Transcript: Average Gary: Bitcoin Is the Peaceful Revolution

Average Gary [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.

Marty Bent [0:25] In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

Average Gary [0:29] I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

Marty Bent [0:31] If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Average Gary [0:34] Probably should be. Probably should be. The recruiter was good at being a recruiter. And then, you know, my ex-girlfriend's stepdad was like telling me sea stories about being on a ship and using rebar to spear hammerhead sharks to like off the side of the ship. So signed up fully psyoped into freedom, played a lot of like SOCOM, US Navy SEALs on PlayStation 2 and Call of Duty and all these other things. So I like fully bought into that whole psyop, very much like, let's go spread freedom and democracy.

Marty Bent [1:03] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:03] Um, so yeah.

Marty Bent [1:04] Bubba would tell me stories. He, he was a captain of large ships, and he would tell stories about having like take the ships down the Mississippi into the Gulf and like navigating that. But I forget when he was deployed. I think it was after the Gulf War, like in the '90s, or like before. 2001, and he would tell stories about it. They would just get commands, just like there'd be stranded boats in the ocean, they just use their artillery to sink them.

Average Gary [1:33] Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's no international law, right? Once you go 12 miles off the coast, you're in international waters, and it's— I don't know, there's rules and treaties and ways that things should be happening, but yeah, if there's a boat out there, Yeah, I don't want to dox too much, but if you're comfortable sharing.

Marty Bent [1:51] So you enlisted when you were 18. What year was that?

Average Gary [1:53] That was '08.

Marty Bent [1:54] '08? Yeah.

Average Gary [1:55] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:56] And so you got deployed in 2012?

Average Gary [1:57] I was in boot camp when the meltdown happened.

Marty Bent [1:59] Oh, what was that like?

Average Gary [2:01] I had no idea. I mean, I was completely oblivious. Um, I remember distinctly there— it was the same thing. So like 9/11, I was in like 6th grade, and I just remember like the teachers were all like, like worried. And I remember the same time, like when when, you know, the whole Lehman Brothers, bears, whatever, was like crashing. 'Cause I was in boot camp from August to October of '08. And I just remember like people were very much paying attention to the news and not to what we were doing. And I'm like, okay, what's going on here? Like something's happening. I don't know what it is 'cause they don't, they completely isolate you from the outside.

Marty Bent [2:32] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [2:33] To, you know, it's a whole process. But I came out and in hindsight, There were a lot of like second career older men joining the military at the time.

Marty Bent [2:45] Ah.

Average Gary [2:46] And in hindsight, it's like, if I'd have been paying attention a little bit more, it's like, oh, these guys like just got their asses handed to them because of the crash and needed something to go do. And the military is a fantastic, you know, if you're looking for something, like the military is always there. They're taking volunteers all the time. Steady pay, great benefits, you get the pension, all these other things. And so there was like, I was 18 and there was a bunch of like older men that were joining at the same time, which I think was a boon.

Marty Bent [3:13] And I mean, going back to 2012 when you were deployed, what was that experience like?

Average Gary [3:19] I'm very fortunate. So none of my deployments I saw combat. Like, I thank God that I never, I was never shot at. We got mortared, right? So like called indirect fire, they're just like sending mortars on the base. Nothing super close, but I was never like in gun-to-gun combat, and I'm very thankful for that. Uh, you know, as a young man, you glorify combat and you think about that, but then as I've gotten older and reflected a lot more, it's like, no, I'm really glad I don't have those demons to deal with because there are— um, I'm sure you've heard about like veteran suicide numbers.

Average Gary ⋮ Like, guys go through hell in combat, and, uh, I'm thankful to not have that hell to have gone through. while still very, very much participated in it. I called myself a FOB-it, right? I never left the FOB when I was downrange in Afghanistan. I was like intel sort of backend support, running operations on the backside of things in my nice air conditioning without exposing myself too much to harm.

Marty Bent [4:19] How high-tech are those? Are those operations in the battlefield?

Average Gary [4:27] I mean, they're pretty high-tech.

Marty Bent [4:28] If you—

Average Gary [4:29] there's this guy on YouTube called Data Slayer, and he releases all these YouTube videos about like, I built military-grade radios using like open-source whatever. Some of the things that he's building were like being fielded and deployed, like mesh radio, like Wi-Fi mesh radios, right? So like one of the systems that some of the guys were using would have this like Wi-Fi mesh radio. So that way you were on this ridge and another guy was on this other ridge and another guy was on this other ridge, and it would talk long-range Wi-Fi. so that way they could all— all the sensors could collaborate and coordinate with each other. And this was 2012, right?

Marty Bent [4:59] Yeah.

Average Gary [4:59] So you can— if you fast forward and just look at the trajectory of software and like what Palmer Luckey's doing and everything, warfare has become even crazier. One of the things that in another universe I would've gone on to do some like technical R&D work for Naval Special Warfare. I'm glad, again, glad I didn't go that path. I decided to get out and like be with my family and ended up going into a different kind of warfare R&D. It's like, open-source battlefield we find ourselves on of ideas and technology. But it was pretty sophisticated even in 2012 because that's where a lot of the bleeding-edge tech always comes from is from war, right?

Marty Bent [5:37] So are you officially retired from the Navy or are you on reserve still?

Average Gary [5:39] I'm not retired.

Marty Bent [5:40] Okay.

Average Gary [5:41] No, I got out 11 years, 4 months, and 3 days.

Marty Bent [5:43] Okay.

Average Gary [5:43] Just separated, no retirement, just decided it wasn't for me anymore. I had a young— I had my first kid And I realized that being away wasn't worth it anymore.

Marty Bent [5:53] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [5:54] Um, the Navy was going to send me back to like a regular unit, and I was going to have to deal with like regular Navy problems, which is not great. I was in middle management too, and I started to see like behind the curtain of like, oh, all these people that have problems, they're now my problem because I'm like the middle management. I'm a Navy chief, right? It's like the middle management, senior enlisted of the Navy. And so I'm like, having to counsel this guy on like sexual harassment. Like, no, you can't talk to this woman like that in the workplace. And I'm doing it like multiple times and nothing's happening to this guy.

Average Gary ⋮ He's just like still around. He just like gets shoved into a different department or something like that. So it was like seeing that there's a lack of the ability for anybody to actually drill in and have consequences for people that weren't doing their jobs was like super demoralizing. And then also the Navy stopped giving me sort of like what I wanted to do. I wanted to go into like cyber. I wanted to go into these more advanced technical fields. And the Navy was like, no, You're a Chinese linguist, according to the manning numbers, right? Because everything's just like a number. According to all the personnel numbers, like, we need you here to be this job, um, and we're not going to send you over here because you're too high rank, and the whatever the numbers worked out didn't, didn't accommodate that.

Average Gary ⋮ It's like this weird formula.

Marty Bent [7:04] What are your thoughts on Hegseth and the trajectory of the armed forces under the second Trump administration?

Average Gary [7:10] You know, I haven't paid too much close attention to it. Um, from what I can tell, I like that there's like an actual aggressive, like, assertiveness to the military. I think The whole, oh, we're the Department of Defense, but we're gonna go out and like conduct offensive wars, was just a huge misnomer and like completely misleading. So I'm happy that we relabeled it Department of War 'cause that's what it is. You know, hold comments on recent military actions.

Marty Bent [7:37] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [7:38] But I think it is a positive trajectory. I think though that there is still a lot of things to like wash out in the broader, complex that is the federal government that are like deeply, deeply entrenched. So I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think there's still some like very deeply rooted, um, entities that are not aligned with like this whole like Hegseth revamp and revitalization. Like they're giving people like tea.

Marty Bent [8:04] I love it.

Average Gary [8:05] I mean, all my boys were on tea anyway. It's like, it's not like— I got my one buddy that he's just like, he's just super big in Yoke because You go in and you beat your body into a pulp, and especially in the special operations community, right? And again, I'm not, I was just like an intel guy. I got to work and enable the special operations guys. So like by no means am I like an authoritative like special operator. So let me just like throw that out there. But I worked with a lot of these guys and I have a lot of friends that were in this community. And guys, like their body is just destroyed. You do, the reason why special operations is so good at what they do is they do the same thing over and over and over and over again until you don't even have to think about it.

Marty Bent [8:45] Yeah.

Average Gary [8:45] about it. And so you're in and out of helicopters and Humvees and boats and like all these, you know, physically demanding things. Your body just starts to tear down. And so a lot of guys would look for other things like tea or, you know, HGH or whatever, whatever like juice they were looking for. Um, like there was a guy, there was a team of Marines in Afghanistan that they were unable to take helicopters because they all got so big and jacked that they were out— like they outweighed the capacity of the helicopters. So they had to always go on ground. Now that's like too far in my opinion. But if you're signing up to like destroy your body for, you know, your brothers on your left and your right and for the greater good of the nation, uh, I think you should be able to have access to some of these like performance-enhancing drugs, we'll call them, right?

Marty Bent [9:31] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [9:31] Uh, I don't see any reasons for that. Like, you want the tip-top shape military if you're going to fight a war. If you're going to have a military, like, the purpose of a military is to close and destroy the enemy. Um, to do that, you need to be physically dominant. Uh, it's becoming less so with the drone warfare and all this other stuff, but still, you still have to be able to like take 100+ pounds, carry it for, you know, 15 kilometers, go execute a bunch of people, take things off the objective, whatever it is, and then also exfil. And you have to do all of that without your body breaking down. And the reality of our bodies is like they just don't work after a certain point.

Marty Bent [10:07] Yeah. It's insane to think about. It often makes me feel like a pussy. I was like, goddamn it. And it is like, uh, it is true. You have to truly admire the people that, that take that burden on and go do it with the intent to protect the country and the ideals that it was founded on. And I think that's one thing that's very conflicting for civilians, and I imagine veterans alike, where you get to a point where it's like, are we, are we the baddies? Uh, Did you ever ask that question?

Average Gary [10:37] Not until after I get out, right? So, um, it's a, it's a heavy thing to consider, but I, uh, you know, I cheered when people died. I don't think that is good for your soul, um, but it's a, it's a reality, right? You're watching the, the stream, the live stream basically of a drone, and then like puff of smoke, dude's gone. And then you all cheer because that was the guy, um, in the moment. It's fine, but like reflecting on them, just like, man, that like— there should be some very stoic sort of like, not a celebration, but stoic acceptance that, okay, job's done, move on to the next thing. But it's not like— I don't think anybody should ever celebrate somebody else dying.

Marty Bent [11:16] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [11:17] Like, that just is, uh, that just doesn't work out. And then you look into the monetary implications of the forever wars and the debt funding and all that kind of stuff, and this is like a huge thing. And I'll say Bitcoin veterans in general has this sort of thread throughout it. It's like a lot of these guys realize that some of the things that we were sent over to do were not necessarily for the benefit of the nation, but were the benefit for the people printing the money. And that's why Bitcoin is like a huge thing for veterans. And the veterans that finally get Bitcoin understand what's at stake and understand that you have all these tools in your toolbox.

Average Gary ⋮ And ideally, we never want to get to the point where there's violence, right? We want to be extremely peaceful. Peaceful is not harmless. It's peaceful, meaning you have a capacity that is restrained. Bitcoin enables you to be extremely peaceful and also have a way to usurp and go against this apparatus that is just this beast that's just like churning through people and souls that are— it doesn't stop, right?

Marty Bent [12:17] No. Was it the monetary aspect that led you to reflect and think about Or was there a particular moment that you were sitting and reflecting and saying, oh man, what was I doing? What are we doing?

Average Gary [12:31] Yeah, the monetary aspect was the first of it just because there's like some, you know, Smedley Butler has some quotes like, war's a racket, all wars are bankers' wars, that's somebody else I think. So like understanding that kind of like opened the door for like, oh wow, like this was what I was told we were doing was not necessarily the ultimate motive, right? Even though there might have been some kernels of truth in there, some like good things, some good intentions, it's like, nah, man, there was— we could— there was opportunities to have like closed and destroyed the enemy that were kneecapped or halted or whatever it was. And these people, you know, it— there's a— there's a monetary incentive to keep the machine going, to keep— right? All these contract companies, all these logistics and supply companies. Like, they get paid if they're downrange doing the support and the supply and the logistics. They don't get paid if there's no war, right?

Marty Bent [13:24] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [13:24] That was the first revelation. The second was just like, I returned to, you know, my faith in God and understanding and reading into like what the Bible says and everything like this. It's like, oh wow, there could be a just war. I don't think the wars that I fought in were necessarily just, not at the point that I fought them in, right? Maybe early on you could make a case for it depending on what kind of theories you believe on the origin of the war, which that's a whole nother rabbit hole.

Marty Bent [13:52] That's a rabbit hole that I don't want to explore.

Average Gary [13:54] That I don't want to explore. So like, you know, I'm open to all those concepts and theories, and some of them I think are— that hold some— carry some water. But yeah, once you just start looking at like the war that doesn't stop and what that means for your soul, and for the souls of the people participating in it. And the fact that it's purely extracting from the American populace to go fund this mass, mass murder campaign, uh, that's heavy. That's heavy. And that—

Marty Bent [14:22] Mass murder campaign? And was the defending of the poppy fields real too?

Average Gary [14:26] Oh, I don't know. I can't comment on that one.

Marty Bent [14:28] Okay.

Average Gary [14:29] Yeah.

Marty Bent [14:29] All right. But what— at what period of time were you having this? revelation?

Average Gary [14:34] Interestingly enough, it was, um, shout out to my boy Tim. Uh, he's the guy that orange-pilled me. He sort of like liberty-pilled me. Uh, he's been just like a fantastic friend of mine for a long time, and I lived with him. So I went to Afghanistan, and then 2014, I started going into this special operations community, right, doing intel stuff there. Um, and that's where I met Tim. And just over like bourbon and drinks at the house, we were living together, and he's just like starting to introduced me to these ideas of like liberty and self-sovereignty and like all these other things. And that's where it was weird being on like the tip of the spear, the proverbial tip of the spear, like bleeding edge kind of stuff, while at the same time starting to see the rampant fraud, waste, and abuse that was in the military to just like go do something.

Average Gary ⋮ 'Cause by the time I got into that community, we were like ramping down from Afghanistan. you know, kind of rolling up all those things. Like, the unit that I got to, within a week of arriving, like, our last group of people that were deployed to Afghanistan, like, came back and gave their full, like, debrief and everything. So it was like a period of time where everybody was like, what are we gonna do now? Like, what, what, what is our purpose? Like, what, what are we doing? Like, we, we spent all this time training for Iraq and Afghanistan, everything like that. Now that it's like ramping down, what's, what's next, right?

