NVK (00:02:46):

Actually, let me backtrack this a bit. So a password, right? A password is not really the basis of any secret of the information that you’re trying to store. A password is just how you are encapsulating something encrypted, and that’s the secret that breaks that sort of shield out to see something that’s inside. In Bitcoin, the secret is the money, right? So the stakes are much higher because if somebody can break that because they know the public part already, they already know the information, it’s already out there. So if somebody could break or reverse that and find the original secret, they can spend your money.

NVK (00:03:31):

So in Bitcoin, the secret or the quality of the entropy that the secret has is one of the most important things. It’s the basis of everything security-wise in Bitcoin, self-custody, right? What happens is how do you create a random number? It sounds like an easy problem, but it’s not because if you are a enterprise solution, and they have been having to create big numbers, big entropy for 50 years, and that’s how they protect banks, and that’s how they protect the airplanes and all this stuff.

NVK (00:04:06):

So what they do is they’ll use this FIPS as a certification by the NIST. You’re serviceman, you would know. They certify the little tiny computers that generate the gates on a chip that generate that random number randomly. Some of them will use different things. Some of them will use heat. Some of them will use noise, any kind of noise because noise is entropy, right?

NVK (00:04:32):

Now, it gets really tricky because most things that you believe are entropically good actually are not. If you observe them for long enough, you find patterns, right? If you know those patterns, you could try to reverse engineer which number was created. So it’s a massive problem, so much so that when you’re talking about true deep, deep secrets like the army main secrets, they will use atomic decay as a means of finding true entropies, one of the best sources, but that’s completely unrealistic for the average person to have some apparatus that measures that at home.

NVK (00:05:07):

So what do we do? In Bitcoin, we go and we have very good, well-reviewed crypto libraries that try to do a very good job at spotting bad means of generating that entropy or generating that secret, but you still have to feed it something, right? On a computer, you’re going to feed some of the noise from the computer, and Bitcoin card is going to use some well-researched libraries to do that, but you can’t really fully trust that either because you don’t know if the computer is not lying to you.

NVK (00:05:43):

This is the biggest problem that Bitcoiners have is that, “Do I have one here? I can’t really trust the device,” right? That’s the whole goal is not to trust the device. So what we do is we essentially take the entropy from dice. So you throw dice, and out of 99 dice throws, you have 256 bits of entropy, which is the full amount of entropy you need for a Bitcoin private key.

NVK (00:06:11):

ColdCard can generate the entropy for you. We do a very good job at that, but having the option for you to be able to enter your own derisks one us. There is less interest in actors to try to compromise us as a company because now, they know that most users are not going to trust us anyways.

NVK (00:06:34):

Then the next step is, “Okay. Great. I’m entering the dice entropy into the device. How do I know that the device is showing me the correct entropy, it’s not just lying to me about the dice that I threw for it?” We have a companion script that you can run on say a Tails CD or some other machine, and you can enter at the same time, and because this is deterministic, you actually generates the same seed and you can actually compare so you can validate the device is doing what it claims it does.

NVK (00:07:05):

We are getting at a level of security that it beats almost anything that a state actor has with all their disposable by just being honest, verifiably honest,

Preston Pysh (00:07:17):

By being really rudimentary in the way that you’re doing it, I think. It’s really the simplicity in using the dice is actually just you can’t replicate that in any kind of way, right?

NVK (00:07:31):

Yeah. I mean, good luck trying to replicate 99 dice throws, right? I mean, even if the dice were biased, you’re still fine.

Preston Pysh (00:07:38):

Yeah. No, this is something that whenever I was studying for an interview I was doing with quantum computing and when I was studying this, I realized that really the most vulnerable part of your private keys and your Bitcoin is in that key generation process that you just really went into a lot of depth describing. So I realized that it came down to the random numbers that are being generated by the computer and will say random in quotes because you so eloquently pointed out there’s ways to reverse engineer that pattern that pops out of the way that this random numbers are being generated and without a lot of effort being placed into making sure that the number that’s coming up with, you’re saying. How many digits is this big number, this “big number” that’s being generated?

NVK (00:08:32):

It’s big.

Preston Pysh (00:08:35):

How many digits would you say?

NVK (00:08:37):

I don’t know. It’s 256 bits.

Preston Pysh (00:08:40):

A lot. It’s 256 bits, okay.

NVK (00:08:42):

Yeah. It’s a huge number.

Preston Pysh (00:08:43):

So on the dice, you’re dealing with nine-digit dice or 10-digit dice, including the zero or-

NVK (00:08:47):

No, six.

Preston Pysh (00:08:47):

Six. Okay.

NVK (00:08:49):

Yeah, the D six, standard dice.

Preston Pysh (00:08:52):

Okay, just a standard die. Okay.

NVK (00:08:53):

Yeah. Remember because it compounds, right? It’s cool. I’m very lazy and I didn’t want to throw a dice a hundred times. So we found the smallest dice that could possibly be boxed. They’re five millimeters big and it comes in a bag of 100. So we just throw it at once.

Preston Pysh (00:09:13):

So just throw one time, and then what are you doing? You’re just-

NVK (00:09:16):

We just input the numbers.

Preston Pysh (00:09:18):

You’re just randomly selecting the numbers.

NVK (00:09:19):

No, no, no. Humans cannot do entropy. If I tell you to give me a random number, it’s probably not random. So you literally read each dice and you input each digitally.

Preston Pysh (00:09:32):

Well, I guess what I was getting at was you’re just, and I’m going to use this word, randomly just grabbing whatever dice off the table and you’re just compiling those numbers.

NVK (00:09:40):

That’s right.

Preston Pysh (00:09:40):

99 of them six-digit numbers, and that is how you’re coming up with your key generation. So is this how you did your own?

NVK (00:09:47):

I mean, it depends, right? So I don’t believe there is a single solution to roll them all, right? So I have many hard wallets, right? Some are deep cold. Some are semi-cold. Some are operational for an operational wallet, the one you use every day with smaller funds. I don’t care. I would just let the device generate it. I’ll give myself less work, but the idea is to really trust minimize it because nothing is proof, right? It’s always just trust minimizing. It’s the goal of our company.

Preston Pysh (00:10:19):

All right. I had to ask that first because when I observed some of yours, and I have your Block Clock sitting here. There’s so many things that we can talk about, but this is the one that I’ve just always smiled at and just had deep admiration for the level to which you are willing to go with your products and with your company to ensure that people’s security is at the highest level possible if they choose to take it there, right? I just have a deep admiration for that, but here’s my next. When did you come into the space because I know you came in very early, but when did you come into this space? Then I want to talk about how you built a company around it.

