Preston Pysh (00:03:09):
When I think about this, why haven’t we been doing Discrete Log Contracts, DLCs, since the beginning? Because you guys are doing this on the base layer of Bitcoin right now, correct?

Ben Carman (00:03:20):
Yeah, yeah, it’s all doable today basically because, I mean, the paper for it came out in 2017, by Tadge Dryja, [inaudible 00:03:28] before then. And afterwards, I was really happy to do beforehand and there was no real interest on doing it. In the last year or two, there’s been a lot of elements in the cryptography side to allow us to be able to do today. Previously, we thought we would need more signatures to do the clean model of it, but there was a way to figure out where we could do it on today’s base chain without a new software, it makes it a lot cleaner to do.

Preston Pysh (00:03:55):
Who discovered this? It sounds like it was a discovery within just the last couple years then.

Ben Carman (00:04:00):[inaudible 00:04:00], he’s a square crypto grant. He’s one of the big guys that wrote a paper called One-Time Verifiable Encryption, which basically lets you do adapter signatures or encrypted signatures basically on a ECDSA Signatures, which is what everyone uses today. Previously, it was thought that those are only really doable with Noor. Now that they figured out how to do it, we’re able to do this stuff.

Pierre Rochard (00:04:24):
I’d also add that Tadge, who wrote the Discrete Log Contracts paper, also was one of the coauthors on the Lightning paper. So I feel like two of the most advanced new ways of using Bitcoin have been at least partially formed by the same mind.

Preston Pysh (00:04:42):
That’s unbelievable.

Ben Carman (00:04:44):
He’s a smart guy.

Preston Pysh (00:04:46):
If I’m an Ethereum person or somebody else who’s doing smart contracts on another protocol, what would they say to you in this conversation right now? Because I’m sure they’re very skeptical of this being able to scale, they’ve got tons of arguments. What would their argument against this being able to scale be?

Pierre Rochard (00:05:03):
Well, so first of all, they don’t know about this stuff for the most part, so you’d first get a blank stare. They’re just not familiar with it. That’s why we’re doing this podcast, to help move education along. The second is that to them, this is uncontroversial, I think, is that they would see what a Discrete Log Contract can do and what price oracles can do as being only two of the possible of the many other things that you could do on Ethereum.

Pierre Rochard (00:05:33):
And so, because they have lots of other things going on, they might argue that what we’re talking about is insufficient to build an advanced, decentralized financial system or to put artwork on the blockchain or other use cases. And so, we get into the argument of scalability and if we look at the gas fees on Ethereum, which is the equivalent transaction fees on Bitcoin, they have skyrocketed because their platform is so amenable to usage for applications and combined with architected in such an unscalable manner that now their fees are skyrocketing and show no sign of abating. Whereas the approach that the Bitcoin core developers and most of the Bitcoin protocol developers have taken with scaling is let’s focus on making it as efficient as possible so that when applications do become popular on it, then it doesn’t create as big of an issue. Now, we don’t know yet because Discrete Log Contracts on Bitcoin have not taken off yet, but I think they will relatively soon, but I’ll let Ben speak to that.

Ben Carman (00:06:47):
I think you’re hitting a lot of good points. The way these other systems are designed is to make spinning up new contracts really simple to do or you spend a day writing a solidity contract that’s basically like JavaScript, and you can deploy it, and now you’re done and everyone can use it, versus with DLCs, it’s a lot more private and scalable where if we’re doing a bet, it’s just me and Pierre, contracting this between off-chain, all of our execution last week is off the chain. So someone can’t just write this for us. You need software and then we have to communicate with each other and do all this verification and stuff individually ourselves. This makes it, on the user side, they’re doing all their verification themselves versus just trusting the blockchain to do it for them.

Ben Carman (00:07:28):
So it makes it a lot harder to build initially because we’ve been working on this stuff for like a year or two and don’t have these very nice feature projects versus today, they can spin up Uniswap and SushiSwap in a couple months and get a ton of money going through it because they seem to initially make their JavaScript program and just put it on the blockchain and everything else is done for them.

Preston Pysh (00:07:49):
So it’s really a user interface issue today as far as getting this to grow because it’s not an easy task to really implement this onto the blockchain. But give it, let’s say, three years, five years from now, I’m assuming both of you see this as an up and rising use case where people are using the blockchain, the Bitcoin first layer blockchain in order to have a bunch of smart contracts.

Ben Carman (00:08:15):
Well, I think it’s akin to Lightning where beginning of 2018, the Lightning Network first launched, it was like 10 nodes, and you had these CLI, compile-it-yourself menus, really hard to do. Now you can download four different apps on your iPhone and run a Lightning node on your phone. Just scan a QR code and go. It’s really simple. I think DLCs will be like that in the future where today, they have really ugly gooeys and it’s slow to do sometimes, but in the future, this stuff, they’ll optimized, roughly done. We have more money in this thing or people working on it, actually hire some designers to make the gooeys for us, then there’ll be [inaudible 00:08:52] use it or something.

Preston Pysh (00:08:53):
Now I’m curious, will this scale into the Lightning network? So could you run DLCs on Lightning?

Ben Carman (00:09:00):
Yeah, it’s actually almost usable on any system that Bitcoin uses. All it requires is a multisig and signatures, which basically any cryptograph will natively support automatically. Use it on Lightning, use it on Liquid. You can use it on Reuben Swanson’s crazy state chains things. You can use it on almost anything, but we use the [inaudible 00:09:21]. I guess there’s basically a million blogs about everything DLCs. We have five different blog posts on how to do it different ways on Lightning.

Preston Pysh (00:09:31):
Wow. Okay. The reason why I think that this is such a big deal on Lightning is because your fees are pretty much non-existent. You have immediate settlement as far as the transaction, whenever the Oracle would say that the event, whatever, has occurred, then you’ll receive the payment immediately. I’m sure people that are listening to this are probably saying, “Well, what in the world is an Oracle,” and how do they work when you’re talking about DLC? Pierre, take the first part there as far as talking about what an Oracle is, why it’s important, and then you can cover the other part there too as well, Ben.

Pierre Rochard (00:10:05):
The Oracle or the Oracles are what connect the blockchain and the settlement of that contract with the outside world because inside of Bitcoin, you only have access to a certain amount of verifiable data. So when you’re doing the Bitcoin mining, and the nonces, and verifying transactions like that, there’s only so much external data coming in and the only way to have external data that’s completely unrelated to Bitcoin come in is to have someone make a cryptographic signature attesting to that data.

