Should I Invest In BitCoin? And, More Commentary on Last Week

Bitcoin as a Store of Value in a Debasing Monetary System

Welcome to another edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. I am pleased to have a guest with me today who's going to help us navigate a topic that's been around for a while, but it's becoming more popular now, and that is Bitcoin.

We have Jimmy Song with us. He's a programmer. He's written two books, Programming Bitcoin, the little Bitcoin book, and he's contributed to a Christian book called Thank God for Bitcoin. I've gotten a few chapters into that.

You can find his material at programmingbitcoin .com. Jimmy, thank you for stopping by and being willing to explain this to us. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be on. I've been a fan of yours for a while, so glad to be on the show.

Well, that is very kind of you to say that. I want to start off just with a basic question for all the listeners out there to hear you answer, and that is what's wrong with traditional investments, land, money?

I mean, really, we're coming back to money. If you have $10 million, aren't you pretty secure for the future? What's the problem with that thinking? Yeah. The unfortunate reality of the current monetary system is that if you have the US dollar or the Japanese yen or the euro or something like that, it's essentially a melting ice cube is how I would describe it.

It's constantly being debased by all of the money printing that's going on. It used to be that the dollar was convertible to gold. In fact, every currency in the world at one point was convertible to gold.

But starting in 1971, that tie to gold was severed by Richard Nixon in 1971 with sort of an executive order. As a result of that, any central bank can essentially expand the money supply to their heart's content.

And that means that your savings in dollars gets reduced every time that happens. So for example, the M2 money supply, which is a measure of how many dollars that exist, started at the beginning of 2020 was $15 .5 trillion.

It ended 2020 at $19 .5 trillion. So that's an expansion of something like 30%. And that affects your savings. So you can think of your savings as having diluted. So even if you have $10 million, it just sort of diluted 30%.

Now, you might not feel that right away, but go try buying something kind of expensive like real estate or pro sports team or something like that. Those things are going up at much faster rates than say eggs or milk or jeans or something like that.

So as a result, what you have is a system that perpetuates sort of inequality, a lot of grift and a lot of theft, as we argue in the book, that are really kind of immoral and really kind of put the wrong incentives in and cause a lot of strife for a lot of people.

And of course, this is where some of the Christian moral principles come to play, as you just mentioned with stealing. I know that at the beginning of our republic, there was kind of an effort really up until probably Lincoln, there was an effort of the more Jeffersonian Democrats to get rid of the national bank, because they just thought that was the worst thing.

And of course, now we have a federal reserve system. And I mean, it's such a monstrosity. There's really not much politically that seems that we can do about that. But there are other investments. And this is why I wanted to have you on is for the Christians, especially in the audience who have invested in traditional things, obviously money, but gold property.

They're not familiar with another investment, many of them, and that's cryptocurrency. And you seem to know a lot about this. So what are the advantages of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general? Yeah.

So the current monetary system is horribly broken. And I think you sort of hinted at this. The first and second national banks of the United States were central banks that expanded the money supply. They were sort of able to retire the debt from the revolution and so on through doing that.

And the world of 1812 with the second bank and so on. But, you know, that was essentially stealing from the savings of everybody else. Now, the fact that the United States at that time was expanding so quickly in terms of agricultural production and industrial production allowed it to sort of hide some of the theft that the government was doing through those.

And Andrew Jackson very courageously ended the second national bank. And he was able to get a balanced budget, which I don't think he gets enough credit for. Now, that said, the current system makes it so that it is very difficult to save money or save store value, right, like to store for the future.

And in fact, pretty much anyone that has any amount of wealth has to spend an inordinate amount of time, you know, trying to preserve their wealth. They have to look into different investments, kind of like what you're saying.

You know, you have to look into gold and land and stocks and bonds and all sorts of different vehicles because they know that if they keep it in cash, it's constantly being debased. So you're going to lose money if you try to stand still.

It's a system that forces you to sort of run on a treadmill in order to stay in the same place. The reason for that is sort of the economic philosophy of most of these countries that have a central bank.

And pretty much every country nowadays does. And it's kind of imposed by the IMF, which I won't go into right now. But basically, you know, they want the money to circulate through the economy. They call that the velocity of money.

And this is a very Keynesian concept of, you know, if the money sluices through the economy, then the healthier we are, it doesn't matter what you spend it on. That's sort of the Keynesian philosophy there.

