Transcript: Parker Lewis: The Long End of the Curve Is Breaking

Full speaker-labelled transcript of TFTC episode #803 with Parker Lewis.

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Transcript: Parker Lewis: The Long End of the Curve Is Breaking
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Full speaker-labelled transcript of TFTC episode #803 with Parker Lewis. Read the written article: Parker Lewis: The Long End of the Curve Is Breaking. Click any timestamp to watch that moment on YouTube. Machine transcription, lightly cleaned, may contain errors.

Marty Bent [0:36] We don't we don't have to slap anymore. We're not we're not in the studio. I miss the studio.

Parker Lewis [0:40] We do it for fun though.

Marty Bent [0:42] We do. It's

Parker Lewis [0:43] good vibes.

Marty Bent [0:44] How is Austin?

Parker Lewis [0:46] Austin's good. You know the the Bitcoin vibe is has died down. You know it's like. The vibe. 2021 was a vibe. Having you, you know, no longer here, there's been some energy dissipating. But but there's still just a ton of Bitcoiners around. So it's just like less than less of a meetup scene, less of you know Oz Bit Devs, but still a bunch of people around. So I see everybody and was at the gym with Jimmy and Sile this morning. You know, we're going over to Jimmy's for a barbecue tomorrow. So. The vibes are good, just it's a different vibe getting back to basics, you know. Before, before the meetups in Austin, it was, it was steaks at, uh, bring your own steaks at Will Cole's house. So we're just getting back to that.

Marty Bent [1:31] Yeah, I had somebody, uh, reminiscing about the other beef, the mini beefsteak we threw in my backyard when I was down there.

Parker Lewis [1:37] Oh, remember, it was after, um, after the takeover. I think it was after the first takeover. That was the time. That was 2020. early 2022, so I was still in that vibe. Um,

Marty Bent [1:51] but it was a great vibe, great vibe. But we're getting back to basics today.

Parker Lewis [1:54] I think we've got flying cars now. I don't know if you've showed that off in Austin, but there's a lot going on here.

Marty Bent [2:00] Yeah, it was definitely in Texas somewhere, I would imagine. I would hope. You can probably— yeah, I would imagine there. We're gonna get back to basics, back to first principles. I think, uh, Throughout the years, you've been a grounding force on the show. And for those of you new to the show, I know there's tens of thousands of you, this is Parker Lewis.

Parker Lewis [2:18] Good to be back on, Marty.

Marty Bent [2:21] Author of Gradually, Then Suddenly.

Parker Lewis [2:24] If you found yourself buying a Bitcoin treasury company, go to thenakamotoinstitute.org. You can read it there for free.

Marty Bent [2:33] Yeah. Treasury. You've been on the treasury company tilt. Do you think— talking about getting back to first principles, do you think priorities have been, uh, been dissipated or, uh, diluted in the Bitcoin space?

Parker Lewis [2:47] You know, I, I think that it's, you know, some of it's that it's also tiresome. Like, there's always going to be some next thing, and then those people will figure it out. And can't ever predict what the next thing is that, that distracts people or gets them off the just stay humble and stack sats, but something always does. There's always some next iteration that you couldn't predict. And so yeah, I think this is just an evolution of that. And so yeah, I do think that those— it's like the saying of everybody gets Bitcoin at the price that they deserve. Well, that also applies to Bitcoin Treasury Company shareholders. Yeah, unfortunately. But, um, but it will be a learning moment for everybody, and then, you know, people will move forward stronger.

Marty Bent [3:43] Yeah, speaking of moving forward stronger, seems like there's a crisis of confidence in parts of, uh, the industry, or parts of the holder base, if you will, with the Coldcard hacks last week, the, uh, the Ledger supply chain attacks, um And I wanted to bring you on. I know we talked on the phone about 30 minutes earlier this week, but again, I think you're a steadfast, stern voice in the space. Why right now, considering everything going on in the world? You've got the hacks of ColdCard, of Ledger. You've got treasury company stocks taking a lot of attention away from UTXOs. You've got ETFs, you've got AI. Yeah. having sucked the capital out of every other asset class for the last 18 months, why is it important to still have Bitcoin on the mind or to be stacking Bitcoin? Have you lost it? Do you have a crisis of confidence in Bitcoin, number one? And if not, why not?

Parker Lewis [4:48] No, no crisis of confidence. What I can say is 2 things. It's clear to me, or one thing that I've observed is that at least in my time in Bitcoin, that sentiment has never been worse. I don't know if it was you who put something out, but there's a reality that this is probably the tamest bear market that's ever happened in terms of the drawdown. But the reality of just in the Bitcoin industry or amongst Bitcoiners, from my own personal observation, it's the worst that sentiment's ever been. I am not negative. I think that the setup is as good as it's ever been. The fundamentals are as strong as they've ever been, but it's just reality.

Parker Lewis And I think that it's kind of a signal for the light at the end of the tunnel. It's like when sentiment is worse. I personally believe that it's a function of 2 things, one being that there has not been an adoption wave since 2020 and 2021. That, in my view— and when I say that, I'm talking about being at the meetup scenes, going to conferences. There was not a wave of new people that became excited about Bitcoin. There's ones and twos trickling in, but not a decided wave like what happened in 2017, 2020, 2021. And there hasn't been this. So there's a lot of fatigue because there has not been new energy that's come in.

Parker Lewis And I also think that that sets up for when it does happen, it's going to be large and significant. But when you don't have— and the way that I— there was a bull market in 2024 and 2025, but there was not an adoption wave. And a lot of what drove that price rise in 2024 and 2025 was what I would call low conviction, small exposure institutional flows that came with the ETF. I do not— I think if anybody objectively looks at the Bitcoin treasury companies, they're not driving institutional adoption by any means. They're not driving adoption at all. If anything, they're cannibalizing adoption, and they're confusing people about Bitcoin that would be adopting Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis It's like, you know, it's missing the boat in a big way, in my opinion. But that's what you do when you're, when you're so focused singularly on number go up and not focusing on what causes number to go up, more people understanding Bitcoin as money. But regardless of the explanation for it, it's just that there has not been an adoption wave, and that when you have the same group of people talking about the same things and the same ideas, and they don't see that affirmation of new energy coming in, number going up really, that would come with an adoption wave. And that's another thing relative to these Treasury companies is when there is an adoption wave, and I think the sign of the next bull market will be when the Treasury companies are trading at significant discounts to net asset values, because when there is an adoption wave of Bitcoin, the people who figured out the signal, what are they going to buy, Bitcoin or stock in a corporation that owns Bitcoin?