Pierre Rochard (00:10:43):
And so, mechanically what happens is that somebody who wants to enter into a contract goes to an Oracle and asks the Oracle, “Hey, will you, in the future, resolve this contract by attesting to a certain event?” And then the Oracle says, “Yeah, sure, okay, I’ll be around.” So here is a cryptographic token that then you can bake into your contract and then you enter into the contract, you put it onto the Bitcoin blockchain. Six months later, you come back to the Oracle and you say, “Hey, I need this piece of data here to resolve the contract,” whatever the conditions are. It could be any number of different payout conditions attached to it and then the Oracle would take, maybe it’s Bitcoin’s price, $60,000 using their private key, then the contract participants would be able to use that signature in order to spend the Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:11:40):
so Ben, I’m looking at a site that you sent me before we had this conversation, that’s called Suredbits, an in here, I see a bunch of descriptions of contracts and I’m assuming that these are real contracts that are DLCs on the base layer of Bitcoin. Is that correct?

Ben Carman (00:11:57):
Yeah. That’s status not new. It’s what we call an Oracle Explorer. Basically, anyone can be an Oracle and say you want to test events, like something I was doing or saying, does Taproot activate in 2020? I put that into my software, give it two options, yes or no, and it gave me an announcement. This announcement any user can enter into the DLC software to negotiate a contract based on what I’m going to say if Taproot will activate in 2021. And then eventually, at the end of the year, if Taproot’s activated, I’ll sign yes, if it hasn’t, I’ll sign no. I’ll enter in my signatures onto the site and then you just pull it from this site and finish and close the contract. And the really nice thing about this is I don’t know who’s actually using me as an Oracle. I’m just putting signatures out there, but I have no liability to them and they have no liability to me, so some are private that way.

Preston Pysh (00:12:49):
So in the future, what you’re suspecting is that instead of it being you that’s authenticating yes or no or whatever the outcome is, you’re going to, let’s say, Coinbase and Coinbase is constantly streaming what the price of Bitcoin is or whatever. And so then that database of let’s just call it Coinbase and what they are streaming as events is something that the contract owners would basically assign an address so that that information could be captured. Walk us through how that sequence of events would occur.

Ben Carman (00:13:21):
We want to draw our future’s contract on the Bitcoin price and Coinbase on Oracle, most likely save Coinbase has been Oracle, [inaudible 00:13:28] enterprise every day or something. Let’s say, okay, they’re going to test it a week from now, on Friday. We’ll grab their announcement or their plan Friday signature, put that into our contract, we’ll say how much we’re betting and then create a curve of what our payouts are based on whatever they sign. If it’s 50,000, maybe I get all the money, 200,000. You get all the money, the curve between, baseline 75, 50 split or whatever.

Ben Carman (00:13:53):
And then we’ll create a contract, broadcast transaction, now we’re locked into it once that’s confirmed. And then at the end of the week, price stays at 100K. I think you’re wanting the money, so now, we take this point baseball, sign the price 100K, we’ll put that into our DLC software, again, sign the transaction. Now we have a valid closing transaction that sends all the money to you and then we’re done. We never even needed to actually interact with Coinbase, we just need to get the announcement and the signatures just from anywhere and they don’t need to know that we actually use them, which is really nice.

Preston Pysh (00:14:24):
So Pierre, when I’m thinking about this, there’s a token called LINK that is an Oracle token. I think people who would own LINK would make the argument that it has value because you’re consuming resources in order to go and fetch this information. And when I’m thinking about what was just described, I’m trying to understand why something like LINK would not be required and why a coin base would be propagating data that could be used for this. What is their incentive in order to propagate this data that then would be used in these smart contracts? It seems to me like there’s something missing there, like an incentive that’s missing there.

Pierre Rochard (00:15:05):
The difference with a system like LINK is that this is happening off-chain, right. And so it’s not like the data provider is broadcasting it out to the world on a blockchain, they can be broadcasting out to the world via any medium. They could be tweeting it out while also putting it up on their website and putting it up on the Suredbits website or-

Preston Pysh (00:15:28):
Just like trading view.

Pierre Rochard (00:15:30):
Yeah, exactly. So because they are using their private key, you would be able to make sure that you are always getting the verified valid data for that data provider. Their incentive could be a range of different parts. So for one, if you are a data provider who has a… that data is coming from, let’s say, your spot trading platform and you want market participants who might, for example, be doing a some arbitrage between spot and futures, it would make sense for them to do that arbitrage on your platform if you’re the one providing the data because then that avoids any issues of having a difference between the Oracle price and the market that you’re operating in price.

Pierre Rochard (00:16:19):
But really, I think that the incentives, and this is something that Suredbits has worked on as well, is thinking about how can we have people pay for Oracle’s through Lightning micro payments. And so that way, you would be buying the data in a very granular way and well, it’s a permissionless way as well because you’re just paying up cash, you don’t have to get into some weird, extenuated relationship with the data provider.

Preston Pysh (00:16:51):
And so that would be when the contract is written, both parties would agree to whatever that streamed cost would be for the data that’s coming from the Oracle, is that correct?

Ben Carman (00:17:02):
Yeah. I mean, we expect the cost of running an Oracle is almost zero. You’re just putting out like maybe a kilobyte of data a day, even that. So it’s really nothing. Say like Coinbase again is being in Oracle, they get charged one cent worth of [inaudible 00:17:14] for satoshis. There’s basically nothing to pay for it and you’re probably betting more than that, so it’s always going to be worth it.

Preston Pysh (00:17:21):
And your opinion is because the data is so readily available, it’s going to be a commoditized thing from their vantage point of what they’re charging. Correct?

Ben Carman (00:17:30):
Yeah, and also it is so cheap to be an Oracle. It could just be like me or some random Twitter plug that’s being an Oracle and I could undercut Coinbase’s cost pretty easily because I know I spent five minutes a day doing it. As long as it’s just any random person without the reputation of testing to the correct things, they can be in Oracle.

Pierre Rochard (00:17:50):
I was just going to mention that in this specific case of these exchanges, they have public price feeds. And so anyone with a reputation could come in and, as Ben said, start plugging into their price feed, do their job for them if they won’t do it.

Preston Pysh (00:18:06):
Let’s say that the price feed goes bad, you could have, in the contract, as it gets written, you could say, “Hey, if this one is not producing any data, the fallback would be this one.” I’m assuming that something like that could be stipulated.

