My name is John Tanklenburg. I'm in part of the marketing team here at CASA, and we appreciate you joining us today for what's going to be a fun conversation and all about stacking stats under extreme circumstances in a bear market. And so I'm pleased to be joined today by Ron Stoner, our head of security, and our special guest, Pierre Richard. Ron, Pierre, if you could take a moment to introduce yourself to the crowd. Sure. Thank you, John. My name is Ron Stoner. I'm the head of security at CASA, working with some of the other geniuses on the team like James and a few others to help bring sovereign security to the masses. I've personally been hacking and stacking on Bitcoin since about 2014, and I've been involved in hacking and security almost my entire life. You've heard me speak on some prior Twitter spaces we've had talking about some interesting things like cryogenics and building actual citadels physically. And today I'm glad to be here talking with all of you and our guest about extreme stacking. Over to Pierre. Great. Thanks, Ron. And thanks for having me on the CASA spaces. So my name is Pierre Richard. I've been researching Bitcoin for most of the past decade, and I'm now the VP of research at Riot, one of the largest publicly traded Bitcoin miners. So excited to get into today's topic, one of my favorite topics. And I see that we've got James in here, so I'll hand it off to him. Thanks. Yeah, I've been interested in Bitcoin for about a decade now and have been working full time as an engineer in the space for seven years. And personally, this is a problem that I deal with on a regular basis. I feel like one of my biggest issues that I'm constantly trying to do is, you know, avoid having to liquidate satoshis and preferably being able to liquidate other things for more satoshis. And it seems to get harder and harder as time goes on. Most definitely. So first question I have is for you, Pierre. So you mentioned that you've been in the space for about a decade. When you've been in Bitcoin that long, you clearly have a different relationship with it than newcomers to the space. If you were going to try and put it succinctly, what is different about how you view Bitcoin versus what the average person that holds it sees it as? Yeah, so I guess I could reflect back on how I saw it almost 10 years ago, which I really had kind of a short term view on it. Part of it was probably because I was much younger. And so the younger you are, I think the higher time preference you are. And for those not familiar with that, it's an economic concept of how much do you value the present versus the future. Maybe you've heard of the marshmallow experiment of, hey, you know, if you can have one marshmallow and eat it now, or if you wait a little bit, you'll get two marshmallows later. So when I was first discovering Bitcoin, I very much was in the mindset of, hey, this is a great way to get rich quick. Because at that point, this was like the end of 2012, beginning of 2013, the bull market was warming up. And you know, you could buy a Bitcoin at $20. And then you wake up the next day and it's $30. It's like 50% gain. Clearly, clearly, this will continue to go on forever. And so if you just buy even a small amount, you're going to be super wealthy very quickly. Now, as time went by, you know, that that perspective quickly, well, not quickly, but it gradually changed, especially after the end of 2013, with that bull market to $1,200. And, you know, I was like, OK, this is an inflection point, you know, we're definitely going into permanent hyper Bitcoinization here. Everyone is finally understanding Bitcoin. And I say finally, but I only understood it like months before. So now, of course, the market crashed, right? And we had this long bear market. And I actually, you know, I didn't rage quit or anything like that. But I certainly got interested in other topics other than Bitcoin. So I started learning about quadcopters and computer vision and things like that, completely unrelated. But the reason I got interested in those was I wanted to build a robot army that would pick up trash in Brooklyn. But anyway, so just goes to show that I think that I think that in the first bear market that one goes through, you know, you lose interest, you don't necessarily sell everything and kind of become, you know, skeptical or anything like that. But there's there's other things in life as well. Right. Now, then the second bull market comes around 2016, 2017. And I'm thinking to myself, wow, you know, here it is again, it's still alive. And we're going to have hyper Bitcoin ization again, although tempered with my prior experience of saying, well, you know what, maybe this is just a cycle, right? We're going through a bull market here. Bitcoins purchasing power will increase, but I shouldn't get carried away like I did last time of thinking that, hey, you know, this is it, the dollar is about to collapse. And sure enough, you know, we we had a healthy bull market that went far above the previous all time high of twelve hundred dollars, went up to depends who you ask, maybe seventeen thousand to twenty thousand dollars. And then it came tumbling down and it kind of felt like another well, it felt, you know, like a confirmation of the previous cycle that, you know what, Bitcoin is going to continue to grow. It's going to continue to evolve and get bigger and bigger. But it's not like we're going to have an immediate inflection point any time soon. And so that's kind of how I came into, first of all, having the view that even in the bear market, I've got to stay focused. I can't get distracted by the other things going on because there will be another bull market and Bitcoin, you know, learning about it and investing in it and building on it will pay off long term, even if short term, there's pain in the bear market. And it's not a get rich quick scheme. Right. It's a get rich slowly. And, you know, I also think that get rich slowly is certainly better than don't ever get rich at all or anything like that. But also it