[00:03:09] Parker Lewis: And that what I also articulated was that realistically, Bitcoin adoption happens as knowledge distributes. And imagine that somebody didn’t know anything about Bitcoin, but started to experience inflation at the grocery store or wherever they were buying goods and services, they can’t connect Bitcoin to that without some prior understanding of it.

[00:03:33] Parker Lewis: And so I think that oftentimes and not. Not really critically, but I think that sometimes errantly people can describe Bitcoin as a hedge, and then it can create this confusion, whereas if you start to dive in and understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin, you can see this rise and fall of Bitcoin is that Bitcoin isn’t going down as inflation appears, It’s more so that the Bitcoin is corrected just as it has many times before, because as it’s being adopted, people are transitioning a state of from no understanding to limited understanding, and only more people see Bitcoin.

[00:04:03] Parker Lewis: Once you see Bitcoin, you don’t unsee it. So it’s kind of that combination of it really isn’t a hedge, because you either live in a zero state where you have very limited knowledge, and Bitcoin’s volatility will destroy you. You’ll think that you were using as a hedge, but you’re really using a speculation, and you’ll sell it at the wrong time.

[00:04:19] Parker Lewis: And then when, when something starts to click for someone, you inevitably get to the state of Bitcoin as a better form of money. It’s really impossible. Once something’s clicked around Bitcoin for you to remain in this kind of in between state, you’re really kind of either at the point where something hasn’t clicked and you can’t see Bitcoin as money or something has clicked and you inevitably go further and further down the Bitcoin rabbit hole until it starts to become more intuitive to you as money.

[00:04:45] Parker Lewis: And you start to see the volatility being able to rationally explain it.

[00:04:49] Preston Pysh: I love this and I heard this so much over this past cycle, especially when inflation was raging. It’s, it’s not as high, we’ve had deflationary forces and we can talk about that in a little bit, but I know it at the heat of like the high of that, this is what I kept hearing from people.

[00:05:09] Preston Pysh: Oh, if it’s an inflation hedge, then why is it going down? The only thing that I could really kind of use to graphically show people is I would tell people, all right, let’s look at an equity chart, say the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq or whatever. Let’s look at that chart. Let’s look at the, the previous low of, of a cycle.

[00:05:28] Preston Pysh: Like let’s find a cycle here where it was very low. Let’s call it COVID or before COVID when we had, when we had a pretty low point in equities. And then you can see where it went high. And then it came back down low again, pick one of those full cycles. And then let’s put Bitcoin next to, you name it, inflation hedge, and let’s see how it performs through one of these full credit cycles where the central bankers are inserting liquidity and pulling it out.

[00:05:52] Preston Pysh: And without fail, regardless of what kind of duration they pick, You can see the performance where it’s actually forming as a better store of value, I think is the better way to describe it than using the word hedge, but I love this point, what are some of the other things that in this presentation that you had that you think are really salient points for people to kind of take away as they’re thinking through or ways for them to graphically see why it’s not this quote unquote hedge in this fractional reserve system that has these deflationary forces that play out just because of the inherent nature of it.

[00:06:28] Parker Lewis: I think separate from people, I think having this idea that the Bitcoin is a hedge to inflation, they also associate hedges to inflation as what people, you know, the flight to safety. Why isn’t Bitcoin a flight to safety? And so one of the ideas that I talk about in the presentation is that when you think about how Bitcoin is adopted but then think about where we are at today, and very few people, if the statement is true, that Bitcoin is a better form of money, which again, most people starting at a baseline of zero, that statement is entirely incongruent.

[00:07:11] Parker Lewis: They see the volatility and you say Bitcoin’s designed to be a better form of money, but it doesn’t trade or move up and down or is used on a day to day basis as money that very few people intuitively have a baseline of understanding to be able to understand how we go from where we’re at today of Bitcoin being a nascent and volatile store of value to a fully functioning currency that’s perfectly stable and that is used to facilitate trade and day to day commerce, like going to the grocery store and buying food with your Bitcoin or going to the gas station and buying gas with your Bitcoin.

[00:07:48] Parker Lewis: That where we’re at today is still very few people can explain to themselves how we can go from where we’re at today to that future state. If you accept that, and I would… I would say that maximum of 1 percent of people in the world have some intuitive understanding of Bitcoin. I actually think it’s far less than that.

[00:08:06] Parker Lewis: I think it’s, in my own mind, certainly not half a percent. And really what I anchor to is all the people that I know in the world and how many of them have had some idea click about it. That it’s not more than one in a hundred, it’s probably not more than one in two hundred, but if you accept that very few people understand it for what it is, or own it in any material way, because say that the number of people that own it in a material way are greater than the people that have an intuitive understanding.

[00:08:34] Parker Lewis: And in the way that I define a material percentage would be something like 5 to 10 percent of someone’s saving. It’s like somebody just has 20 in their Coinbase account because somebody gave it to them five years ago. That’s not a material percentage of their wealth. They haven’t consciously decided, I’m going to store material percentage of my wealth in Bitcoin.

[00:08:53] Parker Lewis: That if you accepted a very small number of people, either have a material exposure to it, or have an intuitive, fewer have an intuitive understanding, people cannot flee to something for safety that they do not understand. Again, the idea that Bitcoin is quote a flight to safety is incongruent with the current state of adoption.

[00:09:16] Parker Lewis: It ultimately is that same thing, but you can’t use it as a tool to preserve your purchasing power. If you think that it’s just like a stock or bond that happens to be particular volatile, because all the people that talk on CNBC do not describe it in the way that I think is actually consistent with both what it is at a fundamental level and where it’s going or how it’s adopted.

[00:09:39] Parker Lewis: It’s people start to appreciate that less than 1 percent of people in the world have any material exposure that when some event happens in the world, whether it be inflation or some geopolitical event that connects with someone to be like, well, if Bitcoin was that, then it should be doing something different right now.

[00:09:58] Parker Lewis: If they accept that that can’t be true just by the definition of how few people are exposed to it. And then that same thing explains the volatility of it that would come back to this idea of why Bitcoin is going down when inflation is running. And it’s just to your point that if you look at it, if you zoom out over a longer time horizon, you will start to see that one, it’s merely correcting off of some prior rise.

[00:10:24] Parker Lewis: And two, yes, it has preserved purchasing power, albeit in a volatile way, better than any other form of quote inflation hedge or really any other asset. And that what explains that is that if there’s very few, if you accept that there’s still very few people who have any material exposure and fewer who have an intuitive understanding of Bitcoin as money, then when Bitcoin is adopted in waves, say Bitcoin adoption goes up by 10 X or 7 X or 15 X, By definition, 1 out of 10, 1 out of 15, 1 out of 7, whatever number you want to pick are people that have previously owned it and everybody else is buying Bitcoin for the first time.

[00:11:00] Parker Lewis: They’re essentially pricing an asset for the very first time in their life. By definition, they have less knowledge than someone that’s owned Bitcoin for 3 years, 5 years, 10 years. And that necessitates both a large rise, followed by what I like to describe, some people irrationally buy Bitcoin, and then they irrationally sell it, but more people find the signal because knowledge does distribute over time, and only more people figure it out.

[00:11:26] Parker Lewis: More people stack up in terms of having, you know, had some idea click, but it has to at this stage of Bitcoin, and it won’t always be, which is also something else that I talked about in the presentation, but at this stage of Bitcoin adoption, it has to be something conscious. You know, you have to make some conscious decision to have come to some conclusion as to why Bitcoin was sore value over time, and then you can start utilizing it, you know, as a vehicle to preserve long term purchasing power, but if you don’t have that knowledge, it’s functionally, it can be even a, a drag on your wealth because you might have bought at the wrong time and sold it at the wrong time rather than been able to hold it through the adoption waves and been able to realize the benefit, but that it all starts with, with knowledge distribution.