Ben Carman (00:18:18):
This is something we’ll actually have a blog post going out relatively soon where you can use multiple Oracles in your contracts. So you could say I needed Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfinex, and Bitstamp to be my Oracle, three of them are similar prices will execute. If you have zero through a million, then we’ll be screwed. But as long as you have whatever parameters you want to, be it like three of five, two of three, 66 of 100, wherever you want.

Preston Pysh (00:18:43):
Pierre, you see, and I’m putting words in your mouth here, so correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that you find the Link to be a worthless token based on everything you’re saying here today?

Pierre Rochard (00:18:55):
Well, the premise of it is good, but the problem is in the execution of it because ultimately, what they’re doing is unscalable relative to the off-chain way of doing it. There’s an infinite amount of data and of different things that one could attest to in the world and so I don’t think that it makes sense to put it all on-chain and to have a fire hose like that. And I also think that in terms of liquidity, it makes more sense to have both the outcome of the contract, how the Bitcoin get divvied up. Basically, it’s a Bitcoin settled contract and it makes sense to me that the Oracle get paid in Bitcoin via Lightning and that it would all be Bitcoin denominated for monetary reasons because we don’t like barter and having to deal with random exchange rates when really, they’re contrived and they add friction to the overall process.

Preston Pysh (00:20:00):
It seems to me like this would be something that’s really going to take root on the Lightning Network opposed to on-chain like Ben’s demonstrating right now.

Ben Carman (00:20:10):
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think we’ve had the Mempool clear in three months and fees are getting pretty expensive. So yeah, I think, eventually, the average usual will be priced out of the main chain, which is expected. And yeah, these things will be with Lightning and luckily, people are working on things like that. It’ll take a few years but yeah, that will be really nice to have on-chain because then you can also do really fast stuff where you’re closing a contract every few seconds and you’re still never paying for that.

Preston Pysh (00:20:37):
I remember, I think it was back in 2017, that Root Stock came out with their big announcement that they’re going to try to do smart contracts on Bitcoin. I lost track of this project. I’m just curious whether this makes that whole thing obsolete.

Pierre Rochard (00:20:55):
So they are I think still, and this is also the case with a project called RGB and Liquid also to an extent, of building a secondary layer where you can have non-Bitcoin tokens and then with various levels of programmability around those tokens. To me, I’m not super excited about projects like that and I haven’t really gravitated towards them like I have towards DLCs because the way I see it is that DLCs are, first of all, not creating their own token and also, they are economically useful in the sense of risk transfer and that’s something I’ve always been interested in. When I was an intern at Deloitte, I was auditing oil and gas derivatives contracts and so this is a world that I’m very interested in and seeing it intersect with Bitcoin was really interesting. But these other projects are looking at ways of… I mentioned DLCs are Bitcoin settled, these other projects would have other tokens involved in the issuance or transfer and that part, I’m not as excited about. We can get into why I’m not excited about it, but that’s a whole other can of worms.

Preston Pysh (00:22:14):
Well, when I talked with Samson Mao, he was creating a new game. They were going to issue tokens that the tokens were going to be part of the game itself. He went through all the proper filings for basically an IPO with these tokens. I think in that regard, to me, it makes a whole lot of sense that that’s how the future of equity issuance will go on something like Liquid. But it seems like the DLCs that were talking about are much more derivative in that their contracts, like you said, are denominated in satoshis and using that as the base layer.

Preston Pysh (00:22:53):
When I think about what’s happening on Ethereum, what’s happening on any other protocol that’s trying to do smart contracts, there’s a aspect of tokens, the issuance and creating of new tokens, and then there’s really just smart contract vehicles. Is there another third or fourth thing that’s really taking place there? Because the NFTs, non-fungible tokens, are just similar to token issuance. What else am I missing other than smart contracts and token issuance?

Ben Carman (00:23:22):
DLC doesn’t exactly compete with this. Like I said earlier, all you need is multisig and signatures that you can encrypt. So this is doable with RGB. This is doable on Liquid. You can do it on Litecoin if you want to. You can do it on any really system, so it’s very easy to pour it over or if we’ve already tested it out or we know we could do this with RGB, you could just use RGB tokens on Lightning. We could do this on some third layer thing most likely. It’s really going to be like the DLCs will probably just be aided on top of all these other systems.

Preston Pysh (00:23:54):
Pierre, I want to hear why you don’t like the token issuance.

Pierre Rochard (00:23:58):
That was a really interesting point Ben just made that I was saying that DLCs are Bitcoins settled, but that’s not necessarily the case. They could be settled in any token. So the reason I am not super excited about tokens is because they create a conflict of interest between the different class holders, let’s say, of an enterprise, and it’s not like that’s new, right? There’s always been conflicts of interest between Class A shares, and Class B shares, and maybe there’s somebody with some convertible debt, and somebody with some senior or secured debt or some junior debt. And then there’s always weird conflicts of interest that have to get adjudicated or worked out.

Preston Pysh (00:24:41):
You’re talking about the INX token is what you’re talking about.

Pierre Rochard (00:24:45):
Yeah, I think that they all have this central issue of the issuance of the token is revenue that accrues to the shareholders. And that’s just the economic, the accounting fundamentals of it and that creates a conflict of interest. Whereas if we were to say, let’s have pure tokenized, equity or a tokenized bond offering, that’s fine. We need to find a different word than tokenized because now, a security token, I’ve only heard it referred to in the specific circumstance where the issuer selling the security token is recognizing revenue from that sale and that’s not a financing cash inflow. It’s an operating cash inflow.

Preston Pysh (00:25:30):
That’s a really good point.

Pierre Rochard (00:25:32):
And then the stipulations they put up around it of revenue shares, this is always diverting value from shareholders to the token holders and they’ve made a point of having lots of safeguards around it, lots of governance, et cetera, and I’m just left scratching my head of like why you’re going into pretzels over this because you really want to have the token on a blockchain part, and you’re not actually improving the merits of the product, and you’re not, in my view, improving the outcome for the shareholders.

Preston Pysh (00:26:11):
The only advantage is that you get the certificates to immediately clear. Let’s just say you would go through a token issuance for real equity, like common stock, like the way you’re describing it. For me, I guess, how I’m looking at this is we need stock certificates to clear immediately. When I look at the whole GameStop thing, total disaster on the speed at which the certificates are clearing because they’re lending them out, the whole Robin Hood thing. That whole thing is really coming down to the speed of clearance, really causing some major issues in the way that the traditional system works.