teaches you patience and it teaches you to, you know, this kind of concept of dollar cost averaging and saving, which we're going to get into. And so now here we are, you know, in kind of my third bear market. And it feels like familiar territory at this point. And it's just about, OK, you know, got to continue to stay focused and gradually increase my investment, both in terms of understanding Bitcoin and learning more about it, but also of, you know, dollar cost averaging and accumulating more Bitcoin, more Satoshis. Perfect. Thank you. And I'm realizing that I need to take care of one small little thing before the lawyers come with their lasso's and drag me away. Everyone in this room, please understand this is not investment advice. We are reflecting on our personal experiences here. So that said to the group, I'll take a moment to look to broaden this out a little bit. When you finally get Bitcoin, and I mean really get Bitcoin, what is the realization that you ultimately have? Yeah. Well, first, I would caveat that with I'm not confident that anyone ever really gets Bitcoin fully. It's kind of an onion where you peel off one layer and then you realize, oh, there's another layer underneath. And so it's kind of an endless source of intellectual curiosity. Now, what I think is true is that at some point you realize that not only is Bitcoin going to kind of outperform other assets financially right now, again, not financial advice, you know, past performance, not good in the future performance and all the other disclosures, but not only is the value of Bitcoin going to outpace the increase in value in any other asset, but also that there's actual fundamental utility that you derive from holding Bitcoin aside from the increase in value. And this is really where I think that CASA's role is critical in the ecosystem is that when you're holding your own Bitcoin on your own keys, ideally, you know, with your own node, you are benefiting every day from essentially what I would call peace of mind, right? That you're not having to experience the anxiety of holding stocks, not because of the volatility, right? You know, I think both Bitcoin and stocks are volatile in their price, but rather about, you know, having to trust other people and having to rely on other people and having to, you know, when you're buying a share in a company, you're really buying into the management of the company and it's continued good governance and everyone coming in every day to do their job. When you're buying Bitcoin and you're actually running your own node and you're holding your own keys, you're not trusting a third party, right? You're not relying on anyone else. Rather, you're relying on, you know, what, what it comes down to often is the laws of physics of, hey, these electrons are going to continue to be here. And this software that's open source, it's fully transparent. The whole ledger is transparent. It's an open network. This software is battle tested, right? It's been around for 14 years. There's many people who have tried to break it in lots of different ways. And I'm not excluding the possibility that we'll have some crazy zero day bug tomorrow, but as far as comparing it to every other asset out there, what I came to the realization that it really is qualitatively better. And it provides far more peace of mind and far more certainty than any other asset. And that that was kind of a breakthrough moment for me that it's not just about the getting rich part. It's what do I want to be worrying about? Do I want to be worrying about my portfolio? Or do I want to be, you know, worrying about enjoying life? For me, the light bulb moment came up. I looked at the protocol in the early days and tested it like a lot of other security researchers to see, you know, where's the fault, how this is going to be gamified. And when I looked into it, I saw some cool stuff with new technology and cryptography and math. And I think I didn't get it until I actually sent my first transaction. And I equated it to email at the time. Like I'm emailing money to this endpoint, right? And that's how I thought of it before I learned more about the protocol and how it worked in depth. But I envision myself as, you know, the person that has family in Pakistan that needs to send money to them. You can go through a money transmitter, a Western Union bank, and you can sit there and wait three to five days and pay all these additional fees. And by sending my transaction, really seeing it end to end, I was like, wow, I am in control here, right? This is the decentralization aspect of it and the sovereignty aspect and controlling your own keys. I realized there was no Mr. Bitcoin. And contrary to popular opinion, you know, there is no CEO of Bitcoin. Nobody owns a master key, they can't shut it down. And, you know, people can dive into the technical specifics and what if scenarios. But just seeing that really work in the end, it's in the old days, end to end, lit the light bulb in my head and went, wow, this technology is sound. There really is something here. I need to look into this and acquire as much Bitcoin as I can. I think what we're really talking about is conviction. And of course, as an investor, you can always build up or destroy conviction in any one thing, you know, create your bullish case, your bearish case, and so on and so forth. And I think that what people in this space end up landing on if they become the laser eyed, highly convicted Bitcoiner that is focused on stacking sats, then it's, you know, it's not necessarily because they're looking at the exchange rate, but rather they're looking at how the system works and understanding that this is a widely distributed system. You know, this is a network and that you much like BitTorrent or the internet itself, as long as there are some like minded people out there, you know, they're not going to be the same people out there that have the same conviction, it's going to continue to operate. Awesome. And so I want to get to the topic of the hour. So Pierre, you're well known