+1 (312) 520-0301 Give us a five star review on iTunes!
Send Buck a voice message!

256: What You MUST Know about Bitcoin!

Share on social networks: Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on google
Google
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on linkedin
Linkedin

Buck: Welcome back to the show everyone. Today my guest is a very, very interesting fellow in the bitcoin space and also in the gaming space. His name is Samson Mow he is the CSO just the Chief Strategy Officer at Blockstream which is a major influencing company within the bitcoin ecosystem and also the CEO of Pixelmatic and if that rings a bell, it’s because Chris Wood was recently on the show talking about Infinite Fleet and I know a number of you showed some interest in that game as well. So Samson’s a man of many talents and today we specifically wanted to talk to him about bitcoin. So Samson, welcome back to Wealth Formula Podcast.

Samson: Thanks, Buck. It’s great to be finally on.

Buck: Yeah it’s great you know so I talked a little bit about your background and obviously you know you’ve kind of got the reputation in this space of being a bit of a visionary not only on the games but in terms of you know bitcoin and where bitcoin is going to end up. Where did you first get started with bitcoin and what was the aha moment for you?

Samson: yeah so I first I’ve been reading about bitcoin you know pretty much from 2011 2012 2013 but I guess the aha moment was reading about it in 2013 when I was reading an article about mining. So someone was talking about how you could mine bitcoin so I’ve been hearing about bitcoin and I thought you know it’s just a virtual currency and it’s used for dark markets and things like that but when I read the mining article that really flipped the switch on for me so I kind of understood that this thing is not controlled by any one party anybody is free to become a miner participate in the network and secure the network so it was very different right time. I was still at I was still working on games I was still just starting up Pixelmatic at the time and before that, I was building online games with massive economies and you know it’s at the scale where to deal with things like inflation in the game or whatnot so right you know like understanding like this is an economy in and of itself that’s not under the control of a game company or a financial company or any issuer that was the kind of moment for me that I understood that this is something important and it’s very very different.

Buck: So let’s dive into that a little bit because it also helps people understand perhaps it might help people understand when you get the question you know what is what exactly is bitcoin and you know why is it valuable and it seems to me that what you’re saying is that it’s all centered around the concept of mining so maybe if we could just drill down on that a little bit and you know help people understand you know what the mining is and why that you know why that specific concept is important.

Samson: Right so my favorite example for what bitcoin is digital gold I think it’s a concept that resonates with most people they understand what gold is they understand that gold is valuable and it’s easier to make that jump to bitcoin thinking it that way and in fact like there is a parallel with the mining right you mine gold and you mine bitcoin so right it’s a very direct and smooth relationship conceptual but bitcoin is very different from gold so if you imagine gold and it was reinvented digitally then that’s bitcoin. So you have something that is valuable that is scarce even more scarce than gold actually that is now transferable over the internet and in fact you don’t even need the internet anymore you can transfer this through radio waves you can also get it over satellite transmissions too. So at Blockstream, we have a satellite service broadcasting the bitcoin blockchain. so Buck, as you’re sitting there, bitcoin blocks are being beamed all around you just point the dish up and you got them wow so it’s an entirely new medium for value transfer and this is the key thing here that you can disintermediate the entire financial system by having this new base level asset which you can build up a number of things on top of you can have security tokens like Chris has been on your show talking about the EXO security token you can have those you can have digital assets you can have tokenized ships like in infinite fleet a number of things can be built on top of this new digital gold foundation.

Buck: Got it and so in that regard and I love that analogy I think in many regards it’s really helpful especially when you look at mining and there’s effort there is money that needs to go into the mining in order to produce you know this asset that’s called bitcoin. So I think in many ways that’s like the easiest way to describe it for people who are just starting you called it you know along that lines you mentioned bitcoin is parallel to gold and we think of gold as a store of value right so in your view is bitcoin a store of value or is it a currency or what’s the best way to think about that?