Preston Pysh (00:26:48):
So with that regard, I’m excited about the tokens, but I see your point that it’s become so smushy as to what it is that the buyers of these things are actually getting and how easy it is for companies to basically upset that stack of where you lie in the equity that it’s causing some issue.

Pierre Rochard (00:27:09):
Let’s say okay, we do have straight normal equity that is being issued as a token, there’s two problems. One is that the issuer is always centralized.

Preston Pysh (00:27:23):
But that will never change though, Pierre.

Pierre Rochard (00:27:26):
That’ll never change. There’s some nexus with the real world. And the second though is that as a corporate entity, you do actually want to exercise some control over who holds your equity. So, for example, you don’t want someone doing a hostile takeover in 30 seconds by buying all of your tokens on the market and transferring them. You want to be able to have stipulations for how concentrated ownership of your stock can be, who can own it, who can’t, write a first refusal. Lots of different corporate governance actions that I haven’t heard anyone credibly explain that their system will be able to handle all of this.

Preston Pysh (00:28:09):
And so this is your case for why the SEC and all the other regulatory bodies are going to crack down on.

Pierre Rochard (00:28:17):
Well, I think they’re going to crack down on it as a shakedown to extract money from them and that’s what they’ve done historically is that they’ve asked for the ICO issuer to pay a fine and to move along. And so it’s not really justice or anything like that even from their point of view. I think that one of the problems with enforcement against ICOs is the coordination problem of what happens if you have a million people who invested a thousand dollars each? Okay, so they have to do some kind of class action, right? And so we’ve seen some securities class actions. They’re a real headache and you’ve got to have someone who’s really motivated and who lost a lot of money. And unfortunately, it’s usually smaller retail participants who lose money and they don’t have enough money or they don’t have the time and motivation to hire a securities lawyer to make things right, even without involving the SEC, right, just using common law fraud.

Preston Pysh (00:29:20):
So recently, on Binance, they came out with this Binance Smart Chain, which is a competitor to Ethereum, and what I found fascinating about this launch was they made the software so similar to Ethereum that people that had smart contracts over on Ethereum could effectively port all of their prior work into the Binance Smart Chain and they had a enormous reduction in fees or the gas price. Is this just a pivot to Binance for the time being? Is this something that’s actually going to provide a threat to Ethereum? And then how does it all relate back to Bitcoin as far as long-term implications of smart contracts and token issuance?

Ben Carman (00:30:09):
I think the fee problem, if they got the same volume that Ethereum did, they’d have the exact same fees, unless they’re more centralized then maybe they could deal with that a little bit better. But from my understanding, they’re not really solving a problem, they took 10% of Ethereum’s volume or something, but they have reduced these.

Preston Pysh (00:30:29):
So Ben, here’s my question for you. So you’re basically saying that this is an inherent problem that’ll keep coming up for a protocol that tries to do too much on the base layer. Is that what you’re really saying?

Ben Carman (00:30:42):
I think their base protocols to just be for final settlement and very minimal verification. It shouldn’t be doing your actual computation. Your actual contracts and computation, we thought we should just off-chain between the parties that actually care. If you and Pierre are doing a bet, I like a I like you guys, but I don’t really care about your contract and you should just validate yourselves. I don’t want to store that and have to validate it myself.

Preston Pysh (00:31:06):
And so by doing a DLC between Pierre and I, let’s say we had a between, whatever that bet might be, it’s a year from now is the termination date of determining whether it was yes or no, we enter into that contract through a DLC, let’s say we do it on Lightning, so our fees are nothing for the most part?

Pierre Rochard (00:31:26):
If we had a channel open directly between ourselves, then yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:31:31):
So let’s talk about that a little bit. That’s fascinating to think that you’re going from something that has tremendous fees associated with doing all this on a base layer that’s then stored and the storage just keeps growing. No one can run a full node in 10 years because the storage capacity required for all these pre-existing contracts that we’ve done are all there. So none of that is necessarily a concern with Bitcoin in the way that you’re writing the DLCs.

Pierre Rochard (00:32:00):
The issue of doing computation on the base layer. There’s also an issue of all of these tokens that are being issued on the base layer. So ERC=20 tokens, for example, there’s no equivalent in Bitcoin. The advantage of that is that the Bitcoin blockchain is really about moving Bitcoin around. It’s not moving other currencies around, except you had Omni that was doing or colored coins that were doing their thing and they got priced out, eventually. And so I think that keeping it focused that way is a huge advantage as well.

Ben Carman (00:32:37):
Yeah, definitely. I think since Bitcoin will be the most valuable asset, then naturally, Bitcoin will be the only thing worth paying fees for.

Pierre Rochard (00:32:46):
If you’re moving the equity of a company, go back to our example of tokens, that can be a SQL database that gets audited by their big four accountant. And then you might have NASDAQ or some other exchange that is trading the “physical” of the actual shares. And then they might actually trade very little relative to the size of the derivatives market where you might have everyone around the world using DLCs in order to construct their portfolios and to track asset prices rather than actually using the “physical.”

Pierre Rochard (00:33:25):
Personally, I imagine a world where the people, the actual share of a company, it’s like the same way in the commodities world. Who actually takes delivery of oil? Well, it’s the people that are actually going to be using it, it’s not the speculators, for the most part. So I think that the in terms of who actually owns companies it’s going to be either folks like Warren Buffett or taking a sizable stake in a company or the arbitragers who are arbitraging between the futures on DLCs versus the physical on the exchanges on the spot market.

Preston Pysh (00:34:05):
So if I’m entering into a contract with somebody with a DLC, let’s say it’s on the Lightning Network, can other participants or outside a third-party view in and see the terms and conditions of that contract or is it encrypted and they’re not seeing any of it?

Ben Carman (00:34:21):
Yeah, not at all. They’d have to get physical access, basically, to your computer to see what exactly you did. Basically, all we’re doing is setting up a contract and just saying, “These are every possible outcomes.” I give an invalid signature for it and then this Oracle gives us a signature, we can make one of those signatures valid and then use that to execute. All people see, like a third-party observer, they just see multisig closing transaction. It looks exactly like the Lightning channel, actually, and it’s very hard to tell exactly what’s going on.

Preston Pysh (00:34:53):
So we would still have platforms to find parties, to have a counter party. So I’m going to log in to some website in the future, let’s say it’s an oil future or it’s a whatever kind of future. I’m a buyer, I’m getting matched up with some type of seller. We can see where the market price still is, but then when we go to execute that peer to peer contract… I’m just working through this in my head. So everything is going to turn into a peer to peer contract, but the platform that would be hosting the two participants would just be a matchmaker site.