But because of that, whenever you have a place to park money, well, that money is not moving. And so that that is essentially what a store of value is, somewhere to park your money. So the current system is sort of almost designed to make it very hard to put park your money in any one place.

The few places that we do have that are places like stocks, gold and real estate. And you'll notice with all of them, at least with physical gold anyway, there's a lot of transaction costs. You know, if you if you order physical gold, they have to actually ship it to you.

And if it's a significant amount, then you're going to have to hire armed guards to bring it to you and so on. If it's real estate, you know, all of the different fees that go into it. There's a lot of people that are very rich because they get in the middle of that transaction in order to facilitate the transferring of property.

Stocks also, you know, there's a lot of different ones. There's commissions, there's all sorts of different things that are going on. And you'll notice that all of these have gone up significantly in the past year.

And the reason for that is because the Fed is printing just so much money. There's six trillion dollars or something to that effect that the Fed has essentially made available to the economy in order to shore up all of the stuff that's gone down with coronavirus and so on.

So as a result, there really aren't very good stores of value. And on top of that, a lot of the stores of value are not very fungible. One property in the middle of San Francisco is very different than, you know, a farmhouse in Iowa or something like that.

So a similar thing with stocks, right? Tesla stock is not the same as, you know, American Express or whatever. They're very different. And you get you get this sort of perception of luck that comes into it or a lot of study and a lot of insider knowledge that you need in order to do it.

The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it is scarcer than all of those things. It's there's a fixed 21 million limit. It's digital and it's decentralized, decentralized, meaning that there's no central entity that controls the supply.

And that is very different than the dollar. It's more akin to gold, where if I wanted to go search for gold by taking a shovel to my backyard and digging for it, I can probably not going to be successful, but it is something that I can do.

In the same way, Bitcoin is such that anyone can try to mine for it. You're probably not going to be successful. You can actually try to mine with your phone. But it's extremely unlikely, like like, you know, many orders of magnitude unlikely than like even taking a shovel to your backyard looking for gold.

But in principle, it is decentralized. And for that reason, it's it's a lot better and it's perfectly scarce in the sense that there's only 21 million that will ever be. And there's fungibility like an insider investor in Silicon Valley gets the exact same Bitcoin as a farmer from Jakarta.

So that makes it a lot more fair, a lot easier. And and you don't have to worry about it as much. And you can put your money, time and energy into doing other things that are more productive for civilization.

How the Bitcoin Blockchain Limits Supply and Prevents Counterfeiting

Now, one of the things I know people are thinking about right now, as you explained all that is how in the world do they limit it to 21 million? And what about counterfeit Bitcoin? And I know the blockchain technology is part of what keeps this secure.

Could you explain that? Yeah, sure. So when you so I'm going to make the analogy to your bank, right? Like when you go and deposit some money at your bank, what they don't do is take your money and put it into a drawer that's named John or something and then say, OK, that that's where your money is.

That's not what they do. They they put the money into their vault or something like that. And then they put put your name on the ledger and put plus five hundred dollars or however much you deposited.

And when you transfer money, write a check to somebody else at the bank or to your friend, that money gets debited from your account and added to that other person's account. That's that's how ledgers work.

The Bitcoin blockchain is essentially the the ledger for absolutely everybody. And amazingly, this this works really well because everyone has a copy of that ledger and you can validate that everything balances and so on.

And part of the rules of the software that runs is there there's a particular schedule of Bitcoin coming into existence. And this is where, you know, the mining analogy comes in handy. It's it's kind of like digging for gold.

And, you know, every 10 minutes there's a certain amount of Bitcoin that comes into existence and has from the beginning. So at the very beginning, it was 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes current. And then four years later, it was twenty five.

Four years later, it was twelve and a half. Currently, it's six point two five bitcoins that come into existence. And every four years it halves so that it asymptotically goes to twenty one million. And the software enforces this and make sure that the ledger balances, that there aren't any illegal transactions, that there aren't transactions that are creating new money and so on.

And it's very easy to figure out if you're if the bitcoins that you're being sent are legitimate, you just check the ledger. Does this person actually have the coins that they're sending to you? Is it actually in the ledger?

If it is, then it's very clear that that it's a legitimate transaction. If it's not, then you can you can find out. And in fact, most Bitcoin wallets that exist do this kind of automatically in the background and say, OK, well, you already received it or you didn't and so on.

So that's how that works. So I just got my first Bitcoin wallet this week. I've been a holdout. I know it's like, what was that, 2017 or so? There was a big spike and and it kind of went down again and now it's spiking like it never has.