Samson: Yeah so you also ask like what makes something valuable right and there is this concept of intrinsic value which some people like to toss out there but there’s really no intrinsic value. Value is very subjective and it’s different for different people for different things across a wide spectrum. So I think that concept has to go out the window it’s been a very traditional anchor in a lot of economic theory and whatnot but there is no intrinsic value. So bitcoin is valuable because we say it’s valuable right just like why is gold valuable because people say gold is valuable and there is a market for this and there is a market for bitcoin. So back to your question, I think bitcoin is a store of value primarily right now but it is evolving on three axes so if you look at money. There’s three aspects to money. There is the store value component, the medium of exchange, and the unit of account. So if it is good money it has all three of these things. Now bitcoin is very young it’s just 12 years old you know it’s just a baby in the grand scheme of things it’s not been around as long as gold and most fiat currencies but it is evolving very rapidly and if you think about what is happening the first step is that store value it needs to be valuable first. So what some people have this misconception that you can create a currency and you can make that medium of exchange first but you can use anything as a medium of exchange you can say you know toilet paper is a medium exchange but it’s not valuable it can be easily printed and you know you can always use it but it’s not going to be very good because it is not valuable. So traditionally you have to go step by step you have to go store value medium exchange unit of account once enough people are using it as that medium of exchange it becomes the unit of account like the US dollar does right everything is priced in dollars even though I’m Canadian typically when I think about bitcoin price it’s you know it’s not Canadian dollar price it’s the US dollar price right. Bitcoin is very unique because it is digital and because it is programmable it can evolve on all three of these axes at the same time so as it’s becoming that sort of value as the micro strategies are stockpiling it the square the public market companies are buying it up it is also a medium exchange because you can use second-layer technologies like the liquid network like the lightning network to transact very quickly and you have that unit of account as well. So the unit of account for the lightning network so in case your viewers don’t know the lightning network is a layer two technology where you transact bitcoin essentially for free and instantaneously it’s kind of like a way to spend bitcoin as cash but that unit of account for that network is the satoshi, the sat. So when people do lightning transactions they can tip people or you can use it in chat apps too now to pay for sending messages you’re paying in satoshi’s the smallest denomination of bitcoin. So it is evolving in all three ways in ways that things like gold could not do because gold is not programmable.

Buck: So the interesting parallel they’re kind of what you know just trying to again you know make this something that people understand is you know before Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard you know dollars were understood to have a value that was based on the value of gold and so in some regards kind of what you’re doing with you know what you just described with the lightning network which is what we were doing with dollars when they were directly correlated to the price of gold. Is that fair?

Samson: Yeah you can make that analogy so you know bitcoin is that underlying digital gold right and layer two tech like lightning and liquid is pegged to that one to one and you transact it off chain so you don’t need to stuff every single transaction into the bitcoin blockchain if I’m just you know buying a coffee then I don’t need that permanently embedded in the blockchain for thousands of years it’s not that important.

Buck: One of the points that you brought up that I think is really important to point out is that one of the main things that make this different because some people may say well why not just go back to a gold standard well I guess the the the key point there is that Nixon took us off the gold standard and in this situation there’s not a government or you know one sort of central force that can just change the way bitcoin works and that is a fundamentally different concept in I guess in global history.

Samson: Yeah it’s difficult to go back to a gold standard you know right when governments and central banks are used to that power the ability to control through the issuance and management and manipulation maybe of fiat currency how do you give that up it’s just like you know you’re a god now let’s demote you you’re not god anymore you’re just a player you’re just a normal guy like that’s very difficult to take away power and you know it takes a seismic change or revolution to shift this and bitcoin in some ways is that revolution it’s a bloodless coup it’s just people taking back control it’s money that is created by the people for the people and operated by the people there’s just no one in charge of it and this is actually a far better system in a way it’s much more elemental just like gold we can’t make gold we can’t fuse gold atoms we’re not at that level of technology yet. So bitcoin is the same way it’s consensus-driven everyone runs a node and it’s enforced by the miners organizing transactions. So it’s this holistic system that is unchangeable and we’ve had people try to change it in the past which resulted in you know the fork wars or the scaling wars or bitcoin civil war however you want to call it you know but that ended very poorly for people trying to change the protocol so you know it is far better in all aspects of its design which is basically giving power back to normal people.

Buck: So taking the financial system out of the hands of central governments would explain the attempts on the part of governments to either actively you know suppress bitcoin ownership I guess you know I guess India would have been one of the places where there was some of that and then even you know recently Janet Yellen’s negativity on this front is there something else to it other than you know just the fear of you know governments losing control?

Samson: It’s difficult to say you know I can’t really say what their real motivations are you just have to look at the high-level picture you know right is what they’re doing good for the average person if major institutions are buying bitcoin if Elon Musk the richest man on earth is buying bitcoin through his company if massive multi-billion dollar funds like rougher Guggenheim you know they’re all buying bitcoin

Buck: Isn’t it good for the normal person to buy bitcoin?