Parker Lewis It's almost definitional to an adoption wave. But I think that that's what's caused a lot of fatigue. There also is a function of it that the treasury companies are what I call cannibalizing demand for Bitcoin rather than unlocking adoption. That's having an effect on Bitcoin companies. Add that all together, and you have really negative sentiment. I think I might have mentioned this to you, but I went and gave 2 talks in Fort Worth about a month ago, right after Labor Day. And when I signed up to do it, I was expecting there'd be one talk, and I would've called success 40 people for a Wednesday afternoon talk about Bitcoin 101.

Parker Lewis There ended up being 2 different events, one at lunch, one happy hour. And for one, there were 80 to 90 people there, and the other, there were 60 to 70 people. And I knew virtually none of them. 10% of the people were people that I recognized, 90% were people that were new. And so, the signal that I got from that, and I have other data points, anecdotes to say the same, is that sentiment is worse than it's ever been within the Bitcoin community, but outside, people are paying attention. And the things that I would attribute to people paying attention is the fact that inflation is still high, interest rates are rising, people are looking around recognizing that things are broken, and here Bitcoin is hanging out at $80,000 or wherever it is today.

Parker Lewis It was right after Bitcoin popped back up, because the signal that the market gets when Bitcoin starts going back up is that it didn't die. That's the greatest signal, because when Bitcoin starts to crash, for people that didn't actually move in, it affirms, I made the right decision not buying, but then when it finds a base and starts going higher, then the doubt starts to creep in. Hey, this thing just never goes away. Maybe I wasn't right after all. 6%, that the long end of the curve is getting out of control. And it's not just high, it's also particularly volatile. So, it's going to be clear that they're going to need to print money.

Parker Lewis I don't know if it's the housing market that breaks or some other credit market, potentially corporate credit. Something's going to break, and then that's going to usher in the next wave of money printing, and that's going to be the unlock likely in my mind for— it's why Bitcoin's always existed. The problems haven't gone away. Bitcoin's as fundamentally sound as it's ever been. Square released Bitcoin payments, has been rolling it out over the last 12 months. And that extremely high signal has gotten drowned out by, you know, all the noise of the fight over OperTurn or BIP-110, the Bitcoin treasury companies, the degeneracy there, the ColdCard hack or I don't know if you call it— yeah, I guess.

Parker Lewis Attribute bug. Attribute bug, vulnerability, supply chain attack with Ledger. All those things add up, but Bitcoin's solving the exact same problem in both of those cases for Coldcard and Ledger. As devastating it is for the people that were directly impacted, it's also Bitcoin working. There's no moral hazard. There are no bailouts. There was also an exchange that was hacked, an exchange that I never heard of that lost more money than the ColdCard incident and Ledger combined. But again, it's also Bitcoin working there. That firm and whoever trusted that firm, they weren't bailed out. I don't know how much actual Bitcoin there was there, but loss of funds.

Parker Lewis So the fundamentals I look at is that the debt problem is larger than ever. The interest rates at the long end of the Treasury curve are demonstrating that the system can't bear higher rates. The credit markets are on the path to breaking. And Bitcoin is sitting at an exahash of hash rate, or 1,000 exahashes of hash rate, whatever you call that. A zetahash. A zetahash. We're going to have to start normalizing that term. And the world needs sound money now as much as it ever did. So I can accept and recognize that yes, the sentiment is as negative as it's ever been. Mine personally is not, and that's what allows us to just keep our head down and stay focused and work on Bitcoin payments and ride out the storm.

Marty Bent [13:33] Yeah. I tweeted it out earlier from the TFTC account. We had a 6% difficulty adjustment upwards today. Difficulty and hash rate, highest they've been since March of this year.

Parker Lewis [13:45] Where do you think that's coming from?

Marty Bent [13:50] I would not be shocked if it's a switch out of higher efficiency miners. And I can speak, and this is public, I can speak from experience at Dark Horse that we had a deal with Bitdeer that we signed earlier this year, and they put in new machines that are extremely efficient and powerful. So I don't know if it's net new. miners per se. I think it's miners that are already plugged in, just refreshing their fleets with higher efficiency miners is what I would say. And then on top of that, obviously, summer demand response programs are probably cooling down as the weather gets more temperate.

Parker Lewis [14:30] Yeah. There's just a lot of those large public miners that are in the process of pulling out a lot of hash rate permanently. So it's just interesting to see that bump in hash rate.

Marty Bent [14:41] Yeah, we'll get back to mining because this is a lot of what we talked about earlier this week, and I definitely want to touch on that, the dynamic between the mega miners transitioning away from mining towards AI compute. But first, I'm really interested, Fort Worth, was it Bitcoin in One Lesson? Did you give that again?

Parker Lewis [15:00] Yeah, I gave 2 different Bitcoin in One Lessons.

Marty Bent [15:02] Any unique questions, new questions, or is it the same old questions?

Parker Lewis [15:09] Um, um, I— let me— I think— let me think about it. It was mostly the same questions, you know, and I say that because on the path to Bitcoin, the questions are both very logical and they're generally all the same, you know, where it's, you know, there were questions about, uh, quantum computing, there were questions about Hey, if this is what you say it is, why would the government ever allow that? Where do you see the risks? Yeah, how do you think about the volatility? So it's like, there were probably 1 or 2 questions that were not standard, but In both of the rooms, the Q&A lasts for 30 to 45 minutes, which I always view as like, you know, if it's the middle of the day, people are coming from work again.

Parker Lewis And this is, this is a day right after Labor Day where people are kind of getting re-engaged in their businesses. And so I think that, that, that was also noteworthy to me. It's like, hey, you come and spend 2 hours and then hit when the presentation's over, that just question after question after question just kept Rolling through. Um, so, but, but they were all, I'd say, fairly logical and standard. And the bigger takeaway for me was that everyone, like, when I was looking around the room, people were locked in. You know, I was talking about, um, the problems with the dollar. One of the things that I had in this presentation that I always try to make something timely or topical so that it's not just, you know, stale, but About 6 months ago, I know that you would have seen this as a hawk, when Hank Paulson came out and talked about needing a break-the-glass plan, and showing the room the movement in interest rates and pairing it with actual quotes from him talking about the need for it, that it's inevitable, like when we hit the wall, when we hit the wall, he's not talking about it.

Parker Lewis in if we hit the wall, that it is talked about in, in terms of certainty, um, that it's inevitable. Um, and he's basically talking about what, what Hank Paulson, the guy who was running the Treasury at the time of the Great Financial Crisis and helped engineer the bailout of the banks alongside Congress and the Fed— when he's talking about like, we need to break the glass pan, it's like, hey, when we print money And it doesn't work, or when rates get out of control and we print money to control them and it doesn't work, what do we do? We need to break the glass plant.