So I went I have an Electrum. I don't know if that's a good one or not, but that's a decent one. Yeah. OK, so that's the program that I downloaded. And I went to just I just like like someone who's green into this.

I just Google. They're not Google. I dug dug go. There we go. That's the new one I'm using. You know, buy Bitcoin. And it took me to a website and I bought some Bitcoin and and it wasn't that difficult.

There was there's a little bit of a fee and so forth. Could you just practically walk us through what programs, what you know, how versatile is this? You know, can you have it on your phone and pay for things at a restaurant?

You know, what what is this good for and how do we attain it, especially if this is something we've never done before? Yeah, so the easiest way to attain it is through exchanges. And there's a lot of different exchanges.

And depending on what part of the world you happen to be in, there's many options. In the United States, you have Gemini, Ipid, Coinbase, River, Cash App, you know, Kraken and many others. Probably the easiest way for people that are sort of like a little bit hesitant about the tech stuff is you can use something like Cash App or River Financial.

Those are pretty good. Cash App is especially nice because it's, you know, it's integrated. It's a lot like Venmo. You can send people money back and forth. But one of the options that it has is the ability to buy Bitcoin directly from the app.

And it's already hooked up to your debit account, a debit account at a bank or whatever. And you can just go and buy it fairly easily. And if you need to send somebody Bitcoin, they have that function as well.

There's a lot of different ones. River is especially good if you want to do something called dollar cost averaging. And, you know, because Bitcoin's price is just so volatile, it's, you know, a lot of people get tempted to just try to time the market and, you know, buy when it dips and so on.

What I found is that the people that are looking to buy the dip generally never get in because it's never low enough for them. And when it dips, they're like, oh, I'll just wait for it to dip more and so on.

So from a psychological standpoint, it's a lot easier if you're just saying, all right, I'll buy $10 a week, $100 a week or whatever. So River .com, that's another excellent wallet and so on. But yeah, I mean, there are many that exist all over the world.

If you live in, you know, Korea, there's different ones. There's ones in Turkey, in Bahrain and Europe and Africa. And I mean, literally all of these. Now, as far as your other question goes, which is, you know, can you pay for things with it?

You can. But what I found is that most people don't want to. This is more their savings and not their spending money. So if you if you think of it as like as digital gold or something like that, when's the last time like you use gold to go pay for something?

I mean, you can. There might be some people that would take it. But generally that that's not the main use case. There's there's a lot of technology already for paying for stuff. Right. Not only do we have credit cards, we also have Venmo and Cash App and, you know, Octopus Card and Google Pay and Apple Pay and Samsung Pay and and M-Pesa in Africa and WeChat in China.

And I mean, just there's just so many different ones and they all exist for a reason. They're probably taking a small cut to make things more convenient and so on. But, you know, the main use case for Bitcoin, like I said before, is to store value across time.

And, you know, it's done like anyone that's held Bitcoin for at any at any point pretty much in the last, you know, 12 years of its existence has made money on it because it is perfectly scarce. And as we argue in the book, it's it's a lot closer to what God designated Bitcoin designated money to be, which is storing storing the value that you provided other people to to with your labor and so on.

Volatility, Custody, and Multisig Security

Now, I want to ask a question for those who are skeptical about this, because they they're saying, Jimmy, I've heard you talk about the scarcity of it, the blockchain technology, which makes sure it's secure.

This might be a good savings, things to hedge against what's going to happen with the dollar, et cetera. But, you know, Bitcoin is only as valuable as the value people ascribe to it, which is why it's it's kind of volatile at times.

And and then if you have it, it's stored on your hard drive or hard drive somewhere on your phone or whatever. And, you know, if you if something goes wrong with that, where's my Bitcoin? So could you speak to those two issues?

What about the volatile nature of Bitcoin or the perceived nature? And then, you know, what if something happens to your hard drive where you have, you know, thousands of dollars of Bitcoin or millions, perhaps?

Where does that all go? OK, yeah. So let me speak to the volatility first that that is that is a reality of Bitcoin. And it's been that way for a long time. Anytime you have sort of like the monetization of an asset, it tends to do that.

So, you know, I mean, a lot of people view the 70s like oil crisis as something energy related. Actually, it was because the U .S. went off the gold standard and then they made it so that what that oil was, you know, denominated in the dollar.

So there was sort of like a monetization of oil that created a lot of volatility around oil in the 70s. So that sort of thing is kind of common and does happen with things like Bitcoin. But that volatility is also why it's it go, you know, it breaks upward.

If it went up on a slow and steady rate, you know, I mean, no asset exists that does that. That just sort of goes up at a steady rate over a very long period of time. You're going to expect some level of volatility.

There's a lot of FOMO and a lot of a lot of people that sort of pile on at certain points. And, you know, you get bubbles in human psychology and all that sort of plays into it. So there there is volatility, but generally over if you if you hold over four years, I don't think there's ever been a period of four years where if you bought four years before and then sold four years later, like you wouldn't have made money, at least in dollar terms and so on.

So that that's volatility as far as the other question is more around security and custody. So it really is like gold in the sense that if you're holding your own Bitcoin, it's kind of like having a gold bar in your house or, you know, buried in your backyard or whatever.

If you lose it, you really lose it. And and this is not something that we're used to as a, you know, as as a generation. I mean, this used to be much more common, like, say, 150 years ago, where people sort of kept things.

But, you know, during the last 70 years of sort of the financialization of pretty much everything around the world, they've taken out bearer instruments. Bearer instruments are things that you hold. And, you know, if you can't present it, then you've actually lost it.

Stocks used to be like that. Bonds used to be like that. A lot of things used to be like that, but now they're all sort of like held by custodians and so on. So part of it, part of learning all of this is just learning to be responsible for your own stuff instead of relying on a third party, because oftentimes it's the third party that actually steals from you.

And that that's that's part of the learning that you have to do. Now, that said, one of the nice things about Bitcoin is that it has security properties that no other asset can, including multisig. This is the idea that you can have something kind of like, I'm sure you've heard of like.

No, I'm sorry about that. I something knocked my my camera here. So we're we're back. Speaking of volatility. Yeah, I'm just going to. So sorry about that. Yeah, it's OK. Go ahead. So you have something like multisig and the best way to describe it is you know how the president has like one of the nuclear footballs, but there's like two other ones and you need two of three of them in order to do the launch code.

Right. So you could you could do something similar with your Bitcoin where you have something multisig. So even if you lose one, you have the other two or something like that. And it could be sort of arbitrary.

It could be three of five or seven of 11 or something like that. In addition, there are services that will help you set up this stuff. So Unchained Capital, which is in my hometown, they they specialize in helping people secure their Bitcoin.

So you might have literally millions of dollars in Bitcoin. They will hold one of the keys for you so they can't move your Bitcoins or send it to themselves so they don't have custody. But if you have the other two keys and maybe one of them is in a bank vault or something like that, you can always transact whenever you want with their help.

And if they go bankrupt or something, you can get the one out of your bank vault and then you can do something. But if you lose that one, then you still have recourse to go and recover your funds. So from a security standpoint, it's it's a lot more robust.

There are more options and, you know, there there's a lot of different ways in which you can secure it. There are even more solutions coming down the line, including like, you can spend it or if you happen to lose your phone, then you can you can spread you can get three of five of your friends to coordinate and give you back your coins or something like that.

And those are solutions that are probably maybe like a year away. But those are coming as part of the Bitcoin protocol. What about transferring? So I have this is a very practical question for me, I'm asking, but I have my Electrum wallet, right?

And I have different I'm not I'm actually opening it right now just to take a look. There's different I don't know what you would call them. See, I got the right password here. There we go. Addresses, different addresses.

Isn't that right? So I have a limited amount, but I have, you know, quite a few. And so I've done two transactions so far and I have different amounts in two different addresses. And if I want to transfer those amounts, let's say to my phone or to another wallet.

How easy is that to do? OK, well, you would just need the address of wherever you're sending it. It could be to yourself or to other people or whatever. Soon as they give you that address over email, text or, you know, even a QR code or something like that.

If it's a QR code, you're you usually scan it with your phone or something. And then you input that into the software and say, this is where I want to send my bitcoins and this is the amount that I want to send it.

And the wallet will figure out, you know, the transaction that needs to be signed and using the private key that's on the phone or on whatever device that it will sign that transaction and broadcast it to the network.

At that point, it goes into the network and, you know, you might have to wait a little bit until it's confirmed, but then then it's confirmed and you could do that. You know, I can send to somebody on the other side of the world.

So it's relatively easy. It's like depositing a check. I mean, yeah. Yeah. And it clears a lot faster. Right. And this is part of the nice thing is if you know anything about like settlement, it's you know, you might think that you're actually getting things right away.

But the you know, if you if you know anything about like how things settle on the on the back end, it's usually like three to five days. So if you execute a stock trade, it feels like it's right away.

But the actual settlement happens like three days later when when the clearinghouse actually, you know, adjusts all the accounts and so on. And all of those things are in the background. So you don't really know about it.

But with Bitcoin, it settles. It's done. It's you know, it's like you really gave it to the other person and you no longer have possession of it. So in that way, it's a it's a little more permanent and you can't really claw it back or appeal to somebody to get that, which is pretty important given sort of what a lot of a lot of conservatives, especially in the in the world today, are going through.

Why Bitcoin Is Better Than Altcoins

So, yeah, that that. Yeah. So, you know, that's fascinating to me. And I mean, as someone new to this, I wanted to just pick your brain on that because I have gone to restaurants where I've seen them, at least I'm not sure if I've been there or people have just sent me pictures of things.

But there are businesses now that are accepting Bitcoin and and you can go in, you can and I never understood really how it works. I guess you whip out your phone, you have some there, you can just buy your coffee or whatever you're getting.

And I'm wondering if the future is going to look more like that with with especially with with the incoming administration and the monetary policy, we're probably going to see if more businesses are going to start doing that kind of thing.

Or we'll see other cryptocurrencies pop up. Well, so let me address the other cryptocurrency. Yeah, yeah. I want to get in. Go ahead. All right. So so there's a lot of different cryptocurrencies right now.

I think last I checked that somewhere in the vicinity of seventy five hundred and different cryptocurrencies and they're creating them every day. Right. Like there are new ones that are being created all the time.

Now, I specifically tell people not to go to those for a reason. And and you'll it's in chapter eight of our book where we talk about that, you know, why, why, you know, like the altcoins are very different than Bitcoin.

So what one of the key qualities of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized. There's no central authority. There's nobody that says, you know, that that's the adjudicator of everything. It's actually just pure software.

And, you know, you either sent it or you didn't. And that's it. The second most popular cryptocurrency is called Ethereum. And it was created by a guy named Vitalik Buterin back in 2014. And and because he created it, he printed for himself something like, you know, like 10 percent of Ethereum, something like that.

So most of these altcoins have a creator that printed money for themselves. Right. It's not very different than fiat money. And and in fact, that's that's sort of the scam is that they they print the money for themselves and then they, you know, sell it to other people based on some specious reasoning or something like that.

And, you know, they don't actually use it for what they, quote unquote, intended for. Most people just use it as sort of speculation, gambling, something like that. And they're they're all centralized.

They have, you know, at multiple points, they they're they have a creator, often like a developer foundation. One of the things that Ethereum did back in 2016 was they had some incident on their platform where somebody was able to drain about one sixth of all Ethereum that existed away from the people that had owned it because there was a flaw in the smart contract that they created.

They the Ethereum developers decided, OK, we're going to roll all the all of those back. It's and if that sounds like a bailout, that's because it was they basically bailed out all the people that made the stupid decision to put it into this insecure smart contract.

So like for me, altcoins are not the same thing at all because they're all centralized. One of one of the one of the things that I tell people about Bitcoin is that Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared in 2010.

And that was probably the best gift that Satoshi could have given to the entire Bitcoin community, because by disappearing, it became decentralized. There was no central decision maker. There was nobody to appeal to and say, can I get this money back or can I get your favor or something like that?

All of these other ones essentially work a lot like the currency and they print their own money. And unfortunately, there's a lot of grift and scamming and stealing and taking advantage of people that don't understand what's going on.

But that that that would be for all coins. I forget what your other question was, though. So do I. I don't know if I have one. I can come up with another one, though. So someone's listening to you right now and they're saying, Jimmy, you're making a very compelling case.

And this is probably someone who's already kind of fed up with the Federal Reserve System and understand our dollars really aren't worth the paper they're printed on or they could be very soon. And they're going to invest in some some Bitcoin.

I want to know from you, someone who doesn't know anything about this. You tell me the app, where to go to buy it and how to store it. Hmm. OK, I know a lot of people are probably not too happy with Jack Dorsey right now for a multitude of reasons, but he does have a very easy way to buy Bitcoin and it's called Cash App.

And from what I'm told, he's actually a little bit hands off on Twitter, but he's much more involved in Square, which is the company that puts out Cash App. So that's an app that you can download on Android or iPhone.

Very easy. You put in your debit card and it lets you buy Bitcoin right away. You just have to click. I think they actually have it so that you can also buy stocks and so on. But Bitcoin is the main one that makes it super easy.

Now, if you want custody of your Bitcoin, you're really if you're doing that, you're really custodying it with Square. They have your Bitcoin and they essentially they owe you some Bitcoin and you have a claim against them, which is more or less how dollars work with banks.

I don't know if you knew that, but if you have five thousand dollars at your bank, you have a claim against the bank, but they can not give it to you if they don't want to. It's kind of this trusted third party that has control of everything.

So it is nice to be able to control your own currency. And actually, let me tell a quick story. So the thing that put Bitcoin on the map was in 2010, PayPal cut its relationship with Wikileaks. And I don't know if you remember back in 2010, but they were putting out a lot of very embarrassing material to the United States government.

So the U .S. government pressured PayPal, like you can't let them take donations. So they cut off, they essentially de-platformed Wikileaks from PayPal. So after that, Wikileaks was looking for a way to get donations and they found Bitcoin and they decided to take donations of Bitcoin at that starting in 2010.

Crazy part of that is, you know, like people started getting into Bitcoin. That was around when Satoshi disappeared because there was a huge influx of users and so on. But that the amount that they actually got from in 2010 still funds them to this day because it was less than a dollar back in 2010, so they, you know, even if they got like a ten dollar donation, that's a hundred Bitcoins, which is worth like three, three and three point eight million dollars or something like that right now.

So it was, you know, for them it was like kind of revolutionary. You know, I know that Stripe, you know, is no longer, they de-platformed the Trump campaign, for example, so they won't process any of those.

So for conservatives, I think it's pretty prudent to, you know, take possession of your stuff because all of these trusted third parties that sort of are there to sort of enforce government mandates and so on, they're going to start coming after people.

And this is, I mean, you can't have gold bars in your own house. That's another way to do it. But, you know, like having some form of wealth or savings, because the first thing that that everyone comes after.

Well, so one other story. So the previous book that I wrote, Little Bitcoin Book, I was one of eight authors on that as well. And one of my co-authors was Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation.

And one of the things that he told me, he works with human rights people all over the world, is the very first thing that a government does to you if they don't like what you are doing is to cut off all financial access.

And this was why he was really interested in Bitcoin, because this happens everywhere. If they don't like you, that's that's what they do. So you read about the Holocaust even way long before anyone even thought anyone knew that there are going to be the death camps and everything.

It was there was a financial war and people were stuck. People that were previously very rich, you know, didn't have anywhere to put their money or so. So I think that's what's going on now. And, you know, the technology makes it easier for them, but also makes it harder because of things like Bitcoin.

What what do you suggest if someone doesn't want to go with Cash App or Jack Dorsey? River Financial is pretty good. I don't think they have a phone app, but you can go on their website, River .com, I think it is a bunch of good guys.

I'm actually having dinner with the CEO tonight. So but yeah, he he's a he's a really good guy. Really under understand stuff there. There are numerous other other ones. If it I mean, Gemini is by the Winklevoss twins, so you can I don't know how you feel about them, but but you can you can use that exchange as well.

Kraken's a pretty good one. Jesse Powell is a pretty good guy. He's the he's the CEO of Kraken. Level .co, I don't want to show them too much because I'm an advisor, so I feel like it'd be a little bit of a conflict of interest there.

LVL .co, that's another one. But yeah, there's I believe PayPal has the option of being able to buy Bitcoin as well, which is kind of like full circle with the Wikileaks stuff. But they they have it so that you can't withdraw, so you can't take possession of your Bitcoin.

So it's not nearly as good if you're in the stock market. You could do something similar with GBTC, which is a ticker symbol created by Digital Currency Group. And this is run by Barry Silbert out in New York.

And he he basically makes it so that you can have exposure to Bitcoin in sort of like a stock market context, except there tends to be a pretty significant premium to that. If you're interested in using your IRA funds or retirement funds for this sort of thing, I you know, there are numerous services that that can help you do that.

I have a friend that does this for a living, right? He he helps people get Bitcoin into their self-directed IRA so that they they can sort of control that without having to, you know, put it into GBTC, which charges a two percent management fee and so on.

So lots of different options. I'm sure there are others there. There are certain I think there was a fund that was launched maybe like two weeks ago, like with a point seven five base or seventy five basis point management fee that lets you invest in Bitcoin and they'll take care of everything and give you the proceeds and so on.