Samson: I would say yes you know you’re impoverishing your nation if you’re denying them access to this you know the whole point is bitcoin should democratize money it should make it so it’s not controlled by any one party so if you’re the democratically elected leader of the people you should be looking after their best interests and you don’t even need to understand bitcoin here you just look at what other people are doing successful people successful institutions successful companies what are they doing let your people do that too and I understand that there’s a concept of protecting people but you know there is a point at which you’re protecting them too much by denying access you know the same thing with the accredited investor regulations you know that it doesn’t make sense to me that you can have people gambling away on lottery tickets but they can’t invest in early-stage companies yeah it’s just there’s a huge disconnect there and it makes me question the whole underlying system.

Buck: Right. Now going back to the concept of bitcoin being either you know storage of value maybe second layer currency you know a lot of skeptics you know guys like Peter Schiff etc out there you know they have lots of problems with bitcoin and one of them really relates to volatility and I’m saying you know how can this be a currency or storage of value if you know if it’s so volatile. Now obviously you know bitcoin has a 1 trillion market cap now and presumably if that becomes 10 trillion it’s not as volatile is that really just you know does it really come down to that kind of simple scaling or is there you know where? Why are they wrong?

Samson: Well bitcoin is volatile it has its ups and downs and it is volatile if you want to use it as a unit of account right where you are pricing something in bitcoin you know if I’m a shopkeeper and I want to sell a hat and I want to price that hat in bitcoin it doesn’t work because there’s just too much volatility we’re not at the stage where you can price something in bitcoin and it makes sense. You can do it of course but it doesn’t make sense until we reach the point of hyperbitcoinization where everything is now priced in bitcoin and bitcoin is at hundreds of trillions in market cap so we’re still very young it’s still very early people forget that bitcoin is only you know 10 plus years old they think it’s existed for much longer the speed of technological development sometimes accelerates or distorts our perception of timelines you know like bitcoin is very young it’s gone from zero to what’s the price now 50k 49k in the span of a handful of years. Gold has had hundreds if not thousands of years to a thousand years to evolve into what it is now which is a very stable store of value it’s it’s very stable but bitcoin is still growing it’s still finding its price point and bitcoin is like a black hole it’s sucking up all this monetary value and all these use cases that now have a better option so if you listen to Michael Saylor talking about it. He’s basically saying holding cash is like having an ice cube that’s melting you’re just losing value and he estimated the value to be like 10 to 15 a year so much worse than inflation because there’s hidden inflation and bitcoin just serves that case use case better how to store your cash put it in bitcoin it stops melting.

Buck: So along that point Samson maybe you can point that explain that concept because big bitcoin is you know ultimately is a more of a deflationary asset so why is that?

Samson: Well the thing is so bitcoin is deflationary let’s talk about that first. So there is a hard cap there will only ever be a maximum of 21 million bitcoin that come into existence and this bitcoin is mined gradually so it’s going to take 100 plus years to get to the tail end of that we’re still we’re having every year so every four years the supply of bitcoin mined per bitcoin block is halved so now we’re at the third halving so it’s just every four years the supply dwindles more and more and what happens is that causes this deflation because the supply is decreasing and we’ve never had this effect happen before there’s never been a system that has existed where the supply is decreasing and nobody can change that. So for fiat currencies, the supply is always increasing you can have stimulus bills that pump trillions into the economy dollars can be printed out of thin air and even gold even though it’s mined you can always find more gold so I think in Africa in a country they found a deposit of gold in the mountain and people were just grabbing shovels and bags scooping it up to to get it so actually actually one step further if you go into space you can mine gold from asteroids and there is one asteroid called the psyche that is mostly gold so it’s not that scarce if you look at the bigger picture gold is only scarce in our gravity well on earth if you leave this gravity well it’s quite abundant and bitcoin is actually infinitely more infinitely more scarce than gold.

Buck: Let’s talk about you know your vision of bitcoin I mean obviously you mentioned hyperbitcoinization etc you know I guess the question is from my end how quickly do you see that happening you know and what kind of challenges will bitcoin have along the way?