[00:12:10] Preston Pysh: Could not agree anymore with you on that. I love this statement that you had. People cannot flee to safety of something that they don’t understand. Going back to the chart that, that I mentioned, as far as like trying to graphically present it to somebody, something, I was helping a person, they’re talking to a corporation about potentially putting Bitcoin on their treasury.

[00:12:31] Preston Pysh: And we were talking through kind of like the financial side of that. And I said, you know, you can pick out any four year period, go to the price chart, pluck any date and time you want, and then go back four years prior to that, and then do a compound annual growth rate of that four year period. And if you had Bitcoin on your balance sheet, just 2%, the rest, all cash, you would match the performance of the S&P 500 if you were a hundred percent exposed to the S&P 500.

[00:13:00] Preston Pysh: The thing that’s really fascinating about it with that metric of only a 2 percent Bitcoin exposure and the rest just cash is that you had one fourth the volatility as the S&P 500 index that you were 100 percent exposed to that had the same performance parameters. And the reason I was talking through the Sharpe ratio with this person, but I said, it’s really important that you have to frame it in any four year period of time.

[00:13:26] Preston Pysh: Let them pick the four year period. It doesn’t matter if they pick the Bitcoin top or a Bitcoin bottom, pick a four year period of time because that’s how much time it kind of takes for it to kind of manifest these properties that prove that it’s a better store of value. And I got into like the four year halving cycle and all that.

[00:13:42] Preston Pysh: But again, it’s a, to have, to hold something for four years. to hold something for duration through all that volatility relative to the thing that in their head is, is a better store of value, right? Or that they, they might think is better. It requires education to get through that, that holding period.

[00:14:02] Parker Lewis: And I, and I think that that’s exactly right.

[00:14:04] Parker Lewis: And actually in the article that I wrote that was back in January, under the same title. I, I did, I did a similar exercise. I can’t remember exactly what I picked out, but I think it was the S&P, the Dow, gold, maybe oil showing kind of at a point in time versus over time and over a longer duration. And that it ultimately, because people have a very reasonable fear that they’re, they’re buying Bitcoin that quote the precisely wrong time, right?

[00:14:31] Parker Lewis: Like, how do I know that if I’m buying Bitcoin today, I’m not buying Bitcoin? When it was at 69, 000 at its all time high, again, I always come back to these fundamentals, which is you have to have some fundamental understanding as to why Bitcoin will store value over time. And I, I agree with you, like And I think it’s also consistent with most people that you’re talking to as well, that their time horizons are generally longer than one, two and three years, even four years, yet they have this struggle when it comes to Bitcoin because of the shorter term volatility.

[00:15:10] Parker Lewis: But without the anchor point in the world to say, I can rationally explain to myself why from whatever point in time I’m at, even if I’m buying Bitcoin at 69 K or whenever it was there, that if I do hold this for the long term, that it will store value. And that’s where, you know, in the presentation and generally when I speak to people, I always anchor to the 21 million.

[00:15:34] Parker Lewis: You know, if Bitcoin credibly enforces fixed supply, that it will emerge as the global reserve currency, that that is the fundamental reason why people will demand it, why they will have to demand it, and that it also connects because it’s also in the book that I’m about to come out with, but it was also I wrote about this and in the series when I was writing online of like, only through reason and logic can someone arrive at the same conclusion about the same thing consistently.

[00:16:00] Parker Lewis: And that is really the fundamental point that people have to get to, to be able to both stomach the volatility of Bitcoin, but also rationally explain to themselves why Bitcoin will store value over time, why more people will have to demand this medium or whether they will or not. That if they’re not grounded in that fundamental as to why more people, if you accept very few people, because I think most of our peers in the world will accept that very few people, you know, if you say Bitcoin is money, they will say that doesn’t make sense to me that that almost by definition is an establishment that that they’re not seeing it as As you or I might see it, but then if they would say, okay, well, how many people are in the bucket?

[00:16:43] Parker Lewis: Like you saying Bitcoin is money versus saying not in any world is that money that an overwhelming majority of people still, still are not there that if they ground themselves in the reason to explain why say, Even if 1% of people are in the camp that say Bitcoin is money, do I think 2% of people will say that?

[00:17:01] Parker Lewis: Do I think 3% do I think 4%? Because ultimately you have to have that basis in your own mind to say, I can see a path as to why more people would adopt this as money, but without it, you are stuck there thinking, I’m at the edge of the cliff. I might be buying Bitcoin right before its next 70% drawdown, and so it all comes back well.

[00:17:25] Parker Lewis: Let me anchor into why this thing stores value, which is inherently anchored to why would more people demand it as money in the future once you’ve evaluated that question, which some people might come away and say, I just don’t see it. But Bitcoin’s ability to store value over those cycles and over that longer time horizon is also almost by definition, more people forming a consensus.

[00:17:47] Parker Lewis: Yes, it is a form of money, even if, you know, knowledge might perfect over time and harden over time that more people come to that conclusion. And that’s exactly why after that rise and fall, it still has stored purchasing power far better than than any other certainly form of money, but particularly any other form of asset.

[00:18:07] Preston Pysh: The people that in my, just in my personal life, family, friends, whoever, that have really kind of stuck with it and truly in the end, get it, are really the dollar cost averagers, the, the people who were like, all right, yeah, this, this sounds like this could be something and they just slowly kind of chip away at it.

[00:18:25] Preston Pysh: They didn’t take a big position early on. They just kind of bought a little bit and they kind of put it on a DCA monthly or whatever. And then it was like a year later and they were like. Wow, this is pretty incredible. And through that process, they continued to build their depth of knowledge and their education and became way more interested in it as they continued to watch it.

[00:18:46] Preston Pysh: A metric that I recently heard, Parker, that I just found, I think it was Dylan LeClaire that put it out there. If you bought the top at 69, 000 and you continued the dollar cost average, you didn’t take a larger position at the top, but you just initiated the DCA. You are already in the green right now.

[00:19:03] Preston Pysh: Despite the price being significantly lower than that local top that we saw back on this past cycle. Is that the solution when we talk to people or like, what do you tell them?

[00:19:13] Parker Lewis: I mean, I definitely, I mean, I definitely think that that is a rational approach. Right. But I think also something that fundamentally happens is that oftentimes it’s like, and I, I’ll just speak for myself, but I think that many people have similarly experienced this.

[00:19:28] Parker Lewis: First time that you buy Bitcoin, it feels like you’re like, feels almost viscerally like you’re lighting money on fire. You’re kind of taking the jump off the deep end and you don’t know exactly what you’ve just done. Right. And so doing that in a more automatic, lower amount, gradual over time, it kind of takes some of the teeth.

[00:19:48] Parker Lewis: Out of, you know, stepping off the ledge. But once you’ve done that, and once you have that, you know, some skin in the game, you’ve made that kind of forward or conscious decision to be involved, then it creates a stake that makes you want to learn more. You might see it go up, and you might see some benefit, or at least your perceived benefit to yourself of like what that is worth now, but ultimately, you’re paying more attention.

[00:20:14] Parker Lewis: And as you’re paying more attention, You see Bitcoin in a different light or you start reading different things and diving in more and oftentimes without the stake, it’s harder to do that. But I think, I mean, I was somebody as an example, like skeptic for a long time and I had to like, and also very conservative from with my money perspective.

[00:20:35] Parker Lewis: And I had to like, you know, work through the reason and logic how, how there could be a possibility that this is what people claim that it was before I could put any immaterial dollars in. And I think a lot of people are in that same position. The other side of it though, that I helped connect people. So I think it is, yes, it’s like having a stake.

[00:20:52] Parker Lewis: And doing it with a, you know, dollar cost averaging

approach, I think has proved to be highly effective.