Marty Bent [15:52] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [15:52] And then you just start to see, it's like, well, Nobody has any idea and everybody's just trying to figure it out to see where we can throw money at things. And that's where I'm like, oh wow, okay. So my boy's telling me about like the Federal Reserve and the money printing, the Cantillon effect, like all these things. And then at the same time I'm seeing it's like, hey, it's September, we have a bunch of money to spend. Who needs gear or who wants to go to a course? And I'm like, oh, oh wow. Like this is because if we don't spend our budget, we're not gonna get budget next year. So it's like this whole game of like we need to spend in excess so that way we can ask for more money next year to do more things.

Marty Bent [16:26] Yeah.

Average Gary [16:26] And then that just like the loop.

Marty Bent [16:28] So this is an official special ops group that's not deployed and you guys are giving autonomy to do things or what budget?

Average Gary [16:35] It wasn't autonomy. It was part of the normal military budget, right? And you have a budget to like train, man, and equip, right? Or man, train, and equip. And it's fully within the scope. And it's not that it's like inherently bad, but it's like these incentive structures of, and you can see this across the entire government, right? Is you have a budget for a given fiscal year. if you don't spend your budget, the next time they come around to like, you know, do the line item for your budget, they're like, oh, well, you didn't spend your million dollars, so we'll give you, you know, $900,000.

Average Gary ⋮ Well, that like, for a given organization within the government, like, that doesn't work out, right? So it's just like getting a very clear picture of like these things I was learning and reading about, but very clear and defined within the DOD of like, oh wow, yeah, there is like this gross budget inflation problem. And it's not It's not like a malicious thing in the sense that like, you know, the commanding officers and the people running these organizations, there's, there's no malice. They want to like do good, but the do good is like to spend more, right?

Marty Bent [17:32] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [17:32] It's like this perverse incentive of like, oh, we need to spend more money. If we don't spend our money, they're not gonna give us the same amount next year. They might even give us less. So when we get to the end of a fiscal year, we have some money left over, we gotta figure out how to spend it. Now there's like legitimate uses to spend that, right? It wasn't like all just like boondoggles. But at the same time, just the incentive, the fact that it's like, oh, we have money to spend, we need to spend it. And then you start talking to people, like, as I've talked to people throughout the government that manage like budgets and stuff, they're like, oh yeah, that happened in, you know, this organization, Department of Energy, the— yeah, everywhere. It's always— it's part of the rampant, like, userist inflationary nature of our monetary system.

Marty Bent [18:09] And like, the incentives are so clear. It's like, if you have money, who doesn't want more money? And who doesn't If given the mandate to spend the money, who's not gonna do it?

Average Gary [18:18] Exactly, right, yeah. It's, again, it's not a malicious thing. It's just like the system is just designed to make you want to consume and spend more over and over again.

Marty Bent [18:28] All right, so bringing this back to Tim, what was Tim's background?

Average Gary [18:31] Was he— I won't get into his background.

Marty Bent [18:33] Okay.

Average Gary [18:33] He's a friend, that's all. Okay, all right. That's all I'll say. He's a good friend.

Marty Bent [18:36] From like, was it like, broadly speaking, was like liberty-minded growing up? 'Cause—

Average Gary [18:40] Yeah, he had like a libertarian background, right? That was like his sort of philosophy that he introduced me to. Um, you know, good Christian man.

Marty Bent [18:47] Was his first foray via the monetary system, or was it like free markets and freedom of association?

Average Gary [18:54] I don't know. For me, it was the monetary system. Uh, I read— it was Tom Woods' Rollback.

Marty Bent [18:58] Yep.

Average Gary [18:59] I like— that was the first like sort of like liberty book that I dug into. For whatever reason, I started listening to Tom Woods.

Marty Bent [19:05] Great, great man to start listening to. Yep.

Average Gary [19:08] It was— I learned that 30 minutes every day. I was like, okay, this is good. And so I read his book And that was like my entry point to all of this was like, oh, the money is broken. Which is why I think once I got to Bitcoin in the future, it's like, oh, I had the money broken problem. I just didn't see the solution until much later.

Marty Bent [19:25] So money broken problem incepted in your brain, what, like 2014?

Average Gary [19:28] Yeah, 2015, 2016. Yeah, right around there.

Marty Bent [19:32] What was the first time you were like, oh, Bitcoin's the solution?

Average Gary [19:36] So fast forward again to 2020, one, um, I was working in big tech. I was in the office because I was essential, um, and, uh, I'm looking for anything that is remote, right? So like, because all these people are going remote now, and I'm in software, and I'm like doing software engineering, and, uh, I wanted a job. And again, Tim's like, oh, hey bro, check out this crypto thing. So, you know, he did his time as a shit corner, uh, but he was like, hey, go check out this thing. So like, I interviewed at Celsius Oh, what was that like?

Marty Bent [20:10] Did you meet them?

Average Gary [20:10] They ghosted me. They ghosted me. It was fine. It was like, I'm glad I interviewed. I tried to get an interview at Kraken.

Marty Bent [20:15] Dodged a bullet there.

Average Gary [20:16] Absolutely dodged a bullet. I didn't land a job there at all, right? Like, there was no— I had no proof of work. This is like something I came to realize too, but it got my foot in the door of like the idea. Like, I bought some Ethereum, right? Because he was like, oh, you gotta go do some smart contract. You're a dev. You gotta go do this. And then come to find out, I need like, I don't know, like $3,000 worth of ETH to like do anything fun or exciting. And I'm just like, what is this? And it costs like $30 to send it to my own wallet and everything.

Average Gary ⋮ I'm like, I got kids, I can't afford this thing. And so it was like, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin. I was like, okay, well, let me go check out this Bitcoin thing. Boom, node was syncing within a day. Like, I had my old gaming laptop up and running, downloading the blockchain, doing IBD syncing. And I was like, huh, okay. And then like, I send myself some, it doesn't cost, you know, 30% of whatever I bought. I'm like, okay, what is this? It's all open source. And so I just started like going down this rabbit hole of like, okay, what is this Bitcoin thing? Because it's— to me it was like accessible and it was like cheap, I guess, which is funny to think about.

Average Gary ⋮ Um, and so like I just started exploring that and just— I got onto Twitter again and just started like poking around there. Uh, eventually it landed on RHR, right? That was like one of the first shows.

Marty Bent [21:23] I was gonna say, I feel like you've been like a ride-or-die RHR fan like for like obviously many years, like it feels like longer. I feel like you were like an A1 day one.

Average Gary [21:33] No, not that long, uh, but you know, I have this, this, this blessing of ADHD that I've really learned how to channel and manage. And so like when I get into something, it's like I'm going down the rabbit hole and I'm like free falling. So, you know, I, I did find a remote job, uh, at a startup. It's not worth mentioning, but, uh, they laid off like 14% of their headcount after the first year. I was part of that, and I acknowledge why, because I was simultaneously on my gaming laptop managing nodes and losing money on Lightning channels and doing Bitcoin Twitter stuff and trying to do my job at the same time.

Average Gary ⋮ And so I was just completely checked out from the job because I was rabidly consuming Bitcoin content. I listened to the whole Saylor series with Breedlove. That was a huge unlock of like, oh, this is a thing. And this matters. And that was like a big unlock for me as far as like the conviction point. And then it was just rapid consumption and just trying to learn every possible thing and poking holes in it, right? Like trying to figure out like, okay, where does this break down? Where does this— what makes this fail? And, you know, it's apathy, I think is true. The mining centralization thing, that was like That was a big thing I found.

Average Gary ⋮ There was a blog post by Adele that was titled Fetti Pools.

Marty Bent [22:52] Yeah.

Average Gary [22:53] I was looking for something to do, looking for a problem to solve that was not being addressed. And I read this and I was like, huh, okay. And I worked on Fetti Mint for a little bit. And I realized that there was not anyone doing Bitcoin mining development, not in an open source large way. It wasn't for a long time that I finally came across the Stratum V2 project with the existed at that time, but was not the project it is now. You know, I was looking for like open source pool software. There's like CKpool, but even that was like, maybe I wasn't looking in the right places, but it just seemed like mining and engineering in mining was like the right place to go. And I feel pretty vindicated about that today.

Marty Bent [23:32] Yeah.

Average Gary [23:32] But yeah.

Marty Bent [23:33] And so with your special ops intel background, I feel like you're well equipped to prod and probe the edges of the technology around Bitcoin. And I imagine you know when a system's secure and when it's not. Did anything about Bitcoin impress or depress you about the security of the network?

Average Gary [23:53] No, not the security of the network. Again, it was the mining thing. It was seeing that there was this massive underdeveloped space that was centralizing and is still to a degree centralizing. I think we're getting better on that front, but it was purely on the mining spot, right? Like the cryptography, which I've gone down that rabbit hole. I did a whole like year-long Motivate the Math series with Fundamentals where we talked about like, he has this whole magic internet math thing, but like I was the first sort of like test pilot of like learning cryptography because I wanted to understand like, okay, what is this math?

Marty Bent [24:29] He's doing that. He's got a website.

Average Gary [24:31] Yeah.

Marty Bent [24:31] Shout out to Philly John. Diehard, ride or die. The last one before we went into summer remission was about his Fundamentals Math program. So if you want to learn more about the hardcore cryptography of Bitcoin, I think he's open towards it. And he still has the podcast, right? Yeah.

Average Gary [24:47] Well, it's a new podcast.

Marty Bent [24:49] With Rob.

Average Gary ⋮ With Rob, yeah. But there was the prototype with myself. That was a great time. But I went down that, right? It's like, okay, the cryptography. I don't think cryptography is broken. I'm not a quantum guy. I don't lose sleep at night over it. Looking at the node implementation, I can grok what's going on in Bitcoin Core's codebase. I vibe coded a testnet for CTV activation client at a conference one time, early on in the vibe coding days. So I feel comfortable enough, but I feel like I still lack a lot of the academic rigor and patience, really, to be honest, to meaningfully contribute to that project.

Average Gary ⋮ So I looked into that, but I don't think that's my cup of tea necessarily. And so I was just kind of looking around for different opportunities. I didn't see any edge cases though. I didn't— probing, it's like, okay, well, the Cold Card clicked instantly, right? Because if you're in comms in the military, even not even like this super sweet secret squirrely stuff. If you're in comms, you understand that there's these devices that you carry around that you can't let anybody hold it, right? And it's locked up in the safe at all times, and it never gets connected to the computers, right? Because it holds the cryptography keys for the military communications, right?

Average Gary ⋮ And so, all these principles and properties of security and cybersecurity and everything like that, I was like, oh, okay, Bitcoiners are doing this for their money. And they have these special purpose air-gapped devices, right? And like CoolCart's just like one of a number of them that you could use. But it's like, oh, I don't have to connect this thing to the internet. And it just made sense because I had devices that I operated that I couldn't, like you don't plug it into the internet, you don't connect it to the Wi-Fi, like it's all a standalone self-contained system. And that's how I like learned Linux, right?

Average Gary ⋮ It's like you have to run this black box. Oh, it runs Linux. I'm like, what is Linux? They're like, oh, it's this operating system thing. So yeah, I mean, I definitely probed around and have thought about it. There's tons of veterans. One of the things that military does is sand table, like wargaming, right? Adversarial thinking, like how would I attack this? Red teaming, right? I try to get into that. I have some friends that did legit red teaming, like get the orange vest and the hat and go walk in with a ladder and say, hey, I'm just here to fix the sprinkler, to get past security, then go plug in a Raspberry Pi somewhere and hack the network.

Marty Bent [27:14] Yeah.

Average Gary [27:15] So, that kind of thinking definitely is applicable to Bitcoin. But from a technological standpoint, the biggest thing is just people running the hash rate, running the nodes, holding the keys, not trusting that the benevolent overlords of the custodians are going to do what is best in the minds of the people.

Marty Bent [27:34] What's up, freaks?

Average Gary [27:36] This episode is brought to you by Block's Bitcoin ecosystem.

Marty Bent [27:39] You probably know Cash App. You probably know Square. Yeah, definitely know BitKey if you've been listening to the show for the last couple of years. What matters most is that these are not disconnected random products. They're part of a broader push to make Bitcoin easier to buy, easier to hold, and easier to use in the real world. Cash App helps people stack Bitcoin. BitKey helps people custody without turning self-custody into a weekend engineering product. Square helps merchants run their businesses and increasingly plug into the Bitcoin-native payments rails. Listen, this is the kind of ecosystem Bitcoin needs. We've been talking about this on the show for a while.

Marty Bent ⋮ We know that we need the different parts to line up to make Bitcoin everyday money. Block is doing just that. Check the episode description for the current Cash App, BitKey, and Square links. What's up, freaks? When you take Bitcoin seriously, you start with custody. You want to control your keys, avoid single points of failure, and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up. That is what Unchained has been focused on since 2016. Unchained is the leader in collaborative multisig custody and Bitcoin financial services that keep you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients.

Marty Bent ⋮ That means about 1 out of every 200 Bitcoin sits inside an Unchained vault. Their model is simple. You hold 2 keys, they hold 1 key, and it always takes 2 keys to move Bitcoin, meaning their single key can't access your Bitcoin on its own. Just resilient shared custody that gives you institutional-grade security while keeping you sovereign. Unchained also lets you trade straight from your vault, access Bitcoin-backed commercial loans, open a Bitcoin IRA where you hold your own keys, and set up personal, business, trust, or retirement vaults. They even offer inheritance solutions built for long-term hodlers, or opt for the highest level private client service with Unchained Signature and get a dedicated account manager, discounted trading fees, exclusive access to events and features, and much, much more.

Marty Bent ⋮ com and use the code TFTC10 at checkout to get 10% off your new Bitcoin multisig vault. com. And so you're having these realizations and it seems like obviously because it exists independently, other veterans are having these realizations as well. And you guys started the Bitcoin Veterans Project. And so how did that come to be?

Average Gary [29:44] So I didn't start it. There were 5 guys originally that started it. You can go look it up if you want to. But it started as like a Twitter group chat. And it was just this realization that there was no Bitcoin veterans community. Like, I think there's like maybe 1 other, 2 other like Bitcoin adjacent blockchain, whatever veteran stuff. But they just identified that there was this gap in the Bitcoin industry, in the ecosystem, community, whatever you want to call it, that there was like no veterans organization. And then understanding that Bitcoin is like this important thing, it's like, oh, well, we need to be educating veterans. And also, the government has trained all these veterans on all these skills that directly map onto all these aspects of the Bitcoin ecosystem that we can be force multipliers for. Like beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. I mean, you're like ASICs, electrons, and whatever else.

Marty Bent [30:37] Secure enclaves.

Average Gary [30:38] Secure enclaves. Yeah, exactly. Understanding that you have to secure the radio crypto in a certain way directly translates to, it's like, oh yeah, there's my keys. I can't let my keys go online. Backing up, physical security, defense in depth, all these applicable skills to like, I'm going to run a hot wallet on some HSM somewhere, well, I better have like these layered security things. It's the same thing the data centers are doing, right?

Marty Bent [31:03] Yeah.