Parker Lewis And that then 4 or 5, 6 months later, and these presentations that I did were just a few weeks after Bessent talked about repurchasing more at the long end of the curve than they had previously. It's like the only institution that can really control interest rates is the Federal Reserve. The Treasury, the United States government is $40 trillion in debt. So you talk— like Bessett was talking about his Treasury General Account. Well, you've borrowed the money that's sitting in the Treasury General Account. And so all you're doing is going into more debt to buy the long end. And for, you know, $2 billion or $4 billion on $40 trillion is, um, you know, whatever that's saying about, you know, an ant in a— yeah.

Parker Lewis And whatever— I don't know what that saying is, but it's like you're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller or something, you know. It's like one of those two sayings of like you're not moving the needle, you're just shifting, you know, food around the table and claiming that you ate. Um, you still have a debt problem and The only way to functionally solve it, it's a math problem. You can't grow your way out of it, you have to print money. And that's what everyone's figuring out, the long end of the Treasury curve is uninvestable. But when I was talking about those people, and I talked about the inevitability of hyperinflation, people were both locked in and didn't flinch, that they were receptive of the message.

Parker Lewis I don't talk about it. I mentioned it in the room, and I don't talk about hyperinflation. to get a kick. It's uncomfortable. 5 to $4 trillion after the Great Financial Crisis, that's the inevitable consequence, and people have to prepare for it. When I was sharing that message in the context of Bitcoin, the room was locked in. They weren't spooked by it. These are people that run their own businesses. You know, small business owner types. Um, so that, that's what my takeaway was.

Marty Bent [20:13] They were small business owners, so it wasn't like Fort Worth institutional capital?

Parker Lewis [20:19] I mean, like, well, I would say, you know, small business owners are typically the most wealthy of them all. You know, it's like people that, that have their own money and, um, you know, oil and gas industry people, family offices, that type. People that run and manage their own wealth.

Marty Bent [20:45] Yeah. And I think I completely agree with everything. My conviction's never been stronger. And you were right, it was I that tweeted out, it was I. It was I. The dislocation between sentiment and market structure has never been Never been wider. And I will say, 2015, people legitimately thought Bitcoin was going to die. I think this is the worst sentiment since 2015.

Parker Lewis [21:12] And I wasn't involved in 2015, so that's why I wouldn't have been around to see it. So in my mind, because I really went down the rabbit hole in 2016 and it was like part of that 2017 wave, That since then, it's clearly the worst. It's worse than when Bitcoin crashed from $8,000 to $4,000 in a single day by far.

Marty Bent [21:35] Oh, easily by far. Because you knew there was like this imminent money printing coming after that, um, and there was an easy thing to point to, like BitMEX and everybody being levered, levered long.

Parker Lewis [21:50] I mean,

Marty Bent [21:51] but,

Parker Lewis but also, this is what I think it is, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, but like I've had people text me who got involved in Bitcoin in 2021 that have such fatigue that are like, I would have made more money in the S&P, saying things like that. And so it's like, well, so if you think about someone who was in that adoption wave in 2021 and they bought Bitcoin, Let's say it's $60K or $65K or $69K, wherever towards the top, that there hasn't been an adoption wave since. And Bitcoin at $80,000 going down to $16,000 and back up and sitting at $80,000, if you zoom out and you're like, hey, well, in 2020, it was at $8,000 and then crashed to $4,000, zoom out, you're doing— this is working exactly as intended.

Parker Lewis But if you were somebody that wasn't at the last adoption wave, you're not feeling— and when I say feeling the gains, it's like that's where the fatigue comes from, the lack of an adoption wave. And tell me if you think wrong, was there an adoption wave in 2024 and 2025? Not from my vantage point, but I'm curious yours. So if you're in that world where you're not really, quote, up a lot, but you've felt you've had to ride all the way down to $16K. Now it's 5 years later and there's no new energy coming behind you to affirm, ah, you were right about Bitcoin. That's the source in my mind of why sentiment within the Bitcoin community is as bad as it is.

Marty Bent [23:39] You wouldn't consider ETFs adoption? I guess that was like—

Parker Lewis [23:43] I don't consider it an adoption wave. What I mean by that is there was not a new wave of people that had an unlock of Bitcoin making sense. I've met ones and twos that have stumbled down the rabbit hole, not a wave, not a 5x, 10x crowd where a lot of people that you will have met over the last 5 years, they figured out Bitcoin in 2020 or 2021.

Marty Bent [24:15] I agree.

Parker Lewis [24:16] There wasn't an unlock. It wasn't something that unlocked in 2024, '25. An example of a low allocation, low conviction position is like the Wisconsin Pension Board. I think that it's Wisconsin Pension, where they bought $160 million worth of Bitcoin, which is a lot of money, but it only was a 0.1% position, and then they sold in 2025 rebalance. They sold like 90% of it or something. So it's like, was that Bitcoin adoption? It was

Marty Bent [24:50] a trade. It was a trade.

Parker Lewis [24:51] It was a trade. So low conviction, small positions are what drove the price up, not a new wave of people really figuring out the signal behind Bitcoin. And all I'm saying is that that is what I attribute that Now going on 5 to 6 year gap of not a new wave of people figuring out, which would be new energy coming into events, conferences, Bitcoin companies, um, at the same time where, you know, quote, the price didn't go at, you know, many multiples higher. Like, it all, it all leads together. But from my vantage point, Again, I don't over-index to the events that I hosted in Fort Worth.

Parker Lewis It's just looking at the market setup that the sentiment isn't nearly as bad outside of Bitcoin. People might be focused elsewhere, they might be focused on AI, but they're not just down and out. And people are paying attention and the interest rate environment is setting up for something to break critically in the money printing. And so it's just like everybody has to stay focused.

Marty Bent [26:07] Yeah. I mean, it's like I pulled up that Wall Street Journal headline from October 1st, so the beginning of this month, like 2 weeks ago, Trump says inflation could pay down the debt very rapidly. It's like they're prepping the narrative skis. Right.

Parker Lewis [26:22] And that's one thing I always like to— it's the Wizard of Oz, like the emperor has no clothes. You're basically saying the only way to get out is, quote, inflation. Well, the only real way to get out is money printing. That's the source of inflation. And it's the only way to create pressure on the long end of the Treasury curve. What's the 30-year at today?

Marty Bent [26:55] Let me, uh, your US is at 544.