[00:20:57] Parker Lewis: It allows people to, you know, cause you can, you can certainly buy too much Bitcoin. If you’ve bought too much Bitcoin and the price goes down in half, you’re very logically with limited information in a position to quote, cut your losses, but realize, actually realize your losses and then not actually benefit from Bitcoin storing value over time.

[00:21:15] Parker Lewis: But the other side of it, which I try to connect for people and I did in this presentation, which I think has helped resonate and it’s resonated historically when I’ve talked in smaller settings, is that people need to connect Bitcoin to a problem that they have, and I think in our current environment, people are connecting that there’s something broken, I don’t think that most people know what they know that inflation is a problem.

[00:21:39] Parker Lewis: They know that inflation is in the case of most people suffocating them, creating significant financial strain because their bank accounts might be dwindling because food at the grocery store is more expensive and they’re trying to figure out how to make ends meet. But connecting that to Bitcoin is an important part to connecting the side of Bitcoin is a better form of money.

[00:22:00] Parker Lewis: And if Bitcoin credibly enforces its fixed supply of 21 million, it will emerge as a global reserve currency and everyone will adopt it. And that’s the basis of why it will store value over time. Because if you are looking at Bitcoin as a vacuum, and imagine I just said that statement and I hadn’t connected the idea to the dollar.

[00:22:20] Parker Lewis: And creating a framework for someone to understand how all the money that they printed in 2020 and 2000, you know, nine to 14 before that is directly connected to this thing, Bitcoin, then you’re sitting there saying in a vacuum, I’m evaluating if 21 million Bitcoin, it’s going to emerge as a global reserve currency.

[00:22:43] Parker Lewis: And it’s far more than a hedge to inflation. It’s actually the permanent solution to inflation. We’re all going to be at the grocery store buying groceries. It’s like, you’ve just lost 99. 9 percent of people thinking in a vacuum. If you start with, let’s talk about the fiat system, because Bitcoin being the solution to inflation, If you’re just sitting there saying, Hey, there’s this great thing that can have do great things for your purchasing power.

[00:23:07] Parker Lewis: Or as most people think about it, making money when they first buy Bitcoin without connecting it to the problem, it very reasonably is a solution in search of a problem, but Bitcoin is not that it is. It is not a solution in search of a problem that was created in a very intentional way to solve a very finite problem.

[00:23:26] Parker Lewis: And that is one of all the money that’s being printed. And so kind of helping connect that fiat economists will, we’ll try to explain inflation away, you know, every which way that doesn’t include the fact that they’re printing massive amounts of money and that, Hey, what’s causing this inflation at the grocery store is all the money that they printed in the past.

[00:23:48] Parker Lewis: And, oh, by the way, they’re going to have to print ever more money. And they’re always going to do that until the money doesn’t work. You know that you have a problem. Your problem is actually directly tied to the fact that they’re printing all this money and because most people I don’t think connect this in a direct way that the Fed printing money is actually this thing causing inflation for the reason that economists explain it every way but that that first connecting inflation to the money printing to the fact that they are going to have to print more and why and oh, this thing, Bitcoin is a solution to that. And that’s why people are demanding it. That is the connection of all those ideas that then allow somebody to what I would say, see Bitcoin for the first time, or at least open up the possibility in their mind.

[00:24:30] Parker Lewis: You know, it’s kind of a convergence. Either you can go down the rabbit hole of understanding that first and then buy more Bitcoin, or you can start buying Bitcoin in little amounts. You have a stake and you’re going to be paying more attention. And it’s actually Bitcoin that’s going to drive you to this place of, oh, this is actually far more significant than I understood at the beginning.

[00:24:50] Parker Lewis: I’m not only a lot more comfortable with my DCA today, maybe I’ll increase my DCA by 10 percent or 15 percent or double it or on liquidity events, buy more.

[00:25:01] Preston Pysh: In this presentation, when you took the Q& A, you were talking about how over in the UAE, they have 400 megawatts to maybe 500 megawatts that they’re mining with.

[00:25:12] Preston Pysh: And you were talking about why you found this to be just really important beyond just the mining implications. Do you remember kind of your response on this? And if so explain to the listeners what, what were you’re talking about here?

[00:25:26] Parker Lewis: Yeah. And part of the, part of the background to the question was, What are you seeing that, that tells you on a, on a fundamental day to day basis that this transition to Bitcoin is happening in a real and fundamental way beyond, and I think, I think it was intended to be like beyond just people speculating financially.

[00:25:46] Parker Lewis: And I used mining as an example and then I used it kind of fundamentally for two reasons, which I’ll explain related to the UAE, was that I had a chart where I showed the mining hash rate increasing 9x over a period of five or six years. And through which a period when, when China banned Bitcoin mining, and there’s this significant rise followed by a steep decline and then an even more rapid rise that far exceeded where it was at before.

[00:26:16] Parker Lewis: And I connected that to people with more knowledge, if you’re going to mine Bitcoin, regardless of whether you are the UAE or somebody out in West Texas, that if you’re going to endeavor to build. a 500 megawatt mine, which I don’t know if 500 megawatts is online, but I believe that that’s the number that they’re, they’re building out toward.

[00:26:38] Parker Lewis: And I believe it’s a project with Marathon, which is a US public company for people that are interested in reading about it more. If you are going to endeavor to do that, that is a multi billion dollar Project at the end of the day and that say you endeavored to do that you would have to put capital investment up front to the tune of multiple billion dollars and that it would take likely 12 to 24 maybe 36 months to get fully operational and then on the other side of that all you are going to get paid in is Bitcoin.

[00:27:12] Parker Lewis: Ultimately you are pursuing that activity and performing a very important function to enforce Bitcoin’s fixed supply and clear for final settlement all Bitcoin transactions, but that if you think about, and I made this point that like, honestly, it is fairly easy to buy Bitcoin with very limited understanding you can get signed up with an account and go financially speculate with very little information and click a button and buy Bitcoin.

[00:27:36] Parker Lewis: If you are going to go out and build a 500 megawatt mine and spend multiple billions of dollars worth of capital over a period of 24 to 36 months into the future, but that’s the period lead time to then start to return your investment. You necessarily or definitionally have to have more information than the market.

[00:27:58] Parker Lewis: And so the, I use it to explain on the one hand that the fundamental of mining going up is more significant because the nature of the people who are doing that and the nature of the operation. requires a lot more skin in the game. And that the fact that all you get for doing that is Bitcoin sends a signal that you are willing to make a longer term decision, not worrying about even what happens necessarily in the next 12 to 24, 36 months.

[00:28:26] Parker Lewis: That you can only do that if you have made a long term conscious decision to be involved and exposed to Bitcoin over a long, longer time horizon. So that was one part of it. The other part of it was this idea of kind of recognizing that the old world is broken. The new and a big part of what has caused that old world to become so broken is that everything about the currency system is trusted that it is a debt backed, trust based system, chock full of counterparty risk.

[00:28:56] Parker Lewis: And one of the other things that happened in the last 12 months, I believe, maybe 12 to 24 months. was that the UAE began and I can’t remember which one, but was decided to trade oil for rupees with India. And that in 2022, when Russia got caught off of SWIFT, a lot of people, that was like a kind of earth shattering moment.

[00:29:23] Parker Lewis: I think a lot of people will say, well, point back to the kind of end of the dollar reserve currency will be tied to that point, but that what it inherently demonstrated for the world to see was the dollar is all, it’s a trust, trust back system. SWIFT is a trust back system. You can get your, you can be cut off from it by the stroke of a pen.

[00:29:42] Parker Lewis: And that if we’re looking at a world where someone like the UAE is mining Bitcoin and making a very conscious decision to invest in this, this long term infrastructure at the same time that it’s keyed in on that, like, I need diversity in what my reserve currency is, but they also mentioned at the same time saying, yeah, we’re, we’re accepting rupees for oil, but we don’t actually want the rupees that there’s, there’s a lot of options in the trusted world.