Samson: Yeah so I would say my view is that bitcoin is going to be the basis of a new financial system you had the gold standard you had fiat originally pegged to gold and then you have this the stock market and bond mark and everything based on top of that so bitcoin will just replace gold and then you’ll have you know layer 2 scaling tech for spending bitcoin as cash but you also have this new asset class of tokenized securities which I believe are a massive leap forward compared to what we have currently and those are things like the security tokens that we’ve talked about on your show before these are they’re still securities but they’re in tokenized form and they’re issued like the ones that we’re talking about are issued on the liquid network a bitcoin sidechain so they’re directly compatible with bitcoin. If you get a dividend in a liquid security that dividend can be paid out using a bitcoin transaction to all the holders of that asset and you can do atomic swaps between that security token and bitcoin. So in case your users your watchers don’t know an atomic swap is just a type of transaction where it has to happen atomically which means both sides sign off on the track transaction and then it executes simultaneously so there’s no counterparty risk it’s not that I send you Buck one bitcoin and then you send me back 100 EXO tokens that transaction just happens all at once or does not happen and that opens up a large new frontier for us if you think of the current financial system as being broken having a bitcoin based financial system fixes a lot of things like the whole stock brokerage system is broken right you have brokerages that use clearinghouses to settle at the dtcc and then you have the issue where you can have halts in trading if they’re not collateralized enough settlement is fundamentally broken and you know I don’t think a lot of people understand this but settlement with bitcoin is actually several orders of magnitude if not infinitely better than the current system of settlement like it’s difficult to even get to t plus one settlement I don’t even think we’re there yet you know but bitcoin is like a few blocks like an hour maybe for settlement and it could be considered slow if you’re thinking about buying a coffee but you can use lightning for that but if you you can settle billions in bitcoin in an hour that’s pretty big that’s right that’s huge right right and you can settle for securities instantly or atomically using atomic swaps right on the liquid chain it also the applying the bitcoin technology to securities is kind of what we’re trying to accomplish on liquid and it solves another problem or actually two more problems one is the problem where you have brokerages lending out shares which they shouldn’t do but they bury that in the terms of service. So when you click ok because you didn’t read 50 pages of the toss you’ll say you know we can lend your shares out to someone else if you have a tokenized security and you have it custodially in your own possession in your own wallet nobody can lend that out and nobody can stop you from trading. So like the EXO token it is tradable peer-to-peer amongst the white list of investors and eventually once it’s you know approved for reggae then anybody could trade it freely but nobody can lend out your EXO tokens against your will because you can have them in your own wallet nobody can see your transactions too in the liquid network so liquid is a bitcoin side chain but with assets so if you think of bitcoin as having only one asset type the liquid chain actually gives you multiple asset types and one of those could be a security token and all these assets are confidential. So it’s all encrypted. If I send you an EXO token we see that transaction but to anyone else looking at the block explorer looking at that blockchain they just see there’s a transaction they don’t know what was sent and how much was sent so you have this ability to prevent front running because along the trail when you’re trading a stock you have people that see the trade and aggregate that data I mean robin hood’s whole thing is they’re selling that trade data to someone else like melvin capital right they can trade against you but if you’re trading a security token on the liquid network nobody else can see what you did if I sent you an EXO token nobody can run because nobody knows what we did so there’s a lot of benefits to this new bitcoin based financial system and we’re only at the tip of the iceberg we’re just starting right now.

Buck: So it seems to me though that one of the biggest challenges I mean everything you’re talking about obviously once you understand it makes a lot of sense where you know a consumer may want to switch to this model because in many ways they’re being victimized by the current model but you know I would think that one of the biggest challenges is you know breaking through I mean you’re basically trying to almost sort of take down the current financial system and that’s got a lot of powerful you know people and money behind it right I mean do you see that as presumably the biggest challenge for bitcoin in the next 20 years?

Samson: I think the biggest challenge for bitcoin is just educating normal people about what it is I think it’s difficult for people to really understand it most people come in because they see the number go up and yeah they’re attracted to that and then some will stay and learn more about the technology and why it’s important and how it is different than just say buying a stock and some will get sucked into alt coins or you know like the scammier things but I think the biggest challenge for bitcoin is that’s educating people about what it is why it’s important and how to store it properly it’s easy to keep your money with someone else and people get a sense of safety and security but I think there’s also a big downside to that in that you lose control and we just have to get people back into the thinking that it is normal to have custody of my own assets whether it is bitcoin whether it is a security or whatever you know you want that in your own safe outsourcing that safety and protection to a third party just means you’re at their whim you’re at their mercy if they want you to stop trading you’re stopping trading and that is a big challenge your other point was will the big players stop this I think they might want to but the odds are in the favor of bitcoin and the new financial system because it is incredibly better you know if you’re doing product development and I’ve done products for well a long time if you want to really disrupt a market you need to come up with something that is at least 10 times better and bitcoin is far more than 10 times better than the current system and I think security tokens are far at least 10 times better than what we have right now in terms of efficiency and transparency and privacy they just can’t do it so in the case of bitcoin you know all those big players and the banks came out very strongly against it at first but now they’re and capitulating.