Parker Lewis [27:07] I think it went as high as 566 or 570, something like that. Um, yeah, also like because it's like it's come in, right? But, but also the volatility is also problematic. 6 trillion over the course of Immediately in 2008, but then over the course of 2009, 2014 as well, that there was $52 trillion in debt at that time, and there was only $900 billion that existed. And of those $900 billion, the banks only had $350 billion. And that imbalance between debt and dollars was the source of fragility. Well, that $52 trillion in 2008, 7, 8 is now $107 trillion. 7 trillion approximately. But now, so it's like the credit system is larger by in excess of 2 times.

Parker Lewis They've increased the money supply by 6 to 7 times. They increased it up to 9 and then started subtracting out. But each time they subtract money out of the system, it functionally releverages the system. And there's 2 ways to deal with the debt crisis. It's one, to let the bad debts go away. The other way, if you can print money, is to print money. 4% because virtually all corporate credit is priced off the 10-year, some the 5-year, but then the 30-year mortgage is priced off the 30-year. And you have that debt stack. It's like if we were in 2008 with a credit system that was unstable and unsustainable, it's now 2 times as large.

Parker Lewis The sins of the past and the Great Financial Crisis never went away. They're still sitting in the credit system today. And as those rates go up, it starves That market. Anybody who needs to refinance is just getting destroyed. I saw, you know, it's probably a separate issue, but the AI craze, there was a company that was founded earlier this year and JP Morgan issued them a $5 billion loan at 11% interest. You know, like that's the type of crazy town we're living in. And that's also a function of where rates are. So it's just, it's, yeah. The credit market is in the process of breaking.

Parker Lewis What actually caused it to go from breaking to all-out pandemonium, anybody knows? I just look at it as inevitable.

Marty Bent [30:16] Yeah. I flashed up that high yield—

Parker Lewis [30:19] Yeah. That's one of the things that I look at. It's like that market will get super illiquid really quickly. And when it does, that HYG will start taking a nosedive. Pull it back up, can you? Boom. Go show the 5-year and then show the max now. So it's like you look at this event back, like financial crisis, you know, going from 100 down to 60, and then you see in 2020 that like 90 going down to 70, there's like slapdowns. That, that'll be what we're looking for when things really break. Less of the intermittent kind of— it's like absolute— because functionally, what happens is those credits become no bid.

Parker Lewis The underlying credits are people need to source liquidity in a financial crisis. No one bids them. And if you want to get any liquidity, you have to start pricing bonds down 10%. if you're going to get a bid at any volume. And similar things happen to the investment— that's high yield. Similar things happen to investment grade. And so I think I'll be looking for that to happen again. And when it's—

Marty Bent [31:41] If you look at— I mean, let me pull it up again because if you look at it, it looks like— I mean, this is caveman TA just looking at it, but you go on Max and you look at this consolidation, the dump, We've had—

Parker Lewis [31:53] Well, that crash right there, that was 2020. That was March 12th, 2020. Yeah. But also, a $1.6 trillion bond market, that going from 90 to 70 virtually overnight, what it is is absolute zero liquidity. And when rates are high, if you think about the 30-year at 5.4%, everything that's long-dated trading off that, or the 10-year. The 5-year is at 5.05% or wherever it is. And so they're all above 5%. Everything trades off of this. So that's why when people are looking at Oracle bonds, but any credit in the market is having to refinance at massively higher rates than whatever they were taken out at. And then it destroys the economics of the underlying business. The 30-year mortgage is something like 7.6%. So Nobody can afford that at the price levels. What does that cause? It causes asset values to crash. And then when asset values crash, that's the financial crisis.

Marty Bent [33:02] Yeah.

Parker Lewis [33:04] I say all that not to be a doomer. I say it to say it's like, hey, when you ask me about the signal of Bitcoin, the signal is the same. We're not getting out of this problem until people figure out that they have to opt out of this debt system where they print a bunch of money, And into sound money and into the money that can't be printed.

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Marty Bent Do you think the narrative's getting stale? Is it getting diluted? Do we need to rejigger how we position Bitcoin to people, or is it just they'll get it when they get it?

Parker Lewis [36:07] I think they'll get it when they get it. The signal is the signal that I look at as like there's truth and objectivity in the world. There's also high time preference in the world. That's what I attribute the Bitcoin treasury companies to be, that it's a function of— imagine you figure out what Bitcoin is. Most people that are buying them really haven't, or if they have, they've just become they've lost track. I'm not saying 100% of people don't get it, but a lot of them, a lot of the people that are there have no real concept of the fundamental signal of Bitcoin. But those that are there that have lost track of the real signal, it's like, if the prices of Bitcoin is not going up higher or as fast as you want it to, Then the the solution is more people understanding Bitcoin as money, not kind of shifting narratives to Bitcoin being capital, which then makes it more confusing for people to understand Bitcoin and to you know essentially get drunk behind the wheel and just you know start oh let me let me I feel late or I want to catch up let me give my money to this corporation to buy Bitcoin, and I'll buy their stock at a premium, because I want more Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis I think leverage plus price number go up means more Bitcoin, but I have no concept of actually having to price a public company stock, and so I'm going to YOLO it. That's what's happening. I think that the high time preferences, Bitcoin's not going up as fast as I want it to on the time horizon that I want, to the level that I want, to the time horizon. Well, sorry, like the path is on them understanding, more people understanding Bitcoin, and the macro environment plays into that. Like rates going from the zero, like from 2009 when Bitcoin was created till 2022, interest rates were zero functionally.

Parker Lewis And then they decided to aggressively increase interest rates, and immediately several banks failed. Also, large institutions that were holding people's Bitcoin failed— FTX, BlockFi, Celsius. Celsius. Um, and so Bitcoin has been in this environment with rates being high, as well as the entire rest of the market has been dealing with that. And at a time when inflation is destroying people, like what do you think's going to happen? 9% of the real economy. And there's no like easy seamless transition. So with rates being high, what do you think's going to happen when people's home values are starting to be pressured because of the high rates, and food inflation and gas inflation is up.

Parker Lewis Where are they getting the money? People look at the statistics about how 50% of Americans don't have $500 put away, that the high interest rate environment is pressuring asset values, and Bitcoin is a liquid one. So lower your time preference, people will find the signal in Bitcoin for the exact same reason. The way I generally look at it is that people have to have some primary knowledge of Bitcoin, and then there has to be some real-world event in their own lives that they connect it with to have that real unlock. Money printing is a common one. The Canadian truckers is a second one. The cutting off of SWIFT.