[00:30:06] Parker Lewis: You can take the counterparty risk of India and their rupees, Russia and their rubles, China and their yuan, the US and your dollars, and functionally, you are exposing yourself in a very uncomfortable position to another country’s currency and ultimately another country’s counterparty risk. Whereas the only alternative that you have in the trustless world of money, where you don’t have to trust anyone as to how the supply of the currency is both issued and maintained and enforced, that it be a fixed supply, that that’s not dependent on the trust of anyone, that if the UAE is at the point of both mining Bitcoin As well as shifting at least partially away from the dollar and willing to accept Indian rupees, which they don’t want for oil, that it also becomes inevitable in that world that at some point in time, someone like a UAE looks at India and says, Hey, how about you just pay us in Bitcoin because we’re already producing it and there will be this connection between, you know, they’re already converting their power for Bitcoin.

[00:31:08] Parker Lewis: Why not oil? You know, and it’s not just a, why not in like the, well, there’s a random chance in the universe, but if you connect these two things that you have to be very intentional to set off on a multi billion dollar Bitcoin mining project, and that’s a very long term focus initiative, and what it ultimately is doing is converting energy to Bitcoin.

[00:31:29] Parker Lewis: Well, here you are looking at the exact same thing, trading oil for what? Either a form of money that the Indian government and central bank creates out of thin air or the same form of money that you’re helping to secure and ensure that there will only ever be 21 million of.

[00:31:47] Preston Pysh: Just to give the audience a little bit of context on 500 megawatts.

[00:31:52] Preston Pysh: A stadium, a large sports stadium, might use 1 megawatts during a night game when all the lights in the facilities are operational. So, 500 megawatts is the equivalent of like 500 large sports stadiums worth of power. So, when a person hears that and they’re thinking about the context of what you just described, The UAE, just the UAE, has invested in infrastructure to service the security and the transactions of this network, of this Bitcoin network, to the tune of enough power to power 500 large sports stadiums.

[00:32:30] Preston Pysh: That’s how mind blowing the infrastructure is. Now, and again, we’re just talking about a small country in the world. We’re not even talking about the U. S. or anywhere else that also has infrastructure to know if I don’t even know how much how much, how many megawatts are we talking Parker for the whole planet right now?

[00:32:52] Parker Lewis: Yeah. And it’s, it’s inherently, you know, there’s no central, you know, source of truth. People estimate the amount of power based on the amount of what’s referred to as hashrate, and then they tie it back to individual machines and how much power those individual machines consume. So it’s an inherently imprecise science.

[00:33:12] Parker Lewis: I would estimate it’s somewhere in between 10 maybe 15 to 20 gigawatts. My understanding here in Texas. That there’s three to four gigawatts online just in Texas alone, you know, kind of measuring by bookends. But I do think it’s a good context that you just provide there. The week before last, I was in Missouri at an event, a single day event hosted by a group called Build Asset Management on trying to educate people in Missouri on Bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin.

[00:33:41] Parker Lewis: And one of the guys there that spoke worked for a power company. And he’s been working with a number of Bitcoin miners and trying to get kind of internal support within the power company to make more investments on, you know, kind of creating the environment to be able to host more miners as an example and, and kind of recognizing how, you know, kind of separate discussion, but how Bitcoin can help solve an energy problem with all the variability and kind of peak to trough demand.

[00:34:08] Parker Lewis: But the thing that he did to help connect for people was, and this was in Jefferson City, Missouri, and he’s pointing across the Missouri River and saying, Hey, we service that large company. It was a, it was a large industrial company. I can’t remember exactly which company it was, but I don’t think that this was it, but it was like to the tune of like a John Deere, you know, like making large, heavy machinery.

[00:34:29] Parker Lewis: And it’s like that plant, which is one of our largest customers is five megawatts. Right, and they’re not using 7 either, but to give you the context of when a single miner wants to come and take 100 megawatts, 20 times larger than our largest customer, that these are, you know, one, extremely large loads, highly capital intensive, the mining equipment alone to go in requires significant investment, And every single watt of energy or, you know, kind of computer hashing power is going to secure the Bitcoin network and that when you put it at the 500 megawatt scale, it’s like this is material and significant and you don’t do that with the same amount of information as somebody clicking a button to buy, you know, 1, 000 worth of Bitcoin, you’re not doing that as quote a hedge.

[00:35:26] Parker Lewis: If you are going to devote that amount of your own country’s power resources in a primary way, and even if it’s in a JV.

[00:35:35] Preston Pysh: Recently, you were on record saying the halving this upcoming halving is not priced in. So, lay it on us. Why is this, why is it not priced in?

[00:35:44] Parker Lewis: Yeah. So, and I, and I use this to explain in the context of the presentation that every fundamental of Bitcoin is strong.

[00:35:53] Parker Lewis: I pointed to the mining hash rate. I pointed to the growth of the lightning network, which is used to facilitate more day to day payments on Bitcoin. I talked about kind of, I think, you know, using your example of saying. Hey, where Bitcoin is today. And at the time it was like 27, 28 K it’s three and a half to four times higher than what it was pre the drop in March of 2020.

[00:36:14] Parker Lewis: So from like 8, 000. And if you compare that to any other asset over the same time period, it’s stored purchasing power far better over, I think it’s just under 70 percent of all Bitcoin has been held for over a year. And for context, for people that after the rise and fall in 2017 and 2018, only 40 percent of all Bitcoin had been held over a year.

[00:36:39] Parker Lewis: So from that period to today, 30 percent of all of the currency on a 19 million nominal currency, the nominal units of currency that have moved from short term holding to long term holding were not only kind of, you know, 30 percent higher than where we were. Where Bitcoin is being held by more long term holders than it ever has before.

[00:37:00] Parker Lewis: And then I said, and on top of that, the Bitcoin halvening is six months away. So every fundamental is strong, including price. And what I believe is the most significant market event in Bitcoin. is six months around the corner. And that now is the time, you know, it’s not, now’s not the time for people to blindly go buy Bitcoin, but now is the time for people to be doing work.

[00:37:24] Parker Lewis: I say that it’s the most important market event for Bitcoin. And for those people who are aware of the running debate, everyone knows that the Bitcoin halving is in six months. And if it, if everyone knows that it’s happening, surely the market is pricing it to happen. Of course. And the reality is the, the halving is not priced in.

[00:37:44] Parker Lewis: It’s never priced in. It functionally can’t be because ultimately it creates, it creates a supply shock. So even though everybody who is paying attention knows that this quote supply shock is happening, it really doesn’t know the consequence of it till after the fact, because it doesn’t really know how much of a deficit on a percentage basis is now absent from the market that needs to be made up in bidding the price up and that as people start bidding the price up, psychologically, people get more confident and they’re less willing to sell. And so the example that I use simplistically, and it’s not exactly this, but I just use the example to help articulate for somebody of functionally what happens at the point of the halvening.

[00:38:29] Parker Lewis: Is that if 6. 25 Bitcoin are being issued every 10 minutes on average and and technically speaking because hash rate is going up block times come in about 10 seconds on average faster than every 10 minutes, but just simplistically to help people understand the point I was making was let’s assume that it’s every 10 minutes.

[00:38:47] Parker Lewis: That currently at the time, 6. 25 Bitcoin at a price of 27, 000 translated to basically revenue to miners in a dollar equivalent of 24 million a day, 900 Bitcoin a day on average, and that in order to maintain equilibrium in price, that the market would have to absorb that 24 million in supply and some miners hold a lot of miners naturally do sell a good amount of their revenue to pay for power costs to buy more miners.

