BTC145: Adam Back on Drivechains, Mining Hardware, & L1 scaling w/ James Macedonio (Bitcoin Podcast)

You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have CEO and founder Adam Beck, who's a Bitcoin OG and cryptographic expert. He's the inventor of Proof of Work and also referenced in the Bitcoin white paper. He's joined by fellow blockstream employee James Macedonio, and we cover a very wide range of topics during this interview. First, we start off talking about blockstream's efforts to develop their very own ASIC minor and what it takes to take something like that to market and all the challenges that are associated with it. Next, we talk about the abundance of minors that are currently on the market and how infrastructure lag is actually causing this abundance of supply that we're currently seeing. Finally, we talk about the hotly debated potential Bitcoin upgrade called drive chains, um personally not a big fan of drive chains, and Adam is a little bit more open to the idea. So this was a good opportunity to present the various arguments around the topic. So with that, here's my interview with the ever thoughtful Adam Beck and James Macedonio. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host Preston Pish. Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. Excited to have Adam back back on the show. James, great to have you with Adam. We got a lot to talk about here, guys. There's always something happening, right? Adam, you and I had a conversation down in Miami. You described it as building a high performance machine. And I liked that characterization because before we had that conversation, I never really I guess thought about Bitcoin mining rigs as being this engineering marvel. You described it almost like a high performance sports car to try to keep pace with the competition. So explain some of this to people. So they have a deep appreciation for the engineering that you guys are working on and then help them understand what it is that you're building with the mining rigs in the market that you're trying to enter. Right. Yeah. So Bitcoin mining is an economic competition, basically to have low operating costs, which implies low energy costs, but also electrically efficient miners rate. And the technology is improving as we know, you know, society benefits from Moore's law, which is the CPUs and other kind of integrated circuits get cheaper and faster every year, fantastical pace for decades straight. And here we are with, you know, more power in a soft phone than the world's supercomputers a year ago or something, right? And so it goes and it, you know, people keep thinking, oh, it's the end, you know, they reached a physical limit where they just keep going, right? Right. And it's down to, you know, iterative innovation, right? And so of course that applies to mining machines and they're using, you know, standard technology, right? So the market technology, which has, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of R&D over the last decades and even an individual fab, like a foundry that manufactures ASICs for one of the ASIC companies of which there are, you know, four or five globally that can manufacture the cutting edge, you know, that just a plan to build them cost 10 billion maybe or something like that. There's some international companies, you know, Samsung and TSMC are starting to break ground in the US even and, you know, they're operating in different countries around the world. So the types of chips they make on those are, you know, CPUs, cell phone, CPUs, graphics, GPUs, memories, all this kind of thing, right? And so, but you can make custom hardware and you can see the hint between a CPU, which is, you know, the, it's a general purpose computing device and a GPU, which is a specialized graphics processing device, and just a GP rate graphics processing, and it's been specialised in the hyperoptimalized for graphics, but it's not so good for general computing rate. It takes, which cuts corners, it does the same thing repetitively, and so the big point ASIC is kind of like that, but to come to the extreme, which is, you know, it does one thing and only one thing extremely efficiently, and it's a kind of SIMD machine, which means it's doing a single instructional multiple day, so it's doing the same thing a lot and lots of times. Whereas a CPU, and to some extent GPUs are, you know, following different instructions or different software on different calls, Bitcoin is kind of a hard-wired activity. You, you should calculate this hash on this nonsense and do it very fast, right? So that's what's going on in there, but, you know, the whole thing is super optimised in terms of CPUs are obviously very optimised because, you know, cell phone and laptop manufacturers care about, you know, the battery life and the performance and the efficiency and all this kind of thing. And so, but the Bitcoin ASICs are also extremely optimised, even down to custom units. So our customised nodes, so at the lowest level of a chip, you know, you can sort of compile a circuit, right? So you can describe the digital logic and then there's some software that can lay out for you and you standard library cells, you know, for like an all-gate or something or an adder or a shifter, so there's sort of building blocks and libraries that you license. And if you really need an extra bit of efficiency, you make custom ones so that you cut corners, you know something specific about the way it's used and so there's all these custom optimisations and hand tuned layout and so, you know, it's good that last bit of efficiency and that's where things are these days, the custom stuff is in there as well. James, anything that add on that particular topic in general? No, I think Adam said it pretty well that if you can optimise these chips to do the very specific function, like Bitcoin mining, then you're, you know, you're ahead of the game, right? And that's what we're looking to achieve to do, right? We're putting in our own little special sauce that being able to do our own, building our own ASIC miner, and we're able to tweak it exactly the way we want in many different ways. One of the things that Sailor mentions this from time to time and he says that Bitcoin is backed by not just energy but encrypted energy. When you look at what Adam was just describing in a lot of detail of how custom and specialised it is, I think it's lost on a lot of people that aren't intimately familiar with this space, that that is additional security in Bitcoin because you just can't go to an Amazon server farm of their, you know, all this processing that they're doing and say, all right, start mining Bitcoin and think that they're going to be competitive against these rigs that are highly tuned and specialised for guessing the, uh, the knots that Adam's talking about. And I think that's a really important thing when we talk about security and what backs actually Bitcoin. Anything, when I'm thinking about this from a manufacturing standpoint, I mean, this is a major overtaking that you guys are doing and to do it, not just to build it once, but then to build it its scale and then get the timing right seems to be very hard or very difficult to do, especially for somebody that's entering the market for the first time. What are some of your thoughts on that? Is that correct in thinking or is it maybe easier than what? No, it's driving. It's spawn and in fact, most people with that prior experience or even with ASIC experience, but not specialised to Bitcoin mining, who enters the space nervously thinking that they can, you know, they can make it a Bitcoin ASIC and a miner. How hard can it be actually end up failing to technical failure? This is extremely high risk. But what we did is we won it and bought some specialists in, I'd say the spawned early's team. That's a company that's been, you know, with a team of experts have been manufacturing Bitcoin ASIC since 2013, 2014 with multiple previous generations and they've done, you know, everything from the ASIC design, hand supply, control boards, chassis, airflow and they do the, you know, the R&D. Of course, you have to work with specialised companies for different parts of that process, like design process and finally, the mass manufacturing by everybody effectively is done by large specialised electronics manufacturing companies that, you know, will manufacture Toshiba laptops or whatever you want, basically, right? You contract with them. These are public companies that have