Buck: The ironic part about it right so now you’re seeing actually a lot of institutional money coming around an infrastructure being built such that you know it that the quote-unquote smart money knows they know that bitcoin is here to stay in some capacity but in that regard you know you’ve got the irony there is that you’ve got you know custody for bitcoin becoming commercial custody you know not everybody’s keeping their stuff on a ledger right can you talk about sort of that transition of you know first of all I guess the institutional money wall street kind of coming into this space which they are and maybe you can allude to that and then you know there’s going to be some attempts on their side to sort of turn it into you know just another product.

Samson: So I think there’s always going to be a marketplace for custody solutions for people that are not technical but you have you know people coming up in in the world that are familiar with technology and I don’t think it’s difficult to have custody as long as you learn how to do it safely there is a learning curve but it’s not insurmountable and if you look at the younger generation you know they’re quite savvy like even like my generation growing up playing games you know we we’re okay with digital assets we’re okay with trading digital things it’s not a big hurdle to overcome now you might have people like Peter Schiff that are older that can’t adapt to this new mental model or a new way of doing things and they might use custodial services and that’s okay you know they can they can let someone else hold their money or hold their gold for them but for the younger generation I believe there’s a mistrust of of the the big players that or the system and gamestop and robin hood didn’t do much to make that any better sure so that’s just going to drive people in the direction of having their own assets and not giving away their control the big institutions are coming because they have customers themselves yeah so they can’t just say you know bitcoin’s a scam and bitcoin is just delivering every year it’s just plowing ahead it’s gaining value getting more and more adoption if they don’t take an allocation it’s almost like they’re in breach of a fiduciary duty to their shareholders or their lp’s or whatever because you know they’re just missing it and all the evidence just stacks up and shows them that any thesis staying bitcoin is a scam or bitcoin is worthless is wrong I mean some people are so ingrained and entrenched in that line of thinking that is all they can say but they’re leaving a record you can go on on twitter or social media or news sites and you can google these guys some of them have been saying you know dump bitcoin it’s a scam since it was like ten dollars or a hundred dollars yeah and you just have to look at that and go like wow like this guy’s still saying that that’s just crazy some of them like I am convinced petership owns bitcoin I’m I don’t believe he doesn’t own bitcoin well it doesn’t matter the important thing is his son owns bitcoin and his son is a big bitcoiner so that’s funny you know it’s the trend it’s the way the world is going and it’s the younger generation that is going to make it mainstream.

Buck: One of the things that happens though is there’s sort of a feed forward momentum when if you’ve got institutional money you’ve got you know endowments that you know maybe they’re not going to buy a lot but maybe they have do you know maybe they do you know 50 basis points of the the thing in bitcoin or something like that in when you have a finite amount of bitcoin that kind of you know gradual adoption into funds large funds and pensions creates an enormous amount of money in terms of market capitalization right and so if you look at that kind of feed forward thing it’s hard for me to imagine and you know I’m not a you know I’m not I’m not a bitcoin expert I just I generally understand the thesis enough to think this is something where I need to be involved with but it’s hard for me to imagine that this isn’t at 250 000 in the next four or five years I mean do you how do you see that and I know you’re not in the business of speculation but that that to me seems you know kind of a no-brainer at this point.