[00:39:17] Parker Lewis: To achieve equilibrium on top of everything else that the market might need to sell, the market of existing holders, 24 million of new supply. Well, overnight when Bitcoin, in April 2024, when the new supply goes from 6. 25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes on average to 3. 125, That translates to 450 Bitcoin a day, which translates to 12 million of new supply that the miners have, but that if demand, even if it fluctuates some day to day in an equilibrium, say, if demand say, you know, to achieve equilibrium needs to be a 24 million, well, now you have a supply and demand imbalance.

[00:39:52] Parker Lewis: And no one knows how great that gap is relative to the market. But that what has to happen necessarily for all those people that are accumulating to get their Bitcoin is that it has to come from somewhere else that’s not the miners. If they’re trying to accumulate nominal Bitcoin and the market has to bid up the price of Bitcoin in order to get it from existing holders.

[00:40:11] Parker Lewis: One of the things that Paul Tudor Jones pointed out when he was rationalizing his case for buying Bitcoin on the other side said, you know, what I noticed that when the price of Bitcoin went down by 80%. You know, 10 people didn’t sell or something around that order of magnitude. While on the other side, it’s like, well, we’ve seen in past cycles is when the price goes up 10X, it unlocks about 20 percent of Bitcoin.

[00:40:33] Parker Lewis: But what that means is that a 10X move in price was insufficient for 80 percent of the market. You know, and so ultimately my view is the halvening creates a supply and demand imbalance like the droppings in new issued Bitcoin does nothing to the people that are out there in the market saying I need to buy Bitcoin, but what it does create is this certifiable imbalance where the supply that was there yesterday, newly issued Bitcoin is no longer there tomorrow and the market has to figure out just what that imbalances and that’s naturally what inevitably forces the price higher.

[00:41:09] Parker Lewis: Because the market has to bid up the price in order to unlock supply from the existing holder base, which increasingly turned into a long term base.

[00:41:19] Preston Pysh: I love your framing on that. Would you also argue that the low that was put in on this past cycle was lower than what most market participants expected and therefore their conviction and their buying was amplified?

[00:41:36] Parker Lewis: And why we’re seeing so I, I, I do think that that was some, that’s, that was something that personally caught me off guard that, that Bitcoin did trade through its prior all time high. I think that there might have been some, well, to explain that, so like, one of the ways I think about it is that I think that a lot of these failures I mean, it’s like one Bitcoin can do anything and everyone has, I always psychologically prepare myself and I, and I think it’s done me a lot of good over time and I think it will serve everybody that’s getting into Bitcoin and starting to see it as money and why I will preserve purchasing power over time to psychologically prepare for the unexpected.

[00:42:13] Parker Lewis: I have always psychologically prepared for a drawn down of 50 percent in a single day. And then, you know, I always talked about that. Then when you actually live it, you’re like, okay, like, yeah, you’re right. That was worse than I thought it would be, but that it can happen. So it’s like all bets are off, but fundamentals went out in the long run and you better be positioned in a way to survive.

[00:42:34] Parker Lewis: All weathers can’t be caught off sides because you’ll ultimately bear the brunt of it and not get out unscathed. But that what I think happened in this cycle that is different from past cycles was all of the waves of failures. And I think it might be more similar to say, or like, at least the prior cycle, I went, I was not yet involved in Bitcoin when Mt. Gox failed, but I would say that those market events probably have, have distinct effects that maybe were absent in a cycle without a big failure, like what happened in 2017. And so, you know, part of the way I describe it is if, I don’t know, do you know how many Bitcoin blocks I had?

[00:43:13] Preston Pysh: Wasn’t the number like 50, 000 or something like that?

[00:43:17] Parker Lewis: I think it was 50, 000. So FTX was around 70, 000. Celsius was 150, 000. I think BlockFi was 50, 000. That was the number I used in the presentation. It was the one I was like least confident in stating, which is why I asked here. But if you total that up, 240, 000 Bitcoin. I’m not saying that BlockFi, FTX, and Celsius Force sold 100 percent of all their Bitcoin, but we’re talking about hundreds of thousands or 100 to 2000 Bitcoin that was force sold because of institutional failures of a few entities that that depressed the price a lot more than probably was otherwise natural for the cycle.

[00:43:53] Parker Lewis: And there are a lot of people that lost Bitcoin that wake up tomorrow and don’t have it. But that was the market absorbing it in order to absorb that unnatural supply that that became unlocked because institutions that were insolvent were for selling it to try to cover up liabilities. That is what forced its price below its prior all time high, but always anchoring back to the fundamentals is that the market absorbed the liquidity, right?

[00:44:18] Parker Lewis: And that now it’s back at levels prior to all time highs. And so it’s unclear how kind of that impacts, I say, this go forward. I just anchor to the fact that. Fewer than 1 percent of people have any material exposure to Bitcoin and more people are figuring it out because of a perfect storm of the fiat system with maybe, you know, a tightness of this past cycle or kind of a more depressed setup than, than, than would have existed without the massive failures.

[00:44:44] Parker Lewis: And that, that ultimately where we’re, we’re at from a, from a market position is. You know, right back where DeMarco was at in 2016 or 2020 and that, you know, we have four of these cycles and, and humans responding to scarcity the same way. And still a significant imbalance between people that own Bitcoin in a material way versus not to expect that that the quote Bitcoin is priced in when very few people still own Bitcoin, I think it’s like the fundamentals.

[00:45:16] Parker Lewis: Say that people are going to have to, to bid up the price of Bitcoin to get it. So, you know, I hate forecasting on like, what does price do? I just try to explain why more people will demand Bitcoin over time. But I’m certainly conscious and try to explain for people what drives the big swings. And for me, the haveing is a critical one because it’s like in reality the fixed supplies would force every 10 minutes.

[00:45:41] Parker Lewis: That you start to understand when you’re deep down in the Bitcoin rabbit hole, but if you’ve heard this fixed supply of 21 million and then the way that that happens is that the rate of issuance gets halved every four years and then you observe it and you say, Oh, a group of people in D.C. or New York did not get together and do that.

[00:46:00] Parker Lewis: It happened by pure economic force and there’s no way to deviate from it. I just saw it happen. It reinforces for all existing market participants that new supply just got tighter and everyone that was on periphery can see Bitcoin is doing exactly what people told me to do. Not that it was hedging inflation, but that it was enforcing its fixed supply and that that enforcement of the fixed supply is what drives everything.

[00:46:25] Preston Pysh: Just to wrap your head around some of the numbers that he was talking about with the FTX and BlockFi and Celsius, just all those customers that had Bitcoin on deposit, let’s just say roughly the number was a quarter of a million Bitcoin, 250, 000 Bitcoin ish, somewhere in that range.

[00:46:41] Preston Pysh: The inflation rate that, that miners, all this electrical power that’s being poured into the protocol in order to secure it and to verify the transactions. Based on 6. 25 every 10 minutes, it’s about 328, 500 Bitcoin on an annual basis, 328, 000. So you’re almost matching that amount that FTX, BlockFi, and Celsius sold into the market that when they went bankrupt, the Bitcoin weren’t there.

[00:47:13] Preston Pysh: They sold their customers deposits. And that cell pressure took place in this past cycle, just to kind of wrap your head around how significant that is. I think it’s a very significant number. I think it’s a lot bigger amount of cell pressure than people realize that they actually went through and endured if, if you are in this space and have been in the space through the, through the past cycle.

[00:47:35] Parker Lewis: Yeah. And what you also like, when I try to, cause it’s like, think about like the micro example of what happened in that instance. FTX sells a Bitcoin, it has to deliver a Bitcoin to some other counterparty. Somebody had to come up with dollars. And those, imagine, imagine you had one Bitcoin, you were fortunate enough to have one Bitcoin on FTX, you no longer have it.