like 150,000 employees and can, you know, manufacture to the same tolerances in like three or four different countries in the world and like ship it to you from, you know, so you can say, well, I want it to be manufactured, you know, could you do it in Mexico? Could you do it in Thailand? Could you do it? You know, they've got different sites where they can do it and reach the same specifications. And so they take care of the bulk of the sort of generic supply chain and the assembly machines and the kind of mass production, manufacturing and QA process. You know, so we're more involved in that earlier stage. Embrace, and on top of that is the timing you brought up, which is very critical. We look at the ASIC market now, it's overabundance of supply, which are driving the prices and keeping the prices low. So anyone looking to enter the market now, but at first time, there are ASICs in the market that are selling below manufactured costs. I wouldn't be a smart thing to do. And going back to the comment about Microsoft and Google and Amazon, or yeah, it's more than just a chip, but they're building highly redundant data centers and they're not really specialized for one purpose. So if a Bitcoin mining perspective, especially in a blockchain has a huge amount of experience, we're out there looking for the cheapest energy we can find and we build modular data centers, which are more efficient than what you're finding in somebody's larger enterprise cloud providers. So we're going to come out cheaper. I would think that the reliability would be really hard in testing to fully understand what the actual reliability will be long term because the thing's already running at peak power at all times, but to really kind of understand the reliability, you got to get three years into the future of that thing running constantly. So like how can you emulate or simulate what that reliability might look like three to five years after it's been manufactured and sold when there's no way to kind of really accelerate, that's the word I'm looking for to accelerate the use of the rig. How do you guys think through that from like a testing standpoint? Well, yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that helps is this team has built multiple before and learn things along the way. And so I think there's really no substitute to learning by experience with manufacturing Bitcoin Essex even for somebody who's made less, you know, high performance, high duty cycle, high power drain Essex. And I think there are specific areas where it's not not where it's specialization. So you need a staff on the line really, but you know, from talking with them over the last year or so, I've seen that there are kind of premature aging strategies people will use. So they'll intentionally overheat something pre-projecture period and that would sort of simulate aging and things like that. So the things you can do, but ultimately, yeah, you have to work with tolerances and, you know, with all these design tools for slick at layouts and things we're all working with tolerances and robustness estimates from the ports up to the completed system as well. It seems like everything's going to immersion and liquid cooled. Is that kind of how you see the next five to 10 years playing out for any new rigs that are coming on to the market is that they have some type of liquid cooled or immersion capability? Well, we've we've designed from the ground up to support both with minimal extra skews like major component parts, right? I think some of the other manufacturers have been sort of aftermarket immersion, so they weren't really designed for it, so they will work if, you know, you adapt them right. So I think by designing for from first principles for that, we can make it the red dimensions to efficiently cool, use immersion, for example, because the amount of the cooling oil is expensive for eight, so you want to have an efficient dimension to be able to pack them in. We also, you know, so we've also looked at the liquid cooling, which is like water blocks and there are some advantages to that sort of pros and cons, but we've also been doing air flow words, you know, some success. So, you know, even a relatively hot climate in Texas, for example, so we can support both out. I'm curious where you think it might come in from like a price per Terra hash standpointers. Is that known at this point or are you still too far in the left of the developmental timeline to know where that might shake out? And I know it's highly dependent on the price of other rigs and the price of Bitcoin and all that kind of stuff, but is there something that you're talking about? I mean, I mean, I could just give some kind of vague observations of the general market, because none of the manufacturers are really disclosing what the build cost is, but we're sort of inferring, you know, from how low they seem willing to sell them for and things like that, right? So, you know, we're seeing things so for under $15 Terra hash, it's all priced in and like, plus our hash growth. And we think there's below manufacturing, maybe manufacturing is around 20 or something 20 to 25. Some manufacturers might have a different manufacturing cost, or maybe, you know, different generations might cost a little more if they're on a more advanced process node. And one difference for our minor is it has more reusable parts because it's a 14-year blade server that fits in standard data center racks. So, in a, so is it effectively a two-foot cube with 10 blade servers that slide into it? And those are like field swappable, so you can, you know, essentially upgrade a blade, which is a tenth of the things hash rate. And it's kind of one pair hash in a two-foot cube. So usually people are selling miners, you know, 90, 100, 110 Terra hash in a kind of shoebox size, but this is a data center rack size with blades. And so you can fit three of those in a full size, this and a rack. Is that part of the strategy maybe moving forward as far as making the blades interoperable for upgrades in the future, or would you get a whole new bar? Yes. No, I was part of the, part of the thought is less e-waste, less cost, we ever shared control board across 10 blades. Whereas today people have a separate control board for each shoebox, and a shoebox is roughly equal to a blade. And then we can also, you know, upgrade blades with, you know, all 0.5 versions, right? So like in between versions, like extra optimizations on a current generation, or new generation, even in the same blade, and reuse, you know, the power supply and the control plane. So this is a dangerous question, and you don't have to answer it if you don't want to. When can the public market start getting their hands on these things? Since the next year, so, you know, we've taken the time to focus on more optimizations because of James indicated the ASIC market is depressed right now. So normally, let's say in 2021, no mining machine manufacturer had inventory because nobody's well enough capitalized to do that. And so what they do is they ask the customer to prepay. And even to manufacture the ASIC itself, the foundry manufacturing process takes like four or five months, right? So you are looking at at least six months before you get your first machine. In 2021, the market got so overheated that people were for, you know, tripping over each other to buy miners, they pushed the price up, they're fighting over the same supply chain, and there was supply chain limitations too, right? So it went from, you know, six months and you might get a first batch to, you know, nine months, 12 months, and your big order will get delivered in 12 parts over the next 12 months after that. So you know, you start making a payment plan and you might not get the final miner until two years later. And so that, you know, we're still seeing the tail end of that. Now, people were really quiling in buying miners in early, first half of 2021. And, you know, those are still in box on pilot or tail end, possibly still arriving. But it does mean that at the moment, there is inventory, which is not typical. And so you could actually pay money and get machines within a space of a week, right? Normally, you'd be looking at six months. So yeah, that's changed a lot since what a year ago, two years ago. Yeah, I mean, it's down to you, the cycles say, I would say, you know, most of the people with those machines would really like to put them online, but there's a shortage of hosting capacity. So places