Average Gary ⋮ It's the same thing. It's like nothing new necessarily, but the gravity and the understanding of the day-to-day operations of doing that, it's like veterans get that, right? Veterans are molded to be leaders, right? You're taught to step up and get things done when other people are either demoralized or demotivated. You're taught organization, right? Like even if you don't know how to organize things, by the time you reach a certain, rank in the military, they've drilled into your brain, this is how you get people to accomplish a goal. This is how you define a goal. If the goal's unclear, you need to go take it back to your commander and be like, hey, sir, what, what are we trying to accomplish here?

Average Gary ⋮ Let me develop the plan. Let me bring it back to you. We'll reiterate it. Let me go brief it to the boys, and then we're gonna go execute. But first, we're gonna like train on this and everything. So it's like the, the whole thing originated from just like a Twitter group chat, and then it just grew steam. It was like a Bitcoin or Twitter Spaces. So we're running, we run one every weekday at 10:00 AM on X now. But this was like back in the Twitter days, we were running one and it just kind of blew up. Like it was just like a thing. People came in, it was good conversations.

Average Gary ⋮ We moved from that Twitter group chat over to, we have regional chats on Signal. So primarily it's around Signal. You know, depending on where you're at in the country, you'll get plugged into a regional chat. Those are veterans only. And then we have this huge list of like topical chats, right? So it's like you want a gun chat, you want privacy or self-custody chat, you want to— there's like a Tesla owners chat, right?

Marty Bent [32:28] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [32:28] There's a pilots chat. There is a chat for like health and wellness. They're like any of these topics. It's just veterans that are Bitcoiners that are like, hey, I'm super passionate about this. I want to run it. So, we spin up the chat, we throw in some of the founding members as admins, and then we make the dude an admin and we say, here you go, run it, right? Like one of the most active chats is like the Bitcoin Veterans of Christ. And there's just like deep—

Marty Bent [32:51] Great.

Average Gary ⋮ Oh yeah, dude, theological debates and like all these other things going on. The regional chats are more for like coordination and like, hey, here's a meetup going on here. You know, the event tonight at PubKey, I like threw that out there. I was like, hey, come on out. So there's gonna be some Bitcoin veterans showing up for that. But yeah, it just kind of spawned into this like bigger group and to the point where we ended up getting a room at the 2024 conference for free. which was awesome. And, you know, that blew up. That was a huge success. We had like vendors in there, and it was like this very like low-key, down in the basement of the conference, but like very, very high signal event.

Average Gary ⋮ We qualified people on ham radio down there. And so it just kept gaining this momentum. And then the following year in 2025, we partnered with Bitcoin Park. We're like, hey, can you host like a summit or something like that? They're like, yeah, absolutely, right? Park's great. Love the park. So we did the first like official sort of like summit, named summit, at Bitcoin Park in 2025. It was a day of just like speakers, and it was a lot of just, you know, discussion of like what veterans are, what are these topics that we go into, right? What is 5th gen warfare? What is the fight for your health on the emotional, spiritual, physiological aspects, right?

Average Gary ⋮ We had doctors up there. Like we have the Bitcoin veterans, as we've come to find out, it's like veterans have this diverse group of skills. And so they're everywhere. We got doctors, we got pilots, we got mechanics, we've got electricians, we've got Intel guys, we've got admin guys, right? And they all have these different skill sets. And so, they're getting plugged in in all these different aspects across the industry, speaking on stage, running their own meetups, running companies, right? So, like this t-shirt, this guy started BitPrint Solutions, and he just identified that there's not a good swag store for Bitcoin merchandise. So, he started a swag store, right?

Average Gary ⋮ And he's got Lightning checkout and all these other things. But it's people like that that are just identifying these gaps and like filling the gaps, right? Because again, veterans are prone to action when they see that there's a problem or something, or they're given a problem to solve. It's like, okay, let's go ruthlessly attack this. Let's get with the boys. Let's figure out what's going on. Let's go solve, problem solve. And it just kind of evolved from there. And now, you know, we did a— we're doing our 3rd annual summit at Bitcoin Park this year, November 9th and 10th. org/Summit2026 for all the info. We're still looking for like participants and volunteers and everything like that.

Average Gary ⋮ That's the other crazy thing is like, there's no like official like Bitcoin veterans org. Like there's some nonprofits that sort of like Operation Bitcoin does like veteran education. They're partnered with the state of Georgia to do distinct Bitcoin veteran like workforce develop— or Bitcoin mining workforce development and training and everything. That is like an official org that exists. But this like broader Bitcoin veterans group is just people getting plugged in.

Marty Bent [35:36] Yeah.

Average Gary [35:37] Nobody's in charge of it. Like, I'm not in charge of Bitcoin Veterans, right? Do I get asked a lot of technical questions? Like, absolutely. But there's other very technical people within the community. And so, it's become this network of individuals that just understand that there's 2 rules. There's no violence, and there's no shitcoins. And outside of that, like, have at it, bro. You want to do like a Bitcoin Veterans pop-up meetup in like Des Moines? Sure, go for it. Call it Bitcoin Veterans, but no violence and no shitcoins.

Marty Bent [36:03] Let's— I mean, I get the second one. No shitcoin seems pretty obvious to me. No violence, like, what is the sort of boundaries of that specific rule? Is it like not advocating for violence? Is it not like getting together and doing like a fight club, or what is it?

Average Gary [36:16] It's not advocating for aggressive violence, right? Here in America, we have the right to self-defense. We still have the Second Amendment, right, which defends the First. And so we have government-sanctioned right to self-defense. Um, that means that we are an extremely peaceful organization, but again, being veterans, we are highly trained and highly capable that if there is violence to be met in, in a defensive or responsive manner, it's like we're going to be the guys showing up for that, right? We got law enforcement, we've got people that are still active duty. Uh, so it's not so much that like we don't practice violence in a controlled setting, right?

Average Gary ⋮ Like rolling jiu-jitsu or going to the range. The summit, we're gonna have a range day. The second day of the summit is a range day at a private range just outside of Nashville, and you'll get some of the best training you've ever had in firearms. So it's not so much like violence, it's like no calls for violence, right? And that's really to curb people coming in fed posting.

Marty Bent [37:09] Yeah.

Average Gary [37:10] Right? Like, we're not trying to incite violence. We're not trying to incite a revolution. The revolution is fully underway at this point, and it's completely peaceful. One of the key things that I believe and I think a lot of Bitcoin veterans would agree with me, is the greatest appeal of Bitcoin is the fact that I can use this tool as a peaceful means to protecting my family, protecting my community, and protecting my country from those that would wish it harm. I don't have to go out and mow down a bunch of people because they wish my community harm. I can just be successful. I can stack sats.

Average Gary ⋮ I can run a business that is cash flow positive, and push all of my excess cash flow into Bitcoin. And eventually, I will starve out the parasitic people that wish me and my country and my community harm, and they'll just die a slow death of starvation. And that, to me, is like the direction that we're heading in. It's going to be a long, slow grind, but that's why you build the community, you build the networks, you build your citadel, right? Learn how to farm. It's not that hard. Learn how to run the meetup. If you're running the meetup in your local area, Now you have a network of people.

Average Gary ⋮ It's like, oh, Billy does goats. Well, we're going to buy goats from Billy. And Bobby over here, he grows herbs and stuff like that. And Joe runs a trash company. So we're all going to go and we're going to pay Joe now to pick up all our trash, not because he's got the best price, maybe not even because he's got the best service, which he's a veteran, he would, but because he is on the same mission and he is ethically and morally aligned on this idea that Bitcoin is money and it is a superior money. And it lacks all these negative aspects of fiat. So we're going to enable the people in our community that we want to win, that will enable us to win by using Bitcoin and funneling Bitcoin into these companies, right?

Marty Bent [38:54] Do you think veterans are more attuned to Bitcoin than other subsets of the population?

Average Gary [38:58] Yeah, we like pain. We know what it's like to suffer.

Marty Bent [39:04] High pain tolerance.

Average Gary [39:05] Yeah, high pain tolerance. You know, we say that in the depth of the— we're at $64K, right? It's like—

Marty Bent [39:11] I'll take $64K today.

Average Gary [39:12] Absolutely.

Marty Bent [39:13] Absolutely.

Average Gary [39:14] I came in on the way down from $69K and rode that thing all the way down listening to RJR every week.

Marty Bent [39:19] It is, uh, I mean, my pain tolerance threshold was developed like skateboarding and fighting my brother, uh, growing up. But, uh, you get used to it. The first bear market was certainly scary for me, but, uh, This time around, it's like, ah, it's just another one.

Average Gary [39:36] And it's not the pain, right? It's the ethos. You know, everybody that's a veteran stands up and swears an oath to, you know, support and defend the Constitution. Um, that, like, that is a thing. You get some guys that'll join, it's like, okay, you were either gonna go to jail or you're gonna join. It's like, okay, commendable for you to, like, sign up and serve, but we're still primarily a volunteer force. Um, and so whether you were sold a lie on what the patriotic mission was. A lot of us, myself included, still believed in like, okay, there's a country, and I can serve that country, and I can die for that country if needed in the defense of that country.

Average Gary ⋮ And Bitcoin is now just a new mission and a new tool that enables me to not die. I can flourish. I can flourish while still serving others. So, you get a lot of veterans that are service-oriented. They just want to do good, whether they were misdirected or misguided or misinformed, whatever, it doesn't matter. The heart was set on acts of service, and they were willing to sign up with their life to carry that out. And so when they get out, you lose this entire identity structure, you lose this entire support structure. And so that's another one of the things that Bitcoin Veterans aims to do is provide a new mission and a new community to get veterans plugged into another band of brothers that say, hey, man, we get it.

Average Gary ⋮ We know you're out there alone on this island. You're struggling with PTSD. You're struggling with whatever it is. You don't know how to cope. You don't know how to exist in the world. We've got a community for you to plug in, and we're going to help you uplift yourself. We're going to teach you this new skill set. We're going to try to get you plugged into this new skill set. And by the way, if you listen to us and you stack Bitcoin for 5 to 10 years, you're going to be doing all right.

Marty Bent [41:18] Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? Is I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for 5 years now. Literally this month, 5 years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had 2 babies, we've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, you help out with other people's bills, and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA as a family of 3 when I left my last job before I went full-time to TFTC.

Marty Bent ⋮ Went on The Crowd Health. Now as a family of 5, we pay, I believe, $700 a month. It's significantly cheaper. They're going to negotiate prices lower for you. They've consistently negotiated healthcare prices as much as 50%, 60%, 80% in many cases. They help out with babies. If you have a pregnancy, you pay the first $3,000 and The Crowd covers the rest. If you have A regular health event, you pay $500 and the crowd pays the rest. com, sign up today, use the code TFTC, opt out of health insurance. I'm uninsured, baby, and I love it. com and you'll get $99 a month for the first 3 months that you're on the CrowdHealth platform in the community.

Marty Bent ⋮ Bitcoiners, you found sovereign money. Now find sovereign health and sovereign healthcare. All right, freaks. You know me, you know I don't take sponsor money from products I wouldn't use myself. So listen up. The Aave Bitcoin Visa card is one of the most interesting things I've seen in the Bitcoin lending space in a long time. Here's the deal. You can get a line of credit up to $1 million backed by your Bitcoin without selling a single sat. No games, no annual fees, no minimum draws, and your Bitcoin is custodied by BitGo, which is one of the most trusted names in digital asset security. Aave never lends it out.

Marty Bent ⋮ There's no rehypothecation. You stay in control. And guess what? You can lock in a fixed rate for up to 10 years. That's 10 times longer than most lenders out there, or go interest only for up to 5 years. 99% APR. For a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity, it's hard to beat. I mean, the duration and the rates is the best I've seen in the market to date. You also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card. Spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin. It's the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and you need liquidity without triggering taxable event, this is worth a serious look.

Marty Bent ⋮ com/bitcoin. com/bitcoin. Check it out. As somebody who identifies as a Bitcoiner, that was one of the things that made me most proud to wear that label was the response to Hurricane Helene. The Bitcoin veterans really stepped up in a big way.

Average Gary [44:00] Yeah. We raised over an entire Bitcoin to support operations in Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee. And when I say operations, I don't mean like FEMA and all these other like NGO things. A lot of them are like, you know, disaster scammers sometimes. I don't want to denigrate a lot of it. The other thing to realize is like Western North Carolina is home to a lot of veterans already. And so when we got on the ground there, and I mean like dudes got in their trucks with camping equipment and like whatever resources like water and food and like—

Marty Bent [44:34] Yeah.

Average Gary [44:35] extra clothes and blankets. And because we, we understand what it means to live in, you know, a hole in the ground, right?

Marty Bent [44:42] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary ⋮ You understand what the bare necessities are. Like when you, when you have to take that ruck and throw it on and go like camp in the middle of the woods for like a week with your buddies, you don't want to take extra stuff with you. You know what the necessities are. And so the guys were like packing up trailers, packing up their trucks, driving out there and just making contact with the local people that were already plugged in and knew what was going on. And it just so happened that these local people were this group called Christian Rangers, um, in at least in the area that we were operating.

Average Gary ⋮ And so we just basically plugged in and said, hey, how can we force multiply you? And by, and by God's providence, I had all these Meshtastic radios, these little like off-grid mesh network radios. And, uh, one of my buddies, Jordan, shout out to Jordan, um, I bought like 300 of these from China. I imported them like a couple years back. He's like, hey man, I got like this like bourbon night with my buddies, like I'll take 80 of them off your hands. And so I ended up delivering those to him. Lo and behold, a couple months, a few months later, Helene hits, and we're like, oh, we have radios that work off-grid that can be deployed like now.

Average Gary ⋮ And so one of this was like driving in all these Meshtastic radios to go hand out. We had them on the National Guard birds, right? The way Meshtastic works is like you have to be able to see line of sight, and they kind of ping around in a mesh network. And so you got people down in the hollers in the hills of Western North Carolina. Well, you can't get radio contact unless you have a National Guard bird flying over top, and now the messages can ping out, up and out. So before the Starlinks, before like anything else were going on, there was like guys hiking through the woods or riding ATVs through these back, you know, these back hollers to go check in on people, making contact usually with local churches.

Average Gary ⋮ Churches, you tend to know like, hey, who's around, right?

Marty Bent [46:21] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary ⋮ Even if they're not attending the church, they know like, who's in the general facility, and just making contact, make sure there's water and communications, right? Because everything was down. The entire grid was down. The electricity, cell phone. And so we probably had anywhere from like 6 to 12 dudes on the ground with their own vehicles, fully funded via Bitcoin donations. They were sleeping in like half-finished condos in sleeping bags, right? Meanwhile, you have like FEMA taking up all the hotel spaces so that people coming in can't find lodging. So we did it very, very low budget. It was very low budget but highly effective because we knew that it's not necessarily about going and like figuring out how to just do it for the people there.

