like, “I don’t trust you sending me the parts, I’m going to buy my own parts, I’m going to build it, I’m going to make sure nobody tinkered with this, I’m going to verify the software release, I’m going to install it myself.” Again, it’s not that everybody has to do this. It’s just important that they can.

Preston Pysh (00:55:02):

I love that point. It’s not that everybody has to do it, it’s that everybody can do it from the hardware to making the hardware, to running the software, to all of it. I don’t know what it was, but there was just such a feeling of self-sovereignty in just release from the old system. Just today for me, for whatever reason, just sending people, “Here’s a dollar.” I sent Luke Gromen five cents. All five cents went to him and it came from my full node. It was just this feeling of just, “Wow!” This is the future instantly with no one’s permission. This is insane, man. It’s exciting. It’s beyond exciting.

BTC Sessions (00:55:47):

So you as a content creator, you probably appreciate this bit here, but let’s talk about some of the stack that I’ve got going on of different pieces of software, hardware, and everything, and then how they benefited me as an individual as a content creator.

BTC Sessions (00:56:04):

So I’ve got, first off, anybody listening to this that isn’t familiar, I live on Bitcoin. My income is Bitcoin. So, yes, I have a bank account, but all of my income comes in as Bitcoin. I convert whatever I need for bills the moment I get it at the beginning of the month, and then the rest sits on Bitcoin unless something comes up where I need to convert later.

BTC Sessions (00:56:28):

Is that a nightmare for taxes? Oh, yeah, you bet, but if you’re getting hit with taxes, it’s because the value of the money that you’ve been holding has gone up instead of inevitably gone down in purchasing power. So I’ll take the headache, but I digress. So I’m making my money in Bitcoin. I’ve got my full Bitcoin node that sits at home. It runs a full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain. I’ve got my software and hardware wallets all pointing at that node. So they’re all verifying the blockchain, my own copy of the blockchain, not having to trust anybody, and that’s from anywhere, right? So I can put in my nodes information on a software wallet on my phone and be anywhere and know that I’m verifying from my own node remotely. Okay?

BTC Sessions (00:57:15):

I also have my Lightning node running. My Lightning node has all the liquidity that I’ve taken my own Bitcoin and locked up in channels and it can route payments, receive payments and send payments, and all of that.

BTC Sessions (00:57:27):

Now, pull in podcasting 2.0, 3.0, 3.0, I can’t remember what point 0 they’re on. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s podcasting but way more awesome. So I do a new show once a week and I do a panel show, which you’ve been on, Why Are We Bullish. So those shows because they run themselves audio only, which I agree with you is so much easier than video content, so I’ll pull the audio from the video after the fact and I upload those to podcasting platforms just via Anchor. Okay. Great.

BTC Sessions (00:58:03):

Well, you can register with a podcast index, the podcast index or podcaster index, I can’t remember what it’s called. What this does is you can link, you can claim your show. You can link it up with the podcast index on there and link it up to something called Podcaster Wallet.

BTC Sessions (00:58:25):

At this point, you can then link Podcaster Wallet to your Lightning node. Once that is established and you’ve claimed your podcast and linked it to your Lightning node, it gets blasted out to a ton of different platforms. A couple off the top of my head that come out, that are top of mind for this use case, one is Breez wallet. Yes, Breez wallet it goes to because Breez wallet is a Bitcoin Lightning wallet, but it also doubles as a podcast app.

BTC Sessions (00:58:56):

When you open it up and you go to the podcast section of it, you have the option to listen to podcast and you have the option to set a number of sats per minute that you’re willing to pay to listen to the podcast. So somebody can now listen to my show and say, “Oh, I’m willing to pay 20 sats a minute.” That’s about a penny a minute. Okay. For somebody to pay that, it’s negligible or maybe they say even less. Maybe they say 10 sats, I mean, half a cent, whatever they may say. Penny a minute just for argument sake.

BTC Sessions (00:59:29):

Okay. Great. They listen to the show, they pay me 60 cents. Great, but the thing is I see that and I was recently on a trip. I was in Greece. I had an app linked up to my node where I could monitor my Lightning nodes liquidity in any payments, and I could see streams of 20 sats, 20 sats, 20 sats minute to minute as people listen to the podcast and paid every minute a penny as they’re listening.

BTC Sessions (00:59:57):

This previously would be impossible, and not only can I see it, I have access to that liquidity. I can immediately spend it from this wallet, which is remotely referencing my Lightning node on the other side of the planet. I’m getting paid a penny a minute and I can immediately spend that anywhere that i like.

BTC Sessions (01:00:17):

So I’m looking at this going, “First of all, the speed at which I’m able to access this liquidity and the size of transactions that we’re dealing with is insane,” but think about the consequences of the rent-seeking platforms previously. I’m still on YouTube and you can’t survive on YouTube revenue. It’s laughable when they slash and hack away the revenue that comes in from ads. So you’re reliant on sponsors, right?

BTC Sessions (01:00:51):

Let’s just spitball an amount. Let’s say you enjoy some degree of success and it’s a sat streaming world and everybody’s cool with like, “Yeah. Well, I’ll spend a penny a minute to listen to something.” If you have a degree of success and 10,000 people listen to an episode, that’s six grand for one episode for 10,000 people that drop a penny a minute. So that’s 60 cents for a person who cares, but for you as a content creator, nobody scrapes that away. It goes direct to your Lightning node. Nobody is in between. That is groundbreaking. It’s incredible.