for this selling your chair meme. You want to walk me through that and how that came to be and what it means? Yeah, absolutely. So the IMF, International Monetary Fund, one of the most fiat institutions out there, put together an educational video on why deflation is bad and why inflation is good. And this educational video, I came across it, I believe, thanks to my friend Saifuddin Amoos, who probably had a very scathing reply to it. But the gist of the video was, I mean, it was pretty absurd. The gist of it was that the reason why deflation is bad, that is why an increase in the purchasing power of your money is bad, is because it incentivizes you to not buy a chair. And so you're going to wait until later to buy your chair because the value of your money is going up. And so I just, I found it to be hilarious. And so it really caught on to, now, oh, one other thing is that at some point our friend Udi said, well, if you think everything's a scam, do you think chairs are a scam? And my response to that was, yes, I think that chairs are overvalued today and that you should be buying Bitcoin instead of buying chairs. So, you know, the overarching point here is that it's twofold. One, obviously, even in a deflationary environment where the purchasing power of your money is increasing, people buy things for their utility, right, that they want to rest their legs, heaven forbid. And so they're going to buy assets in order to derive utility from them. Whereas the IMF thinks or is implying that people should be buying assets in order to store value, right? The reason you should buy a chair is because the value of your money is decreasing. And so now your chair is a store of value. Your chairs have become monetized. We're now on the chair standard. And this is how we're going to engage in commerce going forward. So, you know, I it's chairs are one example of an infinite number of examples, right, of consumer goods, but also of investment goods that have been monetized. And it's I thought what was striking was kind of the lack of self-awareness that the IMF put a tremendous amount of production value into this video. And at no point did somebody suggest that, you know, the video is kind of absurd because we have clear counter examples, for example, electronics, electronics. If you look at the price of electronics, even despite inflation, despite all this money printing, the price of electronics has been going down for the past 50 years. And it's not just electronics. I mean, there's lots of examples of technology driven deflation. And yet people continue to buy electronics. Right. I understand there's always a temptation to say, hey, I'm not going to buy this latest generation of laptop because, you know, in one year, it'll be a little bit less expensive. And so maybe I should wait. But ultimately, people want the utility that they get from the from today's laptop. Right. They can't take the utility from next year's laptop and somehow bring it into the present, you know, with a magic wand. They have to buy the laptop today to get the utility today. And the utility itself is why they're buying it, not because the laptop is going to be a fantastic store of value. So, yeah, now, the the other part of it is that, yeah, I think that as long as Bitcoin adoption is continuing, that Bitcoin is undervalued, right, that there's an information asymmetry. We know a lot about Bitcoin. We don't know everything about Bitcoin, but there's still a massive gap between what the general public's understanding of Bitcoin is and what Bitcoin is. And so as long as that's true, then it really it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to be holding any other asset, whether it's a consumer good or an investment product, other than Bitcoin, as we kind of see this information asymmetry close over. And, you know, just looking at the past decade, I don't think that the information asymmetry is going to close quickly. I think that it's going to continue to take decades, in which case it makes sense to, you know, for the coming decades to minimize how much one spends on present goods. And really, it gets down to scrutinizing how much utility am I getting from this chair, right? Maybe I would prefer a standing desk. Maybe I don't need two chairs. Maybe I only need one chair. And so really thinking critically about and being intentional in the way that we spend our money because the opportunity cost is so great. That is that if we know that Bitcoin is deeply undervalued today, there's a massive opportunity cost to spending it on overvalued assets. One final point on this. You know, people will talk about how they're going to buy a Lambo or they're going to buy a yacht with kind of all their gains from holding Bitcoin. Eventually, you reach a point where it is so convenient to hold Bitcoin, right? That if you're set up on CASA or any other kind of, you know, solid key system, key management system, it is so convenient and so low maintenance that when you think of the idea of owning a luxury automobile or a boat, you're like thinking to yourself, this is going to be a pain in the tuchus, right? Like, why would I spend so much time and so much energy and so much money maintaining this other asset that I might use 5% of the time that it just kind of reframes the question of, well, is this actually success, right? Is the material, is owning this asset actually worth it? Because you can always rent, right? You can rent a car. You can rent a sports car, take it around the track. You can rent a yacht. You don't have to own it. And so now you start thinking about all other assets of not only is Bitcoin going to outperform them, but also how inconvenient and how much of a hassle is it going to be to own this asset and to maintain it? And then to, you know, have to also experience the inevitable depreciation of that asset and then having to replace it and so on and so forth. It's an endless treadmill. Well said. And I suppose you could always rent a chair as well, a co-working space or just go to the library. So we talked