NVK (00:10:56):

I mean, coming to the space in the early days is a complicated question because I got into the space when the Satoshi paper came out on Slashdot, and then it’s like this is some insane idea, right? I mean, I still to this day, I just laugh if anybody pre-certain, pre-2012 said that this thing is a certainty. 2010, it’s like, “Okay. Great. Some Satoshi guy wrote some paper that’s very interesting and there’s absolutely no way this thing’s going to work,” but it was very interesting and it was interesting to see the stuff starting to form and people start to use.

NVK (00:11:34):

I mean, our first project was launched, I think, end of 2011. We were still working other companies and still doing other their stuff. The first little attempt at doing something in Bitcoin I think might have been late 2011 kind of thing.

Preston Pysh (00:11:50):

What was the product?

NVK (00:11:53):

It was the early days. Oh, it was btclook.com. It was a block explorer for Bitcoin transactions. In those days, the entire blockchain was maybe 11 gigabytes or something or 30 gigabytes. I can’t remember. It could fit in a normal computer RAM. So we ran whole blockchain reddits and you could do all this cool visualizations of it. It was fun. It was the project that we did to understand Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:12:20):

When did you decide that you were going to do the hardware wallet?

NVK (00:12:24):

The first thing, and this is me and Doc Hex, my co-founder, we were looking at this stuff as, “Okay. Great. Money is in the computer. If I send money, it goes to another computer. There’s no middleman. Wonderful. Bitcoin is for payments.” So we created this Bitcoin debit cards and Bitcoin payment terminals, and we started deploying them around the world in late 2012 kind of thing. There were PCI-certified payment terminals that we got them done and the hardware was ours and it was a little too early, but we had to essentially be the backend for all this stuff, right?

NVK (00:13:04):

So we started creating the hardware security modules so they just send servers because neither Tails nor the other company that I forget now the name had any servers, any security servers that could do the Bitcoin curve. The Bitcoin curve is not FIPS certifiable. Maybe it is now. I don’t even know anymore. It wasn’t at the time. We needed secure servers, and then we ran with that, and then the company started to become more of a online wallet solution, and then essentially like BitGo. Before BitGo, it was the backend for a lot of exchanges.

NVK (00:13:38):

Then we decided that, one, that was not profitable enough and, two, I didn’t want to be a centralized point of failure. Receiving letters and things was not my shtick. So we moved on to focus only on hardware.

Preston Pysh (00:13:51):

Back then, I know whenever I first came into the space, there really wasn’t a lot of confidence that you could scale so that you could get to the instant payment portion that you have with Lightning now, and building the product that you’re talking about, I’m sure the biggest concern really had been wrapped around this idea that you needed 10 minutes on average for just a clearance, assuming you can get into the next block. So how are you guys thinking about that at that point in time in the business and thinking about how it could possibly scale? What were your thoughts at the time?

NVK (00:14:21):

It funny. So let’s see if I have a card here. Oh, actually, I do. So this is for the debit cards. You could, essentially, there were a few things because the cards didn’t have a private key themselves. There were essentially just authentication to get into the big system. You could do user-to-user instant transfers if they were within the same system. If you’re paying from another wallet to the terminal, the merchant had an option to choose how many confirmations he wanted. We explained that zero confirmation concerns. It’s not your Bitcoin until it’s confirmed, but people buying coffee and stuff, who cares, right? I mean, it’s like, what? You’re going to lose a dollar? Somebody tries to do a double spend attack at a merchant. It’s unrealistic, and this is before transaction malleability, too.

NVK (00:15:09):

So it was possible to do that kind of stuff. Then that’s when some of the Poo coins, in my mind at that time was like, “Okay. Great. So you have Bitcoin 10 minutes a block, and then you have say Litecoin, which had enough security at the time. I think it was two, three minutes a block. I can’t remember anymore, but it was enough. So maybe you use this stuff for payments that are instant. Maybe you use this stuff for the other, but people are really going to want to start their money in Bitcoin.

NVK (00:15:36):

So we just give options to the people to choose because a lot of people are using those terminals not for retail. They’re using those terminals as a means of being Western Union transfers because you could print paper wallets. You could onboard new Bitcoiners into the system or withdraw, really. You could get a whole private key out in a QR from the machine. It was a mixed bag because it’s easy now to see Bitcoin as a store value, but in those days maybe, I think the only person I remember saying that was Trace Mayer.

Preston Pysh (00:16:07):

Trace Mayer, yeah.

NVK (00:16:09):

Everybody else was saying Bitcoin is payments, right? It’s hard because it was just so unclear what it best did as a utility.

Preston Pysh (00:16:18):

Yeah. No, you’re right. Trace was pretty much the only guy out there saying those things. So what timeframe did you develop the calculator? I love this design. I’m just going to tell you right now, this is the best design ever that you have this hardware wallet looking like a calculator. When did you produce this?

NVK (00:16:37):

Okay. So Opendime must have been 2016-2017. I think we launched ColdCard on 2018-2019, around that time.

Preston Pysh (00:16:46):

That sounds right.

NVK (00:16:47):

Because that’s when we closed our other system finally. No, the system was close 2016, maybe. Anyways, we were in flux even with our own stuff, right? I was not very satisfied with the options in the market and we created this just for ourselves, really. Then there was enough demand and we started to make it into a product. Opendime was the product that the company was making and selling at that time, but we figured, “Hey, we need a good harder wallet that respects certain principles that we like, it’s our preference, our sets of trade offs,” and ColdCard was born.

Preston Pysh (00:17:23):

By the way, I just heard American HODL paid Peter McCormack with one of the Opendimes on the show just this week.

NVK (00:17:29):

It’s hilarious. I mean, it’s surprising the amount of those devices in the market and how much people actually use them. It’s instant. It’s already confirmed, right? It’s a pre-confirmed UTXO. So for people that don’t understand, that’s an unspent Bitcoin is in there, and you can trust when you’re receiving, anyways. So it’s just fun.

Preston Pysh (00:17:53):

It’s awesome. It’s awesome. How about the clock? So the first question I got for you is, what did you do when you were watching Jack Dorsey testifying before Congress and there’s your clock behind him? You had to just been laughing. What was your reaction when you’re watching this?

NVK (00:18:10):

It was funny because I think a year or two prior to that, I had dinner with him and met the guy first time was out of the blue. Super nice guy. We gave him some products. Block Clock didn’t exist yet, at least not the mini. Then time passes, exchanging messages here and there. I’m watching and it’s like-

Preston Pysh (00:18:37):

So you didn’t even know he had it.

NVK (00:18:39):

No. I had idea. It was a funny surprise. It was funny because what a better way of sending a message to those guys that, “Look, there is Sats,” and it’s Sats dollar.

Preston Pysh (00:18:52):

I know.