Ben Carman (00:35:29):
There’s some precedent for this in Bitcoin already where things like Join Market or biz where these are peer to peer wants a coin join or wants a buying Bitcoin anonymously platform, both of these, Join Market uses an IRC chat server, you find peers on there and it sends messages for you through IRC and so that’s how they negotiate stuff. This is just like a peer to peer network and you send around messages saying, “Here’s all the orders I know,” and then people will just say their orders and you feel it’s like a Mempool, basically, of people’s buy and sell orders. And you then would find one that you’d like and take it.

Ben Carman (00:36:07):
We could do the same thing for DLCs. We also could do a more centralized thing where maybe you go to our website.com and pick whatever thing you want and you can find it. It’ll give you an invoice or something that you can paste into or software and it’ll negotiate the actual contract. There’s lots of different solutions. This is like the one thing we haven’t fully figured out how it will or probably something more like the market figures out rather than a technology solution.

Preston Pysh (00:36:32):
Pierre, I want to talk a little bit about running your own node and opening up channels. So I run my own full node, I opened a channel with some party, I have no idea who it was. So I did this and I was just clueless as to what to do next. I had Jack Maller’s Zap app on my phone and I told it what my node was. Does that now enable me to really use that money that I basically open the channel with that one other party or can I only conduct transactions with that one party that I opened the channel with?

Pierre Rochard (00:37:09):
Got it. So for the first question of what you can do, when you open a channel, you’re buying an option. You’re buying the right but not the obligation to send a Bitcoin or to receive Bitcoin if this channel happens to have some inbound capacity or, presumably, if you’re the one opening the channel, it’s just outbound capacity because it’s your own Bitcoin that you’re putting up into the channel.

Pierre Rochard (00:37:31):
At that point, if your channel is connected to another node that itself has, let’s say, eight other channels with other nodes, then your payment doesn’t necessarily have to be to the one peer that you open the channel with, it could be with any of the nine peers that you’re now connected with, and so on, and so forth, four dozen hops. And so it’s a routed system. It is peer to peer, but because you have multiple hops that you can do with your payments, you don’t necessarily have to be directly connected with every single peer on the network. And that’s what really allows it to be very scalable.

Pierre Rochard (00:38:13):
On top of that, the Lightning developers recently made an improvement where, when you send a payment, it could go through several different channels in parallel. And this is much how the internet works, your packets across the internet might not necessarily follow the same route every time, it’s just going to depend on the relative capacity of the different routes. And the Lightning developers made it so that you can split up a payment into multiple different channels that made Lightning a lot more capital efficient as a system because one of the drawbacks of Lightning is that it’s a prepaid system. So you got to put up Bitcoin in order to send Bitcoin and somebody else has to put up Bitcoin in order for you to receive Bitcoin.

Pierre Rochard (00:38:59):
Now, I actually don’t think that’s too big of an issue because of this really cool feature called NGU, number go up technology. And so people actually don’t have as much of an issue of holding cash. With USD, it’s a problem when you have to put up capital because that means that you’re tying up cash, it’s getting diluted, and the inflation is eating away at it. With Lightning, you have the opposite problem let’s say you put up $10,000 worth of Bitcoin into your Lightning node and then Bitcoin’s price goes up 10x. Now your Lightning node has $100,000 worth of Bitcoin on it and you didn’t do anything to do that. And so it’s okay to have it be a prepaid system in that regard, but it is routed and it is peer to peer.

Preston Pysh (00:39:50):
One of the issues, or I don’t know if it’s an issue or not, that I found interesting, is as I was trying to open a channel with another node, it didn’t seem like I could really put all that much value into it. I think 10 or $20 was all the more that I could open a channel with for the most part, at least the couple that I clicked through, that I tried to open a channel with. Does that cause any type of issues moving forward?

Pierre Rochard (00:40:15):
So that sounds like there was a UI issue where they might not have been communicating as clearly as they should have been what was going on there because today, you can open very large channels and with a feature called one bow, you can actually, in a custom manner, open up arbitrarily large channels, up to 21 million Bitcoin. And the nice thing about Lightning is that it is not a global consensus system like Bitcoin is. And so two peers can come up with their own rules of how big their channels are going to be or how big their payments are going to be without having an impact on the overall protocol for Lightning.

Pierre Rochard (00:40:58):
Now, ideally, the channel management is something that’s automated and happens in the background. So you would just put Bitcoin into your Lightning wallet and your Lightning wallet handles all the liquidity management behind the scenes for you so you don’t have to think about your channel sizes or who your peers are. The technology is still relatively early, so that’s not a hundred percent reliable yet. I’m pretty confident that it’s a solvable problem and that a lot of this will get automated away for mainstream users.

Preston Pysh (00:41:30):
Let’s just fast forward four years into the future. How do you see the typical person using Bitcoin? Are they outsourcing to some… let’s just say your mom or dad or grandma or whoever or somebody who’s not going to be running their full node, most people are not going to be running their own full node, right?

Pierre Rochard (00:41:49):
Well, I’ve got to go on historical data on this because it’s a behavioral question and so far, we have seen a lot more people using centralized services like Coinbase or like Cash App instead of using their own self-hosted, holding their own keys. Now, that’s got some nuances to it. But I think that by and large, it is going to continue to be the case that the median person is going to be using a custodial service. Now, the median Bitcoin, probably not. I think that the median Bitcoin is actually on somebody’s own keys that even if we looked at the median transaction would be between folks who are self-castigating. But with Lightning, it actually makes the problem worse because Lightning, in some ways, is more complex than on-chain. And so it actually increases the value of using a custodian to send Lightning payments or receive Lightning payments. That’s going to be controversial, but that’s the truth of the matter right now. But I think the technology will overcome that and they’ll level the playing field.

Preston Pysh (00:43:12):
Let me ask you it this way. Let’s say we go through hyperbitcoinization. Fiat’s dead. I would suspect that most participants in the economy, they’re going out, they’re buying their day-to-day stuff are getting paid over the Lightning Network. Would you agree with that?