[00:47:58] Parker Lewis: You thought you had a Bitcoin, you don’t have it. Somebody in the market when Bitcoin was crashing, had to step in and buy that. And the Bitcoin’s no longer at FTX, Bitcoin’s no longer at BlockFi, the Bitcoin’s no longer at Celsius. Again, saving that there’s some residual small percentage of Bitcoin that maybe they didn’t sell and they had to file for bankruptcy before that point but that the market absorbed that. And also the market absorbed it at a time when everybody was fleeing, not to safety, but running for the hills because they were scared that the people with more information, it’s, it’s actually, it’s a lot easier to buy Bitcoin when the price is going up, it’s a lot harder and you have to have by definition, more knowledge to be able to step in with a position of confidence when Bitcoin is falling, like, or dropping like a falling knife.

[00:48:48] Parker Lewis: And the nature of what happened was like the Bitcoin that you thought you had at FTX no longer there. Somebody bought it somewhere else in the market and FTX delivered it. Now the person that thought they had a Bitcoin at FTX no longer does. They’re now not short of Bitcoin in terms of having borrowed it and sold it, but like they thought they had a Bitcoin and they don’t.

[00:49:06] Parker Lewis: So if they want to get another Bitcoin, they’re going to have to go back into the market. and buy more. But that’s the other side of it, that there’s 200, 000 ish worth of Bitcoin. Those are people that had made the decision or thought they had Bitcoin that now don’t. They’re now in a deficit and they need to accumulate.

[00:49:20] Parker Lewis: But at the same time, the market of people that had more information rather than less were stepping in to accumulate forced deleveraging from the institutions. And that I think did inevitably have an impact on the last cycle pot, probably shortening kind of the rise, but then also exacerbating the volatility on the downside.

[00:49:41] Parker Lewis: So it is important to be conscious of the big things that cause swings to then be able to find the signal through the noise, right? Because it’s like, if you are not in a position to understand over the longterm, why the world is shifting to Bitcoin as a new form of money, trying to fit all the different moving pieces of the world around it.

[00:50:02] Parker Lewis: Rather than having a strong anchor point, it’s 21 fixed supply, the thing that’s going to drive all demand, or already does, but, but it will increasingly, you’re like like I, I, I’ve never figured out the perfect analogy, but it’s like a, a sea that’s, or a boat at sea that’s lost its anchor in a violent storm that’s just whipping around.

[00:50:19] Parker Lewis: You don’t know what directions north or south. that you don’t, you don’t have an anchor point to be able to evaluate anything. Once you have that anchor point of the longterm fundamental, then you can start looking at the halvening event or large institutions failing and being able to fit it around what might be causing larger or directional market shifts.

[00:50:41] Preston Pysh: You know, I have to throw this up here because you were saying that to step into that market and buy that Bitcoin, you had to have increased knowledge or more knowledge. And so you were over here on the right side of this bell curve that I’m displaying. But I would also argue, Parker, we had the less than 80 IQ folks stepping in and buying the hell out of that market when it was crazy. I’m just, I’m joking.

[00:51:03] Parker Lewis: One of the other things I do say is that Bitcoin is a common sense test, right? Yes. Because. It’s like people who try to overanalyze, overthink it, try to zero in on trying to find the one thing that’s broken about Bitcoin or the why, you know, everything falls apart that that can be their own worst enemy, right?

[00:51:26] Parker Lewis: And that that’s that I think that’s that part of the mean, but it’s like Bitcoin’s IQ test. You can tell certain people say, Hey, look, they’re printing a lot of money. You know it. Food at the grocery store is getting more expensive because they’re printing a lot of money and there’s only ever going to be 21 million Bitcoin and they’re like, okay, that’s, that is it.

[00:51:42] Parker Lewis: Yeah. And then they’re also on that other end of the knowledge distribution curve. They’ve made it there. Like it doesn’t have to be like the, the rocket scientists being like, ah, you know, this is money. That it’s, I would say it’s a, Bitcoin is an equal opportunity mind bender. Someone like Jack Dorsey can get it, but he didn’t get it because he’s a billionaire.

[00:52:00] Parker Lewis: Someone like Elon Musk cannot, but he does not get it because he’s a billionaire. It’s that we’re staring at a problem that virtually every living human being has never consciously considered. And it’s not that it’s super complicated. It’s just that it’s hard to see. And that, you know, once people key in on the fundamental, once they tie it to that, I, yeah, I do have a problem and I can see how this big thing Bitcoin is related to it.

[00:52:25] Parker Lewis: Then they can start to make sense of what’s otherwise a chaotic world and otherwise unexplainable. But the other. One thing that it made me think of, and you know, we can talk about it as answers is that, that I, you know, kind of the thought that I put out of why they’re always going to have to print more money, you know, because part of it is when Bitcoin’s going up in value or quote, you know, or going up in price, increasing and purchasing power going down, vice versa.

[00:52:53] Parker Lewis: If someone, again, is just looking at Bitcoin in a vacuum of like 21 million fixed supply and trying to make sense of it. But they don’t tie it to the problem of printing money and they’re still at this point because I’ve gotten this comment a lot. It’s like, well, how do you know they’re going to print more?

[00:53:08] Parker Lewis: Like, I get kind of that they’ve printed a lot, but how do you know that they’re going to print more and the part of that presentation that I keyed in on that, like when I’m sitting there in these volatile times, not knowing truthfully what’s going to happen in Bitcoin on a day to day basis or month to month basis.

[00:53:25] Parker Lewis: Other than knowing that over time people are going to have to adopt it, it is the 21 million fixed supply on one side, but on the other side, it’s this relationship between the U. S. credit system, which can be a kind of analog to the global credit system. I use the U. S. because it’s the largest. It’s on the order of magnitude of 25 to 30 percent of the entire world’s credit system added together.

[00:53:48] Parker Lewis: But that where we exist in the world is in the U. S. is 96 trillion of debt. And that’s very vanilla debt where it’s like auto loans, mortgages, student loans, credit card debt, corporate debt, both financial and non financial, state, local, federal debt. But just. Like this amount of money is due at this point in time, and there’s an interest rate on it.

[00:54:10] Parker Lewis: It doesn’t include derivatives and it doesn’t include unfunded pension liabilities. And it’s a number that the Federal Reserve puts out and they, they put it out quarterly. That number today, or kind of stepping back at the financial crisis was 52 trillion. At that time, there was just under a trillion dollars in the system, 900 billion.

[00:54:29] Parker Lewis: The banks had about 350 billion of it. So the financial system was leveraged over 150 to one. They put the money in to be able to save the credit system to prevent collapse. Then they try to take the money out later, but the money that they put in caused the credit system to expand massively. And so prior to 2020, when they put the 3.

[00:54:48] Parker Lewis: 6 trillion in after the financial crisis in 2008, that had caused the credit system to grow from 53 trillion to 76 trillion or 75 trillion. Where we’re at today, after they inserted 5 trillion between 2020 and 2022, or really the fall of 2019. Now that credit system has grown from mid 70 trillion to 96 trillion, and so now there’s 96 trillion of debt in the system, and quote, only 8 trillion.

[00:55:15] Parker Lewis: So even though they’ve printed a massive amount of money that is causing wreckage and inflation, They’re still in a position where they’re ever going to have to print more money because as we see right now, as they’ve tried to raise interest rates, one, it’s not reducing inflation of food and energy for fundamental reasons, but then two, all that it necessitates is in the future that they’re going to have to put all that money back in and more, otherwise the credit system would collapse because at a world where we sit today, a credit system in the U S of 96 trillion in debt and only 8 trillion dollars. Each dollar is leveraged 12 to one. So for every dollar that exists, it’s owed 12 times over. And as the fed quote, tries to tighten, everyone figures out the dollars or the world is far more than a dollar short. And the credit system starts to contract initially, and then ultimately starts to accelerate to a collapse.