NVK (00:18:55):

You cannot ask for anything better than some crazy person to create a conspiracy with Russia around-

Preston Pysh (00:19:01):

Oh, my God. So people who are listening to this might not be familiar with what happened here. So Jack goes on, he’s testifying in front of Congress. I think it’s all about just this censorship on social media is what I’m assuming that it was about. I don’t remember, but in the background he has this Block Clock that NVK and his team there have manufactured, designed, manufactured and has on the market. I have one actually sitting right in front of me right now. Instead of it posting the price of Bitcoin, Jack had his setup to display the value of Bitcoin in dollars per Satoshi or the other way around, Satoshis per dollar.

Preston Pysh (00:19:38):

So he had at the time it might have been 2,300 Sats per dollar, right? Following the appearance on CSPAN or whatever it was, there was a person on Twitter who’s there talking about how Jack Dorsey has the time in Moscow behind him. So all these Bitcoiners are on Twitter. All these Bitcoiners are on Twitter.

NVK (00:20:04):

It is so good.

Preston Pysh (00:20:05):

They’re like, “No. Bro, I’m sorry. It’s not Moscow time. That is the price of Satoshis per dollar.” This guy-

NVK (00:20:14):

He wouldn’t believe. No, no. He doubled down.

Preston Pysh (00:20:16):

He quadrupled down. He was some kind of journalist, right?

NVK (00:20:18):

I don’t know.

Preston Pysh (00:20:18):

I don’t know what he was, but he had a fairly decent size following. So the whole Bitcoin Twitter laser eye obnoxiousness swarms this guy and are like, “No, we know the guy that made the clock. In fact, here he is,” and then you were in there and the whole bit, and the guy just refused, refused. So how does NVK respond to this? Well, I’ll tell you how he responds to it. He rolls out a software update so that you can, and hold on one second, I just want to make sure mine is in Moscow time, sir. He rolls out a soft software update that says instead of it saying Sats per dollars, it just says Moscow time and then it has the price in Sats per dollar. Still, it’s Sats per dollar, but this is brilliant. This is how you’re having fun. I can’t even imagine the marketing that came out of this and it wasn’t like you were planning it or anything, but it was just brilliant. It was hilarious. It’s fun.

NVK (00:21:19):

Yeah. This is how we see all this stuff is we only come to the office, which we don’t have one. This is my hobby. My hobby is to make stuff, right? We just love what we do.

Preston Pysh (00:21:36):

It’s awesome. It was sure a lot of fun. All right. So NVK, how would you make Bitcoin cheap to transact for the unbanked locations in the world?

NVK (00:21:49):

So these two cards are what we think is the game-changer, right? I mean, this one has cryptography on it. We found that Opendime is a fantastic solution. People loved it and people were trying to use them in developing countries, but it’s just too expensive, the device, right? I mean, we just couldn’t do it. So after a lot of sourcing and trying to figure out, we found a chip that could do NFC in the security in the way that we want it at a cost that we could drastically decrease and also make it usable.

Preston Pysh (00:22:21):

What do you mean by the NFC part?

NVK (00:22:24):

So this is a tap card. It’s a compactless card. So you just tap it on your phone and, essentially, this is how you can transact Bitcoin. You load the card with Bitcoin. There’s going to be a QR on the back, this one isn’t activated, and that’s it. You give this to somebody. They don’t have to trust you and they can just take the card and that’s it. The transaction is done. It’s already in the card.

Preston Pysh (00:22:45):

So if I’m receiving this payment or say I’m requesting $10 worth of Satoshis, right? So I would type in to my device that I want that many Sats, which would be what? How many Sats would that be? 20,000 Sats or something. So I’d put that there, and then you’d just hold the card up to my device, and then I would see that it was paid? What would that look like?

NVK (00:23:09):

So think about it this way. You could just send it to the card. Say the person doesn’t even have a wallet, but say you want to give it to your cousin, some Bitcoin, but you want to do it in front of him. So you can give him the card. You take a picture of the card with the QR or the tap, and you send Bitcoin to it, done. He has Bitcoin. He doesn’t need to understand. He doesn’t have to have a wallet, nothing, but he has the private key. This is non-custodial. Whenever he wants to spend it, he just taps on an app and puts the pin that’s on the back and he spends the card.

Preston Pysh (00:23:39):

Wow.

NVK (00:23:41):

Now, imagine you have a stack of these preloaded with whatever amount you want or denomination you want, right? You can go and you can say, “You know what? Here’s 10 cards of 100,” just gift cards, but it’s Bitcoin. Then if the person receives these, they can spend it, but then they can generate the new private key on them. They don’t get the QR. The QR is fixed to the first one, but you can do it 10 times. You can have 10 private keys in a card.

Preston Pysh (00:24:09):

That’s just unbelievable.

NVK (00:24:11):

The key here is it’s going to cost less than $10, right? Say you want to donate this to some cause you want. You don’t have to worry about privacy. There’s no privacy implication. The person receiving this can just give this to the next person. They don’t need to spend it, right? So you can have an old UTXO here, an old Bitcoin in this card just passing around for years and years and years without ever being spent. There’s no cost to transact.

NVK (00:24:38):

Now, it gets interesting because you have a Bitcoin private key here. So we made another variation of this that this one essentially behaves like a normal wallet. You can essentially use this for multisig. So you can just tap it with other wallet or you can authenticate with your phone. You can authenticate with anything that has NFC and you just don’t need to understand Bitcoin anymore.

NVK (00:25:03):

It’s nice. We want people to understand it, and it functions off of the web, too. So you have a website that if you tap this, these ones are not active, but if you tap it on the phone, a website tells you if the card is valid or not because you can check the cryptography of it, and in good fashion is you don’t have to trust us either. Well, there’s a level of trust, but the trust is minimized because we use a block nones as part of the entropy. So it’s provable that we don’t know the private key. It’s just that Opendime was fun and all, I’m still going to sell it, but it’s just I couldn’t make it scale to a billion people, right?

NVK (00:25:44):

This is a card with a chip that I can get a billion made and that’s it, and the cost would just lower and lower and lower and lower. I can get economies of scale on this that are different and you can get artists on this. It’s a whole different universe of scale that I think we can finally serve people that don’t necessarily even want to understand Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (00:26:07):

When does this roll out?

NVK (00:26:09):

We actually announced the SDK for devs to start implementing this on wallets. So it’s open, right? So it’s going to function with any wallet that wants to work with this essentially. The software is done mostly for the cards. The cards are functional. I think in just a few months it should be out the door.

Preston Pysh (00:26:31):

Wow.

NVK (00:26:31):

Who knows? Maybe Bitcoin Miami already have some, but I just don’t want to promise, but it’s done. That’s why we got the laser machine there.

Preston Pysh (00:26:38):

Congrats. That’s amazing.