Average Gary ⋮ It was going figuring out who were the leaders in that area, enabling them to figure it out and distribute it. We actually linked up with this one guy. We got him set up with a cold card, we got him funded, and he had this massive warehouse that he ended up using as a logistics hub to disperse all this disaster equipment. And so, like, he was not a Bitcoiner. He was just a veteran. You know, we did our secret veteran handshake, right? You have a shared experience, a shared ethos. And so, like, it's very easy to connect with other veterans and be like, hey, man, what do you need?

Marty Bent [47:30] Right?

Average Gary [47:30] He's like, I just need funding. I got this warehouse. I just need people. I need, you know, a fire watch, you know, because there's people there playing games with all the supplies arriving. So it's like some of, some of our guys just showed up and stood armed watch overnight. over like the supplies that were being delivered, right? It's as simple as that. But like that, you don't get somebody down off the mountain and say, hey, can you stand watch overnight here on all this stuff? It's like, no, man, their entire house just washed away in a mudslide. So even just a simple act of just like watching over, you know, people and stuff, uh, or getting up there— they hiked up, some of the guys hiked up to the top of, I think it's like Bald Mountain or something like that.

Marty Bent [48:05] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [48:05] It was one of the taller mountains and put like a solar repeater node for Meshtastic that ended up just blowing up the connections all across that area. So that was a response to Helene, and I mean, we were on the ground within, you know, weeks before even like the news was like fully covering it, right? There's that weird like lull where the news is like—

Marty Bent [48:22] You could only see it on X, like, hey, is anybody coming to help? Well, and it's an incredible example of distributed self-organization.

Average Gary [48:28] Yeah.

Marty Bent [48:29] That is actually, I mean, to your point, like FEMA, just being reminded of some of the things that FEMA was doing at that point. I mean, you remember the story from Florida where people had like the, the destroyed buildings like in their driveways, and they wanted— they were like literally trying to pay private trash companies to come in and pick it up, and FEMA said, no, you can't do that. And yeah, they were allowed to sit there and just get moldy and create a health hazard. And it's just like a glaring example of the incompetence of the federal government, where it's like, hey, you individuals like yourself and other veterans who are self-organizing to solve these problems immediately, and there's some bureaucratic bullshit stepping in the way saying like, no, you can't come pick up this trash.

Average Gary [49:10] Yeah.

Marty Bent [49:11] It's insane.

Average Gary ⋮ Well, that's where I see veterans plugging in too, right? Because, um, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on politically, like, veterans are still a very respected class, right? Because we do— we sign up with our lives. It's like, hey, Uncle Sam, you're gonna own me for these next 4 to 8 years. Um, and so there's, there's There's definitely a degree of respect there. And so, one of the things I see Bitcoin veterans fitting is some of these harder conversations that might look like they're political one side or the other. It's like, no, this is a problem for freedom. So, like the whole Samourai case, the Samourai developers are still in jail.

Average Gary ⋮ I, with the help of AI, penned a letter to US senators to describe like, hey, if you don't— and during the BPI Day on the Hill, I went and talked to some of these staffers about Not just like the Samourai case, but just in general, that open source developers should not be prosecuted for code that they write. That's like taking like, oh, you murdered somebody with a hammer. Well, I'm going to go arrest the guy that made the hammer. It's like, that's not how this works. You're going to scare people offshore. You're going to have a brain drain of some of our brightest and our best people leave the country if you do not protect open source software and open source developers distinctly in the Bitcoin space.

Average Gary ⋮ Because Bitcoin is such a powerful tool, you're seeing these parallels now in the AI space, right? With all these open models. It's just, you know, we as veterans have a platform to go say some of these hard things because like, throw your slings and your arrows at me. Like, I'll dodge them. I don't care. Like, they'll hit me. It doesn't matter because I will tell you my opinion and I'm going to do— I'm going to go pick up the trash and come and arrest me, bro. Yeah. Come on. Right. Come. I'm going to do the right thing regardless of what's necessary. I see parallels. Not that I'm saying you should do this, but the whole flock camera thing, right?

Average Gary ⋮ We don't want surveillance.

Marty Bent [50:53] No.

Average Gary [50:54] Nope.

Marty Bent [50:55] Not only that, I mean, I was on the Bitcoin News Podcast. I don't know if it published yet, but we talked about the flock cameras. The thing that's— I mean, obviously, we don't want surveillance, but then it's similar to like Chainalysis. Like, not only are the Samurai guys in jail, Roman Sterlingov is in jail for Bitcoin FUD, Chain surveillance, chain analysis tools were used to, I strongly believe, incorrectly incriminate him with starting Bitcoin Fog. And bringing this to blockhammers too, you have so many false positives where it's like—

Average Gary [51:29] Yeah.

Marty Bent [51:30] I'm sure you've seen the videos. I think there was a woman in Colorado, like the cop came to her house ready to arrest her.

Average Gary [51:36] Yeah.

Marty Bent [51:36] And she had to like prove on the spot like, hey, that's not me. It's insane.

Average Gary [51:40] Well, that's like, that's another place where veterans I think can step up is like, we are in law enforcement, we're qualified for law enforcement, go run for sheriff, right?

Marty Bent [51:49] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [51:50] Like, if you want to make a change, one of the other things is in civic service, in civil— like, I'm not saying don't run for Congress, don't run for Senate. Like, I think at this point, like, federally, like, unless you're really, really motivated and charged and you have the funds and the resources and the backing to do it, uh, I don't— I think it's probably a waste of your time. But locally, your board of supervisors, your mayor, your sheriff, your city auditor, councilman, whatever it is, go get plugged in there and start talking about freedom tech. Go start talking about these principles that Bitcoiners understand, and that the broader freedom tech open source movement understands.

Average Gary ⋮ But go be a beacon of light in your local community to say, no, we don't want this. We don't need to be $21 million in debt because all the boomers have mismanaged this county's government for the past decade and a half. We can actually do something different. As soon as you start doing that, you'll start to see the tendrils of control. So in my local area, I tried to pitch BIT bonds. I was like, oh, it's a great idea. Well, you can't do it unless Richmond tells you you can. I'm in Virginia. We are subjects of Richmond. The county cannot do things without Richmond's approval and express authority.

Marty Bent [52:59] Right.

Average Gary [53:00] And so any sort of idea— I have gone through multiple iterations with people in my local area of like, what can we do to like write the course on this? And they're like, oh, well, obviously we have to build data centers, which that's another hot topic. But it's like, no, we have to destroy this heritage farmland and plow it over to build data centers. And I'm like, wait, that's not the only way to create tax revenue. But all these other mechanisms for tax revenue, you have to go to Richmond and get Richmond to approve it. Richmond is not going to let go of that control.

Average Gary ⋮ So, it's like veterans can plug in, and any Bitcoiners, right? It doesn't take a lot of money to win an election locally, right? So, if you're a Bitcoiner sitting on a decent stack, and you're civically minded, and you have the gumption to do it, go spend some money and run a local campaign, or find the guy in your local area that's willing to run, and just fund his campaign. And get people in the local area, have this grass— Bitcoin's a grassroots movement, right? Enable people in your local area to rise, whether it's the business owners or it's the local politicians, to rise up and say, hey, we're not doing this shit anymore.

Average Gary ⋮ We're done with fiat. We're done with this stupid panopticon surveillance state. We're gonna use free and open-source software. Oh, FOIA? Dude, I tried to FOIA my county government. They wanna charge me $4,000.

Marty Bent [54:06] What?

Average Gary [54:07] To do an email query. And I'm like, I should be able to come in. You can issue me an API key, right? This is 2026. You can check my ID, scan my face, my eyeballs, whatever. But I should be able to come into the county government, sit down at a terminal, and I should be able to query everything you do because you're my employees, right? You work for me as a citizen of this county. And there's this whole, like, smoke and mirrors thing around, like, FOIA, like, Freedom of Information acting, and then they charge you an arm and a leg because, oh, it takes IT this many hours to do the query, and then it takes so-and-so to review the query to make sure there's nothing in there that's, like, sensitive. I'm like, well, first of all, what is in there that's sensitive? What are you hiding from us?

Marty Bent [54:45] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary ⋮ And a lot of the people were like, oh, well, some people like email in that, you know, they— some like domestic abuse victim will like email in to like seek out help. I'm like, okay, you can flag that one as soon as it comes in, but at the end of the week, everything should be released publicly, and I should be able to query it programmatically using my Clanker to like figure out what you're doing day to day and who you're corresponding with and who you're signing NDAs with, right? Because I blew up— I, I did pay for a FOIA request. It was very narrowly scoped.

Average Gary ⋮ It still cost me like $400. But I found that my local board of supervisors had in fact signed NDAs with data centers, even though publicly they're like, we don't know anything about NDAs, we don't know what you're talking about. And we're like, oh well, what about these emails that we found? And then everybody's surprised. Oh wow. It's like, no, you work for us, and the radical transparency that you desire so desperately for the populace needs to be flipped around and focused on you.

Marty Bent [55:36] Well, that's what I was just about to say. It's insane, the inversion of the relationship between the government and the governed. In this country today. And we're just, as you're describing, the complete opposite of what it should be.

Average Gary [55:47] We should be making tyrants uncomfortable again.

Marty Bent [55:49] Yeah. Well, bringing this back to Bitcoin veterans, I mean, it started as a Twitter group chat, has obviously grown, and seems like momentum is picking up. Like, if we're 4 or 5 years into this sort of amorphous, loose association of veterans within Bitcoin, like, where do you think it'll be in another 5 years? And really with the context of the force multiplier that you described with Bitcoin specifically.

Average Gary [56:19] And this is something that I've seen in the mining industry specifically. There's a strong veteran presence, again, because just the direct correlation of if you can run a FOB deployed, you can run a mining site. If you feel like you're on a FOB, The mining sites that I've been to out in West Texas, it feels like a mining site. There's gravel paves, and there's all these huts and boxes all over the place. And everybody's doing meetings in the morning to figure out what we're doing for the day, stay hydrated, all this stuff. It feels like you're deployed. I'm like, wow, okay. But that's one aspect.

Average Gary ⋮ Another one is you've got the Georgia Bitcoin Council, you got the Illinois Bitcoin Council, you've got various meetups that are all being run by veterans, led by veterans, various groups that like are plugged in. Like, there's— I'm fairly confident in saying this, I'm pretty sure at least one of the core contributors is a vet. Like, there's a core contributor that's a veteran, right? He's not necessarily directly plugged into Bitcoin Veterans, but the fact that there's a huge alumni network, essentially, right? Like, I've heard people talk about like, oh, you go to an Ivy League school not for the diploma, but for like the network of individuals.

Marty Bent [57:27] Right.

Average Gary [57:28] Well, veterans have one of the biggest alumni networks ever, right? And they're all across the board. They're in C-suites at S&P 500 companies. They're in Bitcoin companies. They're running meetups. They're running random off-grid gas mining facilities, right? They're doing security audits for whatever open-source tools that they're using. They're working on protocol development, right? So, I see Bitcoin veterans, one, just being a bigger and more respectable name. And it's really just a network of people. And I see it as the organizations and the institutions of the first turning that we are going into, Bitcoin veterans are going to play no small part in that. And that's where I see it.

Marty Bent [58:18] Well, that's why I didn't mention it earlier, but Bitcoin famously has this problem of being distributed network with no, obviously, central organization structure. And it's not that I'm calling for that, but I think the skills that you described earlier that veterans are equipped with around organization is desperately needed. And I think you, obviously, I won't speak for every veteran, understand that the distributed nature of the protocol and the governance around the protocol is extremely important. But bringing the organizational skills that veterans have to work within those confines, but still get shit done seems—

Average Gary [58:52] Yeah.

Marty Bent [58:53] like a very massive value add to the network. Absolutely.

Average Gary [58:57] Well, and this is the whole thing. If you ever talk to Gabe Lord of Operation Bitcoin, he does that workforce development. This is one of the things he says is, or maybe not what he says, but what he understands is because veterans have these leadership abilities and these skills that have been developed, one of the other things is you also train to a point where you can operate without command and control. So, You have to know what the final objective is, right? The objective is hyper-Bitcoinization. How do we get there? I don't know. But, like, how do I— and if you look at a command structure, and you have command at the top, and then all these tiers along the way until you get to the smallest unit of, like, a fireteam, right?

Average Gary ⋮ That fireteam knows what their tactical mission objective is, to the point that even if they lose all of communication and blackout on comms and whatever, that fireteam together is an effective unit to go close and complete that objective, and then also link back up with the rest of the units, right? So it's great to have centralized command and control. There's efficiencies to that. But at the same time, veterans plugged in as leadership across this network of individuals means that even when a cell is isolated and there's, you know, you're alone and unafraid with no support or resupply anytime soon, you can still figure out how to get the job done.

Average Gary ⋮ You can still figure out how to enable yourself and the other people around you, right? That's the force multiplication thing is we're not doing it like we're not James Bond. That's a whole psyop, right? Like James Bond is not like— that doesn't exist for the most part, right? There's support. There are, you know, tons of people. You can't do things alone. That's one of the biggest humbling aspects that I learned in the military was like, Yeah, I'm a smart guy. I'm very motivated, high energy, get a lot of shit done, but I am nothing without the people on my left and my right. And if they're not coming along and if they're faltering, like, you're only as strong as the weakest link in your chain, right?

Average Gary ⋮ So it's like shield lock with these guys and push forward together, and you're gonna push right through anything that you can ever come across. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:00:58] Well, you mentioned it earlier, but we have it as a topic that we want to dive into on the list. You mentioned that James Bond, not real. Is that 5th generation warfare? Is that a psyop? So getting into this whole concept of 5th generation warfare.

Average Gary [1:01:12] Yeah, 5th generation warfare. Go back and listen to the Bitcoin Veterans Summit. There's a— I think it's the pinned tweet on @BitcoinVeterans. But there was an entire panel about it. And you've had sequences like trench warfare, like air warfare, like all these developments. And where we find ourselves now is in the information warfare, right? We are more interconnected than we've ever been. The internet has enabled us, for good and for bad, to directly connect with any individual on the planet for an unlimited amount of time and duration. And that's been weaponized, right? That's been weaponized by our government, other governments, non-government entities, individuals, right?

Marty Bent [1:01:53] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:01:53] Like, this episode is a form of 5th generation warfare, right? Like, we are— I'm putting ideas into your brain right now that when you're listening to me, me talk. Um, and it's never been easier to participate in that. The thing that I think trips up a lot of people is nobody knows that they're in a war. Nobody understands that you're in a war for the what you're thinking about, what you're focusing your time and attention on. And if you don't understand you're in a war and you don't understand that you are a combatant in this war— because there's no like civilians and combatants, right? Like it's very easy to like understand that— if you don't understand that, like you're just gonna get eaten alive. I mean, how about the algo change?

Marty Bent [1:02:28] An example of this, like, how long have Bitcoiners been disconnected from each other?

Average Gary [1:02:33] Well, I was at Nostr, so I was like completely unplugged for a while, you know.