where, you know, transformed up power at 250 volts, cooling racks, ethernet, et cetera, right? It has an infrastructure cost to build that kind of thing. And that's something that we've, you know, built quite a bit of, and you can see the hash radius come up this year, you know, about, what does that mean? 50% up from the beginning of the year. And so clearly, you know, quite a bit for a structure has been built, but not enough. And so there is, you know, until the infrastructure capacity to plug them in catches up. There's a surplus. And so, you know, people are not going to, so it's a kind of bias market. So they're going to negotiate a lower price. And we think that once the inventory is absorbed, which it will be sooner later, then, you know, the prices will start to normalize because it depends on the market price of Bitcoin and the profitability of mining and so on. But, you know, the profitability of mining has also improved. I mean, the revenue per tarash has gone up because the prices increased faster than the hash rate. And because it's a, you know, the mining activity is dominated by the energy cost and the operating costs. If your revenue goes up 20, 30%, your profitability probably goes up a lot more because a big part of that was electrical cost range. So you might be like a double or triple your profitability. And you know, people won't persist in it and profitable. So if they can't make money on electrical terms, on like very old generation equipment or because they have high cost of power or high finance charges, they will stop. And so, you know, you know that everybody is kind of plus or minus making a profit. It just has a lot of sunk cost activity going on because of this kind of glutton supply, too, let's use that. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. Recently, we've seen the importance of choosing a secure Bitcoin partner. That's why people are looking towards river as their Bitcoin exchange of choice. 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Join 15 million people and businesses already saving and see what Wise could do for you by downloading the app or visiting Wise.com slash TIP. That's wise.com slash TIP. All right, back to the show. I know you threw the number 15 dollars per terrahash, but I think it's a really important consideration for people that hear a number like that. A lot of the times the rigs that have been employed for call it three years are running at a price that's 15 dollars per terrahash and you're going to run out on the reliability in a year or two and you might pay up a higher, you might pay a higher price for something that's maybe mining at 20 dollars per terrahash. And that is, it is built into the fact that you still have the entire life of that miner to employ. So the numbers on this stuff, it is very complex. There's a lot of moving parts. I couldn't even imagine trying to manufacture these at scale and get out the door like what an undertaker. But you know what, if you're in finance and you're an engineer, you're a pig and mud right out. I'm like, you couldn't get more pig and mud than this. Yeah, it's definitely a fascinating area. I mean, you've seen other like in previous, you know, because we've all kind of sat through and watched one or two market cycles, you see that in those bull market periods, the profitability of mining gets so ridiculously high that people will buy anything that mines and they'll buy, you know, they'll turn old miners back on. And there was even a period where one of the major manufacturers couldn't get enough foundry capacity at the cutting edge process node at the time. So they went, you know, to their other fab and said, well, could you made a previous generation? Because people will buy those two right now, you know, so people stop caring that much about efficiency. Just want to get them online when there's a, you know, a ball run and a profitability is very high. So, yeah, I mean, that feeds into the basic fund, but that's sort of dynamic. So it's basically swinging across market cycles between a shortage of basics, and then a shortage of hosting power, and when people are over short, I just get really excited when I think through how difficult a lot of this is in order to stand up the production and the deployment and the infrastructure once the rigs arrive and making sure you have the right transformers and like all of this stuff for me is protecting Bitcoin. If there is a nation state that's going to try to attack this, good luck. Like, bring all of this online and securing enough hash rate to have any type of everyone talks about the 51% attack as being the attack vector on Bitcoin. It's like, you really don't understand how complex the mining process is if you think that that's something that's easily done. Adam, and James, you weren't here on the last conversation that Adam and I had with the block stream mining node, which this was probably like in the 2021 time frame, I would guess we had this conversation, but I understand that block stream is doing a basic, you guys are always so good with your naming conventions. The basic, which stands for block stream, ASIC node, and you guys are listening this over in the EU. This is a bond or a note because it's short duration. Explain why you covered this when we talked about it years ago, but for people that maybe didn't hear that conversation and James were Adam, take it away. Why would a person be interested in owning this note as opposed to Bitcoin, give them that value prop from your point of view of what that does for the investor, and then really get into what this is and what you guys are trying to do with it. Yeah, I mean, the note that we launched in 2021 July was a mining note. So that was, you know, plugging miners in into the hosting facilities and James had a banner, kind of an enterprise sales and customer relationship management, so globally. So, you know, it looks like a big enterprise customer to us, but what the user has is a financial instrument that is a Luxembourg security and runs for that, that one's a three year note, so kind of fixed term and it just mines Bitcoin and then at the end of the time, the note holders get, you know, minus like filing fees and administrative fees, they get the Bitcoin mined to that point and so we are like about 26 months in, so there's like 10 months left to go and it's mined. I think it's about 6.8 Bitcoin per note and there were eight trenches sold and seven over the trenches were sold less than 6.8. So, you know, and it turned out, we were anticipating that that note would be actually bought by people with dollars looking to build a Bitcoin position, but it turned out that Bitcoin is bought most of it using Bitcoin itself because we could see the payment method rate, and so even though they did that, it appears they did well. So like everybody except crunchy, they bought it using Bitcoin is already in profit and there's another 10 months to go. So they'll be fine. Now the basic note is different animals, a different strategy, it's not do mining, it's some buying Bitcoin ASICs, the expying up accessory and holding onto it until the market gets into a different mode and then selling it back to the market, it's still new and unused in box because there's really a different market for used miners versus new miners kind of like used cars, but even worse, used cell phones or something, which people generally are not too keen to buy because, you know, maybe they dropped it, maybe the battery isn't so good anymore. In the case of miners, you have to worry, like did they adequately call it, did they use enough filtration, you know, have they damaged it basically, right? You don't know how much wear and tear there is on it. And so, particularly at this point in the market where ASICs fairly cheap, it doesn't make a lot of sense to most people to buy used miners. So, because one of the questions we get with the basic notes is, well, why don't you mind the miners and then sell them afterwards, right? Mind them in the meantime to make a profit. So, there's two problems with that. One is, as we just said, there's a shortage of power. So, we've sold it out. So, where are we going to plug them in? Obviously, if there was power available, the people selling it to us that cheap price wouldn't be selling it to us that cheap price, they'd be hosting them. So, we can't, right? That's one answer. And the other answer is, if we did it anyway, so if blockchain is like earmarks and some new infrastructure for it, we'd