Parker Lewis One of those events is going to trigger the next adoption wave. And you being— you know, I'm picking on them, but like, you being a treasury company and, you know, getting someone to, you know, make a terrible investment decision buying perpetual preferred equity doesn't make anybody wealthier, you know. So it's just that the thing that's going to cause the price to go higher is more people, like a wave of people, 5x the number of people that, that have been there before Figuring out Bitcoin. What does that say?

Marty Bent [40:43] It says kill fiat. Kill fiat. I was going to— the camera wasn't working with me.

Parker Lewis [40:48] I can see it from where you are right now. So when you put it close to the screen, it actually came forward.

Marty Bent [40:54] But I completely agree. And so you're talking about the mechanical monetary aspects of Bitcoin, yields blown out, Trump saying, we're going to get out of this via inflation.

Parker Lewis [41:07] We're going to give people $5,000 if they vote Republican. He also said that.

Marty Bent [41:13] You're going to get your Trump checks. You're going to get your Trump checks. And this week too, I think we should pull this in separate from the monetary mechanical side of things, which is Bitcoin's competing with this fiat system, which has levers that are pulled and creates more units of the fiat currency. I mean, the other aspect of Bitcoin is be your own bank, control your own money. 21 billion for money laundering. And it was a slap on the wrist for them, cost of doing business. 1 billion in profits in Q3 of this year. And those profits are derived from the fact that they take their users' deposits and put them in short-term bills and notes.

Marty Bent and just rip that yield and don't pass it on to their consumers. 0 and confirms, yes, the large banks, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo, were all discriminating against individuals and businesses based off of their political, religious views or the industry they were in, in our case. Bitcoin, the Bitcoin industry. And so it validates that Silvergate, Signature, First Republic, Silicon Valley Bank, the catalyst, one of the catalysts for them going down was not only the sort of structural lack of integrity in the monetary system and the banking system, but also this political attack on people who have certain views and preventing them from accessing banking services.

Marty Bent And so talking about narrative catalyst for an adoption wave, what you would be looking for, it's just more people becoming aware of things like this. And I know both you and I have talked to Alan Lane at length about the saga of Silvergate specifically, and it's absolutely atrocious what happened to them.

Parker Lewis [43:19] Yeah. I mean, I don't know the story of Signature as well, but the story of Silvergate specifically is just atrocious. Because I think anybody that was observing that one as it was happening recognized exactly what was happening. And then also, yeah, having, you know, knowing Alan and considering Alan a friend and knowing how principled Alan was, you know, one of the things that I'll just share is that, and I mentioned this, but the first time I met Alan, we had breakfast and we had met talked over the phone a few times before this, but I think it was 2021 at the Miami Bitcoin Conference, had breakfast, and I was still at Unchained at the time, and we were talking Bitcoin-backed loans.

Parker Lewis I don't know what context it came up, but I remember him very clearly telling me that they built Silvergate in such a way that if all of the Bitcoin-related or crypto-related deposits fled and left, that Silvergate would survive, that they very intentionally built the business that way. And that proved to be true, that despite a 60%, 70% bank run that was then effectively finished when all the regulatory overhang came, they wound down not being taken over by the FDIC. And basically, every depositor got their dollar back. And the people who lost were the equity holders, as it's designed to be, but they were a political assassination, effectively.

Parker Lewis And after that, I had spoken with a friend of mine who was an ex-bank regulator, and asked him straight up, it was like bank supervision specifically, and said, true or false, Silvergate was the only bank in America that could have withstood a full bank run without needing a bailout and to be taken over. And unwavering, no hesitation, unequivocal, true. I think anybody that's paying attention, any other bank, it's like Silicon Valley Bank, I don't know if they were associated with crypto. They failed because they bought a bunch of long-duration credit in treasuries. I don't know if it was treasuries and mortgages. And when rates rose, that created a hole for them, and they failed swiftly.

Marty Bent [45:59] I think they were issuing, I guess, margin loans on illiquid startup debt for a lot of the founders who had

Parker Lewis [46:10] Yeah. And I can understand why they're not politically unpopular, right? The same reason that they had 90% of their deposits were not FDIC insured. That's why all these hedge fund guys like Bill Ackman were out hammering about how they need to be bailed out because there's so much of it that wasn't insured. And you knew they were going to get bailed out. And that one was different, but that something like that occurring again could be the thing that creates the wave. Because in response to that, there was this mini money printing where they changed the— they created a program to be able to stop the bank run wave.

Parker Lewis BTFP. But I think the most likely scenario is something else breaks in the credit system, and they have to print money. And that's the thing that the people who did not participate in the wave of 2020 and 2021, but have Bitcoin remained on their radar, that they look themselves in the mirror and say, the Bitcoiners were right again. They need to buy Bitcoin. It's like, that's what— Yeah. Money— you don't have to create these false narratives about Bitcoin being digital capital or batteries. It's money. It's money that's designed that can't be printed, and it's solving a problem of printing money. And when you explain it to people in that very direct way, then the next time they see central banks print money, it all makes sense.

Parker Lewis If you instead paint a vision of the world of Bitcoin not as money, but as it's this digital capital, and it starts to create this image of people all staring at their digital wealth, And then questioning, well, wait, what are you all doing if you're all just buying Bitcoin? But to what end? What's the thing that's closing this loop? Everyone's just staring at the zeros and ones on their computers and then borrowing in it and other currencies that can be easily printed. What problem are you solving here? It doesn't logically follow. There's actually a logical gap that makes zero sense. And that confuses people. And the other side of it is just like, hey, it's not that difficult.

Parker Lewis It's like, we have a problem. The problem is printing money. People hedging the printing of money with dollar-linked inflation-related, you know, correlated assets like stocks and bonds doesn't fix the problem of a broken money.

Marty Bent [48:43] Yeah, I was just looking for a I mean, this is this is the image that people are going to get when they're getting in digital capital. You know,

Unidentified speaker [48:55] living on

Marty Bent [48:56] digital

Unidentified speaker [48:56] life.

Marty Bent [48:57] Wow! How did you

Unidentified speaker [48:59] make it? I worked hard as an engineer to save money again. Then I put my savings into stretch. What is stretch? Right now I get.

Marty Bent [49:09] It's like

Parker Lewis [49:12] so it's like so what I did was I invested in a perpetual preferred equity that has a fixed dollar claim on a company that owns Bitcoin. It's like, what? Like, how— what problems you solve? You have an instrument that's worse than a bond. Good luck, you know?