Marty Bent [1:02:36] But, uh, I mean, as an example, I mean, Twitter, Nikita, this one guy who has central command over the algorithm of Twitter, clicked the button earlier this week and every Bitcoiner was like, holy crap, I haven't seen you on, on this platform in years. And it's like isolating Bitcoiners, and going back, bringing in what we previously discussed, which is veterans' ability to organize when you don't have any communication with the outside world. I think that was discombobulating for the amorphous Bitcoin community on X specifically.

Average Gary [1:03:08] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:03:09] Not having the skills to recognize, 'cause I, my cousin is like a big follower of me on Twitter, and he like, he's been swearing to me for like 2 years. He's like, you're shadow banned. I can't find any of your tweets, like all that. I don't— I'm not going to put malignant intent in them. Like, I'm not going to accuse X of having malignant intent. But I think regardless of whether or not they did, the outcome was this sort of isolation of Bitcoiners and the inability to pick up signal from others about what's going on. So I think that's an example of 5th generation warfare.

Average Gary [1:03:48] It's a spiritual war too. Right? Like, uh, I know you're a man of faith. I consider myself a man of faith. It is a spiritual war as well because, um, you know, the mind, the body, the soul is all connected. And, you know, one of the things is if you're a man on your own, you know, like Satan's out there looking for you on your own in isolation to devour you. It's like he has a— he's a prowling lion waiting to devour the lone man. Um, which is why I think like the internet's great, but if you don't have like in-the-flesh real-life people that you are getting coffee with.

Average Gary ⋮ The simplest thing you can do is find the boys in your neighborhood or in your whatever. I got some good Bitcoiner friends that we get coffee semi-regularly, but it's like, go meet up in person, because you will not have the same interactions you do online. We have not evolved or adapted or whatever it is to this digital presence that is, malignant or not, is sucking our souls into the cyberspace. And I would encourage more people to go to a Bitcoin meetup. If you've never been to a Bitcoin meetup, and you're listening to this episode right now, find your local Bitcoin meetup, even if you have to drive 3 hours, and go to it just one time.

Average Gary ⋮ One time, and I don't know how to describe it. And I feel like you could probably test it. There's many other Bitcoiners I feel like— it's like the first time you go to a Bitcoin event, and you show up to a place where everybody is mutually aligned on this fundamental understanding of value.

Marty Bent [1:05:09] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:05:10] Because money is a placeholder for something else. It's a placeholder for value. And so, Bitcoin as a money means that we are all aligned instantly on the same value set at the fundamental layer. And so, now we can build on top of that. And we don't have to start from like, oh, well, do you think printing money is a bad thing? It's like, well, it's great for civic— No, no, no, no. We understand 21 million is the hard cap, and there's nothing else to it. And so, we can start to build from there. And there's nothing better than somebody in a room with another person conspiring, right? And it's like, well, people conspire and they should conspire in the flesh.

Marty Bent [1:05:48] And we say this a lot on RHR, if you don't have a local meetup, start your own. And it's funny how God works because this is the second time this week I've recorded a podcast and I've been thinking about the gospel and the homily at Mass on Sunday, which was sowing seeds. And that's what these Bitcoin meetups do.

Average Gary [1:06:04] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:06:05] And I feel like there's some divine intervention this week, specifically the last 2 conversations I have. I'm getting goosebumps right now because like it very, very much aligns with what the Gospel and the homily discussed this week.

Average Gary [1:06:18] So sowing seeds. Um, I recently attended a Farming God's Way class, right? So my kids' school has partnered with this farm, uh, just on a mountain ridge in West Virginia. And this old, this This lovely woman basically got thrown from a donkey, cracked her skull, was miraculously healed, right? Has a seizure dog that's been out of work for years now. Miraculously healed, attributes it all to God, and is like, I'm gonna donate this and become an educational ministry. And so I attended this class 'cause I got in touch through my kids' school. I was like, this is awesome. I've always wanted to like feed people, right? Like, I'm gonna retire into farming.

Marty Bent [1:06:50] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:06:51] My wife doesn't wanna be a farmer. I'm like, that's fine, babe. I got it. I'll handle it for you. But like, I'm gonna be a farmer, right? I think like the meme of selling our chairs is great, but like take it a step further and grow your own food, right? Like nature has provided this like free thing called sun and water that you can just like grow your own food. And yeah, it might not be the best or the tastiest, but grow lamb, grow goats, grow cows, grow corn, grow whatever it is. Like start working the land. One, you'll be physically more prepared if you're working a farm for anything that's coming, right?

Average Gary ⋮ You're going to be mentally prepared because you're going to be outside in the sunshine. One of my good friends said it's like, oh, come to find out with all this health research, we just need to go back to farming, because you're going to be outside in the sun eating real food, carrying water, chopping wood, physically active. You're not living this sanitary lifestyle plugged into a blue light screen. So, you talk about reaping what you sow. I think in a very real way, I think that's where Bitcoiners are headed is like, we're going to start Growing our own food. This already exists, right? com. I get my ghee from a Bitcoiner.

Marty Bent [1:07:54] Soapminer. I got the— my bag's over there. I've got the tallow soap in this building right now.

Average Gary [1:07:59] Sats.coffee. I get my coffee. I'm about to buy a head of beef from a mutual acquaintance down in Washington, Virginia there.

Marty Bent [1:08:06] I got a quarter of that beef in my home right now.

Average Gary [1:08:09] So, it's like food, this fundamental thing is like, get into that business. right? Find out what it is. There's like a company like Oshi making like nut butter and nut bars and stuff. It's like, figure out what food is out there that you can make better as a Bitcoiner, remove all the gross like goyslop additives, and then go do it and sell it for sats. You're going to stack sats.

Marty Bent [1:08:29] Yeah.

Average Gary ⋮ Right? Make bread. The simplest inputs is like bread. It's like flour, salt, and water at a minimum, right? You can add other stuff, but you can quantify this, right? And this is like, I think maybe business advice. You can quantify what your inputs are, and then you figure out how much you need to sell it for to make a profit. And you can make a modest profit, right? You don't need to make 100% markup on whatever you're selling. You can make a modest profit. You can do that for 5 to 10 years continually. You can grow that business. And if you're stacking sats along the way and saving it, it's like now you have more capital to deploy to make more bread and make, you know, bagels or whatever else, right?

Average Gary ⋮ Like, you can grow into this thing. Go find some boomer that wants to retire out of his business. Start to get to know the business, befriend the guy. Like, there's still good people out there that have businesses that have no successors. Private equity is going to eat those things up, flip them and sell them out to somebody else. Go find the mom-and-pop shops, figure out what their business is, figure out if you want to do that business, go run that business and turn it into a Bitcoin standard. Yeah. And like, now you are the winner in the local area. You're feeding people.

Marty Bent [1:09:30] Yeah. I mean, that's— we're talking about literally sowing seeds right now, but too— but like, bringing it back to Bitcoin veterans, I what you guys are doing, again, is sowing seeds in the minds of other veterans. And if you're successful in hitting a critical mass of veterans that get Bitcoin and are motivated to organize around it and get shit done, like, talk about that force multiplier. But you have like quite literally a military that has opted into—

Average Gary [1:09:56] We are not a militia.

Marty Bent [1:09:57] Not a militia, but like military, military-trained individuals.

Average Gary [1:10:00] We do have a lot of guns though.

Marty Bent [1:10:01] Um, who have opted into Yeah, absolutely.

Average Gary [1:10:04] Well, I mean, what is it? I think Secretary of War or one of the Indo-PACOM admiral was talking about how—

Marty Bent [1:10:12] Paparo.

Average Gary [1:10:12] Was talking, yeah, like, it's there, dude. We're there.

Marty Bent [1:10:15] Well, all right. This is where we get into— what are your thoughts on Sol4, the thesis?

Average Gary [1:10:21] I think it's a fantastic thesis. And this is probably a contrarian to maybe the broader Bitcoin veterans group. I think it falls down to implementation. At a fundamental level, it is database of keys. It's key management. It's a database. Introducing Bitcoin to a cyber system does nothing new or novel that isn't already accomplished by other cybersecurity systems and protocols and practices. Like I was saying earlier, having an HSM that is just a cold card is no different than having an HSM that's not a cold card. The same cybersecurity principles apply. I think one of the novel things that most people don't— most people are thinking like, oh, yeah, I'm going to secure my computer with Bitcoin. I'm like, no, you're not. That's stupid. I think that the whole paper queue L402 thing, that's legit.

Marty Bent [1:11:17] Yeah. But hash rate defending critical military, how System. That's like, I know, I mean, I got yelled at because I had Jason on, and I have a lot of respect for Jason.

Average Gary [1:11:27] Oh, I love Jason. Great thinker.

Marty Bent [1:11:28] Great thinker. And I think a lot of, I mean, obviously, like, Bitcoin is a form of force projection on the world. Yep. But like, where I will draw the line and say this does make not, this does not make any sense, is like hash rate cannot protect military systems.

Average Gary [1:11:43] I think this is where, okay, this is where I think there's, there's a there there. the idea of a macrocomputer, right? Because if you zoom in, like this phone, right, there's like tiny resistors and like different electrical components that are essentially controlling the flow of electricity, right? That's what like chips are doing.

Marty Bent [1:12:00] Yes.

Average Gary [1:12:00] Electrical components are doing. And I think there is something to— and Bitcoin mining is not like the only aspect of this, but I think because Bitcoin mining can saturate a shit ton of energy, in one go, you might be able to zoom out and essentially use Bitcoin mining as a macro-scale electrical component that can be observed, like macro, observed at a macro level to check the state of it, right? Because that's essentially what the electrons are doing here is like you're checking the state of the electricity flow. And this is like gross oversimplification, but you're doing that at a micro level, right? Microchips. I think there might be a there there at a macro level where you have the entire grids can be observed in a given state of electrical flow, and Bitcoin mining would 100% plug into that as one of the electrical components.

Marty Bent [1:12:55] So, are you talking about leveling out draw on a grid system?

Average Gary [1:13:02] Sure. That's one aspect. But It's not like— it's not the leveling out. That's like one aspect of it. It's the reason why a certain pixel appears on your screen is because certain electrons are flowing and arranged in a certain way and are observed in a certain state, right? Macro scale now. And this is like when you have a planetary grid, one, there's the balancing aspect to it, but like when you have a planetary grid, What would be the best way for you to project signals beyond our solar system?

Marty Bent [1:13:37] Radio waves?

Average Gary [1:13:39] Maybe, right? What are radio waves? They're just electromagnetic pulses, right? They're, they're, um, they're going through the medium that is the air, that is space.

Marty Bent [1:13:50] Lasers? I don't know.

Average Gary [1:13:51] The way that your phone modulates electricity to make the antenna vibrate in a specific frequency to send those waves out, I think, and this is like my— this is like a theory.

Marty Bent [1:14:02] We're getting cosmic here. We haven't gotten cosmic on this show in a while, but I like it.

Average Gary [1:14:06] I think Bitcoin mining plays a huge— like, you look at Bitcoin mining with the SMRs and all this other electrical infrastructure and grid, and I think you can get to a point where we can signal, um, like way, way out there using massive energy grids. and people from a distance, galaxies away, are able to observe the given state. And this is where, like, it gets a little cosmic because you have to worry about, like, the time dilation or the time, whatever it is, between those 2 observation points. But, like, nobody's gonna be observing from, like, a galaxy away, like, my iPhone. But what would be very easy to observe is an entire, you know, the entire North American grid system in a specific configuration.

Marty Bent [1:14:53] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:14:54] that is balanced and managed, and the flows of the electrons are given a specific state to be observed using Bitcoin mining and other grid assets. Does that make sense? Macrochips. Planetary-scale macrochips.

Marty Bent [1:15:13] I might not be mentally equipped enough, intellectually equipped enough to So like, like a transistor in a chip, right? I know, yes.

Average Gary [1:15:23] Right, it's a flow. It's, it's either—

Marty Bent [1:15:25] So you would design, you would redesign the grid, and that's like where my mind's going. It's like, okay, okay, I can see you design the grid, and basically the idea would be like no electron is wasted to a certain extent.

Average Gary [1:15:39] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:15:40] Like what, what I'm thinking through, like getting autistic about this, is like, okay, what if you need to add Like new forms of hardware that pull from the grid? Like, does it— that messes up the state, right?

Average Gary [1:15:52] There's new transistor gates, right? Like, it's like fundamentally, it's like the gate's open or it's closed sort of thing. And that's, again, very, very gross oversimplification, but it's like, is the energy flowing between point A and point B, between, you know, El Paso and New York? Is that flow— what is that flow? How high is that flow? And Bitcoin mining definitely can play an aspect in it just because of the monetization aspect of it, right? Like, you have this sink of energy, this demand of energy that is completely monetizable from the first electron. And so you can use that to create what I think is like macro-scale transistors, right? Like all these little silicon wafers that are like super tiny, like the most complex things we've ever done as humanity, they're all working on this very, very micro-nano scale, but it's still just observing the state of the electrons flowing and whether the gates are open or closed, right?

Marty Bent [1:16:41] Okay. Now I'm picking this up better.

Average Gary [1:16:42] Now zoom way out, and it's like, is the flow of electrons open or closed between El Paso and New York, or between New York and Boston, or whatever, right? Like, things that you would need to— if you zoom far enough and out, the Earth becomes microscopic. You can still observe the state of that and react to that as a signal. Not to mention, you could use that energy to broadcast, you know, whatever signal you want, right? The signal being broadcast is determined, the modulation of the signal, right, the data modulated onto that signal is determined by the configuration of the chips that are driving that signal on that antenna, right? And when you think about like the crust of the Earth, right, and it's like we can get into like pole shift if you want to as well.

Marty Bent [1:17:24] Oh God, I try not to think about the pole shift.

Average Gary [1:17:27] Well, maybe, maybe having a robust energy grid that is well-balanced with Bitcoin mining and all these other technologies are something that can help stabilize the electromagnetic field.

Marty Bent [1:17:37] Do we have enough time? We're in the middle of the pole shift, aren't we?

Average Gary [1:17:40] Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So when you learn land navigation in the military, I'm at Fort Pickett in Virginia learning land navigation, and they're like, oh, by the way, this map has the magnetic declination adjustment that you need. It's a little bit off, right? So like that way back when, I just kind of, I was like, okay, cool. I need to know that it's not, it's like 7 instead of 5 or whatever. Um, fast forward to like learning about the magnetic pole shifts, and I'm like, oh wow, like yeah, the poles are moving around because my compass needed to be adjusted based on the map from like the 1960s, right? It's completely different. So, um, I think there's a there there as well, and that is very cosmic.

Marty Bent [1:18:16] It's observable, right?

Average Gary [1:18:17] Oh yeah, absolutely, definitely observable.

Marty Bent [1:18:20] Yep, yep. Yeah, I try not to think of it, but I mean, how can having a robust Grid. And so like going back to the, uh, the macro cosmic conversation.