Pierre Rochard (00:43:30):
Maybe, maybe not. They might be using Bitcoin with their Visa card. And it’s not because I want that to happen or I own a lot of shares of Visa or anything like that. It’s that building out the last mile in payments is very time-consuming and expensive. And that’s why Visa has 50% profit margins, they’ve been building a payments network for decades now, and Bitcoin has only been doing it for, let’s call it a decade, and Lightning has only been doing it for let’s call it two or three years. And so if hyperbitcoinization were to happen tomorrow, I think it’s much more realistic that Visa would add Bitcoin to their network and that that would be the network that people use and it would take a couple of decades for Lightning to eclipse Visa in terms of usage.

Preston Pysh (00:44:23):
Visa would be using Lightning Bitcoin.

Pierre Rochard (00:44:27):
Not necessarily because they have their own closed network. So they have their own proprietary system, which is a layer three, if you call it, as does Coinbase, for example. But Visa has been using different currencies for decades as well. You can use euros on Visa, you can use dollars on Visa, and it’s not farfetched that you’d be able to use Bitcoin on Visa’s network. It just wouldn’t have any of the assurances that we have using on-chain Bitcoin or of using Lightning of being trust minimum. You’re a hundred percent trusting Visa, you have no privacy with regards to Visa, it’s got those throbbing, and then you’re also paying fees to Visa.

Pierre Rochard (00:45:12):
Now, I think that because Lightning is a better system, it will outcompete Visa. But we have to keep in mind that it took decades for Visa to outcompete checks. Even though Visa is better than checks, it’s still not an overnight revelation where everybody switches over to using [inaudible 00:45:32].

Ben Carman (00:45:33):
Visa could be using Lightning as well. If they’re doing a payment to MasterCard or something, to Venmo or something like that, they could easily use Lightning payment like the other third-party system instead of having to go on-chain for a $10 payment.

Preston Pysh (00:45:46):
I was listening to an interview that will Reeves was doing, and he’s the CEO at Fold, and he was talking about how expensive it is in order to send Bitcoin from people’s wallets on Fold just to whatever self-custody wallet they’ve got and how they basically release those funds on a weekly basis. At least during the interview, I think I remember him saying that they do it on a weekly basis, and how expensive that was for the fees to send out all those different Bitcoin once a week, and how he was effectively saying that in time, it’s going to make a lot more sense for them to start working on Lightning as well. So I find it really interesting. I don’t know that I fully grasp what that’s going to look like in four years and eight years from now. But like you’re saying, Pierre, it seems like it’s not going to be something that happens immediately. There’s going to be this overlapping period as it becomes more widely adopted.

Ben Carman (00:46:39):
I think there’s already good precedent of that just like on-chain Bitcoin where when Mt Gox got hacked, they’re talking about how they had pieces of paper of private keys written on them as their backup system where today, exchanges of much more complicated things and then average users are able to write down 24 words on a paper. Lightning is only two or three years old and it has a lot of time to mature and people to figure out the best practices of things to do. That’s all coming. It’s just lots of work to be done and these things take time, especially when you’re building really robust system correctly.

Pierre Rochard (00:47:10):
I actually think that DLCs could get adoption more quickly than let’s call it coffee payments on Lightning and the reason I think that is two big criticisms of Bitcoin. One is it’s just speculative, it’s just speculation, just casino, and the second is that it’s too volatile. DLCs cater to those two “problems”. It enables people to speculate on prices in a permissionless manner and enables people to hedge volatility or to go long volatility or short volatility and both of those combined, I think, make it so that the audience is much more likely to be interested in DLCs than in being able to spend Bitcoin at Starbucks.

Preston Pysh (00:47:57):
You would think all these hedge funds that are long volatility type or volatility trading type hedge funds would be all up in Bitcoin, but it appears that many of them are the biggest critics of Bitcoin these days. There’s a lot of irony there.

Pierre Rochard (00:48:13):
There’s a lot of closet indexers out there.

Preston Pysh (00:48:16):
Pierre, I want to get your thoughts on the contango trade. When I’m looking at this, I’m trying to wrap my head around why it exists. What are some of your thoughts on why the future price of Bitcoin, which has effectively no storage costs for the most part, has this bid in the future tail versus what you could get in the spot today?

Pierre Rochard (00:48:40):
It’s a really interesting question because if we look at Bitcoin’s monetary economics, there’s two things that a monetary network or authority could do. One is target the money supply and the other is target interest rates. And so when you’re targeting money supply, the interest rate is free-floating. When you’re targeting the interest rate, the money supply is free-floating. Bitcoin, obviously, does the former and with the halvings and difficulty adjustments, targeting a very restricted money supply, and that allows interest rates to be freely floating.

Pierre Rochard (00:49:16):
And so when we have contango like this, I think I saw it, it was annualized 30%, it’s basically saying that the Bitcoin central bank currently has a 30% interest rate. In today’s world of 0% interest rate central banks for Fiat, it’s astounding that this is happening and it opens up history’s largest carry trade imaginable, but it’s causing that interest rate to be not only positive but very, very, very positive. I don’t know. Honestly, I think that there’s so many just so explanations. One would be that there are folks who can only get exposure to Bitcoin through CME futures and so they are driving up the curve because they can’t, for whatever operational reasons or anything like that, go buy a spot and drive up the spot price. But there might also just be a lack of sellers. If nobody wants to sell futures, then they have to be strongly incentivized by having this contango.

Pierre Rochard (00:50:20):
And really, the way to reduce it would be to see more Fiat getting created to buy Bitcoin and basically this 30% is saying, “Hey, look, if you have access to the Kantian effect and you can get some cheap credit, then you can borrow for 3% and lend for 30% and have a 27% net interest margin. So it’s a huge price signal to the market that folks should be doing that and yet, the only person really doing it at scale is Michael Saylor with his convertible bonds, at least in the public markets. But look, if there were more people doing it, then it wouldn’t be such a big contango, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of the very few. But I have a huge amount of confidence in the market system, and that rational actors will respond to this price signal, get into the game.

Preston Pysh (00:51:14):
And write contracts and put up a hundred percent escrow.

Pierre Rochard (00:51:18):
Well, and the amount of capital is really the biggest issue, I think, is that you do have to have the ability to move billions of dollars and to have access to cheap rates to be able to do this. But yeah, it’s a very fascinating trend going on.

Preston Pysh (00:51:37):
So when we think about this derivatives business and them being a hundred percent collateralized when these contracts are written and then we look at the Discrete Log Contracts, the DLCs, that we’ve been talking about, this sounds to me like a recipe for locking up more Bitcoin and clawing it off the market not to be sold for another year or whatever the duration of each one of these contracts are, which sounds like it goes to this number go up technology you were talking about. So here’s the question, Michael Saylor is quoted as saying that halving cycles, they’re pretty much going to become irrelevant. What are your thoughts on that?