[00:56:13] Parker Lewis: And the only way to avoid the collapse, the credit system, which is how the entire system works is on credit. Is by printing money and going out and buying financial instruments to prop up asset prices to sustain existing debt levels. And so it’s like my world when I’m looking at the price of Bitcoin and the impact of the halvening, all of that, or the failures of financial institutions, I bring it up now because it’s like, it’s all anchored by those are things in the middle, creating kind of short term volatility and chaos.

[00:56:42] Parker Lewis: And the thing on the book ends that are driving everything are six supply, 21 million, a world in debt, and they’re going to have to print more money than they ever had before. And those two things on the book end are related. And this thing, Bitcoin fixes, not just the problem of debt, but the money printing that the debt problem induces.

[00:57:02] Preston Pysh: Parker, you’re working on a book that I think has one of the coolest titles I’ve ever heard, which is Gradually Then Suddenly. What are you trying to accomplish with this real simply for people and when and when is it coming out?

[00:57:15] Parker Lewis: It’s officially at the printers. So I got a figure I got to figure out how many weeks It will take to actually have the prints in my hands, but I would hope in three weeks Okay for but before Christmas I’ll hope for sooner, but you know, just the covers done, the books done, the printing specs are done.

[00:57:35] Parker Lewis: It just has to be printed and there’s a cue at the printer.

[00:57:38] Preston Pysh: Give us the premise. So you just laying it out for, from an educational standpoint to kind of cover a lot of the things that we just talked about so that it makes it more accessible for folks or what was kind of your main intention with it?

[00:57:50] Parker Lewis: Yeah, I mean, my main intention is to help more people come to an intuitive understanding of Bitcoin as money. So, the title is Gratitude and suddenly the subtitle is a framework for understanding Bitcoin as money. I will always recommend that people first read the Bitcoin Standard. It was formative for me.

[00:58:08] Parker Lewis: But I also designed this to be a zero to one guide. It’s not designed for somebody that is super casual that thinks Bitcoin is money. If they read the Dummies Guide to Bitcoin, that they’re going to figure it out. Like I, I lay out that, that bitcoin’s hard to see, but, but impossible to unsee once the picture starts to become into focus.

[00:58:29] Parker Lewis: But if someone’s self-motivated and been staring at this equation for a long time and it just has never added up. But that they’re curious and they want to understand and want to understand Bitcoin at an intuitive level. That is what this is designed to be that I don’t know if it’s going to necessarily be a book for the masses, but it’s kind of more of a rifle shot approach to get somebody very deep beyond a cursory understanding to kind of start to be able to explain rationally to themselves how we could go from today of Bitcoin being a nascent but volatile store of value to a stable form of money that’s everything’s priced in Bitcoin and Bitcoin’s facilitating virtually all the world’s trade in day to day commerce and Bitcoin’s a global reserve currency. That anybody that wants to understand that has to be intentional.

[00:59:18] Parker Lewis: And that it really, yeah, to be that zero to one guy, what I kind of framed it after was my series called Graduates and Suddenly that I wrote online over the course of 2019 to 2021. There were 16 essays as part of that series. Each one of those is basically has a chapter and I’ve refined them to be more polished, more timeless, but to maintain the substance, to not veer, you know, to, you know, basically maintaining the historical record of those, but then I’ve organized them to be more linear and to be more kind of knit together, but also to preserve the historical context because a lot of them were written in the periods before and then just after this last latest episode of, of Unlimited QE.

[01:00:04] Parker Lewis: That happened from 2019, 2020, 2021, and so the time period in which I wrote a lot of the original bulk of my work, the historical context was very relevant to it, and that kind of passage of time helps reinforce the argument, so it’s kind of capturing the same spirit of the series as I wrote it back in the day, which is that each chapter is both meant to be part of a comprehensive framework, But then each chapter can also be read as a standalone.

[01:00:32] Parker Lewis: So there’s a section on the fundamentals. There’s a session on common misconceptions, and then there’s a section on Bitcoin versus the dollar. So I kind of, you know, zero to one Bitcoin. Then things like, well, if you are particularly struggling with why Bitcoin’s too volatile to be money, why Bitcoin’s not too volatile, why it’s not too slow, why it’s not for criminals, why it can’t be banned, all the, all the, I think the most common questions, there’s that common misconceptions.

[01:00:59] Parker Lewis: Section and then Bitcoin versus the dollar is one where I kind of explain more of my thesis or not really a thesis, but just the fundamental economic reality as to why they are always going to have to print more money, but also why it’s a problem and why it’s a bigger problem than most people understand on the surface for that reason that oftentimes people can’t come to understand Bitcoin in a vacuum, they’ve got to understand it in relation to a problem that it’s solving for them and that it’s a problem that they have.

[01:01:25] Parker Lewis: So it’s really kind of architected off of the same series that I’ve written, but refined quite a bit and better knitted together, better structured to be able to ship off to somebody. And, you know, that that’s self motivated that wants to be able to see what they haven’t been able to see before.

[01:01:39] Preston Pysh: I got another thing. I have another thing here to highlight that you’re working on because you just work, you’re, you’re building. We’re in a, we were in a bear market. We’re coming out of the bear market. You were building Zaprite. Talk to us about Zaprite. What is this? You did, you’re doing this with Will Cole, right?

[01:01:56] Parker Lewis: Yeah. And John McGill, he’s actually the founder.

[01:01:58] Parker Lewis: So we joined John. Zaprite is still at a very early stage, but we’ve got great product and market. It’s focused on Bitcoin payments. Okay. And oftentimes when people hear. I’ll give you a little bit of the backstory, but before I do that, when people hear Bitcoin payments, they think, Oh, this is a lightning company.

[01:02:15] Parker Lewis: Realistically, what we are focused on is enabling businesses to accept Bitcoin as payment. And we’re focused on two early use cases of Bitcoin payments. One is invoicing such that like Preston, you, if you are invoicing advertisers for advertising, to be able to issue a business invoice with all the business contexts.

[01:02:34] Parker Lewis: To bill somebody and then to be able to receive Bitcoin as payment either on chain lightning, Importantly, both non custodial or custodial zapper rate is not a payment processor. We’re enabling businesses and facilitating Bitcoin. They’re businesses, not Bitcoin businesses, some Bitcoin businesses, but any business.

[01:02:53] Parker Lewis: That wants to receive Bitcoin as payment. With that application of business invoicing as well as e commerce. So, it could be someone like yourself, issuing invoices and wanting to be paid in Bitcoin. Another key feature of Zaprite is that we allow for fiat payments side by side with Bitcoin payments.

[01:03:09] Parker Lewis: Again, Zaprite isn’t a payment processor. We enable people to connect methods of payment, like on chain Bitcoin wallets, like a you know, a cold card ledger Tresor V and X pub or an unchained vault, or they could connect something like a strike account. But then also they could connect like a stripe with a P account.

[01:03:27] Parker Lewis: So they can receive credit card payments. One of the ways part of our vision of businesses accepting Bitcoin as payment is not that somebody goes from zero to one. You know, one day I was a hundred percent receiving fiat payments. And then tomorrow I’m receiving a hundred percent Bitcoin payments. It’s that it will be a shift in that you start by giving your customers an option side by side.

[01:03:47] Parker Lewis: Do you want to pay Bitcoin on Chain or Lightning? Do you want to pay in fiat? Our whole kind of premise is you bring your wallet. You don’t need to accept our counterparty risk as a company. What we are specializing and facilitating is the actual payment itself. And again, focusing on the contract services on the invoicing side.

[01:04:08] Parker Lewis: So podcasting you know lawyers, contractors software developers that, that are doing contract work or on the e commerce side, small businesses that are selling goods and services online. And that we importantly focus on noncustodial because we think most of the people that are at the point where they want to receive Bitcoin payments.

[01:04:29] Parker Lewis: are minded to hold their own keys, but we’re also not opinionated about. We accept that people are going to receive Bitcoin in the way that best fits their needs, and that will be both custodial and non custodial, but a core of Zapwrite is being able to enable direct to non custodial payments for Bitcoin.