Marty Bent [49:28] Well, there, there is, like, uh, to your point, like, about, like, the, the existential question, like, if it's just—

Parker Lewis [49:37] Like, what I would just say is, like, in honesty, like, if you, if you pulled that out from, like, the, the thing that's incredibly cringe about it, um, The whole thing makes no sense to a normal person. They're like, "Wait, so you're borrowing? Who are you borrowing from to buy the Bitcoin? Are you manipulating the price of the Bitcoin higher? Like, how does this make any sense at all? " because they aren't credit investors. They aren't people who lend with instruments that have maturity. But they're like, it just feels like robbing Peter to pay Paul. Or if Bitcoin doesn't make sense to you, if you do not understand Bitcoin, say Bitcoin doesn't make sense to me, how does somebody getting paid 13% by somebody else that just owns Bitcoin, how does that help them understand it?

Parker Lewis And is it more likely to make it harder to understand for them? And they say, stay away. And again, to those people, I say, well, hey, you get Bitcoin at the price that you deserve. It might make Bitcoin look like a Ponzi scheme. It's not, because there's actual value to the asset. But if you don't understand the top level, the asset that's storing value, then somebody getting money and paying 13% just to go buy more Bitcoin certainly doesn't make sense to you. And then if you start saying, oh, it's not money, it's digital capital, we're going to build these fiat instruments that start on top of it, you then get into this wicked position about, well, but what's the problem?

Parker Lewis Because you can't then say that the problem is fiat currency because you're— well, how are you going to solve it with fiat currencies that sit on top? Yeah. Um, but, uh, so yeah, I ultimately think that truth and objectivity exists in the world. People find the signal. Bitcoin solves the problem. Everyone is feeling the pains of inflation, and there's no way out of that The only trapdoor is an exit to actually owning Bitcoin.

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Marty Bent And I think what you, Will, John, Nate, everybody at Zaprite is doing is working to make Bitcoin everyday money and make it tangible, particularly for small business owners and individuals. And I'm happy to learn that Fort Worth was much small business owners and In that context, what have you seen recently in terms of business owners having the light flick off or flick on? Excuse me.

Parker Lewis [54:43] What I would say is, hey, we're in a Bitcoin bear market right now. Sentiment is as bad as it's ever been, and that impacts people's excitement to adopt Bitcoin at all levels, that there's a tempered a tempered level of interest. So if you think about a lot of our customers are small businesses, but others are people that are directly involved in the Bitcoin economy, and they're just focused on surviving themselves, not changing their payment gateway. And so we're not immune of that. We do continue to see high signal and are unperturbed by the— the bear market has not scared us away. We wouldn't have gotten in.

Parker Lewis We know that we're early to Bitcoin payments, and we know that we're early— or sorry, we're early to Bitcoin, and we know that we're earlier to Bitcoin payments. But really, that's why we just focus on the most strategic parts of our business, keep our head down, deliver value, and knowing the inevitable wave to come is what we're setting up for. So over the last 9 months, we've built a peer-to-peer app for Bitcoin that we view as incredibly strategic to everything that we're intending to do. We've built an MVP of a Zaprite pay feature that leverages that to to really make the paying process in Bitcoin easier.

Parker Lewis One of the realizations that we had as part of this process of working on Bitcoin payments is that if we were path dependent on integrating into larger platforms to want and demand Bitcoin payments, say something like Shopify, we've had a ton of interest from Shopify businesses. Well, Shopify doesn't care about Bitcoin payments. And so if someone like Shopify doesn't care about Bitcoin payments being there and being a third-class citizen, you're not going to actually drive value because the payments experience is, is not only degraded, but it's not valued.

Unidentified speaker [57:01] Mm-hmm.

Parker Lewis [57:02] That we had to be in control of our own destiny, and that if we were going to really have success, we needed to be able to, one, control the experience, and two, being able to perfect the actual experience of paying with Bitcoin, that we realized, okay, if we were always going to be scanning QR codes, if we don't have relationships with the people paying, we're inherently limited in how well we can remove friction and manage the entire payment process. And it was kind of a— the P2P app was a two birds, one stone where we said, hey, one of the early common, most common markets of people paying others in Bitcoin is peer-to-peer, and there's no good solution to it.

Parker Lewis That also happens to be a key strategic piece to enabling a more seamless path to paying a business, because we solve how I pay you in Bitcoin and remove that friction of we each use different wallets, we use multiple wallets, some people use Lightning, some people use on-chain, How do we solve that? And that's what we intend to solve. But then if we solve that for me paying you and being able to push a payment with a swipe rather than ever seeing a QR code or a string of data, the same applies to a business. I can push a payment to a business that way.

Parker Lewis And then that also starts as the foundation for things like Bitcoin autopay and managing subscriptions and automated refunds. So we've really just been having our head down. But then when we zoom out, it's not why I'm working on Bitcoin payments, We're in Bitcoin payments because I think it's a necessity and it's an inevitability, and there's a great opportunity to being early to that and to develop a moat and a network effect when others don't care about it, is that I also see it being an unlock for a wider group of people understanding Bitcoin. Because there's only so many people who can go down a rabbit hole, not seeing Bitcoin being used as everyday money, and have the vision to see why it's going to be adopted as money, to connect all those dots.

Parker Lewis I don't say that in a negative way. It's just that if you looked at the population that were able to connect all these dots, the Bitcoin being at a relative point today is still very small in the grand scheme. It's non-immaterial in size, but it's relatively small. Say, okay, there's this fixed supply of 21 million. And yeah, there's some energy involved to prevent more apparently from being created. I don't understand how that works. But yeah, I get that the problem of printing money is a problem. How in the hell is this actually money? Well, when people see that you can go down the store, or go down the street to the store and buy eggs in Bitcoin like you can here in Austin, Texas, or go to the coffee shop and buy Bitcoin— or sorry, buy coffee using Bitcoin.

Parker Lewis I paid the woman who cuts my hair in Bitcoin. It's like when you say— if somebody— if you're explaining all those other things to somebody about Bitcoin and then say, oh, and you can do this today, that there's a reason that you never walked into a grocery store anywhere in America or anywhere in the world, and something popped up that allows you to pay with your US Treasury, or your stock, or your bond? Never, ever. But there are places, and even if they're not ubiquitous yet, there are places that allow you to pay in Bitcoin. It's one of the reasons why I think Square enabling Bitcoin payments on their side is such a watershed moment, because it does get that signal out to so many more people that someone small and early like Zaprite could not, even though we think that what we're working on is just as foundational as the things that Square is doing, um, that more people will actually come to understand Bitcoin as money when you can tell them everything else about the fundamentals bottoms up and then say, hey, it's also being used today.