Samson: Well my own call is that we’ll hit 100k this year yeah and I said that last year when it was you know 15 20K ish range all signs point to a massive increase in bitcoin’s dollar value and you know is it just bitcoin’s value that’s going up or is it the fiat system making it go higher because more dollars are being printed. You know I remember reading some guys saying at the time of brexit he was looking at his bitcoin price on his app and he said like I’m not sure if bitcoin went up or the pound is going down yeah right yeah like all that matters like the price of bitcoin is not that important all that matters is you understand that the future financial system is based on bitcoin and eventually everything will be priced in bitcoin if not your kids generation then it’s their kids generation but knowing that inevitability you have to choose now in the present what allocation you make and it seems to me you know even if you have no idea even if you don’t believe in it a 10 allocation would be prudent and a 10 allocation is in line with these multi-billion dollar funds allocating their capital so that’s not financial advice that’s just my analysis of the situation but if you can afford to invest in something you might as well put something in bitcoin yeah because it’s not likely to go to zero but it is there’s a chance it could go to infinity.

Buck: Right you’re just talking about satoshi’s at that point you’re not talking about you know full bitcoins anymore. Well listen, the other I guess the last question I have here on this matter from the techno goes it again goes to some of you know the Peter Schiffs of the world who really you know try to find holes in this thesis which is that you know listen you’re a bitcoin maximalist and so one of the thoughts is well you know obviously you know most people who are bitcoin maximalists think of pretty much any other cryptocurrency you know is a scam of some sort and I’m not saying that correctly about you correct me but I assume that that’s kind of where you’re at but let’s just say for a second if we’re talking about long term how do we know or you know what do you say to people say well there could just be a better technology than bitcoin that comes along that is you know quicker and you know easier and you know why does it have to be bitcoin

Samson: Yeah so there’s a lot of projects out there I mean there’s like thousands of cryptocurrencies and a lot of them market themselves as better than bitcoin or better at something than bitcoin and a lot of those cryptocurrencies are not decentralized just because their marketing materials say you know we are a decentralized network. I mean you know you’re you you have a network of investors you know no one just reads the marketing speak and just takes it at face value but in the world a lot of people take that at face value I was on a panel with some academics and they were talking about ethereum they’re saying yeah well you know it could never be shut down because it’s decentralized and they’re just repeating that marketing message but ethereum is not decentralized a lot of these cryptocurrencies are more like companies and securities sure than they are cryptocurrencies I think to be considered a cryptocurrency it needs to be mined at least that has to be a bar you can’t just press a button and print a token which is what ripple did and now the sec is coming down on them because you know they’re pressing a button printing this crypto and selling it and that’s a security even though they say we’re decentralized no one buys that at the end but one you should be mined and two like there should be no no organization that is clearly in control of that cryptocurrency and there’s very few that would meet this criteria and if the criteria is it needs to be mined like permissionless participation in the system then you have to look at how much security is there behind this thing and if that cryptocurrency is not dominant in its hash rate then it’s very likely it could be attacked and then it’s not secure so even if it’s decentralized it doesn’t matter because someone could just 51 attack and overwrite the whole chain and if you look at the news you actually see this happening but you know yeah a lot of private people look at that.

Buck: Yeah other privacy ones.

Samson: Yeah specifically well it yeah there are privacy coins too but then you have the issue of the launch so bitcoin had like what I like to call a virgin birth like it was satoshi creating it socializing on the cypherpunk’s mailing list and there’s no VC capital investment people started working on it building it mining it and trading it and it gained value organically so there have been other cryptocurrencies out there that have tried to launch fairly and they were focused on privacy but in the end what happened was VCs started investing in them and investing in mining and it just artificially skews the whole thing it’s difficult if not impossible to have a fair launch these days just because everyone is now aware and people are going to try to get in on that launch and yeah make some money off of it.

Buck: Yeah absolutely interesting stuff man this has been great. Tell us what you’re doing over at Blockstream these days. What’s the latest initiative?

Samson: We have a lot of initiatives. So in case your listeners don’t know Blockstream is a bitcoin infrastructure company we work on the bitcoin protocol the lightning protocol we have Blockstream AMP which is a platform to issue security tokens on the liquid network. We are also the tech provider for the Liquid Network which is a bitcoin sidechain it’s essentially a blockchain anchored to bitcoin it has no native currency in it so the native currency of liquid is just pegged in bitcoin is locked up. We also are one of the largest miners in North America. We have facilities in Quebec and Georgia in the USA and we have Blockstream satellite which is a service broadcasting bitcoin blocks through space but yeah we’re busy doing a lot of things there’s always something going on at Blockstream.

Buck: Good stuff man. Thanks again I appreciate it and you know hopefully we can get you on again in a year as this continues to develop and becomes more and more what everybody doesn’t think it’s going to be it’s been doubting it from the beginning. So thanks again, Samson. We’ll be right back