have to charge to go market rate, which is not that cheap, because of the shortage, right? And we would convert a new miner into a used miner for maybe six months or nine months and lose most of the upside of the miner, because then we'll be selling used miners, right? And people would be asking a lot of questions about, well, how did you use it? And how do we know? Can you give us a warranty, et cetera, right? I wanted to discount a price. So, we think that if there are people that want the economic benefit of mining, what they could do is buy the basic note for the ASIC opportunity strategy and then separately buy some BMM or hash rate contract to have a partial exposure to hosting. And that makes more sense, then, because your miners are still new. And by buying a hash rate contract, you're kind of engaging in a similar activity any way, right? And then you can see how that would work out. That might work out, okay, too, right? But we kept the basic note. Let's keep the miners new in books. Thank you. Pressive, if we were, if we had a capacity to have a blockchain with no work in additional capacity, we have a proprietary module of mining units with a much better filtration than most containers, then also we have our very cooling system as well. So we probably feel more comfortable if we were to make a choice and to mine. But we don't have the capacity, so that would create a dependency on other hosting providers. And I can tell you, some of the miners that we received from other providers, it looked like they went through the desert a few times and back. So it's risky to throw them up online. We do see that we do see it could benefit, but we think it's more beneficial just keeping brand new in some way that way. Yeah. All right. So I understand you guys have a chart that you want to display kind of making this graphically visual for people that are looking at the YouTube video. So James, are you the one with the chart? There we go. Yes. Yes. I'll bring that chart up right now. Then I'm going to speak about it. Okay. Okay. So now with the basic note can be bought using dollars or Bitcoin. And so the question is looking at historical information, how would it have performed if this kind of strategy would have been executed in the past. And so you can see that now this is in dollar terms, right? So you've got the yellow line is the Bitcoin price. So that was the 65,000 and the 69,000. And like early and late 2021. And the orange line is the sort of middle efficiency miners. Let's call them. So the miners that were the best in the market back in 2020, 2021, which were a sort of efficiency band 25 to the H or to hash and you can see that interestingly the price of a six went from $20 to a hash ish in early 2020. Let's say temperature in this period. And when all the way up to 120 and so you can see that the price is like had a bigger swing than the Bitcoin price. This is basically the point, right? So, you know, if you were in and actually blog stream did this. We bought some line-up inventory back in this period, early 2021 and late 2020, not to speculate on line-up prices, but it happens to work out that rate. The reason we bought them is we once provided an instant gratification to enterprise clients, because what we found is they didn't understand a pre-ordering, and so they'd come and say, I want to do our fund wants to do five megawatts of line-up, and we say, great, we'll negotiate your price. You worry money to this company in China, and between six and 12 months, you'll have the miners coming in and batches, and they're like, what do you mean? I can't turn it on today. It doesn't work that way rate, and so they may kind of be flammocks, maybe change their mind or do something with faster action, right? And so we figured, well, let's buy some of this pipeline, so that when they come and they decide they've made their investment decision, we can slot them in, and we can say, well, you know, this month has sold out, but we have another batch coming in, so we can put you in between, you know, next month and a month after, that'll be enough to get you online, and so we bought this inventory, and we did it into selling some of its enterprise customers. We also sold some into the market at different prices, so we found out firsthand that you can make a lot of money, just buy miners and buy them up and selling them right before, and you may not even take delivery of them right, and you just tell the manufacturer, oh, shipper to this guy, and in the next time you've sold them right, say that there's a kind of history of it, and then the other observation is that even if you look at the price of miners priced in Bitcoin, there's more, you could still make it upside in Bitcoin terms, you know, because the general wisdom is like almost nothing up forms Bitcoin. It has generally been the case rate, you know, the best performing asset class, it's gone up two times on average, although barely world swings in between, for the last decade, and basically nothing else. Now, here the point is, during economic cycle, actually, there's two times upside in this roughly, where if you'd bought A6 using Bitcoin at the lower of the market and sold them, and kept the proceeds in Bitcoin at the top of the market, where the A6 lay this one, you would actually have as much as the two times return in Bitcoin itself. And that's in hindsight with perfect timing and stuff, so that's very hard to reproduce, but you can see an effect is there. So now let's scroll forward to 2023, where we are now. You see, the Bitcoin price is appreciated, you know, 60, 70, 80% year-to-date in 2023, sorry, so the Bitcoin price itself is up quite a bit. Mining profitability is improved, but the miners have continued to fall because this area of supply, so you can see that, you know, buying miners in Bitcoin terms is extremely cheap. And the red one is a newer generation that, you know, only came on the market mid 2022, that's why it doesn't go back further, right? So, and even those are quite cheap too, right? Sub-20, so, you know, there's a bit of a judgment call about the allocation to buy, you know, whether we spend that bit more to buy the sub-25 dual miners, which, you know, will have, they were all new, but they will have a longer economically useful life, right? Because there'll be more efficient, and they might be easier to sell in a wider range of market conditions. So, you know, but then again, the orange, the mid-range ones are quite cheap, so even if you sold them at discount, you could potentially make a healthy profit on those two. So, then basically the idea is we'll just hold down until the inventory gets used up. Once the inventory is used up, they'll be back to the delay, where people are placing pre-orders and waiting for manufacturers to deliver them, and at that point, we'll be sitting on, you know, a bonded warehouse full of new end blocks, Bitcoin A6, and looking to hear what people are willing to pay for them, absent inventory to get online straight away, right? I'm impressed with the numbers, incorrectly if I'm wrong here, on the block stream mining note. You said 6.8, the average price, you know, I know you did different tranches, but around 6 Bitcoin to buy that, and it seems like people will get another 3 Bitcoin between now and the end of the term of the note, for a 3 Bitcoin gain for somebody that would have taken 6 Bitcoin and invested it into the note. So, is that the correct math for people that are looking back at that offering? I can give you the entry numbers, say, tranche 7, 4.8 Bitcoin, sorry, tranche 1, 4.8 Bitcoin, tranche 2, 7 Bitcoin, tranche 3, 5.95, tranche 4, 5.0, it's just going to the Bitcoin price pretty close. It's actually priced in euros, like there's 4.9 tranche 5, 5.3, tranche 6, 5.8 tranche 7, and then tranche 8, I guess a Bitcoin price was down a bit, and that was 8.13, but you can see that, you know, it's mines, you said 10 months left and you had 6.8 Bitcoin mined. So I give you some more data, say 6.85 mines today, another 10 months to go, and because of the anticipation of the Bitcoin to be mined during the next 10 months, it's a security token, as well as a Luxembourg Securitization Vehicle, and so you can trade it, and so there are market clearing prices, which are around 7.37.4, so you can see that all of those tranches, except for tranche 8, are well in money in Bitcoin terms with what the clearing price is, all accepts 2 and 8 are in money just in terms of the Bitcoin it's mined, right, and