Ben Carman (00:52:18):
I think halvings will matter until these take over the block subsidy, which mean it could be the next halving anyways, so maybe they don’t matter anymore now. But I think I think he’s mostly right. We’re getting so many buyers and huge institutional money that the minor selling and the inflation rates are already really, really low. So by and large, it’s just a buyer’s market at this point. Everyone’s just buying as much Bitcoin as they can.

Preston Pysh (00:52:46):
Sounds like you agree with him.

Ben Carman (00:52:48):
Yeah, pretty much.

Preston Pysh (00:52:50):
Pierre?

Pierre Rochard (00:52:51):
I share part of Ben’s view, which is that well, really, if we look at it this way of the first halving of going from 50 Bitcoin to 25 Bitcoin logically, to me, would have a much greater impact than going from 25 Bitcoin to 12 and a half or from 12 and a half to 6.25, which was last year, because the mass, again, the stock was so great that the change in the flow becomes more and more marginal and thus would have an increasingly marginal effect on the price. The nuance I would add to that, though is that just gets into the efficient market’s argument of well, if everyone knows that the supply is going to get cut in half in the future, then that gets priced in today and thus, there won’t be any effect on from the halving.

Pierre Rochard (00:53:42):
We actually do see the quantity of Bitcoin get cut in half because before that happens, all we have is this subsidy function that we think is going to work and we think our node is going to function properly. But I do think that for the market for monies, for monetary economics, what actually happened matters versus what people’s expectations of what was going to happen. There’s a real tangible difference between those two things of people’s expectations versus what actually happened. And we see this in fiat monetary economics all the time where the Fed will move markets by making an announcement of what’s going to happen and then it actually happening also has an effect on the market. And so clearly, just announcing that something’s going to happen, no matter how credible you are, doesn’t mean that everything gets priced in immediately.

Pierre Rochard (00:54:36):
So all this to say that I don’t know. I look at plan B’s model and the stock to flow price model as something that is modulating my views and moderating them. I’m like a perma hyper bull and so I always think Bitcoins going to million dollars tomorrow and this model tells me to be more patient and to lower my time preference. Other people react to it the opposite where they think Bitcoin is going to go sideways forever and that this model is moon juice. That’s nonsense.

Pierre Rochard (00:55:11):
And so I think that it’s valuable for people who are trying to put a price, some kind of range, right? So I can say like, “All right, at the end of the year, it’s going to be between 10 grand and 100 grand.” But I’m not going to trade on that. How could you ever trade on such a wide band? But psychologically, that might help motivate you to save more, for example. If you feel like okay, well after this, halving the value is going to go up, so I really need to cut my own hair and sell my chairs. But that’s a motivational aspect. Hopefully, it’s not a trading signal.

Preston Pysh (00:55:44):
What’s the single most interesting aspect of Bitcoin to you right now?

Ben Carman (00:55:49):
I think there’s so many cool things. It’s crazy, how bifurcated the Bitcoin community is. Personally, I’m working on DLC stuff and I miss all the stuff happening on base protocol, on developments, right? The P2P messages going on and privacy networks being implemented and stuff like that. And then in Lightning, I miss half the stuff that’s going on there where I didn’t realize we added multi-card part payments a month after it happened and stuff like that.

Ben Carman (00:56:13):
So there’s tons of stuff going on that’s really hard to follow it all. But I don’t know. I think DLCs is honestly probably the most underrated thing going on right now where not many people are talking about it and know about it yet. But I think once we have initial products of things using this, it’s going to explode really quickly because they are so useful and it’s going to fill a niche that needs to be filled in Bitcoin.

Pierre Rochard (00:56:35):
I echo that sentiment and I actually think it’s going to be more than a niche because when I look at the size of the derivatives market today, it’s massive. And if you lower the cost of derivatives both in the sense of just the fees you have to pay, but also in the amount of trust involved, if you make derivatives noncustodial, automated, and with multiple Oracle’s so that you have really strong assurances that if you’re right about this contract and it’s fully collateralized, which it is with DLCs, if you’re right, you’re going to get paid.

Pierre Rochard (00:57:16):
And we saw with the GameStop shenanigans where there’s this sentiment that okay, even if I’m right about a future price, I might get rug-pulled by someone who’s more powerful than I am, who can make some phone calls and make things happen so that I lose on this contract, even though I follow the rules. And so I think that if you give market participants confidence, and, frankly, what in the world we call rule of law, and certainty about contracts, that then they are going to be much more willing to enter into them and to much more interesting trading strategies and apply these contracts to a much wider number of use cases than they are currently applied to.

Pierre Rochard (00:58:02):
When I started learning about Discrete Log Contracts, I was like, “Wow, this is like when I started learning about Lightning.” It’s like, okay, we don’t have to accept the narratives about Bitcoin where we say, “Okay, well, because we want Bitcoin to be decentralized, and we want to have this network of nodes, and we don’t want to increase the block size limit, now, we have to make this narrative that Bitcoin is just a store of value and it’s just digital gold,” which is just a rationalization after the fact and that I think critics of Bitcoin have pointed out that, “Hey, look, you guys changed the narrative here.”

Pierre Rochard (00:58:37):
But then when Lightning came along and said, “Hey, look, we can have cheap payments, we can have a net settlement system so that we can have a decentralized based chain while also having a high velocity payment system on top of it,” then suddenly, the critics were dissatisfied with Lightning for whatever little reasons or you have the UX challenges of a two-year-old technology entail. And so that excitement of having something where we can break a narrative of saying, “Okay, well actually, Bitcoin, not only is it not a digital gold, it’s also not just a dumb rock. We actually do have smart contracts that we can build on top of this.” We can build decentralized finance on top of it and it will be sturdy, right? So it’s kind of building on quicksand versus building on a rock.

Pierre Rochard (00:59:28):
And I really think that with DLCs, Ben, and Suredbits, and there are other teams as well that are building on this, I want to call out Crypto Garage and their P2P derivatives platform because I’ve been playing around with it, and others that I think that they’re still stealth. Atomic did the presidential election pretty publicly. That was really cool to see. I’m hoping that more teams come on board because there’s a huge amount that needs to be built for a very wide array of use cases. There’s still a lot of greenfield. Even though Suredbits has done tremendously good work here, I think, that they would welcome additional help in terms of building out more DLCs.