Average Gary [1:18:32] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:18:32] I think now I understand, like the, the mini transistors, like microgrids. So like, yeah, daisy chaining.

Average Gary [1:18:38] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:18:38] Natural gas turbines, whatever, to create a microgrid. Small modular reactors, and you just bing bong, bing bong. Maybe you have massive generation facilities that are more centralized in certain parts. But, um, I think that's something— I mean, we're going to be discussing it tonight here, here at PUBG, um, announcing the series with American Bitcoin about energy policy, energy strategy, compute, and different forms of Bitcoin and AI. But I think this applies beyond those specific topics to like national security.

Average Gary [1:19:09] Absolutely.

Marty Bent [1:19:10] At the pole shift level, like the security of civilization, broadly speaking.

Average Gary [1:19:15] We can't rely on Elon. Elon's going to do some— a lot more cool shit, I think. But like, he is but one man with one team. So it's like we need a lot more people active and engaged on space exploration, you know, energy infrastructure. I'm fully bought into the whole, like, we need a grid renaissance. I was reading a book called One Second After. Have you read that?

Marty Bent [1:19:36] I've heard of it. I haven't read it though.

Average Gary [1:19:38] Fantastic. Well, you'll get there after Mandibles.

Marty Bent [1:19:40] You know, it takes me a while to get to the books.

Average Gary [1:19:42] Yeah. One Second After, basically, like, the, the whole— and it's been out for a while, so I don't mind spoiling it— but it's like a nuclear bomb detonates in the atmosphere above the Eastern Seaboard.

Marty Bent [1:19:51] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:19:51] It wipes out all modern electronics, right? You have a Carrington event because the electromagnetic shield of the Earth is down, and we get a solar flare that wipes out modern electronics, like same, same, right? So it's a book that explores just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, Western North Carolina again, explores like sort of what that might look like. Fantastic read. But I remember reading that, and like, I think one of the prefaces of the book, like the dude was writing in 2001, trying to illustrate the fragility of our electrical infrastructure and our grid in America. And then 9/11 happened, and all the wind got sucked from any kind of sales that he might have started with, like, hey guys, our grid's decaying and we need to do something about it. That's why he wrote the book as like an educational sort of like fictional narrative. But, you know, it got derailed by the War on Terror, right?

Marty Bent [1:20:40] Which— And So I got here last night, had a great dinner and then drinks after. I won't say who, but there's people— obviously we have this event again tonight focused on energy policy. And, um, but I was talking to somebody who's involved with one of the major utility companies in the country, and we were talking about the, the facts that a lot of the conversation around energy has become partisan politics, where it's like, how do we—

Average Gary [1:21:08] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:21:09] How do we get away from making energy a partisan issue when it literally has nothing to do with politics? It's just about human flourishing. Like, how do we educate people to understand that problems like the one explained in the book, One Minute After? One Second After. One Second After, and create a sort of optimistic energy around rejiggering the, the grid to— or modernizing the grid. That seems like something we should all want to get behind.

Average Gary [1:21:40] Yeah, I mean, I think if you, if you want to like attack it on one front, it's like, well, if we have more energy production, your electrical bill will go down. Yeah, and it's funny, like, that's—

Marty Bent [1:21:53] I'm not going to dox them, but I was talking to somebody at, uh, again, one of the larger utility companies in the country, and I had to explain the Henry-Adams curve to Which is the Henry Adams— the Henry Adams curve is the, uh, energy consumption per capita over time, I think going back to 1850. It's one of the charts on WTFhappenedin1971.com.

Average Gary [1:22:12] And, uh, there's no energy-rich poor nation. Is that the one?

Marty Bent [1:22:16] Uh, that's— I mean, that's, I think, a derivative of it, but like it was the Henry Adams curve for US. Um, so like I think energy consumption per capita is what it tracks. And like 1971, it was like going up and to the right and then flatlines.

Average Gary [1:22:28] Really? Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:22:30] And that's one of the most underrated charts in the world, I think.

Average Gary [1:22:33] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:22:34] But getting back to the point is like we have been neglecting our energy infrastructure, many would say going back to 1971, and we are behind. We need to modernize it. We need to update it. We need to make it more distributed, more robust. And the fact that it is— it has become a partisan issue is just mind-blowing. It's like this is bigger than politics. This is literally survival and the progression of—

Average Gary [1:23:01] Have you talked to Daniel Batten?

Marty Bent [1:23:03] Uh, yeah, it's been a while. Yeah, yeah, yeah. New Zealand.

Average Gary [1:23:08] I mean, he— that was like one of the biggest things on the whole, because a lot of the— I think a lot of the other side of the aisle partisan stuff is from like the green side, the environmental side, and Daniel has just like blown all that out of the water. Like, I followed some of his work, like, it's been phenomenal. And then at the same time, you can point to Gridless in Africa You can point to— what was it? There was that article some dude wrote about, I think it was like a village in Malawi or something that has electricity now because of Bitcoin mining.

Marty Bent [1:23:33] Oh, it was the, um, in the Congo, right? The, uh, the nature preserve. They were able to utilize the excess capacity on, I believe, a substation that sat at the top of a hill, and the transmission lines had decayed over time, but the revenue from the Bitcoin mining enabled them to rebuild transmission.

Average Gary [1:23:52] Yeah. I think highlighting and having those concrete stories of— and yeah, it's Bitcoin, which is great, propagandized by Bitcoin. But because Bitcoin is inherently an energy asset and inherently tied to the grid at this point, there's no excuse. It's like, if you want to uplift people out of poverty, you will build energy infrastructure for them. And the best way to do that is to find some capitalist that wants to make make money on mining Bitcoin and say, hey, we've got an energy source, come drop your Bitcoin mining shipping container next to this energy source, you can make some money, slice off some of us to develop this infrastructure, and then like when we don't need you anymore, take your, take your toys and go home. Yeah, right. And like people will do that. That's like, it's happening, that's happening everywhere.

Marty Bent [1:24:36] And since Bitcoin's distributed, the network doesn't care. Maybe blocks slow down, maybe block production slows down a bit, but yeah, the network goes on, difficulty adjusts. But bringing this back to like revitalizing the grid to be able to survive the consequences of a potential Carrington event or a nuclear bomb EMP pulse, uh, potentially destroying parts of the infrastructure. Like, you got me thinking, like, you've heard of Atlantis, and if you're a big fan of, um, Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, they'll talk about—

Average Gary [1:25:11] Right.

Marty Bent [1:25:12] Civilizations, advanced, highly advanced civilizations of humanity's past that have been forgotten but may have been super, super advanced but taken out by potentially a Carrington event.

Average Gary [1:25:24] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:25:25] The Younger Dryas was probably like an asteroid that created the Great Flood that's been talked about throughout history. But not to be hubristic, we should never be hubristic, but Is Bitcoin— like, we're obviously a highly advanced society. Like, is this like a problem that similarly advanced societies in Earth's past have gotten to but haven't surpassed? But we have the opportunity to, and we have to recognize that. I'm getting a little rambly and like heady here and cosmic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, is that— it's like, it's almost like Fermi's, uh, the Great Filter, right? Um, or Fermi's Paradox. Like, if we get the grid sufficiently robust, yeah, we can survive that event and be like the one iteration of humanity that's—

Average Gary [1:26:13] I think it's going to come down to what does sufficiently robust mean, right? Like, what does that mean? Because does robust mean we're all interconnected? Maybe to a degree, but I think like you're saying, these microgrids, right? If you can, if you have If you have flowing water on your property, go put in a hydro dam and start mining Bitcoin, right? Like that, you could build a Faraday cage around that setup, and now you're the guy with electricity, right? Now, you want to make sure you're friends with all your neighbors, so you're not the guy that they're going to kill because you're the only one with the lights on.

Average Gary ⋮ But I think there is something to the monetary incentive to expand the energy infrastructure via Bitcoin mining that will— not will, it is driving microgrids. Like, we're getting microgrids because of Bitcoin mining, right? You know, you have— I was just listening to 256 Foundation today. They were talking— Schnitzel was on there talking about how he is using Mujina firmware, which is the open-source Bitcoin mining firmware that they're developing, to get to the exact wattage. Like, we're tuning Bitcoin mining to the exact wattage that is necessary for consumption, which is a prerequisite for microgrids.

Marty Bent [1:27:19] Yeah. Well, so let's explain this. Mujina, shout out to Schnitzel. and everybody contributing to the open source mining effort. Shout out to 256 Foundation for really fostering and pushing that forward. But Magina, like, I think the big breakthrough is being able to communicate with individual chips on a hashboard.

Average Gary [1:27:40] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:27:41] And elaborate and expand on what that does for the efficiency. 'Cause we had just had the, Uh, we launched a TFTC roundtable. Obviously we did the, the Home Mining Energy Playbook— not obviously, but we did a Home Mining Energy Playbook with the Exergy guys. We had a follow-up conversation with the TFTC community on Tuesday night. Um, and between when we launched the playbook and recorded that podcast and Tuesday's conversation, literally Tuesday morning, Schnitzel announced Magina advancements. And it's the data that we have in the Mining Home Energy playbook, if you go to the solar section, which is like in, like, I think part 4 of the playbook, like you have a bunch of data in there and it's like the Bitcoin mining on using solar, reacting to solar pulls is very like volatile.

Average Gary [1:28:33] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:28:33] But like Mogena, like, would allow you to like really smooth out that curve, which makes incredible efficiencies, makes it more profitable, and Um, it's pretty insane that open source firmware is getting us here.

Average Gary [1:28:46] Yes. Um, so on the Mugina front, I've— I'm a big fan. First of all, shout out to X3G Boys. They sold me my home heater, we'll call it. And so I will be, uh, heating my home this winter and making some money while I do it. Um, fantastic job. But on the Mugina front, this, this First of all, you have to understand that most of the Bitcoin mining software and hardware has come from China. You have very clear examples of Antbleed—

Marty Bent [1:29:15] Antbleed.

Average Gary [1:29:16] In the past.

Marty Bent [1:29:17] ASICBoost.

Average Gary [1:29:17] ASICBoost, tons of other things of like chicanery, which like, okay, cool, it's a rational play.

Marty Bent [1:29:22] Well, Antbleed was 2015. And I think most people came into Bitcoin— biggest wave of Bitcoiners came in post-'20.

Average Gary [1:29:29] Absolutely. Post-COVID. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:29:31] Completely oblivious to Antbleed. Could you explain what Ampleet was to people?

Average Gary [1:29:34] It was essentially a backdoor on the firmware itself. Firmware is the thing that runs on— like, your thermostat has a firmware on it, right? So people that don't understand, like, the software aspects of it, you have your operating system. So like iOS, Android are mobile operating systems. Windows, Linux, macOS are like desktop and laptop operating systems. Firmware generally speaks to, like, specific components for specific purposes. And Bitcoin mining machines have firmware that run on them and have historically been completely closed source and cut off, like, from inspecting or understanding what they're doing.

Marty Bent [1:30:10] And many companies have built their business around jailbreaking that firmware to make it more efficient. Yeah.

Average Gary [1:30:16] And Antbleed, as I understand it, was essentially just a backdoor. It was a way for— I think it might have been like remotely controlling or converting hash rate.

Marty Bent [1:30:23] Remotely brick. There you go.

Average Gary [1:30:25] The machine.

Marty Bent [1:30:26] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:30:27] I'm in that cohort that came in well after Amplead. I know that it was this backdoor thing. But yeah, the fact that you could have a remote entity— because you have to be online to mine Bitcoin, right?

Marty Bent [1:30:37] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:30:38] You don't necessarily have to be— with recent developments with Stratum V2 and Datum, you don't have to be connecting your miners directly to the internet. You can connect to your own infrastructure now. So it's way better in that regard. And you can kind of block it off from direct control. But generally speaking, most miners are connecting over the internet, meaning they're exposing a port. A lot of these firmware developers will say, oh, well, we need to charge you a developer fee. So you need to talk to the developer server to make sure that you check that the developer fee is working. Well, that's a connection to their servers that they control.

Average Gary ⋮ And they're shipping you the firmware that you have no idea what it's doing. So it's like, oh, yeah, I see this connection out to this random server. What is that? I don't know. Oh, that's the developer fee server. Don't worry about it. Now, there's legitimate— like, there's a there there, right, with having a developer fee. But also that becomes an attack vector and a threat to where you get amplied, where you can have your machine just shut down because you're connected to Bitmain servers. And if they don't like you, they'll shut you down.

Marty Bent [1:31:35] Or if they want to mine more, they're like, hey, we need less hash rate so we get more Bitcoin.

Average Gary [1:31:41] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:31:41] Or if I mean, this was 2015, I believe, Amplead came out. And I remember, like, I was in Bitcoin, like, very obsessed with it for years at that point, and being like, holy crap, this is bad. Because, like, yeah, if you believe that Bitcoin is a, a tool of force projection, not only for the individual, but if we do believe that we're getting to the geopolitical game theory with Bitcoin as a variable, like, that's like, again, 5th generation warfare.

Average Gary [1:32:10] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:32:12] another form of it is like if you have these backdoors in these chips and China has a sufficient amount of hash rate, Russia has a sufficient amount of hash rate, and something's going on in meatspace between the US and China and they have that backdoor, it's like, all right, we're just going to turn off their hash rate.

Average Gary [1:32:28] Yeah, it's a— and this is like, that just speaks to the broader open source thesis around like if the tools are not open source for inspection, I would consider it insecure at this point, right? Like trusted third parties are security holes. That's like a well-known, well-known thing. But bringing it back to Mujina, the fact that now we have open-source firmware— the crazy thing about Mujina though is not just that it's open source so you can go check to make sure that it's not backdooring you and gonna brick you, and so like you greatly reduce your risk.

Marty Bent [1:32:57] It gives you control over your computer.

Average Gary [1:32:59] You give complete control, right? So like I have a miner, and I won't— in the basement that's heating the house this winter. And anytime I want to tune the power consumption on it, it shuts down, it stops mining, and it restarts the whole thing.

Marty Bent [1:33:16] Which takes time.

Average Gary [1:33:17] Which takes time.

Marty Bent [1:33:18] Burns the chips.

Average Gary [1:33:19] And so it's just inefficient from like a purely just engineering standpoint. Like, there's no reason why it has to be that way. It's just like the way that the manufacturers deployed their stock firmware, right? And one thing I'll say is, so I was a Chinese linguist, right? So I have some insight into Chinese culture. They're ruthless capitalists.

Marty Bent [1:33:37] I know.

Average Gary [1:33:37] They're a communist country, but they're ruthlessly capitalist, like hypercompetitive.

Marty Bent [1:33:42] I've been trying to figure out ways to describe this because just being in the mining industry for almost a decade now and interacting with China, I have a ton of respect. Yeah, they are ruthless capitalists. Like the whole— I mean, again, it's like hard to describe because like It is command and control Chinese communist culture.