about, you know, purchases. What would be some expenses that nearly anyone can cut? Yeah. So I think that this is really the vices, right? The guilty pleasures, right? Those are the ones that you could cut and they might actually improve your life to cut them, right? So if you have a drinking problem or you've got a drug addiction, you know, I think it's uncontroversial here that you could cut back on that and it would benefit you. You know, then we get into some questions of, you know, coffee, right? Coffee is a really controversial one. I get that you've got lots of people who are controlled by the bean. You know, they think that coffee increases their productivity. It's all delusional, right? I think that they're rationalizing their coffee addiction. But I think that I'm also guilty of this as well. So I think coffee can also be cut. Now, I think that, you know, looking at travel, for example, do you really need to travel far away in order to have a vacation? I like the idea of a staycation, right? Going on vacation while not really going very far away at all or even just staying home. And so that's a great way to cut costs. And if you are traveling, you know, do you really need to go first class? Do you really need to go business class? So, you know, practicing some, you know, almost monk-like behavior of self-restraint of, hey, you know, it could be worse. And this is actually rather comfortable, maybe spend some time meditating rather than wishing or coveting the luxuries of life. Well, I could go on, lots of other examples. I was going to say on the monk note, I know Pierre had some experience with this too, but I haven't had a haircut in four years, right? I think I've had one trim and one was done by my wife. So if you think about that, and you total the amount of money, you know, want to spend at the salon or the haircut place for the past four years, you can convert that into sets, right? So there's a concept of daily cost averaging. Maybe I can do haircut cost averaging, right? We've been in a pandemic, there wasn't a lot of conference activity, people weren't going into offices. That was a great time to do that. You can go get scraggly and nobody's judging you or who even cares if they're really judging you, be yourself. But it's things like that, that I don't think people equate when they look at their monthly bills and budget of what can they cut. I like to take the extreme savings books that talk about, you know, the vices Pierre talked about, gym memberships, micro transactions in mobile apps, right? How much money is being spent in Fortnite per day for these micro transactions? Those could be sats when you think about it. Just like haircuts, what about razors and beards, right? I think people are cooler with big, long beards. So I know Jameson has experience with that. How much money have you saved over time growing your Gandalf beard? Well, I don't know that that's the best example, because I have so many products that I have to put in it to keep it looking so nice. But I will say that one way that I started saving money recently, and this is partially because I was still looking to lose a bit of excess weight, but I've been doing one meal a day. That just makes it easier for me because I don't like to count calories and other stuff. But it certainly helps keep my diet going. And I think that's certainly helps cut down the grocery bill if it's something that you can get away with and remain healthy. Absolutely. I mean, especially if you're kind of doing this intermittent casting and you're avoiding restaurants. They're often overpriced, often under quality, right? They're stuffing their food with seed oils and other such things. But from the other side, we're thinking small. When you think big, large fixed expenses, then you're talking about your mortgage or your rental property, right? Where do you live? And this one, I think that it's really substantial for two reasons. One is that obviously at the large percentage of your budget, if you include property taxes, maintenance, depreciation, the mortgage itself, the interest, the principal. And two, the more square footage you have, the more chairs you have to buy, right? You've got to furnish the place and you will buy as many things as needed in order to fill that square footage. And so if you constrain yourself upfront and say, Hey, look, my family, we don't need more than 1400 square feet or whatever it is, then you're going to have to buy less just mechanically because you're not going to have enough space to put things in. And then of course, if you want to be cleaning your house, it's going to take a whole lot of time if you've got 4000 square feet. But if you've got a fraction of that, it's going to take a fraction of the time to clean it. If you're paying somebody else to clean it, same kind of cost savings there as well. So I think that really scrutinizing how much space do we need? Can the kids all sleep in one room? Or can we get a bunk bed instead of constantly trying to build bigger McMansions and wasting lots of stats on the big ticket items like that? Yeah. So I kind of think of it in terms of like little things versus large things. I consider the large things to be anything that's kind of like a multiplier where if we think about say, you know, compound interest or compound returns on an investment, you know, the reason why long-term investing tends to make sense is because of the miracle of compound interest and how, you know, a few percent per year over a long period of time becomes quite significant. I think a lot of people forget that the opposite is also true. So, you know, the larger the house or more expensive the car or other property that you have are basically things that you're having to pay taxes on. You know, those are multipliers. It's a percentage of whatever the original upfront cost you put into it. And you're having to pay that over and over again every year. So, you know, being able to minimize those things that are much more subject to lifestyle inflation and will have a compound negative