Parker Lewis You know, that is a closing of the mental loop. I don't think it's going to be the thing that kicks off an adoption wave, but it is going to be the thing that when The next adoption wave happens will be an unlock for a lot more people that have already shifted to a different point at the same curve.

Marty Bent [1:01:33] Yeah. Should we demo the pay with Zapier P2P right now?

Parker Lewis [1:01:37] Can we? Can you do that?

Marty Bent [1:01:40] Yeah.

Parker Lewis [1:01:40] Yeah, let's do it. You pull up the— well,

Marty Bent [1:01:46] I got

Parker Lewis [1:01:46] this. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:01:50] Yeah, we've been testing this out. I'm gonna do it on desktop. So as you can see here, you have the ability to pay WebLN. I could scan the QR code, but the browser knows that I've already paid an invoice with the P2P app on my phone. So I don't have to do any of this. I just click pay with Zaprite. You can see I got a Zaprite notification here.

Parker Lewis [1:02:14] They can't see that.

Marty Bent [1:02:17] The, uh, just trust me, there's a Zapier notification here.

Parker Lewis [1:02:23] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:02:24] And I'm just gonna click it, sign in, probably see this better. The payment from the payment from the website.

Parker Lewis [1:02:32] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:02:32] I simply slide this.

Parker Lewis [1:02:34] It's, it's, uh, biometrically gated, so you gotta—

Marty Bent [1:02:38] Oop.

Parker Lewis [1:02:40] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:02:43] Now it's sending. Live on air.

Parker Lewis [1:02:48] Live on air. Come on, work, buddy.

Marty Bent [1:02:51] Success, success. Boom. Is that UX? Didn't have to scan anything, just click the button, got a notification, slide. I should have done the bio first, would have been quicker, but you do the biometric.

Parker Lewis [1:03:04] Yeah, I don't know if you can screencast your Your, uh, phone, but we could, uh, we could, we could demo the P2P if you could.

Marty Bent [1:03:14] I can't, I can't screencast it right now.

Parker Lewis [1:03:17] But yeah, but also just explaining what happened there for folks. Basically, you know, this is a demo Zaprite checkout. It's live on Bitcoin mainnet, but, um, it was a checkout to, to say buy our good or service. Marty has the beta of the P2P app that we built. The way the P2P app works is— and this is core to the problem that I mentioned it before, but just to reiterate, the foundation of the problem that we see as it relates to peer-to-peer payments in Bitcoin is that because everybody uses different wallets, there's inherent lack of knowledge of, well, what wallets does my friend use and how am I going to push payments And that our solution for that is rather than us be a new, like create a peer-to-peer app that's a walled garden that has its own wallet, that the actual solution to it is creating a peer-to-peer app that integrates existing wallets.

Parker Lewis That set of users have existing wallets that they already value that are good at being wallets, combination of custodial or non-custodial. So a couple examples that might be a Strike custodial account or Lexi on the non-custodial account or Alby on the non-custodial side, but saying, okay, Marty connected one of those to the Zaprite P2P app. He could push a payment to me without having to have a conversation with me. We might have gone out to dinner. I have my own wallet connected to it. The money never passes through Zaprite. He can just push a payment because he knows how much he owes me. And rather than him having to maintain a directory of the financial details of all of his friends, I just have connected my peer-to-peer my wallet to Zaprite's peer-to-peer app.

Parker Lewis And also, we've built the peer-to-peer app in such a way that Zaprite itself doesn't know that Marty paid Parker, and that we thought that that was critical to this network effect forming. Marty just paid me here. I don't know how many sats he sent me, but we're going to see. I can see that Marty Bent paid me, and this is connected to my Strike account. which I use for spending. I've also got non-custodial accounts connected, and, and it's as easy as that. Well, if he can push a payment to me that way, then we figure, well, we can connect that same apparatus to merchants and businesses.

Parker Lewis And so what he was demoing there was our, our first V1 or MVP of Zaprite Pay, which, you know, people can still have pay with Bitcoin, pay with Lightning, and scan a QR code and go the old way, or if the merchant has turned it on and the user has Zaprite P2P app, and again, the Zaprite P2P app is in beta, but they'll both be launched. When we launch the app to the main app stores, we'll also launch Zaprite Pay in unison with it or in parallel. That now there's another option, which is pay with Zaprite P2P, where you click a button, you can completely abstract the experience, of QR codes and, you know, eliminates 3 or 4 clicks in the process of buying, attaches the context of the, of the actual purchase to the payment, and actually makes the process of payment on par or easier in our mind than fiat.

Parker Lewis And that's what we viewed as critical, that in order for this to be a real unlock, the actual method of payment has to be on par or better. with fiat, and that we needed a way without us being a wallet, without us being dependent on any single wallet, to have a path to managing that full experience. So that's what we're doing with the Saprite P2P app.

Marty Bent [1:06:56] Yeah, we were just— we were explaining before we hit record is that, I mean, there's a number of employees here at TFTC that get paid at least partially, some fully in Bitcoin, and 95% or 90% of them 80% of them. One person doesn't. We'll talk about that later. But use Zaprite to invoice me. And it's very— it's not the fault of Zaprite. It's before the P2P app came out. But now with the Pay with Zaprite P2P, somebody like Logan were to send me a Zaprite invoice and I have my Strike business account hooked up to my P2P app, instead of taking the invoice, getting the on-chain address or the Lightning Network invoice and then copying it, pasting it into Strike's mobile app or desktop app, and then hitting send. It's like, oh, click the button, swipe, send. It takes 3 to 4 steps out for me.

Parker Lewis [1:07:57] Yeah. And that's the goal. And the ultimate goal is to have every popular wallet in the app. We've built out effectively to the wallets that had capabilities day one that we didn't need them to change anything on their engineering roadmaps. The ultimate success of it is going to, you know, when it's in users' hands, them really valuing the ease of the experience and that it's effectively them not having to adopt a new wallet in order to send money to their peers. And this is really being built— it's not being built even though these test transactions— Marty sent me 500 sats, which feels a little cheap, But no, I'll send you back like 750 sats because the fake good that you purchased online was like 250, at least maybe 270.

Parker Lewis That's fine. But when we think about solving the problem, the problem itself is that everyone has different wallets, and for a reason, because some people want to exist in the custodial land, some people A lot of it exists in non-custodial land, and then there's multiple well-functioning non-custodial wallets. There's many custodial wallets. In that world, an aggregator that focuses on the experience of peer-to-peer, by definition, in order to solve the problem, needs to incorporate those wallets. So we're hopeful that we'll ultimately be able to work with the team at River to integrate River. hopeful that we'll be able to work with the team at Cash App to integrate Cash App, any, any popular wallet.

Parker Lewis We hope to be there because the idea of this is, you know, much like when you, you know, open the Venmo app and connect your bank account, that you won't be, you know, opening up Zaprate and then having to adopt one of the wallets that is supported in the app, that the wallet you use is already there. And it's there because it's one of the most popular wallets. But then if we think about saying, hey, if we were to build a payments company, but also had to be a wallet. Again, there are exceptions in the world. Square is a large company. They have a lot of resources.

Parker Lewis But as a startup with constrained resources, we would be worse at both of those things. Expressly in this problem of peer-to-peer, it would unsolve the problem if we were also building a wallet, because that is core to the problem itself. of people using money, and that you shouldn't have to live in a world where everyone has to adopt a new wallet in order to send peer-to-peer payments, like a wallet native to the app. But then also, you shouldn't have to ask your friend, well, which wallet do you use, to figure out which one you both use to be able to send a walled garden, or even like, hey, what's your Lightning address?

Parker Lewis There shouldn't have to be an out-of-band communication because if— A lot of people look at Lightning addresses or BOLT-12 invoices as a solution to this, but if you provide me your Lightning address, or a BOLT-12 invoice today, and then say we go to a conference and share an Airbnb and I owe you like 100,000 sats, something, or maybe 500,000, however much it is, like real payments, not test payments that are 500 sats. Well, at that point, I'm not going to trust that the Lightning address or the BOLT-12 invoice that you sent me the time before is still good. Because if I send— and that's why, you know, it's like you might create a phone directory of your contacts, but there's a reason why in fiat world you don't maintain a directory yourself that can get stale of your friends' financial information.

Parker Lewis One, you don't really need to know your friends' financial information. You don't need to, you know, you don't really need to know that I'm a Strike user to pay me in Strike. Or if I sent you my Strike Lightning address, I might want to be paid to my Lexi wallet. I might not be using Strike anymore. I might have lost my Strike account or I might have stopped using it. So there's all these fundamental reasons why the solution that we've built on the P2P side works is you basically connect your existing wallet. You can change that, you can have multiple, but any point in time, if I know that you're an active user of it, that if you've attached a wallet to that, You can update it in the background.

Parker Lewis I would never know about it. And again, it's done in a privacy-preserving way. It's not anonymous. Our app is not anonymous, but it is pseudonymous. And you can use it privately. So again, if somebody exposes their custodial account to us and connects a username, we're one step away of the real identity talking to being able to outreach to Strike. But if someone used a non-custodial wallet and didn't have something personally identifying as their username, they could, they could use it privately. And we thought of that in 2 ways as being important. One, just given the position that we're in, we didn't want to know what all of our friends were paying each other, who was paying what.

Parker Lewis You know, it was just like we didn't want to be in that position of knowing that. But then we also thought of it as prohibitive to the experience itself. If we did, that if it was just a honeypot. So it's like there is a pseudonymous social graph, say, but we also don't store the— we don't store individual transaction details. We aggregate it so we can have it for reporting purposes. There's no— it's also all to say it's a very delicate balance to actually solving this problem, but we think we've done it in a really elegant way. And if we have, then we have massive downstream benefits of actually solving B2C payments, merchant payments that we wouldn't have if we didn't have relationships via our peer-to-peer app with users.

Parker Lewis So we're really excited about it. And that's my— it's not just my pitch on the peer-to-peer app, but it's also saying like, hey, when the Bitcoin bear market's happening and everybody is bitching at each other and I participate in a little bit of it, right? I figured out the signal of why Bitcoin treasury company is a problem. Your money, go do what you want to do with it. To each their own. I don't think these things are going to blow up. But when everyone's having this consternation, it's like we have our head down working on products that we think are strategic and foundational, and we're not necessarily doing it for the person who's showing up in the door tomorrow.

Parker Lewis We're setting up for the next adoption wave that we think is going to be massive and it's going to unlock a lot of value.

Marty Bent [1:14:24] Where can people download the app?

Parker Lewis [1:14:27] Um, well, where they— they can either go— so it's still in closed beta. If they want to participate in the closed beta, go to paymeinbitcoin.com and you'll be able to sign up for it there, and then we'll onboard you to the, uh, to the app. You'll get an invite to TestFlight or the Google Play Store.

Marty Bent [1:14:48] Well, I've been using it for 3 or 4 months now. It's an incredible experience. It just makes it a lot easier.

Parker Lewis [1:14:54] Yeah, that's our goal. It's like, hey, do we actually make the payment easy?

Marty Bent [1:14:58] I mean, if Soap Miner, he goes from BTC Pay Server to Zaprite and I go buy my soap and I can just hit the— because I use the web browser, hit the Zaprite P2P and do that, it would be so much easier.

Parker Lewis [1:15:18] Yeah. Soapminer, if you're listening, I emailed you. I would like you to turn this capability on via the trial. You haven't emailed me back, but if you're listening or if anybody knows him—

Marty Bent [1:15:29] Well, I know he listens to RHR every week, so if he doesn't listen to this episode, I'll make sure I tell him next week on RHR.

Parker Lewis [1:15:35] Okay, perfect. That'd be awesome.

Marty Bent [1:15:37] It's a good catch-up. We need, we need to go longer next time. Unfortunately, I got to run here, but I appreciate you doing this. I appreciate you. building the P2P app. It's been a lot of fun testing, and I think it's incredibly important to your point about setting up for the next adoption wave. And thirdly, I think just getting the Parker Lewis sort of sober distillation of what's going on, where we're going in the market is important in these trying times for people out there who are down.

Parker Lewis [1:16:08] Well, now that you're not in Austin and we don't get to do this regularly on the weekend in private, we should just do it more regularly. Um, on the pod.

Marty Bent [1:16:18] Let's hold each other to that. We should. We definitely should.

Parker Lewis [1:16:21] Yeah. And, uh, the bear market will end, you know, at the price that we all deserve.

Marty Bent [1:16:26] All right. Tell, um, tell the Austin crew I said hello. I talked to them, but tell them I said hello from the podcast. Okay.

Parker Lewis [1:16:35] I'm gonna see all the boys tomorrow and girls.

Marty Bent [1:16:38] Tell them I said what's up.

Parker Lewis [1:16:40] I will.

Marty Bent [1:16:42] Peace and love, freaks. 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.

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Independent writing by Marty Bent at TFTC since 2017. Money, markets, AI, energy and privacy, delivered free to your inbox.

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