NVK (00:26:39):

It should be fun. We’ll send you some when we have it.

Preston Pysh (00:26:43):

I’d love to receive it loaded, of course.

NVK (00:26:48):

There might be some money transmitter thing there.

Preston Pysh (00:26:52):

Don’t load it.

NVK (00:26:52):

That’s right. It does ship on a card. People don’t understand shipping physical things. It’s a problem, right? This goes in an envelope. You can ship anywhere in the world.

Preston Pysh (00:27:04):

Unreal.

NVK (00:27:05):

It should be fun.

Preston Pysh (00:27:07):

Here’s a question for you that I think you’re one of the few people that I know I can ask this question to and get a really profound response. How do Bitcoiners harden the network from a transmission and reception standpoint if internet service providers go down? Let me give you an example. For people that are listening to this, over in Kazakhstan, they had the internet service providers turned off. They’re going through a conflict with their politicians and overthrow. I was participating in a spaces chat, and one of the guys was like, “Hey, it’s really cool that Blockstream has a satellite, but all we can really use it for is knowing where the current block is. It’s not like we can actually transmit to it. The satellite’s broadcasting the blockchain, it’s sending, but it has no receive mechanism.” On top of that, he didn’t have any type of, even if it would, he didn’t have a satcom setup in order to transmit or any of that stuff.

Preston Pysh (00:28:07):

So here’s a guy who’s able to pull four cent per kilowatt hour electricity in his mining facility, which is extremely cheap for anybody who’s mining, but he can’t submit block because he doesn’t have an internet connection. What can be done in order to harden this network and make it more robust so that that type of scenario, which could happen anywhere in the world right now based on things we’re seeing, which we’ll get to later for sure, how can we harden this network?

NVK (00:28:38):

It’s hard to explain to people that modern nations cannot just flip the switch. Okay? Your G20 countries, which is where most of the wealth is anyways, can’t just turn off the internet. Okay. I just like starting from that premise just so people understand because that’s how the banking system works. That’s how the stock system works. That’s how every single Fortune 500 company that pays all the taxes works. So you just can’t just press a button, but let’s do the game theory, right?

NVK (00:29:11):

So fine. Let’s say Canada, we are under a dictatorship right now. Let’s say dear leader Trudeau decides to turn off, to flip a switch, right? So what does Rodolfo do? Well, I have my ham radio set up, right? I can transmit in many different types of frequency bands, right? Some are better, some are worse. I do have the block stream satellite. It’s off right now so I can receive blocks. If they try to jam Ku-band, which is the satellite dish band, which they could, state actors have the capabilities of doing that kind of stuff, I probably would use maybe pigeons with microSD cards because it’s a lot of data.

NVK (00:29:53):

So let’s assume that I I can receive, right? So I’m receiving from the satellite. Now, I check the blocks, I sign a transaction, then what do I do? Well, I find a counterparty that could relay this transaction for me in a different country through ham radio. I’ll transmit to him the data and he’ll simply broadcast a transaction for me, and then he would show up from satellite on my desktop saying that it’s fine.

NVK (00:30:20):

So you can resolve this stuff fairly reasonably. Does it create a lot of nonsense? Does it create a lot of friction? Yes, but am I capable of transacting? Yes. Right? Let’s expand this a little more, right? Let’s say, for example, there are now, say, jamming HF, so the frequencies that go very far. Okay. Great. So now, you go closer to the border and you get some Americans in Buffalo to point their high-gain WiFi antennas or all their stuff that the government just don’t want to just fully jam because they’re going to jam their own stuff and you can try to get data in and out that way and they can broadcast it for me, right?

NVK (00:31:07):

We do see this in many countries that do have issues with government, governments trying to block things. In a way, I think modern, rich countries just can’t handle this. They just can’t do this new senses because their economies will just absolutely implode immediately, but it is a nice exercise, right? It’s nice to know that you’re capable of. Maybe there’s a catastrophe, right? There’s a disaster. Maybe our Pickering atomic plant explodes. You still need to maybe receive Bitcoin or send Bitcoin. You can do that, right? I mean the first responders in any disaster are ham radio operators. They’re the first people online and it’s just nice to know that you have a money now that can also flow through the same coms.

Preston Pysh (00:31:57):

So in the first scenario that you were talking about as far as sending it to a friend and then they would submit the block for you that you discovered as the correct solution through your guessing, through your mining, in that scenario, you’re suggesting that you would use HF or would you use a different frequency or would you send it via text message? How would you transmit that?

NVK (00:32:19):

We don’t have a setup that’s already pre-set up. Let’s put it this way, something that’s already high availability and essentially high speed. Everything travels at speed of sound, right? It is digital. Sorry, the speed of light because it is digital. So there is no difference between a radio transmission, regardless of power, and the transmission of something going through copper, so through ethernet, just so people understand, but the problem with-

Preston Pysh (00:32:45):

The amount of data that’s being sent is what’s limited.

NVK (00:32:48):

This is the issue. So transmitting a whole block is going to take a while in HF. Through WiFi, through the border will be fairly quick. Maybe it’s 3G. Maybe it’s 5G. Whatever connection, it can. I think transacting, you’re totally fine. There is a million ways to get in and out. Miners would have a harder time because they are also competing with others, right? So if they don’t get that block out fast, somebody else would probably find a block before they broadcast it out.

Preston Pysh (00:33:20):

That was the essence of my question, but I see where you’re going with this because anywhere else in the world can continue to mine. Is it really an issue, and it’s really not, is it?

NVK (00:33:33):

No. I’m a big fan of making blocks smaller, which is another conversation. If blocks were smaller, then we could just buy old AM radio stations in the whole world and just broadcast Bitcoin. I mean, you come through your little AM radio and you’re done. I mean, it’s just so simple, but I got to say with the existing block size, it’s just on the edge of what you want to do on those 10 minutes in data.

Preston Pysh (00:34:00):

Again, it’s really a non-factor for mining, for submitting blocks via mining because you’re always going to have somebody in the world that’s mining it with no restriction.

NVK (00:34:10):

It is decentralized. I mean, China did that, right? It wasn’t through cutting off the internet, but they literally made mining illegal, and then we had that massive hash rate drop, Bitcoin survived. It actually went up in price.

Preston Pysh (00:34:22):

Easily, yeah.

NVK (00:34:24):

Then the mining equipment moved. I mean, moving things in and out of places that are under distress is not exactly a new thing. There have been dictatorianships and bad places in the world forever, and people somehow find a way.

Preston Pysh (00:34:38):

As far as software that’s written for a country in distress with internet service provider cutting off access, it doesn’t seem like there is a go-to software solution, whether you’re submitting that over HF or you’re doing it via text message. That’s in place for countries that might be going through a scenario like that. Correct?