impact on your financial health over the long term, you know, avoiding those is going to have a bigger impact than just the one-off chair purchase here and there. One of the people I like to watch a few years ago that was talking about this was CZ from Binance, where he said that the only thing he would own and splurge on was the newest iPhone model because he was doing so much work and was so attached to his mobile device that he could, you know, expend the money for that, but didn't really own much physical possessions outside of that, lived in a very plain environment, right, used rental cars for everything. And if you're a business owner or you're a business traveler, you know very well how to offset your business expenses for things like traveling and food and phone bills. And that's where, you know, you can get really crafty as long as you're operating within the legal and, unfortunately, tax limits with that stuff. You can offset some of those things so that you get tax money back so that you're not using personal funds for that or you are justifying things as business expenses and then freeing up some more of that major capital to actually purchase sides with. Excellent points. So moving down the track of chair minimalism, there's also the the vein of, you know, building and sharing, selling chairs, like being an upholsterer or a woodworker. What would be some odd jobs that you have done for Bitcoin? Have you ever done this? I've done some development work for some nonprofits and asked for payment in Bitcoin, and that's worked out very well for me. And then the other thing I will tell anybody that's a developer or people creating content, if you're creating educational material or you're making tools that are making people's lives easier, whether it's Bitcoin related or not, you should be adding a QR code or a donation address to your programs or your scripts or your readme.md, right? If you're providing free services and you're helping people out, there are people that will donate to your cause to continue you to be able to live to be able to enhance those tools or build more. So that's something that I haven't seen a lot of people jumping on is like, what content can we create? There's been some social media platforms where you can pay and pay for content with that. I like seeing that and I hope that matures over time. But really, like the open source world is huge. And I've seen some success there with people that are making cool things and soliciting donations for that. Yeah. So I would say, you know, in terms of odd jobs, you know, accounting, right? It's like you can be what I call fiat mining or what I've heard others call fiat mining. You've got a completely normie job in a non Bitcoin related industry, right? You're just stacking sets, mining fiat out of the fiat system. And that I think is going to be the best opportunity for like 90% of people. I wish the Bitcoin industry was big enough to employ everyone in the world. But the reality is that software is highly scalable. And that's actually a huge advantage of software is that it's highly scalable. And so if done right, Bitcoin should not employ, you know, 99% of the world. And so I think that when we think about how to stack sets, quite often the advice is not going to be about joining the industry, but rather, hey, you've got to find what are you great at? Where do you create the most value for the economy as a whole? And how can you negotiate for more pay? That's a big one as well. How can you manage your career in such a way that you're best positioning yourself to earn the most money and to be, you know, accumulating for the long term rather than trying to find a short term bailout? Awesome. And what strategies do you typically use for conversion into Bitcoin, if you're not, say, earning it or mining it? Do you subscribe to that day trading, lump sum, DCA? Do you take the FOMO route? What lessons have you learned? Yeah, so thankfully, my wife is a financial planner. And so I get to have a little bit of a conversation with her. And she's like, Hey, you know, thankfully, my wife is a financial planner. And so I get to have these conversations pretty often with her of what the best approach is. And really, I think that she's right on it, that basically, you want to buy Bitcoin when you have the free cash flow. And so what I mean by that is that you are spending less than you earn. And that residual amount, you know, that you can put it away and hold it in Bitcoin for at least five years, right? If not, you know, the indefinite future. And so that way, you're not, this is completely unrelated to what the Bitcoin exchange rate is, right? It doesn't matter if you're in a bull market or bear market. This is the approach that you should have of do I have the ability to hold for an extended period of time? And do I have the means to acquire Bitcoin? And so that's it applies in reverse as well of when should you sell your Bitcoin? Well, when you have a cash flow deficit, and you'd need to, you know, spend those Bitcoin, it's not rocket science. And it's not, again, related to the exchange rate of trying to time the market, because timing the market, it might work well for those really fantastic professional traders out there who, you know, are keeping their motions in check, and they've studied all the charts and whatnot. That's not me. And I think that's not most people. And most people would actually just benefit from taking a long term buy and hold strategy that's based on what their financial situation is rather than what the market is doing. Yeah, when you participate in FOMO, most of the time that's going to result in pain. And that's when you're following those market trends in the posts on Twitter and trying to follow the herd, so to speak. So I think Karen, I'm a horrible day trader as well. I've tried it, I'm not good at it. Even if I try to do the opposite of what I do, it ends up deadly for me somehow. So I'm a dollar cost average type of person. I just have a set buy, I let it sit, I don't worry about it. The