Average Gary [1:33:58] It's a homogeneous culture.

Marty Bent [1:33:59] Yes.

Average Gary [1:34:00] They're very homogeneous culturally speaking.

Marty Bent [1:34:02] So even if you're a ruthless capitalist, they get shit done and all they care about is making money.

Average Gary [1:34:05] Yep. It's crazy.

Marty Bent [1:34:07] Yep.

Average Gary [1:34:07] And they're making a killing on these machines because they're making the chips, they're making the machines. The firmware is an afterthought just because you need something to run, right? So like, you've yet to see a Chinese manufacturer lay into like serious firmware. In fact, they like put in safeguards to like prevent you from jailbreaking the control boards.

Marty Bent [1:34:24] Your warranty gets fucked.

Average Gary [1:34:26] Exactly. Um, so by getting Mugena, one is like now we have say over the features that are running on your, your mining, whether you're a home miner or you're a mega miner. Having a say in the features is like huge, right? Like if it's doing something that you— that it doesn't— if the stock firmware is not doing what you need it to do, there's almost no recourse because these, these manufacturers know they have you by the balls, right? They're like, oh, where are you gonna go get Where you can get your ASICs from, right? So I'm a big fan of Proto, like, doing that. Like, we need more people making more ASICs and more miners, right? With open-source firmware, if we can jailbreak these and turn these on, the features like having different hashboards, right? Schnitzel was on the 256 pod talking about this.

Marty Bent [1:35:07] He's got 2 different hashboards running together.

Average Gary [1:35:08] Multiple different hashboards, right? Like, and there's not a limit.

Marty Bent [1:35:11] What do you have, like an S19J Pro and an S21, I think?

Average Gary [1:35:14] It was an, I think, a 19K and J.

Marty Bent [1:35:17] K&J, okay.

Average Gary ⋮ Maybe some other one, but just the fact that, like, to my knowledge, there's not firmware in the past that's been open source or even that is supported having different hash boards in it, right? So generally speaking, you get this Bitcoin mining ASIC, it looks like a metal shoebox, and there's 3 hash boards in there that have the little ASIC chips in it. There's like 300 chips on each board, and then there's this thing called the control board. And the control board is like the brains of the thing. It talks to the Stratum servers, it connects to the internet, it does all like the logic. And then the hashboards are just purely like, it does one thing and one thing only, and it's hash Bitcoin.

Average Gary ⋮ And so you couldn't take a board from a different miner and put it into this other one because you had a bad board. And in fact, the firmware, most firmware won't allow you to run with 2 hashboards instead of 3. They fixed that. It's like, oh, you have 3 hashboards in here and we only designed it for this.

Marty Bent [1:36:08] The logic is such, if we don't see 3 hashboards, it doesn't work.

Average Gary [1:36:11] We're not going to work. Yeah. Or we're going to kneecap you if you're not mining to our pool. whatever, right? They can do whatever they want. It's their software, it's their machine. You bought the machine, but you don't own that machine. Mugena is now enabling anybody to run the firmware that do whatever you want. You want to throttle up and have 2,000 watts or 3,000 watts or 5,000 watts, you can do that. And you can do that with heterogeneous hashboards, right?

Marty Bent [1:36:36] And now with the emergence of vibe coding, like now we can get really Now we can get really sci-fi. And again, that's very bullish on the Exergy team and the home mining and the open-source mining. This is, I think, going back to microgrids and having robust microgrids. Again, making sure no electron is wasted.

Average Gary [1:36:59] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:37:00] Not only at a behind-the-meter or off-grid flare gas mining, but now literally at your home. You can get as granular as your home, making sure that your energy draw from the grid is as efficient as possible via Bitcoin mining and as profitable, or maybe not as profitable, but you're—

Average Gary [1:37:16] No, we're not worried about profit. We're not mining for profit. We're mining for the heat.

Marty Bent [1:37:19] Yes, it's useful. Yep. And it can be— it can make your energy consumption cheaper. Yeah, that's, that's the way to frame it.

Average Gary [1:37:28] Yeah, yeah. The mining industry, um, you know, I got into it professionally a little over 2 years ago, jumped right into like Stratum V2. I've been working on that. But just in general, the lack of engineering, open source engineering development and talent in the Bitcoin mining industry 2+ years ago compared to today is night and day. The fact that it's 256 Foundation works. The fact that you have Stratum V2 with a working group, a protocol working group of like big names you'll see when you go on mempool.space, Right? It's happening. It's coming. The fact that Datum exists, right? Like, Datum was a huge breakthrough, right? Jason Hughes is just like, Stratum V2 is taking too long. I think Rust sucks. I'm just gonna go ahead and ship this thing. And like, dude, it works.

Marty Bent [1:38:15] It works.

Average Gary [1:38:16] Like, tons of people out there are like building their own block templates, right? They're doing these awesome things. Stratum V2 is further accelerating that. The thing I'm most bullish on Stratum V2 is it's a Rust project. And if you're not familiar with the Bitcoin dev ecosystem, there's tons of Rust tooling. So the Bitcoin Dev Kit, the wallet tooling—

Marty Bent [1:38:35] Lightning Dev Kit.

Average Gary [1:38:36] The Lightning Dev Kit. There's all Rust. And so now, we have this suite of Bitcoin software that's written in this same programming languages that's able to talk and interact with each other. I have a proof of concept where I rotate a Coinbase address every block on Testnet 4. So there's a Testnet developer network, And so like Polstra came into the Stratim V2 project and did a pass on like the Coinbase and like, you know, how that did. So now it supports Miniscript. So I could take—

Marty Bent [1:39:04] Wait, so what do you like, are you giving the mining software an XPUB and it's just recycling them every block?

Average Gary [1:39:11] You take a Miniscript wildcard descriptor, right? So for anybody that doesn't quite understand, you have like public and private keys for Bitcoin. This public key can be used to create something called a descriptor, which is like describing the way that the wallet is formatted, derivation path, all these other things. And you can do something called a wildcard, which just means like, this is the high-level description of what the wallet is. If you start to fill in the wildcards with concrete numbers, that's where you get like your addresses, right? And so, I have a branch of code that takes a wildcard descriptor, meaning like, here's an XPUB, essentially, very generally speaking, here's an XPUB.

Average Gary ⋮ And software programmatically, every time you find a block, as the pool, just iterate one, right? And by the way, like, save it off so you know, like, which one we started on so you're not repeating addresses. But it means that every block that was mined on this pool— and I have a whole write-up hosted on GitHub— but every block that was mined on testnet 4 using this pool that I vibed very much so— it's like I'm way better at reading code than I am writing code, so, like, vibe coding has been a godsend, like, huge unlock. But It works, right? I have like 40-some blocks on testnet 4 that it's the same pool, and it's the same wildcard descriptor, the same XPUB, but it's a different address that it was mined to in increments of 1, right?

Average Gary ⋮ So the full descriptor, you get down to like 001, 002, 003, whatever that descriptor looks like, it would just iterate through those every time it was generating a new coinbase on a block find. So a block was found, and the pool was like, cool, we found a block. Let's go look at our wildcard descriptor, iterate on one, create a new address, and now we use that as a Coinbase payout.

Marty Bent [1:40:50] So for those who are listening to that, like, sounds cool, but like, why, why is that necessary? Um, or what is the benefit of doing that?

Average Gary [1:40:57] If you're worried about quantum computing, you don't want to reuse addresses, right? So that's like the big to-do because everybody loves to talk about quantum now. So like, if you are worried about this and you're a mining pool, go talk to your custodian and tell them that you want to rotate the the Coinbase address every time. It is technically possible, right?

Marty Bent [1:41:13] I'm having this problem with Ocean where, like, Ocean, you sign up, you just give them the address, and like, I get a payout. And like, I'm like, the UX is such where I'm like, okay, I got the payout, but the address that I, that I have there is like, obviously the miners are contributing shares, and so like, it's building up a balance. And like, so if I switch out the address, do I get the balance from the previous address? Or will that ever be paid out? It's like, no.

Average Gary [1:41:38] Yeah, well, you should be able to just give them an XPUB.

Marty Bent [1:41:40] Yeah, or like a silent payment address.

Average Gary [1:41:44] Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, there's— and that's where I'm saying I'm like, I'm hyper bullish because like Stratum V2 is like the mining Rust ecosystem now. Like all these other things like Lightning and ARK and like all these other ecosystems are also using the same language. So there's like this synergy, to use a budge word, between the different projects that It's gonna get wild. Like, um, Cashew Dev Kit, right? E-Cash. Um, there are people that have been mining in a subordinate pool, right? So you have your main pool.

Marty Bent [1:42:18] Um, I mean, it's the last time you were on your shows, that's what we were talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we were at Bitcoin++.

Average Gary [1:42:23] It's, it's happening on, on mainnet now. Um, and the pools have no idea. Like, you don't have to Pools are just accounting, right? A mining pool is just— I never thought I'd be working on accounting software, but here I am. Mining pools are just accounting. And so you can do a tiered structure where the prime pool is doing its own accounting, and there's nothing stopping you from just being a single consumer of this pool and aggregating all your hash rate through a proxy. But at that proxy, you're doing your own accounting, right?

Marty Bent [1:42:54] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:42:55] Perfectly normal. It happens in corporate structures. You got P&L at the top level, you got P&L at the different organizational structures. So, it's just an accounting problem. Well, with eCash, it's a database, right? It's a database that now gives you a bearer asset, right? The eCash token is a bearer asset. And with Bitcoin mining, every mining share is a shitcoin. It's not Bitcoin, right? It's the original—

Marty Bent [1:43:20] It's an IOU.

Average Gary [1:43:21] It's an IOU, right? So, they're all using databases to track this. All the mining pools are using databases to track your shares. Well, let's just make the database a cashew database and issue you tokens. And now you can take those eHash tokens, and you can go find your liquidity on the market wherever you can find it. And you can realize your hash rate gains or whatever, your liquidity. If I want to speculate, I'll buy all the eHash from you because I think that the pool is going to hit a block.

Marty Bent [1:43:47] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:43:47] And you can do this completely separate from what the pool at the high level is doing. You can just do sub-accounting. And now you have a community, right? Heat punks, right? My local meetup, maybe. We're all heating our houses in the winter. Hey, mine on my pool here. We'll have eHash tokens that we can exchange. And when the payout happens, now there's a definitive value for all these IOUs that we have. And now you can melt them over Lightning, and I pay you for coffee.

Marty Bent [1:44:09] I mean, digital credit's become such a big meme, and I think it's been misapplied in the way that it has. But this is the only form of digital credit that exists, is hash rate shares.

Average Gary [1:44:18] FPPS is the first form of digital credit. That's a— that's important.

Marty Bent [1:44:22] It's an IOU.

Average Gary [1:44:23] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:44:23] It's like you're contributing hash, and you're basically trusting that the pool is going to give you a commensurate amount of Bitcoin once in a while.

Average Gary [1:44:31] And it doesn't work, though, right? Like, the FPPS model, as the block subsidy goes down, the guaranteed Bitcoin payout in each block, as that goes down, you need a proportionally larger bag of Bitcoin to float the bad luck variance, right?

Marty Bent [1:44:43] Yes.

Average Gary ⋮ Because what you're doing as a miner when you go to an FPPS pool, you're saying, hey, I want you to take all the risk of the luck variance of Bitcoin mining, right? Because you might not hit a block, or you might hit 5 blocks, right? So I'm gonna pay you, and there's gonna be some vig there, some like that the pool's gonna take to basically carry that risk. You have the alternative— or not the alternative, but one of the alternatives like PPLNS. That's what Ocean's running with Tides. Demand Pool is doing a version of PPLNS where it's like nobody gets paid unless we find a block, right?

Average Gary ⋮ And Demand is doing this cool thing where they have factored in the subsidy versus the fee. 125 Bitcoin is distributed normally via PPLNS, but the fee is weighted. So, that way, you can construct your own template. And if you want it full of juicy JPEGs, and you got high fees in there, and I want to have pure Bitcoin and nothing in my block because I don't like JPEGs, your economic weight and reward for the mining pool is heavier, so you should be rewarded more, right? Just from pure economics, like leaving out any other moral principles or anything like that, from purely economic standpoints, if your block template is heavier and juicier in sats, you should be rewarded more.

Average Gary ⋮ So, this PPLNSJD that Demand Pool is using accounts for that in their mining share accounting. It says, hey, we're going to pay out when we find a block, but we're going to factor in what your block template looks like, right?

Marty Bent [1:46:08] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:46:09] block with higher fees, you're going to get a heavier weight in this payout mechanism.

Marty Bent [1:46:12] And is that determined by the heaviness of the block versus the expected heaviness of the block, or—

Average Gary [1:46:21] No, it's purely for the heaviness of the block, right? Because in Stratum V2, I'm sort of telling you the block template I'm using.

Marty Bent [1:46:27] Because what I'm trying to get out there was like, what if somebody didn't have the intent to mine a block that wasn't optimized for highest fees, but they just accidentally mined an empty block or something like that. Like, it doesn't— the intent doesn't matter, it's the outcome that matters. Absolutely.

Average Gary [1:46:42] Okay, as it should be, right? Like, it's cool. Like, cool, you're telling me you're mining me a huge juicy block, but it's actually empty. Um, well, that's not fair. And again, like, it's great that people can create their own templates. I'm a huge proponent of that, huge fan. Um, but there is— there's still an economic reality to mining that, like, you want to maximize for And if you're not doing that, if you're opting to do that, you should be rewarded less economically speaking than somebody that is filling their block with fees. Right. And it's— I also think private mempools are coming. So that's a whole nother rabbit hole.

Marty Bent [1:47:14] Elaborate.

Average Gary [1:47:15] Not in the way that a lot of people think and that are scared. Right. I think what you're going to see is—

Marty Bent [1:47:23] So the way they exist now is like Slipstream. Slipstream. Yeah.

Average Gary [1:47:28] Huge example. Right. Like it used to be, you know, the The dude that minted the 4-meg JPEG, the first ever 4-meg JPEG, that was like a Telegram hex transaction in a Telegram message to somebody at a pool. That's historically how it's happened. Private mempools exist. You just contact the miners, you can get your transactions in there.

Marty Bent [1:47:46] So accelerate— ViaBTC has had an accelerator for—

Average Gary [1:47:50] What I think will be realized, because the economic incentives align better, because fees are great, but running the infrastructure for those kinds of things and having to manage it, that's an operational cost. What I think private mempools are going to realize is these microgrids that we talked about. You're going to have communities of people that are balancing their grid with their hash rate. And you and I are doing business in this community. Maybe we've got B2B deals, maybe we just got— I'm just paying you for the beef. I don't want to pay a fee on that transaction. We got 100 petahash, what are we paying a fee for?

Average Gary ⋮ Well, we'll hit a block eventually, And I know you, we have cigars every night, right? Or every week, like, we meet up. It's like the physical meatspace, the proof of punch, to steal a blurb from MVK. The proof of punch means that, like, I'm not here to screw you over, you're not here to screw me over. So, we can actually wait to close our books out, right?