Preston Pysh (01:01:32):

Well, and it’s also important that if a person is listening and they stop listening five minutes in because the content was terrible, the content creator is not going to make any money and they’re going to be incentivized to stop doing what they’re doing.

BTC Sessions (01:01:45):

Yeah. I made a little blog post about this and I think I phrased it, “The sat stops streaming when you start to suck,” right? It’s literally the person shuts off the money the moment you suck. So it’s like it holds content to a higher bar because you’re not just trying to the model of, “Okay. I’ll get sponsors and if somebody listens to five minutes of the show it counts as a view,” whatever. Now, you’re directly incentivized to get somebody’s attention and hold it for the entirety of an episode.

Preston Pysh (01:02:19):

Imagine paying for the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or something like that based on your dwell time. If you could set up a rate that you’d stream sats for the dwell time of reviewing the page, I mean, because there’s many pages on there for maybe a second. I’m like, “This is crap.”

BTC Sessions (01:02:36):

Well, and how often do you going to something that pops up and say, “Okay. Well, you read the first few sentences,” but you got to subscribe for 10-20 bucks a month.

Preston Pysh (01:02:47):

For a year, for a year. It can be surprising.

BTC Sessions (01:02:48):

Yeah, for a year. You’re like, “There’s no way in hell I’m doing that, but I would pay 10 cents to read this.”

Preston Pysh (01:02:55):

Exactly.

BTC Sessions (01:02:56):

Right? That’s a revenue model where most people would not … If they’re already reading it and they’re like, “Oh, this is interesting,” and they say, “I’m not paying 20 bucks to subscribe and locked in,” but if they say, “Okay. Can you click the button in your browser to approve a 10 cent transaction to read this?” they’ll be like, “Okay. I’m interested. I’ll do that.”

Preston Pysh (01:03:17):

Dude, I mean, it’s all going in this direction. It’s just fascinating to be able to stream pennies to people.

BTC Sessions (01:03:24):

The whole idea even just of a two-week pay period is going to be out the window because you can now … Why do we have those pay periods? Well, because it makes more economic sense to split it into two weeks and pay somebody after certain intervals. Whereas if they’re doing menial work on a computer, you can set a timer as long as there’s activity happening, there’s a constant flow, there’s a stream of sats going to them as they work, pay periods are done. Are you currently working or are you currently doing something? Great. You got a stream of money. You step away, the flow stops.

Preston Pysh (01:04:01):

Dude, give people a handoff to your YouTube channel, anything else you want to highlight. I’m telling you right now, I’m a stalker on your YouTube channel. I’m watching everything you put out there. I’m building. I’m there doing it right there with you. I mean, literally, here on my desk. Here, I’ll just show you. Look at this thing on my desk is a shell with a little fan for me to run my second Raspberry Pi.

BTC Sessions (01:04:29):

Perfect. What are you going to run? Are you going to run … So you got an Umbrel going on right now.

Preston Pysh (01:04:32):

I have an Umbrel running right now. I’m going to stand up another one. So this is the case that I got. That’s what I’m doing.

BTC Sessions (01:04:36):

I like it. It looks great, man. That’s beautiful. I love seeing the nodes pop up. You can find me at few different places. Obviously, on YouTube, you can just search BTC Sessions, really easy. On Twitter, I’m just @BTCSessions. I started doing some short form content where I’ll get people to ask me a question every week and I’ll do a quick two-minute answer and I also do clips of my Why Are We Bullish panel shows where we just all get together and talk about things that we’re excited about each week. So I have content going out to Instagram and TikTok as well under the same @BTCSessions. So you can find me on those places.

BTC Sessions (01:05:17):

I guess my parting thought would be I can’t coax people enough into the idea of just getting over the initial fear of trying new things like running a node or trying Lightning Network for the first time even just using an app on your phone like Muun wallet. Just try new things. I challenge everybody that’s listening that has only just bought Bitcoin as an investment and is sitting on it and has no real understanding of how it works under the hood. You’ll gain a whole new level of conviction when you dive in and you actually hands on run a node and you see, “Oh, my God! Nobody can screw with me because I’ve got a cheap computer sitting on a desk.” It’s unbelievable.

BTC Sessions (01:06:05):

So if you want to get started with that, I highly recommend check out I’ve got a video on Umbrel and just go. As a little weekend project, it will take you a day to set up and then it will take you a few days for it to sync the Bitcoin blockchain and then you’ll be off to the races. You can just play. It’s not a scary thing. I find most people they just need a tiny little push and a little bit of handholding along the way, somebody to nod and say, “You’re doing it right. Don’t worry. Keep going,” and that’s it. That’s all you need.

Preston Pysh (01:06:35):

Everybody is so helpful, too.

BTC Sessions (01:06:37):

Yes. 100%.

Preston Pysh (01:06:38):

I mean, just so helpful. I can’t agree with you more. Your conviction will go through the roof after you start using the application, you’re seeing the pool. I mean, you’re totally in, man. It’s a little hard to unsee some of this. Sessions, thank you for coming on. Thank you for making time, and thank you for teaching me so many different concepts and ideas. I really appreciate it.

BTC Sessions (01:07:01):

Thanks for having me.

Preston Pysh (01:07:02):

If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that and it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review we would just greatly appreciate. With that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

Outro (01:07:35):

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