things that I think I can do are the things with my fiat to be able to up the DCA buy over time, right. And I think another good example we didn't talk about on this call is thrifting. And as somebody that's moved a whole bunch, I know that if you go to the most affluent area in your town or your city and go to the thrift stores there, you're going to see merchandise that's insane, the designer clothes and the furniture and the things that you can get in some of the wealthier areas at the thrift stores and the consignment shops. So instead of going to your big box retailer website and buying those things, can you get that stuff used and then take that money to up your DCA? And in my case, that seemed to work way better for me than to try to play the market, play the swings or trade back and forth between XYZ things. Yeah, so like I said, these days I probably spend most of my effort trying to avoid having to sell. And I would probably fit more in the thriftiness camp of just a few weeks ago, for example, I found some sporting equipment on Craigslist for about 30% of the price that it would have cost from the big box store. And I consider that a good investment because it's going to help my healthy lifestyle continue, keep me entertained outside and, you know, not sitting in a chair in front of the television. John, you also asked a great question of like, what lessons have you learned along the way? In my case, specifically, I've learned that you will not get back what you once had. And what I mean by that is back in the day when Bitcoin was around the $2,000 price range, I ended up selling some to pay bills and, you know, get through the times in between jobs, and things like gifting it. And I bought the alpaca socks. And when you go back and you look at the cost, the true cost of some of that today, and I don't want to even think about it in the future, you know, you're never going to get that back. The memes used to be 6.15 Bitcoin, 21 Bitcoin, you know, that's not an achievable goal for a lot of people today. So if you're one of those people that had 21 Bitcoin, and you had to sell it, right, the chances of you getting that back are probably slim to none today. And I think an article even came out that said like 91% of the bitcoins already been mined, right. And if you look at that with the amount of seizures by the government, the Satoshi wallet, the amount of lost coins over time, just due to user negligence, it feels like we're almost kind of mining on borrowed time. So what I'll say is like, if I had to go back and redo any of those choices, I would have been taking personal loans, I would have been calling my parents, I would have been eating rice and beans and soup and all kinds of things like that for a few months to get through those periods instead of converting my Bitcoin. So when we're talking about extreme stacking, it's not just acquiring it, it's acquiring it and then having the conviction to hold it. Yeah, I would add two things. Yeah, so I completely agree. I mean, I think the biggest lie you can tell yourself is I'll earn it back, like the bear market's going to continue. So I'll be able to buy it back at a cheaper price. And so that's, you know, a sure way to permanently part yourself with Sats. Second of all, is that rather than trusting yourself to log in and buy Bitcoin regularly, automate it, right, put yourself into a recurring buy. There's lots of different recurring buy services out there. And so that way, it's like a it's like a good version of a gym membership, right? It's something that you can set it and forget it and you'll accumulate it and you won't have to worry about timing the market. The thrift store one reminded me of kind of my biggest weakness in terms of stacking Sats is that I've got two kids and I love spoiling them. And so what my new strategy there has been is eBay, right, buy some used toys for them. And guess what? I haven't heard a single complaint. I haven't heard either one suggest that it is even a used toy that they're receiving. They don't know any better. Now, the oldest one's four years old, so maybe eventually he'll start realizing that, you know, these are previously open boxes. But, you know, I think that that'll be an opportunity to teach him about gratitude, right? He should be happy he's getting a toy at all. So that's that's one more I would add there. Awesome. Yeah. And great. Gratitude is a great theme for right now. I mean, we're in a bear market and it is you could look at it with pessimism or optimism. As we look forward, I'm going to open it up for Q&A now. So I'll let the audience jump in. If anybody has a question, go ahead and request. But in the meantime, would they, would all of you like to offer some final thoughts? I think you want to stack Sats, but stack Sats safely. And what I mean by that is there's a lot of charlatans, there's a lot of yield programs. There's a lot of people that are trading altcoins and things like that and rolling them back into Sats. And there's nothing necessarily, I think, inherently wrong with doing that. But by doing that, you're exposing your security and your attack surface to all these different DeFi hacks and exploits. So I say stack Sats safely, meaning, you know, stay within the Bitcoin protocol. If it's too good to be true, it probably is, right, or it's going to get hacked or rugged at some point in time. The last thing I'll add is that, you know, there's a saying that greed is the root of all evil. And I think it's okay to be greedy. I think it's fun to be evil. Sometimes you definitely do need the yin to the yang. I just wouldn't let that evil consume you in your quest to stack Sats, because you will reap what you sow in that case. Yeah, I absolutely agree with Ron on that. I think that, you know, our friend Matt O'Dell says, stay humble and stack Sats, right. And the humility is critical, because otherwise, you get into this, the greed, the avarice, right, the really negative version of it of saying, oh, I'm so late to Bitcoin, but I'm going to get ahead by trading