Marty Bent [1:48:41] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:48:41] Like, I don't need to close my books with you, and we can just keep updating this PSBT transaction of, like, okay, well, here, I'm paying you a Bitcoin. Oh, actually, well, like, let me, you know, Let's re-up and like, you're actually going to pay me back, or whatever it is. But like, we don't have to close our books out. And because we're on this microgrid in our community at this Bitcoin meetup, we can actually have our own private mempool where we have zero-fee transaction clearing anytime we hit a block.

Marty Bent [1:49:05] This is like a new payment channel?

Average Gary [1:49:07] It could be. Like, absolutely. Like, you want to—

Marty Bent [1:49:10] I'm thinking like, naturally, I'm like, why not just use Lightning or something like that?

Average Gary [1:49:13] Do you want to splice? Do you want to use the juicy Omega splice that Dusty was just talking about recently? Why do you want to pay a fee on that? You can pay a fee to these mega miners, or you can build your own block template and hash with your own hash rate in your community. And again, if you know that you have an exahash in your community, that you're going to hit a block eventually in the next quarter, we can just keep a running mempool of private zero-fee transactions. We don't even need to make it private. The relay will just— people will just not pick up our zero-fee transactions, but we can make sure that the node that we're using to build our templates— Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:49:45] Includes those transactions.

Average Gary [1:49:46] Always prioritize our transactions within the community and clears at zero fee, because we are already incurring the cost of running the hash rate to pay for that transaction.

Marty Bent [1:49:53] And you're saving on the transaction. I'm trying to think of the incentives, the economic incentive. Could this weaken—

Average Gary [1:50:01] Well, I know you're not a believer in the full blocks, right? You always take the other side of that bet.

Marty Bent [1:50:05] I think mempools will always clear eventually, is my take.

Average Gary [1:50:10] Exactly, right? But when they stop clearing, because I think that like eventually we're gonna get to the point, I think they will stop clearing.

Marty Bent [1:50:15] Will they? Evidence?

Average Gary [1:50:15] They're gonna be all zero-fee transactions in these mining pool communities. They're gonna be micro-grade zero-fee transactions with fat juicy blocks of zero-fee transactions because we're already incurring the cost by mining.

Marty Bent [1:50:28] And so like again, like it's the first time I'm hearing this.

Average Gary [1:50:33] Yeah, yeah, yeah, this— I didn't drop this one because I like Because I'm thinking like, uh, it doesn't—

Marty Bent [1:50:40] like, so in that case, it wouldn't perturb the mining incentives because like if you find the block, the, the pool that mines the block, because the miners within that pool are worried about the revenue from that block. But in this use case that you're describing, even if there's zero fees, like you're basically reaping the rewards of the fee outside of the blockchain via the peer-to-peer.

Average Gary [1:51:02] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:51:02] meatspace transaction that you're doing. So you don't care about the profitability of the block that you mined.

Average Gary [1:51:07] The profitability— the profitable miners, the ROI miners, they're not going to pick up our transactions. But again, hash rate heating—

Marty Bent [1:51:13] And if they do, it's like, all right, cool.

Average Gary [1:51:15] Exactly. Yeah, pick it up, please, because the mempool is clearing. But otherwise, you have a strong Bitcoin circular economy that's all heating their basements or their houses or their businesses or their churches or whatever it is with Hash rate, that's enough hash rate to hit a block once a month. You want to clear your books once a month for free? Come, you know, participate. Point your hash rate here. And you can still point your hash rate to these bigger pools, right? Like I said, demand pool will pay you based on the fee rate. So you're going to be economically rewarded accordingly. But there's nothing wrong with you— like, we don't care about the fees, right? Because we're just— we're mining for heat. We're mining for the heats.

Marty Bent [1:51:51] Yeah, this is fascinating stuff.

Average Gary [1:51:54] off.

Marty Bent [1:51:54] Mempools will always clear eventually. I'll just—

Average Gary [1:51:58] I don't doubt you anymore.

Marty Bent [1:52:01] Well, the, uh, like that— what you just discussed, what you just explained, excuse me, we should want that. And there's like a where we are and how to get there. And bring it back to like vibe coding, like I think the sci-fi future that we envision, like that's what like I've been getting accused, and many Bitcoiners have been getting accused those of us who have fell down the AI rabbit hole very hard of like, oh, you're like distracted from Bitcoin. Like, don't— like, what are you doing? It's like, no, like, I'm trying to learn these tools and master them to the degree that I can.

Average Gary [1:52:36] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:52:36] So they can help steward Bitcoin. I participate in 5th generation warfare. I'm a propaganda arm for the Bitcoin.

Average Gary [1:52:42] Thank you for your service.

Marty Bent [1:52:43] You're welcome. Thank you for your service. Uh, the— like, and Just like working with the LLMs for media, it's becoming obvious to me we're going to be able to vibe code these use cases. Yes, people say don't vibe code critical Bitcoin wallet software yet. I'll go out on a limb and say we're probably going to get to a point in the next few years where you could probably do that safely.

Average Gary [1:53:07] Well, you'll have a well-reviewed core.

Marty Bent [1:53:10] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:53:10] Right? You still want well-reviewed fundamental foundational software. Right.

Marty Bent [1:53:16] But who's to say you can't train a model based off of that fundamental core and have it narrowly focused on that fundamental core and build off that? We're becoming projectionists. And so what you just described, when it comes to Bitcoiners focused on AI, it's like, that's what I think your focus should be, is how can you master these tools to the extent that you can project to the LLM to build these use cases.

Average Gary [1:53:41] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:53:42] Very easily, if that makes sense.

Average Gary [1:53:45] I mean, that— you're describing my day job, right? It's like, um, I wasn't great. I was very average. Average Gary online, avg_gary on Twitter, Average Gary on Nostr. Um, very average at software, right? Uh, but with an LLM, I know good software versus bad software. I've read enough and I've debugged enough and I've through the pain of like learning enough that's like the LLM is now rapidly iterating faster than I ever could, right? Because I just don't have that foundational knowledge people pick up in like CS degrees and stuff of like, oh, you know, just spitting out code, right? Like the boilerplate, like the slog of just like typing it all out.

Average Gary ⋮ Like I just didn't have that muscle memory. So with AI and with LLMs now, because I know enough to be able to articulate with a good context of like what I want or what I desire from— for the outcome, and I know how to validate the outcome, right? That's a big piece, I think, in engineering and coding is like having designing and projecting something that you can validate, and then having— making sure that those— that validation is the piece that you pay the most attention to, right? So again, like with Bitcoin, the validation is spin up a regtest node and like send a transaction, right?

Marty Bent [1:54:57] Mm-hmm.

Average Gary [1:54:57] And like, does it work or does it not work? And you can get to the point now where you can iterate on it.

Marty Bent [1:55:02] Send that transaction, then on top of that, in parallel, run a fuzz test to see where this vibe could get fucked up. Yep.

Average Gary [1:55:10] Yeah, it's, you know, you've got a swarm of super intelligent interns that will do your bidding, and if you're not clear and concise in your meeting, in the meaning of what you want, like, they're gonna screw it up. But that's where the other side comes in, is like, you have a robust research And, you know, Socratic dialogue tool to go, hey, I don't know what you're talking about here. Can you tell me more about that? Right? And it can break it down and explain to you and give you links to resources on like, go learn about what this means.

Marty Bent [1:55:38] Hey, go to the Bitcoin Stack Exchange and go read the whole corpus of that sort of sub-forum on Stack Exchange and see if somebody there answered this question years ago.

Average Gary [1:55:50] Yep, totally.

Marty Bent [1:55:51] Yeah. 2 minutes later, like, oh yeah, somebody did, like, in November.

Average Gary [1:55:55] Distill that knowledge for me. Explain it to me like I'm 5.

Marty Bent [1:55:57] Yeah.

Average Gary [1:55:57] And it will, it will do this, right?

Marty Bent [1:55:59] Well, this was true back in 2016, but like, can you go do some further research on all the development progression that's happened and make sure that that's not stale data? Like, just knowing— again, I, that was the conversation earlier, in the world of AI, like, what are the critical skills that people are going to need? And it's like first principles thinking.

Average Gary [1:56:19] Well, it's the rise of the generalists, right? It's the Renaissance man now that becomes hybrid. And that was— there's a whole— I think Mike Hobart wrote a book called like The Second Renaissance or whatever, talking about how Bitcoin is going to bring back like this renaissance of art and science and math and engineering and all this good stuff because we have hard sound money again. And AI is only going to further exacerbate this because you don't have to be an expert in everything because you have this tool that can make you expert in the very specific niche domain that you need to be in at that given point in time.

Average Gary ⋮ And you can use it and leverage the tool and grok and understand very in that moment in time and then move on to the next thing, right? And you just have to be just the, the intelligence becomes the discernment and the, the articulation of where you're going. Like you were talking about the projection, it becomes what, what am I trying to accomplish here? What problem am I trying to solve? What are, you know, and, and figuring out the edge cases or the who has solved it already or anything like that is like, put the clanker on it, man. Go out, touch grass, plant your corn, grow your field, come back.

Average Gary ⋮ And then like, you know, I wanna learn, you know, ancient Greek. So it's like I've got an agent loop, like figuring out what, what is the pedagogy of like learning a language, which I have some experience with that, but not for this specific one. So it's like I can go and tell Claude, hey man, I wanna learn ancient Greek. Like, how should I do that?

Marty Bent [1:57:36] Mm-hmm. Right.

Average Gary [1:57:37] I could have sat down and gone through the slog of like watching YouTube and learning blog posts and like all these other things to go learn that and contextualize it. Or you let somebody synthesize and distill it, which I don't think— like, there's the danger of like outsourcing, um, the way that you think. But if you know concretely what you're after, AI is going to go get it for you.

Marty Bent [1:57:58] Well, that's, that's like one of my biggest pieces of advice is advice to people venturing into AI is like, be very cautious of asking advice of the LLM. The way I use it is like, I know what the output should be.

Average Gary [1:58:13] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:58:13] And I'm using it to help me get that output.

Average Gary [1:58:16] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:58:16] And I think that's the most effective way to use these tools, these tools at the current state that they're in. Who's not to say, like, maybe in the future they will be very good at giving you 100% accurate responses.

Average Gary [1:58:29] They have—

Marty Bent [1:58:30] the hallucination has gotten significantly better over the last year alone. It's not perfect, but like when I write, I pair write the, the bent with Martin, our agent.

Average Gary [1:58:39] Yep.

Marty Bent [1:58:40] And I know what the output is. I know what I want to present in the newsletter. And if he gets something wrong, I'm like, no, you fucked this up. Like, right, but like I pulled this up, like again, it's a week of sowing seeds. Like I was telling you, like the, the homily in the gospel from Mass this week It's really stuck with me and come back. And subconsciously, I didn't realize it till like we're having this con— I, I, as you may know if you listen to RHR, I become a homeowner for the first time.

Average Gary [1:59:03] Congrats.

Marty Bent [1:59:04] Thank you.

Average Gary [1:59:04] Condolences.

Marty Bent [1:59:05] Thank you. The, uh, well, we just did our like big landscaping overhaul for the first time. We've been in the house for like 3 months and we did it last week. And subconsciously, maybe, I don't know if subconsciously, it wasn't subconsciously, consciously I've been going out and like watering. Yep. Like, and like But I pulled that up because I have like my headphones and I have my phone. I have the hose in one hand. I'm like just talking to Martin in the other, like, okay, we need to get this done, like run this process.

Average Gary [1:59:28] It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, you know, um, it's biblical to work the garden. That was before the fall of man that we were given work to enjoy in the garden. Um, and, uh, I, I have definitely enjoyed getting this done and being able, like, having more of my time to, to pursue that. Uh, if you haven't yet, I recommend planting a tree for each of your children.

Marty Bent [1:59:47] Right.

Average Gary [1:59:48] And, uh, and you might not see it ever shade you or your kids, but your grandkids will sure be happy that they're there.

Marty Bent [1:59:54] Yeah, we, uh, we actually have to— one of the trees on our property is dead, so we have to cut that down. So we're gonna have to plant a tree. I've got 3. I gotta figure out where we can plant 3 trees on the property. We have a massive ginkgo tree in our backyard.

Average Gary [2:00:07] Oh, that's awesome.

Marty Bent [2:00:08] It's so awesome. It's— I've become such—

Average Gary [2:00:10] You're crunchy now.

Marty Bent [2:00:13] Um, not even crunchy. I'm just like a homeowner now. I'm like, oh, I gotta like tend to my land. Like, previously I've been a renter.

Average Gary [2:00:18] Welcome to middle age.

Marty Bent [2:00:19] I'm like, I'm out there like in my shorts and flip-flops like watering the hydrangeas and like enjoying the birds.

Average Gary [2:00:27] And you walk by, you're like in the mulch, you're like, there's this weed popping up and just infuriates you.

Marty Bent [2:00:32] Oh dude, we have bamboo in our backyard too, which is— Good luck.

Average Gary [2:00:35] Yeah, good luck.

Marty Bent [2:00:37] This has been awesome.

Average Gary [2:00:37] I agree. Thank you, Marty.

Marty Bent [2:00:39] Thank you. Well, before we end, tying this all back to Bitcoin veterans, and maybe not speaking on behalf of all veterans, but I think for any— or maybe speaking to veterans that are out there, maybe Bitcoin curious, what is your pitch to them?

Average Gary [2:00:54] Go talk to your brothers that are already in the space. I guarantee you there's some Bitcoiner that you know that's a veteran that maybe from your unit. If you got sucked into all these crypto scams, I'm sorry if you got sucked into that. I actually was talking to a veteran guy this morning. He's gonna power wash the house for me. And I was like, hey, can I pay you in Bitcoin? And he's like, oh no, I got this other shitcoin thing. I was like, all right, man. But he wants to sit down and talk, right? So reach out. People respect your own privacy, of course, but I think it's never been a better time to come out as a Bitcoiner, especially if you're a veteran, to just go and talk to other people in your life, other veterans, to be like, hey, man, this Bitcoin thing has been super helpful for me.

Average Gary ⋮ Maybe they've seen that you're winning, and maybe they feel like they're not. If nothing else, you can say, hey, here's a leg up. This has worked for me. If they're drowning in sorrows and troubles, finding a community and a purpose again, is huge. So if nothing else, reach out. If you're a Bitcoiner, and you're a veteran listening to this right now, or you're just a veteran, reach out to those you've served with, those that you know might be fighting the demons that we all came home with to varying degrees. And yeah, give it a second chance. If you've encountered Bitcoin in the past, and you're like, no, that's dark web drug money, or it's a huge scam, it's not.

Average Gary ⋮ We're winning and you can win with us if you want.

Marty Bent [2:02:27] We're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating, On the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay.