No private keys, no bitcoin

Joe Burnett: Hi everybody. Welcome back to the Blockware Intelligence Podcast. This week I have Trey Sellers from Unchained Capital on. Trey, welcome. Thank you.

Trey Sellers: Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, glad to have you. So, yeah, let’s just jump right into it. So I’m curious, tell us a little bit about how you originally got into bitcoin, why you started working in the space, and what you do at Unchained Capital.

Trey: Yeah, I first heard about bitcoin back in 2011. I came at things from the libertarian side of this whole equation and back then, that’s kind of all it was really right like this libertarian money for libertarian world. I didn’t really understand it, didn’t really dig too much into it, but it kind of kept coming up. 2014 came around and Coinbase had made it much easier to buy. And so my first purchase was on Coinbase in 2014. Bought a little bit over the next few months there and then kind of just forgot about it. Every once in a while I’d come back and be kind of reinvigorated in terms of an intellectual curiosity, but never really dove deep and went down the rabbit hole, so to speak. And never really never really got it. Never really internalized with me as to what the importance of this thing is and why I should spend some time really understanding it. It’s like, I’ll just throw some money at this. It’s a flyer. It sounds kind of interesting, but we’ll see what happens. That interest was kind of reinvigorated around the 2016-2017 pump as it was for a lot of people. Price is pumping. People are getting excited. It’s in the news. I remember showing the price to my wife after I had seen it surpass the price of gold, and it’s like, wow, this thing is kind of crazy. Like, what’s going on here? Continue to dig into it, but still don’t get it. It’s like as everybody has, I think, a very similar story. Takes multiple touch points to kind of understand why this thing is valuable and why you should care about it. Rode it all the way up, rode it all the way down in 2018, and finally I think found the right resources, found the right people and started digging it a little further, started learning about holding my own keys, started learning about running a node and started buying again. Just dollar cost averaging, buying a little bit here and there and really thinking about this more of like, okay, this is something that I’m starting to understand better. I’m starting to get the value prop. I should definitely start allocating to this a little bit more heavily and more forcefully, and around, call it 2019 timeframe, late 2019, I was deep down the rabbit hole. I was working at a bank. My background is in banking, finance, capital markets, technology consulting, pretty broad experience across all those industries, and I was sitting on a trading floor doing risk and P&L for the capital markets trading guys, but just really obsessing over bitcoin, just really digging into it, right? And then the thought crossed my mind. People are going to start asking questions about this, especially as we head into 2020 and 2021, the halving’s coming up, bitcoin is going to start pumping, and people are going to want to know about what this thing is. So I should be the guy who is there to answer the questions, right? So I put together this deck called Bitcoin for Bankers, started making my way around that organization, presenting to different groups of people, which led to some executive leadership teams, which led to a crypto working group as the bitcoin SME. And by that time the price is pumping. Everybody’s excited about it, everybody’s wanting to learn and it really just kind of snowballed from there. And so from that standpoint, well maybe there’s something out there for me, right? Maybe I can make a move out of the traditional finance world, out of this fiat world and into bitcoin. Probably nothing will come of it. But I started digging in a little bit there, one thing led to another and I found myself in the office in Austin, at the Unchained office, talking to Parker, talking to the other guys there. And before I knew it, I’m like working at a bitcoin company, having the best time in my life. This company is great, I love it. Wake up every day invigorated, excited to orange-pill the world and help people hold their own keys. It’s really great.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, it’s a great background. Unchained, I think, has a great mission of empowering individuals and helping them hold their own private keys. Quick question: given what’s going on with Celsius, BlockFi, and other potentially insolvent crypto yield companies, and even exchanges like Coinbase with that filing that came out about them, how has that highlighted the importance of holding your own bitcoin private keys?

Trey: Yeah. When these types of events happen, we definitely see a bump of people coming to us and finally realizing how important it is that they start taking control of their bitcoin. It really just comes down to this, right? If you are not holding your own keys, you do not own bitcoin. You have, at best, an IOU. You’re an unsecured creditor. The last few weeks, the last few months, really, have made that abundantly clear to anybody who has not been holding their own keys that they are subject to insolvency, right? They are subject to freezing of funds if you turn out to have the wrong political opinion or honk your horn too loud, right? You do not own bitcoin unless you hold your own keys. It’s not that hard. We’re here to help people do that. We’re here to guide people and we can talk about exactly what Unchained does on a day to day basis and how that process works. But it’s so important for people to start realizing that their wealth is not secure when they’re trusting somebody else, that you’re making a huge step up in security by holding your own keys. It is not something that should be shied away from, it’s something that should be approached with the confidence to move ahead and make sure that you’re controlling your own wealth. That’s really why we’re here, is to help provide a support mechanism for people as they’re coming onto our platform and support going forward. But that’s really the main thing there. You do not own bitcoin if you are not holding your own keys. End of story. The sooner people realize that, the sooner that we can stop seeing so many people who are new to the space, who are led astray by promises of yield and all this other crap that’s out there, which leads them to lose a lot of money, which leads to a lot of heartache. And when people are holding keys, and when people understand the importance of doing that, we start taking power away from the fiat world, right? We start moving toward a world where people have self-sovereignty, where they are able to control their destiny in terms of their finances, where they can’t be censored. People start to get the benefit of bitcoin as it’s promised, in terms of being uncensored and having that true hard cap of 21 million, right? If you’re not letting somebody else hold your bitcoin, they can’t lend it out and rehypothecate it and put it at risk and essentially create extra bitcoin above and beyond that base 21 million. So the sooner that we get to that place, the better off the world is going to be, the sooner we can usher in the promise of what bitcoin holds for the future.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I always like to say that bitcoin has two unique characteristics. One has no counterparty risk. Like, if you hold your own keys, you don’t have to trust anybody else. And two, it has no dilution risk. If you hold your own keys and run your own node, you can verify that, hey, I have X out of 21 million and there can never be more than 21 million.

Trey: Yeah, it kind of all comes down to counterparty risk, right? Like that dilution risk is counterparty risk. Your counterparty in that standpoint is the US government. The people running the dollar, like the government and the banks and whatever, when they’re printing money, that counterparty who you’re trusting with that liability to you to not be eroded of value is being eroded of value, right? But there’s another option. You can just opt out. You can upgrade your money from dollars to bitcoin and you don’t have to worry about that. You don’t have to worry about the inflation numbers, you don’t have to worry about any of that stuff. You have the absolute assurance of 21 million and the percentage of that supply from here into perpetuity. There is no getting around that. And you can verify it for yourself, right? Like you should be running a node. If you’re able to do that, this is a great learning opportunity so that you can make sure that you are verifying that that supply cap is in place, that you’re verifying that the bitcoin that you’re receiving is actually real bitcoin that you’ll be able to spend in the future. All of this is available to people. It’s really not that hard. You just have to kind of understand it’s available and then do a little bit of work to figure out how to make it happen.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So holding your own private keys sounds pretty important to me. What exactly does that even mean? And is it a difficult process for someone who may be more tech illiterate?

Trey: So holding your own keys is essentially just protecting secret information, right? This is a really big random number that is a private key that generates public keys, that generates addresses. But the key point is that you’re just keeping the secret information away from other people and available to only you, so that you are the only person who can spend that bitcoin. All bitcoin is always tied to an address that’s controlled by private keys. You can control an address with a single private key or you can do it with multiple private keys. That’s what we help people to do. Our platform is built to make what’s called multi signature, where you have multiple keys protecting the bitcoin. You need a quorum of those keys to move the bitcoin out of that bitcoin address. And we make that really easy and accessible for people on our platform and we provide a support mechanism, right? That’s ultimately what we’re doing at the core of our business is we help people to understand how to use private keys. We help them understand how to think about their operational security around that. And we’re there for them when they have questions about this, when they need support into the future, whether that’s an inheritance type of scenario, whether that is one of their keys that they’re controlling, is compromised in some way, we’re there to help them recover from that situation so they don’t feel like they’re out on an island doing it themselves. They don’t have any single point of failure, they don’t have any counterparty risk. This collaborative custody model allows for all of that true to form, to bitcoin’s native way of working, right? We’re using native functionality that is built into the bitcoin protocol that is just part of it. And we’re leveraging that to provide this really great experience for our clients so that they can hold their bitcoin in the best. Possible way, eliminating that single point of failure, eliminating that counterparty risk and having full control over the bitcoin that they’re holding immaterial amounts for the long term. Right? You want to make sure that the Bitcoin that you hold, that finite supply of that finite supply, that can never be bailed out, right? Like if you lose your bitcoin, there’s nobody coming to bail you out. It is 21 million or bust. And you need to make sure that when you are holding that bitcoin, you’re doing so in the best possible way with the highest level of security, with the highest level of resiliency, so that you can’t just make one mistake and lose your bitcoin. I don’t mean to make that sound scary. It’s not, right? We are here to help do that. That’s what our business is about, making it accessible for people and being that support mechanism when they need help doing that. Our clients are extremely grateful for the amount of time that we spend with them to make sure that they get to that place that’s really comfortable, that’s really confident in the way everything is working and that they know how to get support on into the future. And then from there we’re able to provide some other financial services that are hugely valuable as well.

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, no, I think bitcoin demands extreme ownership and I think when individuals demand extreme ownership, society as a whole has more of a solid foundation to build off of. But that’s awesome. So I’m curious, why does Unchained Capital specifically, why do you guys focus only on bitcoin when a lot of other companies like Coinbase, BlockFi, larger companies, may focus on a ton of different cryptos?

Trey: Yeah, bitcoin is the best money that the world has ever seen. It’s probably the best money that the world will ever see, in my opinion. What that means is that as it becomes a global reserve currency, as it becomes a global reserve asset, as it becomes the global money, it’s going to have a huge impact on the way that everybody lives their lives. “Fix the money, fix the world” is the quote there. We truly believe that. And so having a focused effort on the thing that’s going to make the biggest impact is the way that we choose to spend our days. You can split your attention in multiple different directions, but if you have focused effort on the biggest impact things, you’re going to change the world in a way that is the way that you want to see it, right? If there is other value in some of these other things (I personally don’t really think so), great, let other people deal with that. For bitcoin, that is truly finite, that you need to be taking the best possible care of it. You wouldn’t want us focusing on all this other stuff anyway. You want our attention helping you in this collaborative custody model solely focused on that finite fixed supply asset that cannot be bailed out, to provide the best possible experience for you, to make this easy for you, to make it accessible for you, and to be taking the best possible approach to helping people secure that extreme ownership of that asset. So you wouldn’t want our attention spread elsewhere anyway. And that’s really it.

Joe: Yeah, no, for sure. And I think bitcoin is far from perfect, but it’s by far the best that we have. And I think economic systems and humans converge on one money and that one money is objectively bitcoin. It’s the most immediately scarce, the most divisible, portable, durable, fungible. So it has all these unique properties and it’s obviously objectively the best compared to all of the other cryptos or physical objects like gold as well.

Trey: Look around you. All of these companies that are kind of in the process of blowing up are, let’s just say, not focused on bitcoin, right? They’re not focused on the highest impact asset and monetary network that’s out there. They kind of lean a little bit in that direction and they’re spread across all this other stuff that may or may not have value five years from now. So again, let’s focus on the best money the world has ever seen, exactly like you’re saying, let’s make the world the way that we want to see it. Because when you fix the money, you do fix the world, right? When you change the incentive structure that’s out there for people because of the way that they’re able to save and protect their wealth and take control of it in a sovereign manner, you do change the way that the financial system is structured such that your food supplies get better, such that there’s less volatility, such that people have more savings when they’re going into any kind of financial hardship or natural disaster or something like that. The system is so fragile right now because the money is broken. Any little bit of stress that comes to the economy immediately starts creating cascading liquidations and a debt spiral that ultimately needs to be bailed out. Let’s move away from that. Right? Let’s focus on the best money the world has ever seen, move it forward, and get to that place where we don’t have to deal with any of that crap anymore.

Joe: Yeah, I know for sure. I think I like Jeff Booth’s quote where he says that when there’s scarcity in money, there’s abundance in the world, but when there’s abundance in money, there’s scarcity in the world. And that’s kind of what we’ve been seeing recently.

Trey: Exactly what we’re seeing. This system is built to debase the money. It has to work that way. It’s credit-based. It’s all debt all the way down. Let’s move away from debt. Let’s move toward equity. Let’s have people have actual skin in the game when they’re building their businesses, when they’re building their homes and their families. Let’s get back to an incentive structure that values a low time preference that leads toward capital accumulation and not long term capital destruction.

Joe: Yes. Curious to hear your thoughts on this one. So I think many bitcoin critics are now saying that bitcoin clearly failed as an inflation hedge, given that CPI is now at record highs. Everyone’s hurting when they go to the grocery store, they go fill up their gas pump, but bitcoin is significantly down off its all-time highs. Like, what would be your counterargument to that?

Trey: Yes, there’s a lot of different views of what inflation is. How should it be calculated? What time frame should you be looking at? I think a better way, or the best way, to look at this is that bitcoin is a hedge on monetary policy. It’s a hedge on money printing, which is kind of the classical definition of of inflation. And, you know, if you go back to the depths of March 2020, when correlations go to one, because there’s one of these cascading liquidations happening, right? Like a margin call across the world and scraping for dollars. What that’s met with by central banks, what that’s met with by governments, is massive amounts of money printing. And sure enough, assets like bitcoin, even, like stocks react to that. Because stocks are used as near money. They’re store of value assets. Real estate is used as store of value assets because the actual money is just eroding in value. And so you can see that over the long term, as the base money is expanding, as M2 is expanding, as central banks around the world are constantly debasing that currency, as governments around the world are implementing UBI, bitcoin is going to continue to go up. There’s 21 million. There’s no such thing, really, as like, general inflation in a bitcoin world anymore. You’re actively hedging inflation by the fact that you’re kind of opting out of it when you buy bitcoin. Bitcoin can’t be inflated in the classical sense, so over time, the value of it must go up, especially when denominated in failing fiat. But when you start comparing it to the capital stock of the world, to assets that have real world value over a long period of time, it’s going to continue to rise against those things as well. And the flip side of that is that life gets cheaper, right? Things get more abundant.

Joe: Exactly. As you were saying, when the money is fixed and people can save for the future and they can do that. But this idea of, oh, CPI is 8.6% and bitcoin is crashing, well, look at what is happening around the world.

Trey: There’s a global margin call, right? People are scrambling to come up with dollars to pay down the debt that they’ve accumulated over the last 30 years. Essentially that continues to be piled on year after year after year. And when that happens, as they say, correlations go to one, you’ve got to sell everything that’s not nailed down to do that, to meet those margin calls, so to speak. And so as central banks are tightening, as M2 is rolling over, as quantitative tightening starts its trek, maybe the Fed is behind the curve, maybe it’s not. We’ll see. But that’s really what bitcoin is tracking. It’s tracking the credibility of monetary policy in the real world. It’s tracking the supply of money as we use it, which is fiat, which is infinitely reproducible and they ain’t shy about doing that. And so to say that this kind of government manipulated CPI number is something that should be directly correlated with bitcoin, I think is the wrong way to look at it. And I think we’ve seen that, right? When the Fed is forced to pivot, when things start rolling over and we turn into a downturn, a recession, a depression. When this deflationary impulse starts taking over in waves. Because they’ve stopped expanding the money supply. Because they’re trying to react to inflation. The tide is going to turn for these assets that are used as near money as store of value because people are reacting to the fact that they’re printing money again. And when they’re printing money again, you can’t hold it because it rapidly depreciates in value. So I think that’s the best way to look at it.

Joe: Yeah, I think that is a great way. I also like to think of the idea that CPI is kind of a backward looking metric. The Fed is kind of, it is driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror, whereas markets, whether it’s traditional finance with equity markets or bitcoin, that’s forward looking. We’re looking ahead and people are trading based on what they think is going to happen in the future. And the Fed is trying to drive this car by looking in the rearview mirror, being aggressive, raising rates, whereas markets are staying away. Hold on. Atlanta Fed has just revised their GDP estimate. Negative. Could potentially be in a recession. Right now, we don’t even know. But it’s just kind of crazy times.

Trey: Yeah, the inflation already happened. Right? The inflation happened in 2020 and 2021. The classical definition of inflation is expansion of the money supply that happened in full force during those two years as they were “fighting COVID”. Now that expansion has stopped, things are rolling over. And bitcoin is kind of prophesying that or has already done so by selling off. It’s leading the charge in terms of telling people what to expect from the actions of central bankers and governments who need to run deficits in order to fund all of the things that they want to fund. And the federal reserve, regardless of their intent or anything like that, they must be there to backstop that excessive spending that happens at the federal level. And they will because they have no other choice, right? Like their credibility is on the line. They’re not going to let the U.S. Government go bankrupt or default on their debt in any explicit way. And so they’ll do it the implicit way by creating reserves, by monetizing that debt that is being pumped out there in times of stress in the economy.

Joe: Yeah, 100%. I know Parker Lewis works at Unchained Capital. He wrote a great series called the Gradually Then Suddenly series. Do you have a favorite piece from that? And if so, which one is it and what’s the general idea behind it?

Trey: I don’t know that I have a favorite piece. I think the one that kind of hits home the most right now is Bitcoin is the Great Definantialization. That’s what we’re living through. We’re living through this kind of slow motion train wreck of the global economy being definantialized after being refinancialized, after being definantialized after being refinancialized, every single time that something starts to break, right? And so because the money is broken, everything is financialized. There’s debt on top of debt on top of debt, as I said earlier. And that creates this flywheel effect of really seemingly good times that’s built on really unsteady foundations that inevitably must come crashing back to reality. And when that happens, all of that financialization that’s been built up, all of the DeFi yield stuff that has been out there, like sucking in naive people’s hard earned capital that they’re excited about and that they feel like they have to move money out into risky assets because it’s losing value every single day. You can’t just sit on cash, right? And so you have to move in the direction of financialized products. You have to buy stocks, you have to buy real estate, you have to buy art, you have to buy bitcoin. You have to put your money into a 20% yielding DeFi thing that you have no idea where that yield is coming from because if you don’t, you’re guaranteed to lose value. Now, obviously, I’m being a little tongue in cheek there, right? But the point remains the same. All of that is a function of the fiat world, the financialization of the economy above and beyond actual savings and actual value creation, and a growth of the capital stock over a long period of time. And it’s all driven because the money is broken. And bitcoin fixes that. Bitcoin allows you to not take risk, to not go out and take market risk or liquidity risk or counterparty risk just to stay in the same place, much less get ahead. I came at my investing route through the FIRE movement. It’s okay. I’m going to go to my job, I’m going to earn a paycheck. I’m going to take any excess money that I have and I’m going to plow it into the index. I’m going to plow it into the stock market index, and I’m just going to keep doing that day after day, year after year, until I get to a point where it’s growing enough that it can offset my expenses. Well, guess what? I’m not going in and analyzing the companies that are associated with that index. I’m not seeing if there’s any, like, PE ratio above and beyond where that index is trading, that I should be kind of managing that risk because I’m not looking at it in that way. When you think about it that way, you are using that as a store of value, right? It’s not an investment, it’s savings. It’s a savings vehicle. It’s being used as near money. And bitcoin allows you to stop taking that risk, get off of that fiat train, step into something that cannot be debased, that is built and engineered to gain value over a long period of time. Obviously, this is young and we’re in the process of monetizing, and there’s going to be volatility for sure. But over the long term, that 21 million, because it cannot be debased, allows you to save the fruits of your labor. All the hard work that you’re doing. Bitcoin respects that work. It respects that time by allowing you to save in something that can’t be diluted. And when people have that option, there’s no need to funnel money toward stocks that have all of that excess risk. There’s no need for Chinese billionaires to buy real estate in the US that is illiquid, that they’re never going to touch or live in, right? They can buy bitcoin and they can hold their wealth. They can get out of the country if they need to with twelve words in their head. You know what I mean? You take away all this financialization when you have good money, when you have money that can’t be debased, that can’t be censored, you’re in a position again, where you’re are taking a sovereign control over your wealth and over your family’s financial future. That’s what bitcoin represents. And Parker’s Great Definancialization piece, it just really hits home, right? It’s so timely for right now, even though it was written several years ago. I think it was 2019, 2020. It’s just so prescient. That’s exactly what we’re living through. We’re living through bitcoin replacing that terrible money that we’re all forced to use so that we can be in a position where we don’t have to financialize our lives.