altcoins or going on 100x leverage or earning this ridiculous yield on this product that I don't understand. And so there's lots of temptations of, here's how I'm going to outperform Bitcoin. And I'm going to, you know, make up for lost time, because I got into Bitcoin too late. And I think that that is a path that is going to lead you to falling even further behind, right. It's really the turtle in the hair, the tortoise in the hair. I don't know. I haven't gotten to that kid's book yet. But, you know, there's no shortcuts. You've got to be earning income, you know, and saving as much as you can. So you've got to be earning as much as you can, spending as little as you can, and gradually building up your stack of satoshis and storing it in cold storage, right. Don't just leave it where you bought it. You got to do your due diligence, figure out, okay, you know, should I go with a multi-sig setup like what Casa offers? And that way, you've got the peace of mind, and you've got to be able to do your due diligence. And then you can get to the bottom of it. And that's where you get to be, right. And so, you know, it's really sad to see, you know, people who are off at tremendous risk. It's really sad to see all these stories that came out with these yield platforms over the past few months of people, you know, they were they were doing the right thing of gradually accumulating Bitcoin, except they were lending it out to some bozos, through it yourself. Yeah, there's definitely a lot to be learned by the mistakes people have made over the past decade, quite a few different types of mistakes. I think we've got several blog posts where we try to categorize a lot of them. But one thing that we haven't really talked much about is time horizon, right. So I think Pierre mentioned minimum five year time horizon, also talked about, you know, negative versus positive cash flow. You know, it's fine, I think, if you are stacking stats for one specific goal. But I also would say that I've seen a lot of people over the years, essentially say, hey, I hit my goal, and now I can buy my car or buy my house or pay for my next year's tuition or whatever. And then they liquidate everything and they pay for it. And you know, that's great. That's a success story. But now you're you're back at square one. So I would definitely caution against the short to medium term type of stacking and zoom all the way out. And think of this not only in terms of, you know, your own wealth management or even like retirement savings goals, but even beyond, you know, to the next generation, approach this from a generational wealth standpoint, I think that that will help people in general have a much more solid foundation for making sound financial decisions about what they're doing with the stats that they stack. Awesome. Thank you. And I promise this person wasn't a plant. But I'm stacker. Do you have a question for the panel? Yeah, yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. And I'm extremely grateful for this space. My question is, or my what I was what I wanted to talk about was, people always say that it's, I mean, it's good to dollar dollar cost average. But my approach is, I set aside a chunk of money every month, and then I see whether it has gone down or not. And then I just put in whatever I have at once, depending on on the price. What do you think about that? What do you guys think about that? Thank you. I think you're talking about like the buy the dip method, right? So you're waiting for the price to be in your favor and then buying and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. You're essentially looking for the opportunity, right to make that purchase. I will say that sometimes that can burn you depending on market conditions. And we haven't seen it yet. I mean, we actually we have seen it historically time over time, right? If you zoom out like Jameson saying, and look at the chart. Historically, the chart over time just goes up, right? We do see the dips and the spikes and the floors. But one day, you're not going to go, you're not going to see that price action hit your limits. And it's not going to happen next week. And it's not going to happen next month, right? It may happen in two or three years. So the only thing I would caution to you is, are you willing to hold that money for two or three years to ride out of that market until a good market, I guess, until the price gets to your price point? Well, definitely not. When you put it that way, then dollar crust average seems the best method. But however, I see, you know, when you see the Fed raising the interest rate, and the experts talking about recession, I think it's more the best way would for me at least be to watch it out and see the movement of the price, you know, and then just, and then just stack at once. However, when things get back to normal, then maybe dollar cost averages the weight. Yeah, I think it's also it's dependent on your personal situation. It's also dependent on your tax situation and whether you're doing first in first out last in last out, whether you're holding for short term versus long term gains. And if we're talking about stacking sets, extreme addition, you know, the goal I think is just to acquire as many sides as you can and just hold them for the longest amount of time. Thank you so much. That's it. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. This question came in as a comment. Where would be some safe places to stack sets at? Like safe places to buy? I think I just saw an announcement today that River was dropping all their fees. I'm pretty sure that they make DCA pretty easy. That's true. And for CASA users can also, well, in the US and certain states, you can buy through us as well. Let me bring a couple more people up on the stage. I was going to say for purchasing, it's really going to be dependent on your regulations and your the laws of your local areas and what services are supported and what aren't. With Lightning though, there's some really interesting things where you can do microtransactions in like gaming mobile apps that are out there now. And there's stuff that you can do where you don't need an exchange account or an identity and then you can withdraw the rewards. And it's not life changing money today, right? It may only be 50 sets, but what happens in another generation if the sets go to $1, right? You're pulling $50 a day theoretically for your future generations or for your retirement. So that's always interesting to me when people, I tell them about that, they laugh. They're like, it's 100 sets worth my time. Well, you're sitting there playing games on your phone anyway, right? What's the matter? So might as well get paid for it with an unknown value. Awesome. Well said. Ferris, do you have a question for the panel? Hi, yes. Thanks for having me up. It's more of a request for critique than a question. So here's a stat stacking story, extreme edition. Once I was orange-pilled, I went from basically, here's a little bit I'll throw in here and see where it goes one day to I am going to stack as much as I possibly can and hold it for as long as possible. But, you know, unfortunately, life events occur and sometimes naturally you need the money when you least expect it. So what's happened to me and, you know, this obviously isn't tax advice or anything, but this is just my experience and what happened to me. But I essentially held for a very, you know, reasonable amount of time, the average of what the new entrant holds for and then ended up selling a chunk thinking I would end up needing it, didn't need it, bought it back around the same price. So it was almost a wash and then from there just kept on holding. Of course, once an audit comes in and even before an audit and you're just doing bookkeeping and working with your accountant, I realized that I had realized a lot of gains and then, you know, into a bear market, this was a previous cycle, it wasn't the cycle, but once I realized the gains for one year, wait the next and actually have to sell at a loss, it ended up being a lot more costly in terms of SAT stacking to do that. So I guess a question out of this experience is how to compartmentalize SATs. You mentioned the first in, first out or highest in, first out, last in, first out, but what's what type of, okay, can I? I don't know that we heard the last part of your question. What was the final ask? Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, so basically if there's any methodology that you would recommend for compartmentalizing SATs for tax optimization, once you have gone to the extreme edition and basically have some retirement or generational SATs that you're trying to keep, but also you want to engage in the circular economy, you also need to take a deficit every now and then if you have to make up for it and need some liquidity. So what type of methodologies can I reference and look into? I think that's really going to be different for everybody depending on your setup, your tax implications and where you're located. One of the things we do offer on the cost app is the concept of sub accounts and I've done this where I've even done this with my own hardware wallets where one is dedicated to long-term storage holdings or for, you know, a child and then the other ones are kind of the play money, right? So if that one gets wiped out, not a big deal or if I get, if something happens to that, it's not as critical as my long-term holdings. So that's how I kind of compartmentalize them in my head, but I'm sure our guests have other methods that they approach too. Yeah, so a couple things here. Like Ron, I have different pools that have different cost basis and so if I'm in a situation where I need to liquidate some and I want to minimize, you know, taxes, then I will choose the one with the cost basis that's closest to whatever the current exchange rate is. I will say I have been similarly burned on the, you know, capital gains into a bear market type of thing. Specifically, you know, I had a big tax bill from the like 2017 of, you know, dumping a lot of my BCH into BTC and then of course the whole market crashed after that and one technique that I used to kind of stem the pain and this is, you know, risky and speculative, but, you know, had I, when the bill came due, if I had then, you know, sold more Bitcoin to pay that full tax bill that I didn't have dollars for because I had done a crypto-to-crypto trade rather than to fiat, if I had had to sell more Bitcoin, it would have made that original trade, I think, completely worthless, which was kind of upsetting for me. So what I ended up doing was I took a collateralized loan. I basically looked at the market and I said, look, I think this is a bear market, this is a bottom, it would be even worse for me to sell more now and why can't I just leverage the capital that I already have to wait it out and, you know, realize more of these gains at a future point in time. Now, of course, this is essentially kind of like leverage trading, so this is something that people should be extremely conservative about and I would not recommend doing, you know, sort of collateralized loans with more than a few percent of your total capital because you always need to worry about margin calls and liquidations and the funny thing is margin calls are not an issue as long as you have more margin, it's just that a lot of people who start dabbling in that easily get in over their head because they don't do the math ahead of time when you're dealing with an asset that can go up and down 10x in a pretty short period of time. So that's why I would keep any type of activity like that limited to like single digit percentages of your portfolio. Awesome. Thank you. And we're just about out of time. Pierre, did you have any final thoughts? Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me on and, you know, no final thoughts. I think that was a pretty thorough session and looking forward to the next time. Wonderful. And thank you to the audience for swinging by and in the meantime, don't trust, verify. Take care, everyone.