Ben Carman (01:00:12):
And to put the context of DLCs development, we’re like where Lightning was in the beginning of 2018 really, just finishing up this very initial base protocol for DLCs and they’re probably going to get that within a year and also fleshing out really good UI, fleshing out the protocol more to fix all the initial things we find problematic in the beginning. They have a huge influx of users. So this is all a gradual thing really just getting started now, so it still has tons of room to grow.

Preston Pysh (01:00:43):
Okay, so today, I saw Ray Dalio published the following comment, “If history and logic are a guide, policymakers who are short of money will raise taxes and won’t like these capital movements out of debt assets and into other storeholds of wealth assets and other tax domains. So they could very well impose prohibition against capital movements to other assets, i.e., gold, Bitcoin and other locations. These tax changes could be more shocking than most expect.” Pierre, what are your thoughts on that? Is this something that he’s pulling from historical reference of how individual countries reacted relative to capital trying to move into other currencies that were stable? Is it a one-size-fits-all comparison that he’s making to what we’re seeing right now considering this as a global event?

Pierre Rochard (01:01:35):
It is drawn from history. There’s two ways that they the government or the monetary authorities can react to what one might call a speculative attack. One is to raise interest rates, so that’s the market-based approach, or to sell Forex reserves, if they have any. Very few of them have any Bitcoin reserves, so they’re having fun staying poor. But the other way to react is to have capital controls and to try to clamp down on the private sector trying to get money out of the fiat system.

Pierre Rochard (01:02:10):
Capital controls are, from what I’ve read in the economic literature and what I’ve observed throughout history, fairly ineffective. It’s like with Coronavirus where they were like, “We’ve got to shut down flights, and we’ve got to socially distance, and wear masks,” and all this stuff. That’s like the equivalent of what financial capital controls are and people debate the effectiveness of those things. So just the fact that it’s even debatable, to me, is indicative that it doesn’t have a strong enough effect to be unquestionable. And on top of that, it’s a very short term thing. So people find ways around capital controls, they route around them, there’s always a way to route around. And this happens with taxes as well.

Pierre Rochard (01:02:57):
This is tax policy 101. If you tax one thing heavily, well, you’ll have less of that and you’ll have more of everything else. And so people will find other things to do with their money and there isn’t really a free lunch, you’ve got to tax everything more. If they tax everything more, that’s going to hurt the economy just as they’re trying to not have that happen because, obviously, their revenue shortfall. It’s weird where they’re not making enough revenue from taxes to pay for all of the deficit spending that they have gone on. I don’t know why Ray thinks that it’s going to be a tax response.

Preston Pysh (01:03:36):
Maybe because you look at Ray, he’s worth what, $20 billion. Maybe that’s why he’s thinking they’re going to come after him specifically. Anybody with a high net worth is who they’re coming after.

Pierre Rochard (01:03:46):
Possibly. And now what we’ve seen that is effective is where the government just comes in and seizes financial assets. In Argentina and, very recently, in Cuba, they just said, “Hey, look, all the money you had in this account, that’s ours now and we’re giving you in return some funny money.” And so I can absolutely see a government sees financial assets from an account like that.

Pierre Rochard (01:04:12):
Now, I just don’t think that would even happen in the United States. I think that the US has the same problem financially, allegedly with COVID, where you have too many civil liberties to actually be able to do the totalitarian crackdown like China did pf squash everything. I don’t think it would fly in the US to have the government go so heavy-handed. I think that historically, in the US, there have been capital controls. But also, with regards to Bitcoin, the way that they were able to get the gold was that most of the gold was already deposited in banks. So with the mechanics of getting your gold out of a bank, the logistics of that are much harder than getting your Bitcoin out of an exchange, for example. And so I do think that they would immediately trigger a flight, a run on the exchanges, although I wouldn’t call it a run because these exchanges are not fractional reserve, they are a hundred percent reserve, I’ll emphasize that, and so they would be able to withdraw their Bitcoin from exchanges and then the government can’t get anything really.

Pierre Rochard (01:05:21):
So I’m very skeptical that ray is lumping in Bitcoin with gold here. I think Bitcoins a lot more seizure resistant then gold ever was. It’s unfair that he’s doing that, although I feel like he’s gone back and forth on Bitcoin a few times and maybe he’s accumulating his bag.

Preston Pysh (01:05:40):
All right guys, we’ve been going for quite a while here. I just want to thank you for coming on and talking about this stuff. This is fascinating stuff. You talk about being at the very front of this, it’s YouTube. So guys, give a hand off to the audience where they can learn more about you. And also Ben, if you want to put something out for any software engineers there, if you guys are looking to point them to a resource, be sure to highlight that as well.

Ben Carman (01:06:08):
If you guys want to know more about DLCs, the suredbits.com/blog has tons of posts all about the DLCs from the low-level, deep technicals, to a high-level noob understanding. And we have also things like Lightning, Taproot, anything you want to know about Bitcoin tech. So feel free to check that out, and just follow us on Twitter, and just DM me if you ever want to get interested, I’ll point you to all the great resources we have.

Pierre Rochard (01:06:32):
I’ll emphasize that in this case, I’m just a cheerleader. I’m just excited about what they’re building. I haven’t been a participant in it. So very happy to help communicate about DLCs and to follow their progress. Maybe I’ll build something with it, eventually, so we’ll see, we’ll see. Stay tuned. There’s also the DLC specs, GitHub repo, which I’ll send a link to you, Preston, so that for folks who are interested in seeing what the latest is on DLCs, they’ll be able to follow along there.

Ben Carman (01:07:06):
Pierre, we’re eternally grateful for you because we’re just a bunch of nerdy tech guys and don’t know how to say the financial stuff for us.

Pierre Rochard (01:07:12):
I don’t understand any of the underlying cryptography and I have to ask you guys to make things safe for me because I’ve already cut my finger several times on some of these things. so it’s a lot of fun to be exploring.

Preston Pysh (01:07:28):
And from my seat, it’s just pure magic. All right, guys. Well, appreciate that. We’ll have all of that in the show notes, the links. Be sure to check that out if you guys really enjoyed the conversation and Pierre, Ben, thank you so much for coming on.

Ben Carman (01:07:42):
Anytime.

Pierre Rochard (01:07:43):
Thanks for having us on, Preston.

Preston Pysh (01:07:45):
Hey, so thanks for everybody listening in to the show. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you’re using. We really appreciate that. And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week and we’ll catch you next Wednesday.

Outro (01:08:00):
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 Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.