Joe: Yeah. To me it’s so interesting how most people go through their working career. And obviously it kind of makes sense to do this to some extent for tax purposes, but averaging into a don’t really even know what you’re buying. And people hold hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in these things and they have no idea what they’re even investing in. No idea. Fascinating.

Trey: Yeah. These target date funds, it’s like, okay, you’re just going to have this algorithm out there. There are some people out there who argue that some of the ebb and flow of markets are just related to people just dumping money in their 401k’s. And these target date funds that buy bonds and sell stocks or buy stocks and sell bonds or whatever at this cadence that’s associated with the age of the workforce. I mean, that makes sense to me. It’s just out there, passive money that is just algorithmically enforced. And they’re doing that because you can’t save in money. You can’t take your wealth into your own hands in dollars and not have counterparty risk and market risk and liquidity risk that are associated with all these other assets like real estate and stocks and bonds and whatever. 

Joe: And I think when people are averaging into say like SPY, which is an index of the top market capitalization companies in the US. It kind of destroys capital allocation a little bit where people literally just keep buying the largest companies over and over and over again and there’s not much creative destruction where maybe one of these companies is operating poorly. That may not be revealed in the actual price of their shares.

Trey: Yeah, it’s a really great point. There’s also an argument around, look, people who have the opportunity to start saving by buying stocks and just buying the index and continuing to do that, they intuitively know that the money doesn’t work. They may not understand why. They may not understand the mechanism by which their dollar loses value, but they know enough to recognize that if they just hold onto it, it’s going to melt away. It’s that melting ice cube metaphor that Michael Saylor uses. But in doing so, they’re continually kind of building wealth or saving their wealth there. And there are a lot of people who don’t have that opportunity. They don’t have the education or they just haven’t been exposed to the ability of being able to save by using stocks. People around the world don’t have access necessarily to the US stock market that has produced 8% to 10% returns in dollar nominal terms over the last 100 years or whatever. They don’t have access to that. They use dollars that some government far away is able to print and that they have no control over the value for. So what’s their option? They don’t really have one until bitcoin comes along. When they have bitcoin, they can start to put money away in something that can’t be debased. We’re kind of seeing what that happened, what that looks like in El Salvador and some of the other countries that are starting to adopt this, there’s definitely volatility involved again. We’re seeing that. But that doesn’t change the fact that they have a mechanism available to them that they didn’t otherwise have, which is the ability to put something aside, to save and accumulate capital and save for their future in something that can’t be debased, it can’t be controlled by somebody else, it can’t be taken away from them. Summary execution of your finances. That can’t happen with bitcoin.

Joe: Yeah, I’ve always thought it was interesting, too. You mentioned US stocks or US equities. Traditionally, if you go back long enough, they kind of pull in that 7 to 8% annualized return. But to some extent, there’s kind of a survivorship bias around US equities in particular. Right? Like, if you were in German equities or Chinese equities, you probably didn’t do as nearly as well as you were in US equities, and some of them had wipeouts, like, if you were in German equities during the Weimar hyperinflation, that didn’t work out well for you, obviously. So it’s kind of like you don’t even know if this 7-8% is guaranteed for the next 50 years because things change, and, like, Ray Dalio brought up the changing of the guard where other countries or entities maybe it’s bitcoin comes up and, you know, really changes things.

Trey: Yeah, that that’s a really great point. The US has definitely, obviously has been the leader in the world for the last 100 years and maybe more, right? And has been done very well relative to other countries. As things start to escalate in terms of this financialization and definacialization pendulum, it becomes harder and harder for businesses to value themselves, value their producers and the source of their inventory, value their cash flows. It becomes really hard to predict the future when you have no idea what the money is going to be worth from year to year. When you’ve got these inflation expectations that are wildly swinging, it’s almost…you might almost rather have, like, a steady 2% erosion of your value rather than, like, 8% up one year and 8% down the next year. That’s way harder to predict than a steady 2%. So I get why some people think that’s a good way to go. But you know, what’s really easy to predict is 0% terminal inflation. That’s really easy to measure against. You need that anchor point of the the way to measure economic value, the way to tell if there are actually supply and demand issues that are in the economy, right? Like everybody argues right now: Is it demand driven from the money printing or are there supply chain issues? Is it Russia’s fault? It’s so difficult to discern what’s happening when your measuring stick is constantly changing in value. Typically, if you think of a measuring stick and you got the notches on there, those constantly get closer together, closer together. But the nominal values on those notches stays the same. How are you supposed to build a house with a measuring stick that is constantly having the measuring notches on there getting closer together, by the way, with wild widening happening every once in a while, which is essentially what’s happening right now with the dollar as it’s inflated, inflated, inflated and then deflated, right? All this debt just piles up and then you get this cascading effect. How are you supposed to run a business over the long term? How are you supposed to make capital investments for the long term when you can’t even predict what’s going to happen over the next year because things are so volatile?

Joe: Yeah, 100% random question that I just thought of since it is 4th of July weekend, Independence Day, I feel like there’s a lot of similarities between what bitcoin is and the freedom that it brings to the individual and the founding of America. Do you have any quick thoughts on that?

Trey: Bitcoin is global, right? It provides that same spirit of independence and freedom to everybody around the world who chooses to adopt it. That being said, it is very much aligned with traditional American values of individualism, of libertarianism. I told you that’s kind of the direction that I came from on here. Around pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and putting in work, proof of work to make sure that you can provide for your family, that you can build for the future and that you can do so without interference from outside parties, from the government. Right? Bitcoin solidifies those values in the way that you handle your finances. It solidifies the ability for you to act independently for yourself, for you to declare monetary independence from the powers that be that would otherwise seek to control the way that you spend your money and the value that your money has and the investments that you’re able to make and the wars that are being fought around the globe that you may object to but have no way of opting out of because your money is being debased to fund it. And so all of those values, in my opinion, they align perfectly with the way that bitcoin approaches the world, which is the individual first responsibility and building a world where you can rely on other people and that you have this inherent trust because you don’t have to trust people. It’s like this weird dichotomy of being able to know, hey, my money is good, your money is good. We can exchange these things and we don’t have to develop this distrust for one another and this bifurcation of our values that is really driven in large part by all of this financialization and all of this impairment of the money on the world. So I hope that makes sense, but that’s kind of how I view it.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. I think bitcoin is freedom technology. Absolutely. One last question.

Trey: Well said and way more succinct.

Joe: One last question, then we’ll wrap this up. This is a little bit of a different question, but I feel like some people might like it. So I’m curious to know what your thoughts are like. What do you think the future of private key ownership is in the long term? Will it always be like these physical hardware devices, whether it’s a Ledger or Trezor, or in a weird way, is it possible that there may be a way to generate and embed private keys inside something like a Neuralink, like inside your brain, where humans can consciously but voluntarily sign transactions? What are your thoughts on that?

Trey: So I think that bitcoin succeeds as and when people are able to hold their own keys and do so in a way that scales. Unchained is here to help people realize the possibility that they can hold their own keys, that they can take control of their wealth. And we’re here to support you as part of that. I don’t see a world where bitcoin thrives where the majority of it is held in Coinbase that can just be summarily executed by the powers that be who decide you have the wrong opinion on something. I don’t see a world where bitcoin creates the type of environment that we want to see create. Like, that’s not success to me. So it’s imperative that we drive the importance of private key ownership of your bitcoin as this asset, as this monetary network continues to grow. We have to keep pounding the table on that and keep making it easier for people to do that. It’s way easier than it has ever been, and we just need to keep working on that. Neuralink and embedding private keys in your brain…that all sounds possible to me. The next question is, is that a good idea? I don’t know. There’s something about having a physical backup for your private keys that can’t be tampered with in the same way as humans can be tampered with. And perhaps there’s a way that you have Neuralink chip or whatever in your brain and maybe that’s one key as part of a multisig. But I don’t know that I would trust the fact that your brain is connected to the internet. You basically just have hot keys in your head, right? So I wouldn’t think of that as like the sole way that you control your bitcoin. But maybe there’s a world where that does play some part in it. If you want to keep your spending money in terms of bitcoin in your head and just like, kind of what would you do? Lean your forehead forward onto the chip reader or something like that? Or just you think the thoughts, I want this bitcoin to move, signs with the private keys. Great. I’m not sure I would be comfortable with having the entirety of my wealth just stored in my brain that could be manipulated in any number of ways. I might just fall and hit my head and my Neuralink thing just flashes and I lose all my bitcoin. That wouldn’t be good, but maybe for, like, pocket change.

Joe: Yeah, no, that’s fair. Well, write down your seed phrases, everybody.

Trey: Absolutely, 100% physical seed phrases. Use multisig. Come talk to us. We’re here to help you, to make this easy for you so that you can secure that bitcoin in the best possible way, so that you don’t have that single point of failure, so that you can get the support you need from experts. The people at Unchained are absolutely ridiculously sharp. They know their stuff. They will help you get to that place where you are really comfortable and really confident in the way that you are managing your bitcoin wealth and then be there for you to support you going forward. Whenever you have questions, whenever you and your family approach that inheritance scenario where that bitcoin needs to pass on, having somebody to walk you through those scenarios and be there to guide you is just hugely valuable. Do the right thing. Hold your own keys, do it in multisig and let us help. We’re here to do that.

Joe: Yeah. 100%. Trey, where can people find you after this show? After they listen? They watch it on YouTube. Where can they find you?

Trey: Yeah, cool. Hit me up on Twitter at @ts_hodl. Go to the Unchained website: unchained.com/consultation for a free consultation. You can talk to me or somebody on our team to really dig into the details of how our platform works and how we can help you to secure your bitcoin, the financial services that we offer. We have IRAs, we are rolling out actively the ability to buy bitcoin directly on our platform. We have the bitcoin-backed loans and more to come over the course of the next few years that, once you are in our ecosystem, you’ll have access to, so happy to talk about this. We’ve got a whole team here to support our clients, to make sure they get that support they need. And, yeah, thanks for having me on, and I really enjoyed the conversation. Hope we can do it again soon. 

Joe: Awesome. Yeah, I know. Thanks for coming on the show and enjoyed it as well. Thanks, everybody.