it should sell for more than that, and I would expect just based on like loose number crunching about the rate to continue to increase that, we'd be around 7.4 Bitcoin by end of year, and maybe 8 to 8.25 by end of term, like middle of next summer, summer 2020. It sounds phenomenal. It sounds phenomenal. I mean, there are risks, of course, but it worked out, and it actually got a bit of a, you know, a turbocharged from the China Bitcoin man, because it took a bunch of hours or five or six months, and that was all gravy for people who were mining. Very important points, but yes, and I'm glad that you said that there are risks involved when you're doing this. This isn't like you're, you know, locking it into a channel that you're still controlling the keys and things like that. People need to understand that, like any investment, right? Okay, so I want to take the conversation in a much more technical direction. First, I want to talk about splicing, because that's a little bit different than the other conversation. I think Adam knows where I'm probably going to go with this conversation, but let's talk about splicing real fast. Explain what this is, because I was up at the Bitcoin Nashville meetup that they had, and everybody was all the engineers were buzzing about splicing, and why this was important for layer two. Yeah, I mean, so you're talking about the lightning technology evolution, right? So people have been talking about channel splicing for a long time. So it's finally here. So that hence the technical buzz. And what it does is, normally, you open a lane, the evolution of a lightning channel is you open it, you use it, eventually, gets closed down because, you know, one party's had enough or they need the money book or the other party went away or something like that, right? Or it got too imbalanced when they can't figure out how to rebalance it. And what people do when they get too imbalanced is they, like, close it and open another one. And so what splicing does is it allows you to add additional capacity into an existing channel, sort of send some Bitcoin to the channel, and it can actually be under fairly continuous operation while you're adding more capacity to it. So it's not enough to handle, you know, the capacity is like almost depleted, you're still transacting, a splice transaction comes in, channel capacity goes up, and then you switch everything, you know, suddenly the capacity goes up, and you can send more or receive more. And, you know, then there are other ways to get to sort of rebalance the capacity already in a channel, which is not splicing, like submarine swaps. And so a relatively newer novel development there was Boltz HQ, which they do submarine swaps between Bitcoin UTXOs and a lightning channel. So there was sort of send you some liquidity and accept your UTXO, or you can send them some stats, and they will send you a UTXO. But in the fee run up that was caused by, you know, the temporary trend of ordinals and inscriptors, that caused the problem. And so what they did to work around it is they implemented a liquid Bitcoin to lightning submarine swaps. So it's trustless, it's atomic, but it's cheaper and faster. And so, you know, now that it's implied, it's apparently a fair proportion of their use remains liquid Bitcoin swaps. They're interesting. So they're now like, you know, three or four ways to get capacity one is to close the old channel open new one, which is the old one, old way, or sometimes people just open multiple channels. So they have like multiple channels to the same peers, which is kind of a bit, a bit odd, but that was what people were doing. Now we have splicing, and then you have these kind of submarine swaps between mentioning, which is less efficient than splicing. So I think splicing would replace that one, and then a submarine swap with liquid is interesting, because that doesn't actually use any mentioned space and it's cheaper and faster than doing on a mentioned, even than a splice range. It doesn't involve any mentioned activity, and you're, you know, basically paying somebody with liquid Bitcoin to push some sense back your way to rebalance your channel. Let's take a quick break here from today's sponsors. You want to speak a new language, but haven't quite got the hang of it. Meet your language learning match, Babel. You get a whole kit of effective learning methods that have been developed by real teachers in over 200 language experts. You're taught useful everyday phrases for everyday conversation, and you can test your pronunciation too. Beyond the comprehensive lessons on the app, you can listen to podcasts or join live online classes with professional teachers to get the best speaking practice. 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Absolutely free at net suite dot com slash study. That's net suite dot com slash study to get your own KPI checklist net suite dot com slash study. All right, back to the show. So I'm glad you mentioned this. So liquid was for all intents of purposes, not being highly used, all this ordinal stuff and the wizards leading up to the Miami conference were spamming the layer one with J pegs and NFTs and all this stuff and the fees were blowing out. And all of a sudden, everybody started using liquid, not everybody, but I mean, there was a lot of people starting to use liquid that weren't using it before because the fees were so high on layer one. This leads me to what I would say is one of the hottest topics in Bitcoin. Is this discussion around can Bitcoin actually scale without pushing essentialization on layer two? And this is where I really want to go because there's so much conversation right now around this idea of drive chains and offering this alternate way to do to basically take your Bitcoin and do a peg into these chains that are the side chains off of Bitcoin. And this is BIP 300. There's a gentleman named Paul who's out there really promoting this hard. I think that there's a lot of interest from the mining community to do this because it will allow them to have higher fees because they would be the one setting up federations allowing or basically employing these side chains. But I think a lot of users and people that are not miners are pretty against this me being one of them and just open kimono. The reason why I'm, you know, kind of anti-drive changes, I really don't really need any of this capability of any of these other blockchains or side chains capabilities like anonymity or whatever. I just need Bitcoin to continue to be a store of value on layer one. I don't need it to immediately settle. I just need it to preserve my buying power and to actually pay global fiat currencies that are run amok and destroying the world and creating clown world. That's all I need it to do, right? Right. So I'm much more in this ossification camp. I know sailors in the ossification camp, but engineers and I got my undergrad in engineering. I get it. They want to build things and they want to do swoopty things. What is your opinion? Adam and James with respect to drive chains. Can we scale? Is it important that we scale like to talk about it in a very broad sense like what's actually important here and then give us some of your opinions on drive chains and scaling? Well, yeah. I mean, the thing to just blockchains don't scale well. You know, that was the underlying cause of the so-called blockchain wars back in 2015. One of the series of events was, and I think the outcome of that was kind of market, it was a market solution, which is the market preferred what you're saying, right? Which is they wanted censorship resistant, highly secure, anti-centralized, Bitcoin as a store of value, and to be able to transact that when they needed to move, you know, value around. Right. And the challenge was, you know, to scale that in a simplistic way would erode that value, right? You know, if the blocks were enormous, it would be hard to validate. It would tend to get pushed more into data centers, and it would, there's a fair chance it would become less decentralized unless censorship resistant. So the market was saying, well, we've the buyers of Bitcoin like it the way it is. And you know, so all the folks lost in the market, and that's where we are, right? But in the meantime, I think the, what you've seen is that the market is like sort of the vendors, like the exchanges, the wallet providers are not that proactive, are planning ahead for fee market increases. And so what they will tend to do is wait until