NVK (00:35:00):

There used to be a number for you to text transactions to if I remember right way back in the day that would broadcast for you. I don’t know who ran that number, but it was around. It become and used enough and then I think these projects die, right? That’s why it’s like the ham radio stuff, right? Most people have is collective dust. It’s just nice to have it if you ever need, but the cool thing about the ham stuff is that you don’t need specialized software. We already have FLDG and a few other digital to analog converters.

Preston Pysh (00:35:35):

Got it.

NVK (00:35:35):

Right, that you dump a file, right?

Preston Pysh (00:35:38):

It just spews it out in R2D2 type way.

NVK (00:35:42):

Yeah, exactly, right? So it’s exactly that. So if you are a sailor, people who do transatlantic salient stuff, they have what this thing called Wintor, and it’s essentially email over ham radio.

Preston Pysh (00:35:54):

Oh, okay.

NVK (00:35:55):

There is lots of stations around the world that just broadcast those emails for them.

Preston Pysh (00:36:00):

Yeah, and I don’t think people realize the range on HF. I mean, it depends on which band you’re going in to and the atmospherics and things like that, but you can get 3,000 kilometers out of the HF.

NVK (00:36:11):

Oh, much more. I can reach Japan.

Preston Pysh (00:36:14):

Yeah, from Canada. Yeah.

NVK (00:36:17):

From Canada with very little power.

Preston Pysh (00:36:19):

Gain, yeah.

NVK (00:36:22):

So it’s actually very hard for a state actor to find through advanced com recognition, right? They can normally find people broadcasting, but a low power, it becomes very Hardy. You get lost in the noise.

Preston Pysh (00:36:35):

How long do you think it would take for you to transmit a block in HF if you started it?

NVK (00:36:41):

It depends on the frequency because essentially, the higher the frequency, the more bandwidth you have.

Preston Pysh (00:36:46):

so three megahertz.

NVK (00:36:48):

Yeah. So essentially, three megahertz would probably take about seven minutes.

Preston Pysh (00:36:54):

Oh, wow. It’d take that long.

NVK (00:36:56):

Yeah, and then the radio is going to, “Please stop. Please make this stop.”

Preston Pysh (00:37:01):

That’s assuming you’re going to get the whole transmission comes through. Yeah.

NVK (00:37:04):

No, because the difference between voice and data is that data is constant, right? It’s really the load of the radio. It’s cool. The radio’s going to be like, “Please, make this stop.”

Preston Pysh (00:37:14):

Everybody on that frequency is like, “What is going on?”

NVK (00:37:17):

That’s right.

Preston Pysh (00:37:17):

All right. Okay. So we were talking about this a little bit and I’m trying to keep it as politically agnostic as possible, but it’s a little hard with this one. Things up in Canada are getting pretty crazy. So everybody’s familiar with the truckers, the government’s response, the government steps in. The part where I think it’s just got outrageous is shutting down the bank accounts, going after anybody who’s provided a financial contribution to this protest. It seems like tonight I saw some charts that it’s basically a bank run, right? What’s going on?

NVK (00:37:51):

Yeah. So we don’t know what’s going on at the banking thing. I mean, it was just a glitch between major Canadian four banks.

Preston Pysh (00:38:03):

All at the same time.

NVK (00:38:03):

Yeah. Maybe the mainframe crashed. I don’t know. I had a theory. I think that maybe they were running the donor list against the banks DB at the same time. Maybe that’s what caused that, but banks have a lot of data per day. So it’s unlikely. I don’t know. I have no idea what’s going on with the banking thing.

Preston Pysh (00:38:22):

What an ad for Bitcoin up in Canada. Everybody up in Canada is going to be a Bitcoiner.

NVK (00:38:26):

Yeah. I mean, you have the deputy minister going on TV and saying that, “Essentially, we can’t do anything about Bitcoin.” Thank you for explaining to people why people that have a different opinion may want to not bank. The context of this whole thing here is even more stupid, right? Canada is essentially having a deplorables moment. The political class here I don’t think had ever had a non-woke, big movement happening politically, and these truckers are not exactly polished small guys, right? So you have this big guys who are not going to budge with this massive rigs honking downtown out for three weeks.

Preston Pysh (00:39:13):

Has it been that long?

NVK (00:39:13):

Yeah.

Preston Pysh (00:39:13):

Oh, I didn’t realize that.

NVK (00:39:16):

Yeah. They took the wheels off of some of them.

Preston Pysh (00:39:17):

Wow.

NVK (00:39:20):

Oh, this is amazing. So the towing companies don’t want to tow. They’re like, “No. I don’t want to participate. I don’t want anything to do with this.” You can’t move those rigs without a rig.

Preston Pysh (00:39:33):

Are they still there right now?

NVK (00:39:35):

Yes.

Preston Pysh (00:39:35):

Oh, my God!

NVK (00:39:36):

It’s amazing.

Preston Pysh (00:39:38):

So they cleared the bridge. I understand that they logistically shut off the bridge to the US, right? Have they cleared that out completely?

NVK (00:39:46):

Yeah. So that’s the weird part, right? So they cleared the Windsor bridge, which is the one that has the most amount of trade through, and then there were a few other border crossings that are … Your show is mostly American audience, so no, no. We have a small little border between Canada and US and a ton of a ton of crossings. So they closed a few major ones, but there was some guns found in a truck. So all the truckers are like, “You know what? We’re done with this?” in one of the border crossings and just like, “We don’t want to be identified with violence. This was supposed to be peaceful.” Everybody left. All the borders are clear, essentially.

NVK (00:40:21):

All that’s left is the guys honking in front of parliament and it’s a party. There’s kids. They were actually roasting a pig today. There’s a jacuzzi in the middle of the street. It’s totally like a party and the politicians and the people who live in Ottawa are the political class, right? They don’t know how to handle it. So they’re calling martial law to handle that.

Preston Pysh (00:40:47):

Wow. Yeah. No, it seems like, and I think maybe even the bigger part of this, especially when you’re looking at it from a global context, is that idea is a seed that’s now being planted everywhere. I mean, you saw it being replicated in France. I don’t know how that played out. I just saw that there was clashes inside of Paris, but I think the idea-

NVK (00:41:06):

Israel.

Preston Pysh (00:41:06):

In Israel, you’re seeing this seed of an idea about mandates and basically people wanting their freedoms going back to where they were pre-COVID starting to really take root around the world, especially, and again, I’m trying to stay as politically agnostic on this as possible, but especially when you look at the Omicron variant that had just drastically less lethal effects on people. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it was very much like a common cold, right?