[01:04:47] Parker Lewis: And really what got me focused on this or more focused on it to the point of wanting to dive in and all the time that I spend outside of giving a presentation here or there on the fundamentals of Bitcoin or working on my book is all going to zap right. And, you know, for the last four years, Will and I worked on Bitcoin custody, which I think is critical.

[01:05:06] Parker Lewis: We worked on chain, helped grow and chain from very early stage to more developed stage. And still a client of Unchained, worked down the hall from Unchained, extremely close. I’m generally speaking to somebody from Unchained every day. I like to think about the custody problem. If money is a store of value, then you need a good form of custody.

[01:05:26] Parker Lewis: And I talk about this too in the Bitcoin is Not a Hedge presentation. It’s that if Bitcoin went from 1, 000 to 27, 000, in between there it went from 69, 000 to 16, 000, and now it’s at 35, 000. But if you put your Bitcoin in FTX, and lost it, the bitcoin went from 1000 to 35000 to store purchasing power for you.

[01:05:45] Parker Lewis: No, it didn’t. You lost your purchasing power by making a bad decision. Not because Bitcoin didn’t store value but because you did the wrong thing with it. So, I think of custody, like in order for something to be a long term store of value, you need to be able to reasonably able to hold that. with knowing that you’re not going to lose it.

[01:06:03] Parker Lewis: And that was really the problem that we focused on at Unchain and continue to support and focus on. When we had the slew of bank failures earlier this year, like one, it was twofold. When I was working on my book, I wanted to accept Bitcoin payments actually for the blog posts. Bitcoin is not a hedge. And what I thought should exist for Bitcoin payments to be able to easily set up a website.

[01:06:25] Parker Lewis: Drop in an X pub connect a lightning wallet without having to to have an onerous onboarding process and then have that experience be custodial Or on the other side of the spectrum not wanting to run my own server But but have someone just be like hey provide me the front end to accept a Bitcoin payment and make the Bitcoin payment Go where I want where I wanted to, that didn’t exist as easily as I thought should.

[01:06:47] Parker Lewis: And then, so I was already minded to thinking about this problem, like why doesn’t, why is it not easier to receive Bitcoin payments in a non custodial way, but without me running a server. And also that’s not a dig at BTC Pay, because I do use BTC Pay, it just wasn’t what I needed for this particular application.

[01:07:03] Parker Lewis: And also what I think a lot of people want, but, but then the other side of it that really sharpened my kind of interest in Zapwrite and working on Bitcoin payments. was when Silicon Valley Bank failed and there was a slew of other bank failures, and there’s going to be more bank failures to come, that when, you know, when Silicon Valley Bank failed and there was a 160 billion deposit taking institution and it virtually failed overnight.

[01:07:27] Parker Lewis: You know, a lot of what the commercial companies that were working with Silicon Valley Bank were thinking about was how am I going to make payroll on Monday and that you think very first about your savings that’s in the bank, and that becomes a balance sheet problem. Now, ultimately, Silicon Valley Bank was bailed out, predictably.

[01:07:48] Parker Lewis: It was pretty comicaI, seeing the likes of Bill Ackman and Jason Kaukanis and any very wealthy individual that was claiming for bailouts for wealthy people that had all their money at Silicon Valley Bank and I also, someone who’s like, it was very predictable they were going to get bailed out, certainly.

[01:08:05] Parker Lewis: That’s almost beside the point. But when that bank failed, everyone was supposed to focus on what, how am I going to make payroll? And is my money at the bank? Well, certainly the money is not a bank, but the other side of it is, is that the banks are a choke point, not in like a censorship way, but they’re also the way that every business receives payments.

[01:08:24] Parker Lewis: So it’s not just a balance sheet problem. The decision to own Bitcoin is principally one of a balance sheet. It’s personal savings or savings of a corporation to hold working capital, but you also need a mechanism to be able to charge customers and receive revenue. And the bank is also a single point of failure in that world.

[01:08:44] Parker Lewis: And that anybody that’s run a small business, I mean, I’ve dealt with this and getting my entity set up for my book. You know, dealt with it was Zepp right to get bank accounts set up to actually get the rail set up on the FIAT site. It, it’s not only onerous and costly because they take three to 4 percent of payments, but their counterparty risk exposes you on the revenue side of the way that you receive payment.

[01:09:05] Parker Lewis: And so when those banks failed, I, it just sharpened my lens through which I looked at the world and said, the trains coming off the tracks. in a bigger way than before and in a seemingly accelerating way. And I did a podcast with Marty where we talked about before I formally started working on ZapWrite, but it’s like people need to start thinking about building infrastructure that they would build if the U. S. banking system was not there as a backup. If they didn’t have access to that, what infrastructure would you build in that world? And that’s ultimately what made me say, hey, working on Bitcoin payments and helping Bitcoin businesses or any business or any individual contractor that wants to get set up in a way, in a seamless way to accept Bitcoin payments.

[01:09:54] Parker Lewis: They need to start doing that and building in the redundancy because Bitcoin helps protect their balance sheet, especially if they hold their own keys. And hold it without counterparty risk not that they necessarily have to do that, but if banks become unreliable and the banks are the central point by which companies receive their revenue, setting aside the costs associated, that if those, if those banking rails become less reliable, which they, they already are, but will become increasingly.

[01:10:22] Parker Lewis: That now is the time in a more real way for business after business to make the conscious decision. And it really starts with the business owner to say, I’m going to build, I’m going to invest in this redundancy before I absolutely have to, because if I wait till it’s absolutely necessary, I’ve waited too long, same reality for buying Bitcoin.

[01:10:41] Parker Lewis: And that’s what we’re trying to do at Zaprite is make it really easy, lower the bar, hopefully help grow the market of businesses receiving Bitcoin. You know, not to be competitive with everybody else that’s already in this space, but to help grow the space to, to, to grow the pie and expand the reach of Bitcoin payments, 10X, 100X, The world’s going that way.

[01:11:01] Parker Lewis: We just want to help accelerate it and help usher in and provide greater security to businesses to both have rails to receive payments. In addition, just to having the currency as a means to store wealth.

[01:11:14] Preston Pysh: I love it. We’ll have links in the show notes for folks listening. Zaprite was the company and then obviously the book.

[01:11:22] Preston Pysh: Christmas coming up gradually, then suddenly. Parker, is there a landing page for the book yet? Or do people just search on Amazon if they’re listening to this in a couple of weeks from now?

[01:11:32] Parker Lewis: So, what I would say is follow me on Twitter, @parkeralewis. I’m trying to get off Twitter, but with a book release, it’s proven to be harder.

[01:11:39] Parker Lewis: They can also monitor my blog or like sign up for my blog gradually then suddenly dot x, y, z. I’m going to be putting information out there. I’ll be making an announcement there and on Twitter and where the book will be for sale in the next couple weeks. And then yeah, I’m going to, I’m going to be selling you personally on using Zapwrite Preston, just as a side.

[01:11:59] Parker Lewis: So we’ll follow up about that, but yeah, Twitter, @parkeralewis, the blog gradually then suddenly. XYZ. And then also if you would drop the presentation, Bitcoin is not a hedge into the show notes. Oh, okay. Yeah. People are interested in that. I’d love for them to be able to, they could probably just YouTube it.

[01:12:17] Parker Lewis: But but if you could include that, that’d be awesome.

[01:12:21] Preston Pysh: Okay. We’ll have all that into the show notes. Parker, thank you so much for making time. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you. I learned a ton and love having you here.

[01:12:30] Parker Lewis: All right. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

[01:12:31] Preston Pysh: All right. See you.

[01:12:33] Preston Pysh: 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.

[01:12:57] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

[01:13:07] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. To access our show notes, courses, or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permissions must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.