something breaks, and then they'll look around for some work around, right? And then they'll go back to their business once they've solved the major problem. And you know, so that eventually people started deploying lightning because fees were, in a period where previous period what fees were high. And that's good because, you know, for a lot of uses, you don't really need it to be on the main chain, because it's a lower assurance transaction, and it's a lower value transaction. And of course, ultimately, you know, because we're enthusiastic, like, you know, each of us who have Bitcoin investors and holders are enthusiastic about the properties of Bitcoin, we'd like as many people who are, as are interested to, you know, benefit from they say, properties to be able to do it. And there isn't enough space on the chain, but that's the case today. So, you know, the lack of a technical capacity won't stop on economic activities. So they'll end up using custodians or, you know, storing things in lightning. And evidently, storing things in liquid, we've seen, you know, a number, other organic users like people doing telecost averaging, buying in liquids. And then, you know, like daily or weekly. And then when they get to the threshold, they'll move it to the main chain. So it's a sort of way of, you know, storing intermediate or active trading on liquid and moving to Bitcoin for cold storage, which is, you know, it's cost to mention is the best cold storage technology. And so the drive chain is, you know, I guess you could say it's kind of like a more decentralized liquid, right? So they just want to see, and some Bitcoin layer two things aren't really feasible without additional op codes in, like, for the programmability of the anchor. And so that, I mean, that's why liquid is better at it, right? Because that's sort of close to the limit of what you can build without new op codes. Adam, so I can wrap my head around this. Okay. So you already have liquid, right? It's a block stream federation that you have set up. If people want a monero-like capability, as far as nobody knowing what transactions happening, they can peg into liquid. They can have a liquid BTC. They can move that around in a very secure way in which nobody would know what the, what the transactions are and then peg back out. The argument that I keep hearing with drive chains is, well, now you can do a monero on with Bitcoin. You can pop it into this side chain. You can go do these things. Nobody will know who you're sending the money to or what happened and you can deepag it back into Bitcoin if you want. So that's their rationale. That's pretty much the only reasonable rationale that I've heard use case outside of Bitcoin is the monero argument, right? But my uncle, they have another one as well, which is, let's say is the back of the envelope that the main chain can handle 100 million users and there's demand from a billion users. And the best technology for saving and bear-resistant money, censorship-resistant money, is a UTXO. And so to get to a billion people with UTXOs, there's not enough UTXOs. And so you could have a drive chain when you could do some of it on liquid. That's one solution. But it's not as censorship-resistant because it's a federation operated by dozens of exchanges and not have you rate. So ultimately, there's more censorship-resistant risk, especially because it long-term, liquid is more about active trading, and then people take it down and call store it. And so their idea is, well, you could have a mind drive chain, which is, let's say, 10 times bigger than the main chain. So it's not as decentralized, but it's still censorship-resistant because it's mind. And that would give, instead of the fallback being custodians, or there are other things too, right? Like other federation's like fediment, right? But if you keep it to the UTXO model, then at least they could get a UTXO, even if the people that kind of forwards get onto the main chain because it will come down to cost rate, would get a kind of light UTXO on a drive chain. So I think that's their idea. And of course, it's, you know, it's a modularity list. People can implement experimental features in it, but they don't have to. They can just make it a Bitcoin copy that's got bigger blocks, basically. So Adam, are you concerned about the incentives getting warped for miners because now they're focusing on these federated side chains that they're managing from an energy consumption standpoint, a time consumption standpoint versus just mining blocks on layer one? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, you know, I think people had the hypothetical that, you know, with merge mining, if a sidechain, you know, because the original sidechain paper by blockchain had just some kind of, you know, merge mining activity. And then we had, you know, an appendix with the federated alternative, like what you can do without upgrades, right? And so, you know, that I think in the original paper, we say that like, well, you know, potential concern could be that a lot of economic value piles up in the sidechain. And then miners are and something goes wrong there. And then they're incentivized to reorganize that. So I think, you know, one thing that can be done to avoid an incentive clash is for the, you know, for the miners to be able to reorganize or fix the sidechain without reorganizing them in chain. Like what you don't want is some economic driver, like pushing to undo Bitcoin finality because there's something that's happening over on the side that you don't care about personally, right? So you don't want that. But if it can be, you know, if it's not in lockstep so that, you know, they can be undoing a mistake paper there while continuing to mine, they're mentioning forwards. Maybe that's not as dangerous. Another idea that's popped up is arc. This is coin pools. Explain what this is. And then your opinions on the feasibility of arc. Now, I don't really have a clear picture on how that works, actually. It seems very complex. Yeah. Like you have service providers that are basically consolidating UTXO sets. They're issuing virtual UTXO sets to the participants because there's such a high amount of liquidity that's required in order to run these service providers. There's like a duration that you have to renew every 30 days. To me, it sounds very complex. It seems somewhat centralizing, but I'm curious. No, that's the smart way to answer that question. No, no, enough to know. I mean, he seems to be enthusiastic and to claim that it should be quite scalable. And as he said, you have to, you know, resell them on the chain periodically. Very long. So I don't know. I guess that means no, good for cold storage, perhaps, but maybe maybe a kind of lightning alternative. I don't fully understand how it works. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is what they're going after is a lightning alternative. But yeah, we'll see. And from what I understand, it requires a hard fork on layer one in order for some of this to happen. Any other comments with respect to covenants, APOs, op-cat, you know, in the chat that we were having on Twitter, you had mentioned that some of the op-cat from like 2010 had been turned off. It was originally in the original code base had been turned off, and that, and this is something I was not aware of until you said this the other day, that that scripting pre-existed. And it was turned off for safety security reasons, just to simplify the code and make sure that we get store value right early to a 2010 time frame. But now you think maybe it might be a time where some of that can be turned back on, would that be turned back on with a soft fork in order to enable a lot of the scripting and smart contracting that we're talking about earlier? Yeah. I mean, I think the problem with those op-codes is they turn out to have security bugs, and the simplest fix was to disable them, so that's what was done. But, you know, you can, you know, they had like an actual bug or, you know, disaster, dental service risk. But you can, you know, you can, you can use those things in a safer constrained way. And like, we've had a few of them in liquid for a few years now, like opkinat and check stick from stack and a second version of check stick from stack with, you know, about 30 helper functions to help with serialization, covenant, serializing covenant ashes. So with no issues with no issues or concerns, or is there been anything that you've that you have implemented