NVK (00:41:38):

So for your audience, for your audience to get a little bit context, in Canada we had some pretty draconian rules, right? So for example, have vaccine passports to enter restaurants. You can’t fly out of the country without of vaccine passport. These truckers really started because, listen, I think Canada is probably 80%-90% vaccinated. So it was really just politicians tried to be mean, really. There’s essentially no risk, statistical risk associated with this.

NVK (00:42:06):

So they essentially wanted to mandate truckers to be vaccinated in order to cross the border, but the problem is, though, they’ll lose their livelihood if they don’t want to get vaccinated, essentially, right? So they’re like, “Okay. Screw this. We’re all done with this anyways.” In Canada, about half the population is for it, half the population is against it. It gets very complicated. We have a public healthcare system.

Preston Pysh (00:42:30):

I think you see most of that from a global context, too, in that there’s a split. I think that’s what really is forcing the banging of the heads together between political parties is you really do have a split between how people view this, but I guess for me, just personally, if I’m going to speak on of my own opinion is just the virus is mutating, the last variant that came through was, for all intents and purposes, very much like a common cold. So to be forcing a lot of these policies and a lot of these procedures, I mean, for God’s sake, look at the Superbowl. Not a single person there with a mask on, right? The mayor himself isn’t there, but yet the kids go to school who don’t even have concern of catching this thing. They’re wearing masks.

NVK (00:43:13):

I have kids. I don’t like kids wearing masks because it’s bad for them, right? It’s really that simple. They’re not at risk. The way I see it is like, “Can we just all go back to minding your own businesses and all?” If you want to wear a mask, wear a mask. If you don’t want to wear a mask, don’t wear a mask. If you want to get vaccine, get vaccine. If you don’t want to wear … It’s just really so simple. If you’re really scared, stay at home. Nobody’s forcing you to leave the house, and it’s not like my fabric mask is going to prevent you from catching COVID from me, anyways. So I think people did a power trip and we have to hide inflation somehow, right? So COVID is a great narrative for that.

Preston Pysh (00:43:50):

Boy, oh, boy, what a conversation that is. So you and I, I don’t know that we’ve ever, I know we’ve talked online about our points of view on that particular topic, but how do you view this from a financial lens, from a macro lens because it seems like when you got your start, it was much more about the hardware, the tech, the software of Bitcoin, and then maybe you grew into this understanding or this knowledge of the broader macro implications of what’s going down. Is that a good characterization of it or have you seen the macro background since you’ve been in the space?

NVK (00:44:29):

I have no background in finance. I was economically illiterate before Bitcoin. So this all came with Bitcoin, but I did grow up in Brazil, right? We had multiple currency failures there, and we had bail ins. We had it all. We had capital controls, and then we had the delusion of the Brazilian Real, which was a fascinating experiment. Anyone who’s interested in currency failings or winning should read the story of the Brazilian Real because it was essentially just everybody magically making it happen. It was absolutely based on zero. There was nothing backing it. It’s just we’re all just going to agree that this is going to one-to-one to the dollar and that’s it, and they made it happen.

Preston Pysh (00:45:14):

What was it like leading up to that, through the failure? How would you describe socially what was happening?

NVK (00:45:20):

Oh, the Vimar times.

Preston Pysh (00:45:22):

Really?

NVK (00:45:23):

Yeah. No. The way I like to say it, it’s never the way that people think this stuff is because government is still poking, right? You also have foreign actors causing interference in a peer signal of the economy, right? So you have multinational companies that come in and they can pay a lot more. So there’s a lot of big signals in the market, but the main thing is the market cannot have a clear signal of matchmaking, right? So you’re going to have, for example, a lot of people looking for employees, and then you’re going to have a lot of people without a job. So it’s the market not finding a way of matching those two because it’s that the business cannot pay enough or the government is mandating weird stuff because it’s whatever the times dictate the government to mandate some extra stuff, right?

NVK (00:46:18):

Then you have this other people who may be receiving a check, right? It’s not a great check, but it’s better than leaving the house to go work, right? We had this reserve in Canada. Businesses could not find people. The taxi companies here, they couldn’t find taxi drivers even though the taxi driver would make three times what he made from the check.

NVK (00:46:39):

You start having all this disparity of matchmaking in the market between labor and employers. You start seeing that with financial products. So for example, you’re going to have low interest rates for some stuff that is highly disposable say buying a fridge and financing a fridge, but then the house price, the house interest for mortgage, at least in Brazil, would have been super high, but now in Canada, we have say, if you want a city house, you can get a variable rate, 1.5% a year on a 25-year mortgage. Okay? It’s insane, with 5% down. That’s it. It’s insane.

NVK (00:47:18):

Now, they’re trying to cramp it up a little bit so it’s only 5x combined income total that they’ll lend you, which also makes it impossible for people to buy a house because house prices are doing. We did 28% this year, house increase in price.

Preston Pysh (00:47:37):

Yeah. I’ve heard up in Canada housing price is just going well. The irony for me is there’s just so much land. There’s so much land.

NVK (00:47:45):

Oh, yeah. No, I mean, but it’s not that, the problem. I mean, but outside of the cities, it’s worst. It’s 2x-3x the house price because it was really mispriced before. There was no interest in a country home. Let’s put it this way, right? The market was just not there. Now that people had COVID here and being prisoners in their houses, they were like, “I want more property. I want more land. I want to move out of the city.” So that demand spiked. So you have cottages and country homes going to 2x-3x, but those you cannot get a mortgage for in the same way because I think the government won’t guarantee as much for the bank and then credit cards are going up a lot. The line of credits are going up a lot. It’s an absolute insanity with pricing. The beef, I mean, it’s 15% year over year.

Preston Pysh (00:48:39):

Oh, it’s crazy right now. The meme that you see online is everything’s clown world. Is that what it felt like in Brazil when it was going through it? Was it clown world? Is that the best way to just summarize it into a fun or simple phrase?

NVK (00:48:58):

I mean, Brazil, politically speaking, has always been clown world.

Preston Pysh (00:49:02):

Hey, hey, everywhere in the world is.

NVK (00:49:04):

I mean, the last Comey people who were elected for president through a party, I think they spent $300,000 in lobsters. Brazil, politically speaking, is in a completely different level of clown world, right? Funny enough, at least there you have a little bit more polarity in media. So aside from the main big ones, there is more media variety for you to consume. So there is better source of information. In Canada, we don’t. There’s last people, there’s last options, and they’re all subsidized by the government now because they’re all broke in the last 10-20 years. So they’re all essentially spilling out the message that the government is not evil, right? It’s fascinating to being watching this.

NVK (00:49:47):

To me, the COVID narrative, the reason why they don’t want to let go is because COVID has been great for them to hide inflation, right? Their supply chains, that’s it. There’s absolutely no reason there was all the printing. Canada printed for X, right? It was the M2 last year. So the COVID narrative is absolutely perfect, right? It’s like we have this thing that’s out of our control. Look, everybody’s having problems with this. It’s not just Canada, right? Then print, print, print.

Preston Pysh (00:50:15):

All right. Smart contracts, is this something that you see getting built and constructed on top of Bitcoin? Is it something that requires another token? Can you somehow do this on top of Lightning? What are your thoughts on this idea of smart contracts in Bitcoin?

NVK (00:50:33):

I don’t think that the smart contract that people want to have, the Ethereum style thing, is going to happen on Bitcoin. Remember, Bitcoin’s purpose is to replace central banking, right? It’s on the Genesis block. We’re not going to make any single trade off that will cause any erosion of that immutability of the monetary supply, block size, and how mining works. So it’s not going to change, right?

NVK (00:51:02):

I think what Bitcoin can provide two smart contracts that no other system can provide is that immutable source of truth, right? So you can anchor stuff you want to do on the Bitcoin blockchain. People try to do that in projects back in the day, but it wasn’t the time, right? I think the time is starting to come and people are starting to do stuff, especially with Lightning, right? So Lightning, in a way, is a smart contract. It’s not like a turn and complete one, but you do have two parties and you’re essentially sending a UTXO between each other without spending, and there is this discrete log contracts that are coming that you can add essentially like an Oracle to something. Is it-

Preston Pysh (00:51:45):

What do you think about those? Do you think that there’s some promise there or do you think this is just hype?

NVK (00:51:50):

No. It depends on what you want to do, right? I mean, pretty much everything that’s done in smart contracts nowadays, it’s essentially mostly centralized and could be done on a database, right?

Preston Pysh (00:52:01):

Ament to that.

NVK (00:52:04):

Right? I mean, web three is a big database, right?

Preston Pysh (00:52:08):

Where are all the VCs going to pump their money there?

NVK (00:52:10):

This is ultimately the problem, right? I mean, Bitcoin disintermediates a middleman and the VC model of the last say 10-15 years has been really honed down to be the perfect middleman that creates a monopoly, right? I mean, that’s literally Peter Thiel’s pieces. Right?

Preston Pysh (00:52:27):

That’s so true. It is. It literally is.

NVK (00:52:32):

It makes sense. It’s a great thesis to make money, but Bitcoin removes that, right? So the smart contract stuff is possible and it’s happening, especially with lending, those features. I think as true need, true utility comes, I think we can resolve those issues with Bitcoin being the original source of truth or at least the place where you dump your liquidity because you don’t want to … Like money that I hold in Bitcoin, I go to bed and I sleep, right? If I was holding Ethereum, I probably wouldn’t sleep, right? So all these contracts and all these people would still find their place of resting, where to park their capital they made a profit that they made in Bitcoin, right? So how that plays out is interesting, especially with the stable coins and all that stuff.

Preston Pysh (00:53:25):

I’m sure they’re rolling 99 dice. What does the UX in this space look like in five or seven years from now? This was a question that Marshall had asked some of these questions. I thought these were really good questions. So your ColdCard today, and just most people with a hardware wallet, when I’m thinking where we’re at in five to seven years from now, I think Apple, Google, some of these major players are going to be entering the space. So what does the UX look like? How do they integrate into this space and do it in a way that still allows self-custody because I think that there’s going to be a huge demand for that? What do you see this being?

NVK (00:54:07):

It’s a funny question because thinking about Bitcoin seven years from now is, I mean, what happened in the last 11 years?

Preston Pysh (00:54:14):

I mean, yeah. Just look at what happened in the last seven years. It’s crazy. Yeah.

NVK (00:54:18):

Yeah. So first is you’re never going to be able to trust the Apple phone or the Google phone. It’s just you can’t, right? It’s all closed down. It’s all non-verifiable. It’s extremely complex. Even if you could trust them, you simply cannot trust a general purpose computer because the tax surface is just ginormous, right? What I think they’ll be great at is providing you with a safe wallet that is for small amounts of money, but remember, your carrier can still remote access your phone. Okay? So they could maybe remote cancel your wallet if it’s based on their chips and all that stuff, but even with the wallets on the phone, I mean, technically they can’t, right? They have access to the base band that shares memory with the phone. So they could technically see you generating the private key. So you simply cannot trust.

NVK (00:55:11):

So what we’re doing is we’re making this, essentially NFC cards that you can just tap on the phone, the security profile and trade offs are different than ColdCard. This is not for your eternal wealth. Essentially, you’re going to go, “Oh, I want to sign this transaction,” send money to buy a phone. So it’s like a real money, but not your wealth. You just tap on the back of the phone and just sign the transaction or it’s maybe multisig. The wallet has one key that maybe I only allow it to spend say $1,000 per day either because dad said it or because you said it so that if it gets robbed, it’s not an issue, and you use the card to cosign that, right? You’re going to see a lot of NFC coming.

NVK (00:55:56):

Square analysis are going to do NFC. The mark four has NFC on it. I think that’s how I see a lot of the stuff going the next say five years, right? It’s the NFC as a means of an easy, quick UX. I think that once tap route starts to get more interesting in scripting, we might be able to de-risk devices by having more complex threshold signatures between them. Then you don’t have to trust the phone as much. So maybe one day ColdCard doesn’t exist anymore, right? Maybe that’s 10 years, 20 years from now. The scripting became so, so smart and so good, and so derisked that you could have 50 devices and then it’s all spread and then it’s not a concern, but we’re definitely far from that.

Preston Pysh (00:56:41):

So for people’s who aren’t maybe understanding what you’re getting at from the technical front, so similar to how you have three different Apple devices and then it’s going to ping the three of them and you’re secured. So you’re talking at it because of tap route and because of the scripting that can be done through that update that just went through with Bitcoin you think that maybe they could get to something like that in the future.

NVK (00:57:01):

Yeah. I think there’s limits, being very realistic, but I think a lot can be done and a lot can be reimagined and rethought and more maybe upgrades come, but I think it’s possible to do a lot more on the middle ground, right? I think when you’re talking about generational wealth, you’re talking about real money, the level of security, the level of forward error correction, forward thinking needs to be much greater, right? That’s why I want to trust minimize, a very simple device that is fully verifiable, and you do your dice because we simply don’t know and you might be dead, right? Your kids might have this private key that you generated. Maybe their grand grandkids have the same private key still, right? So making sure you are doing your 256 bits and they’re good bits, that part of your legacy-

Preston Pysh (00:57:59):

Roll your dice.

NVK (00:58:01):

Exactly. I think it would be-

Preston Pysh (00:58:04):

Your great grandkids will be proud of you.

NVK (00:58:07):

Yes. It’s like, “Daddy didn’t get it robbed.”

Preston Pysh (00:58:10):

How do you think about security’s concerns of the components of the hardware when you think about the upstream supply chain? So you’re receiving components. Maybe some are more complex than others, but to think that you have absolute control of everything that you’re sticking in any type of hardware these days is just there’s no way. So how do you think through that? I know that all your manufacturing’s done there in Canada, but I know you’re probably receiving some parts from China or wherever, components inside of your hardware. So how do you think about that, the upstream risks?

NVK (00:58:49):

Yeah. We receive parts from all over the world. It’s very simple. We don’t trust anything. So assume it’s compromised, right? That’s our way of thinking about this stuff is just you assume everything’s compromised. You essentially don’t trust the parts. So for example, we store your seed in the secure element, but we all know the state actors probably have a back door that’s secure, and also, nothing is hackable, right? So give it enough resources, somebody will get in eventually, right? I mean, ledger spent half a million dollars in gear and probably a million dollars in just staff breaking the ColdCard mark two. The three resolved the problems, but it’s a matter of time and somebody’s going to figure out a way. These are repeatable and all that stuff. That’s a different story, right? Good luck.

NVK (00:59:35):

The key here is, so for example, the seed is encrypted with a key from the other manufacturer’s chip, and then it’s stored in this manufacturer’s chip. So now, we’re playing two chips against each other, right? Mark four is going to have another secure element. Now, you have to break three parts to get to secrets, and that’s not even counting the past phrase and everything else you can do and you should do, but we’re just trying to play in a way that we’re raising because nothing’s impossible. We’re just raising the time and cost and failure of attacks so high that essentially it becomes silly for them to try to break it.

Preston Pysh (01:00:15):

You’re not even talking multisig, right?

NVK (01:00:18):

Exactly. No.

Preston Pysh (01:00:18):

You’re not even talking about multisig wallet. Yeah.

NVK (01:00:21):

This plain Jane wallet, right? It’s still fairly secured because remember, you also want to defend the firmware because you don’t want the firmware. That’s why having a secure element is so much more than just the seed protection per se, right? You want to make sure that the firmware is not tampered with because that firmware could lie to you and the firmware can see your seed when it’s operating, right? To protect all those secrets, we want to create this whack-a-mole game that has high failure rate for the attacker. That’s how we play the game theory on the design of the device and how we don’t trust supply chains. It really is that simple because you can’t.

Preston Pysh (01:01:01):

No. Hey, speaking of which, what do you think about the supply chains right now? Are you seeing them getting any better or are you still seeing delays in deliverables?

NVK (01:01:11):

Well, I mean, everything started to get slow on the beginning of COVID because everybody said, “I don’t want to take public transportation,” so everybody decided to buy a car, right? This was early 2020, right? The same chips that we use, car manufacturers use, and they get priority, but we’re pretty good at buying parts. For the next device, we bought parts for the whole year, for manufacturing. We can just make them now, but it sucks because China was super delayed with just logistics per se. So a lot of our stuff doesn’t come through ships, so we don’t have to worry too much about that except when we buy big machines, but because the container ships were all slow, everything got moved to airplane. So now the airplanes are getting sent back with orders that shouldn’t go in an airplane.

NVK (01:02:06):

So if you want to buy say zero press punches, used to be cheap, and they come on a ship and max three months you have them, right? You were starting to look at six months, a year. You’re not going to send these things in an airplane because it’s going to make it cost five times. We had to buy this big laser machine to etch the new NFC cards. It’s a reasonably sized industrial machine. You normally come on a ship cheap. We had to put in an airplane, and that was a fortune. The airplane ride was more expensive than the machine.

Preston Pysh (01:02:44):

Hey, all right. The last question I got for you here, when we think about, this is a generic one, I’m talking about Bitcoin price action. We go through these big run ups and it seems that there’s some type of narrative or something that drives whether it’s the halving event or it’s Facebook’s trying to do their own Libra. We saw a massive run up from that. Is there a catalyst that you see that’s going to play out or something that you think is going to drive the next big wave of people coming inbound into the space? I mean, I guess you could even argue that this stuff happening in Canada right now could be a potential catalyst, but is there anything you see playing out that you think is going to drive a lot of that?

NVK (01:03:27):

I mean, Russia just announced that they like Bitcoin now, right? So can you imagine if Russia tells Europe, “So do you know all the energy you need from us? Well, we want to get paid in Bitcoin,” I mean, that would be-

Preston Pysh (01:03:40):

I’m with you. It’s just insane.

NVK (01:03:44):

No, it’s over. It’s full capitation of fiat. I mean, just because of the drive of Bitcoin and then you have the self-fulfilling cycle of people see the price go up, they go into this thing, too, and then there is the Russian story with the ammonia nitrate, too, the 60% producer. Those guys want to be off the dollar, right? Then you have the thing between China and Russia. It’s a different story. They’re going to be happy to print their own monies and send to each other there. I think if we have more of these Canada style banking, illegal seizure of money, I mean, people are going to smarten up and not have money anymore in these banks because a lot of people don’t understand that the foreign bank account is not what it used to be. Nowadays, all these banks are on their loop. They all talk to Daddy IRS, right? There is very little escape for that except for stable coins.

NVK (01:04:41):

Stable coin is the new Swiss bank account for people that want dollar. A lot of that flows through Bitcoin not because it’s running on top of Bitcoin, but flows through Bitcoin. I think the demand for that has been insane. It’s going to grow a lot more and then a lot more. Then there is inflation. It’s almost like there’s no aspect of life or economy or politics. It does not point to a essentially event horizon for Bitcoin. I mean, this is just nothing. I mean, I look outside, I talk to people, everything just points to a Bitcoin demand just based on the economics and everything else the society has done for the last a hundred years. It’s just no escaping that. Thankfully, we have Bitcoin.

Preston Pysh (01:05:30):

Amen to that. Well, if there’s any Canadian politicians listening to this conversation with NVK and myself, I just want to put out there, he makes the best dice and makes the best calculators in Canada. NVK, I want to thank you for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about you, we want to find out about your products, give them a handoff where they can learn more.

NVK (01:05:50):

For the products, go to coinkite.com, and then on Twitter, we have a million accounts there. @CoinKite is one of them, and then you can find me @NVK, November, Victor, Kilo.

Preston Pysh (01:06:05):

We will have links to all this in the show notes for folks. If you don’t remember, whatever, just go to the show notes. You can click on the links that we’ll have there. NVK, thank you so much for making time. This was long overdue and I thoroughly enjoy learning from you. You’re just such a wealth of knowledge. So thanks for coming on the show.

NVK (01:06:22):

Hey, thanks for having me. You have great questions.

Preston Pysh (01:06:25):

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

Outro (01:06:57):

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.