that you've kind of? I guess I'm asking this question just as like a test bed, right? So you've done it on liquid. My understanding is that some of this stuff was actually re-employed on Bitcoin cash whenever they did their hard fork. Has there been anything that we've learned since that hard fork with Bitcoin cash with respect to op codes that are op cap that is something that a learning point for maybe future employment into the base code? I don't know much about what if anything happened on a Bitcoin cash fork. I do, I do know that they copied some of the op codes, which is kind of interesting. And they're, you know, people have implemented some interesting things using it, like, you know, because it's liquid, there are other assets in their like stablecoins, so you could implement like a half signed limit order. And with the sit-cat and check stick from stack covenant, you can implement a partial match limit order. And say, and like other things, right? So people have implemented some interesting things using them, not, you know, an inage kind of experimental way, right? That it's a kind of specialist area that not that many people that have the expertise to implement using the Bitcoin script or like liquid script extensions to it. But still, it shows, you know, that you can do interesting things whether people have tried it and you know, it works. And we added those op codes to sort of refine it based on, you know, the experience of running it without this helper functions. It was more cumbersome, right? And yes. So at this point, there are, I don't know, probably half of those invariants of how you could get to covenants. I think covenants are probably desirable to get a little, a little bit more expressiveness. So I think the thing is, you know, the, the capability to do covenants was probably there or almost there in early Bitcoin before those sort of buggy op codes were disabled for safety reasons. And if Bitcoin script is made expressive in a number of different directions, there'll be a line that crosses where now you can implement covenants. And so it's not, you know, it's not like we need a specific covenant op code, but like APO, maybe that allows you to implement a covenant or cat, maybe that allows you to implement a covenant. So, you know, it's just on the cusp of expressibility. And there are benefits, you know, that you can implement vaults, for example, which I think is quite useful for cold storage. So things which, you know, provide a benefit to long-term secure storage are pretty interesting, right? And maybe help make secure Bitcoin layer 2s, right? So maybe ARC benefits or lightning benefits in transferring, security can maintain to a layer 2. Then it's good because more things can happen on layer 2. So that's the thing, I mean, I think like personally, that probably what the best way to, you know, figure out which of the variances but is to, you know, people to get together are kind of akathon or people that do script op code coding and try to implement, you know, one using the other, like see which ones are super set of the others and implement common things with them and see which ones, you know, work in practice or have limitations because it shouldn't be about, you know, championing one because of its history or because you, you know, you like it or have your rate, it should be, well, we know none of us should really care which one philosophically is adopted, we should just want it to be the best, like, you know, lowest risk, most flexible, easy to combine with other op codes and do what's needed to do to be done so that we don't find like, oops, we forgot, you know, about this whole optionality and now we need another, another op code to do, half what we thought it did, right? We don't want a surprise like that. So we've got people should, you know, compare and contrast and try to implement them, figure out which ones are equivalent or which ones are more powerful. So yeah, if I had to summarize, it sounds like you're saying that the op code, trying to focus in on one or two or three op code updates is a, what's the word I'm looking for? A safer path forward instead of drive chains or is that not what you're saying? Well, I mean, there's slightly orthogonal, but it's, you know, there are probably ways to implement drive chains or simulate drive chains, like you could probably build a drive chain in a, with a federation, I think root stock has done something a little bit like that using HSMs and a federation and merge mining. And, you know, it might be that you could implement a drive chain using any of these covenant op codes for example, right? So it's a drive chain is like a little bit simplified from a generalized side chain. And so it doesn't take as much expressiveness or complexity to implement it. Yeah, so I mean, I think that, you know, sooner or later, it's hard to like exclude things to say, well, we want vaults, but we don't want, we don't want drive chains or, you know, we want this or not that. It's not really controllable rate. It's like a machine code level thing. If you have a new CPU code for a rate indexing was, and you didn't have it before, it's going to make a lot of things easier to implement, but you can't target like what it does because it's too low level to have much durability, right? So I just think sooner or later, we're going to be able to, you know, we're going to want vaults because they could we're going to want LN symmetry because it's good like a more efficient variant of leaning with easier cold storage without needing to keep backing up state. These are all good things, right? And, you know, unless you like write a really specific sys constructions do that and nothing much else, it's going to be hard to prevent it being an out would be a kind of wrong design. I would say like from a risk design point of view. So we're probably going to end up with some expressibility that enables more use cases anyway. Now this this year way of passively aggressively selling simplicity on the community. Well, so I mean, I do think the simplicity, let me define that for people listening real fast at them. So simplicity is this low level typed combinator based smart contracting language. It can literally fit on a t-shirt the size of this that block stream wrote and correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is this is what you would like to be incorporated into the base layer atom in order to allow smart contracting on Bitcoin layer one is that I properly freeing that if I didn't please define it and then I mean close. So yeah, so I think the I mean, I'm not really I mean, some observers have said that like Bitcoin contributors that they would like to see APO to enable LNC and then simplicity like they want to skip straight there. It depends right? It depends on the time frame because simplicity is in development has been in development for a while. It's game premature. We're getting pretty close to being able to put it onto liquid and live use. And I would say that simplicity is kind of the last soft walk. So it has much lower level soft extensibility kind of like microcode for CPUs that you don't need to keep designing and you know, analyzing which opcodes to add expressibility here and there, you can do it in one shot. So we'll hit the microcode that allows us to implement new opcodes. And so in a way it's less controversial right? Because you're saying, well, do we want the extensibility or not? And if we do, we don't need to have design back offs for opcodes because people can figure that out like organically in the market. And simplicity, because of the like specification simplicity and like nine combinators and its compatibility with formal proofs and proof systems, it can provide very high security assurances, you know, arguably higher than the current Bitcoin scripting system. And it's like a soft forkable, you know, script version. So it doesn't make display anything. It's opt in kind of thing. So I would say that probably simplicity is our best chance to get to, you know, real ossification without feeling like we've accidentally cut off something than they'd be forced right now or don't need to get fixed, you know, fixed in the future like, I don't know, post quantum signature schemes or something, right? Because you know, all those kind of things can be implemented with simplicity. But I wouldn't necessarily throw it into the, you know, which way should we do covenants or should we do covenants tool? Because time sprays might be all, you know, it's a little further out. My gosh, there's a lot technically going on in this space. I think it's getting, I think it's getting really hard for just common Bitcoin users to really kind of like they'll hear that whole conversation and they're going to be like, all right, I feel confused. I feel lost like, is there an issue? Is there a problem? Can Bitcoin actually scale? I'm kind of curious, James or Adam, your thoughts kind of to close this out for the listener that just heard all of that? Like, what's the key takeaway? And if you can't put people at ease because I think the future is very bright. When I look at Bitcoin, this is my opinion right. I'll give my opinion here first and I'm kind of curious to hear you guys follow up. Bitcoin is solving clown world, right? Period. Like, there's a major issue in the world and it's that all this fiat money is not backed by anything. It's not being pegged to the wall and people aren't being held accountable and they're just making up more and more digital units on a whim and they're handing it out to the people that are closest to the money machine that that goes birth to solve that Bitcoin is this peg that's solving that the store of value issue for large bond tranches. We're talking trillions of dollars worth of buying power that Bitcoin is trying to solve and hold these actors responsible so that they can't just make up as many fictitious monetary units that they want on a whim. All this other stuff that we're talking about is unlike a immediately settling Bitcoin, making it scalable so somebody can go out there and spend a tenth of a penny is really kind of what we're talking about technically, but enabling a lot of this into the layer one where most of this store of value technology is taking place is enabling that so a person can conduct those transactions on layer one and not just layer two. So I think Bitcoin solves clown world even if we don't do all of those things. I think there's a lot of engineers that would disagree with me and that's fine, but I also think that a lot of those engineers that would disagree with me really don't understand how the global macro, the botry, like what's causing it and what actually solves it and I think what actually solves it is being able to actually send like Adam, if you give me an invoice for $10 million and you say, I want it delivered in the next 30 minutes or else, you know that if I can't send that to you, it's because I don't have it, right? If I can't get that transaction into the mempool, you know I don't have it and you know I can send it. I don't even know where you're at in the world, but you could hold up a QR code on this video right now and I could send you that Bitcoin if that arrangement was there, right? That's what gold can't do. And that's why gold has always failed throughout time is because you can't immediately settle and inventory the amount instantaneously, right? So as long as Bitcoin can do that, I think we solve clown world and a lot of this engineering talk and like the nuances of all this really specific stuff, you know that use case is still there, which I think puts an enormous market cap on Bitcoin way higher than where we're at right now because it provides that service of store value, right? Let me hear y'all's opinion. Well, I mean, yeah, I'm interested in investing in asset classes and use the whole gold ETF, which towards my research was one of the ones that was physically backed, it would pay attention to that. So I think it's actually correct that even if Bitcoin also paid today, you know, we live without the vaults, et cetera, right? And even if a large amount of it ended up in ETFs, so it wasn't actually transacted on chain where it was in custodial wallets, it was still reached 95% of it's got a monetary potential. It would mean that, you know, maybe it's hard for 100 million users today, it's hard for the next billion to have the same degree of censorship resistant bearer control of their own money, right? Now, not everybody is going to do that. Some people are, you know, they want to call their broker and buy an ETF and that's what that's what they want. And they don't feel comfortable with the key management. Some people are always going to be like that rate, so we can't fix that. But for the people that do want, you know, get interested and want to have control of their keys, I think that's now that provides extra assurance. And so I think some of the technology is about, well, you know, how could it scale? Like the basic technology doesn't scale. So if you don't want to make a compromise on the main chain and like the greatest performance for everybody, can you give these opt-in spaces? I know it turns out you can, right? Lightning, you know, it has some security trade-offs. You have to be online. It's kind of a hot wallet. Maybe you don't want to store like savings amounts in it, but it's okay for retail payments. Get it took a balance and transaction use out of the main chain and like same for liquid, right? Okay. People who are actively trading and moving Bitcoin between exchanges, the main chain doesn't really need to know about that, right? They're moving an IOU from one platform to another. And so, you know, perhaps like the more decentralized side chains have a place there, we'll see, right? So it would be a kind of middle ground where, you know, it can be as if there was a big block, but they can opt into it. The interesting question is whether be incentives leaking to the main chain anyway, even though it's an opt-in thing, right? And that's that's a hard thing to categorically conclude on. James? Yeah, and I think there are a lot of complexities around us, but if you compare it to banking system and the payment systems, they're out there already. There's a huge amount of closely there, but it's new language people learning. So it's a more of a maturity that makes you all is needs to be adopted by the world to understand, you know, the benefits, right? And making this easier to transact is, I think, is going to help with adoption, right? So when you start pulling things up to main chain, you could do speed, you could do it, you make it simpler for people to use. I think we want to see a lot more adoption. So that's my, my opinion on it. Guys, I could talk to you all day, and I've got another two pages of questions here, but I've taken way more of your time than I told you I was going to take and I appreciate your time immensely. This is a real pleasure and honor for me to be able to talk with you guys and just really appreciate your insights. So thanks for making time and coming on. Give people a hand out if they want to learn more about the basic, which we were talking about, where they can find more information on that and anything else you guys want to highlight. Yeah, I think I guess the best link is probably just blockstreamed up finance. It's landing page and the link for stocker, which is the Luxembourg Securitization Provider that does the kind of regulatory set up and then operates the Securitization Compartment on a regulatory basis. And I guess they're also kind of the share registration agent that you enroll with in order to buy and hold the token. Okay, we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Anything else that you want to highlight, James? Well, I think the basic fund, almost selfless self, if you look at the correlation Bitcoin to asset prices historically, they're pretty much they're highly correlated. But if you look at 2023, there's a separation, which kind of suggests a huge price correction coming. We feel that the risk is minimal, even though there are always risks, but for minimal because of the low prices of basics, really not much further they can go other than now. So if you think about the the asset prices that is high, there were about $120 per tarot hash, Bitcoin was just below 70. Bitcoin is shy of shant that now where the asset prices are about a tenth that. So when asset prices start recovering, we're going to see if you're going to see a lot better return that you would normally just see holding Bitcoin. So I think it's very exciting and it'll open up the opportunity to talk to people about that. Awesome. All right, guys, we'll have a link to lockstream.com slash finance. We'll have some links to your social media as well. And thanks so much for making time. This was a blast. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for we study billionaires. 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