Rev (00:02)
Hey, local Bitcoiners. We're back. Rev, Rev Hodel here. I'm back again with my co-host Reed. And tonight we have Sean from the Niagara Falls Bitcoin Meetup. before we get talking to Sean, we're going to do the normal thing. I'm going to share not necessarily a Bitcoin Meetup adventure tonight, but something that's about to happen that I've been very excited about and have been kind of biting my tongue to share anything about it. But ⁓

The guys in the Southwest Michigan, ⁓ South Bend, Indiana, Grand Rapids, like a bunch of us from the Michigan meetups have been kind of kicking around this idea that we're calling ⁓ Bitcoin Community College. And this relates to kind of how do you make your meetup more of a community asset? And so in the past, we've done workshops, like we did a welding workshop where we went over to some guys, ⁓

shop and he had a welding instructor there and we all got a chance to lay down a bunch of welds and learned how to weld ⁓ in a few different methods and it was really cool. And there's other examples of that, but basically the point was just like, man, doing these workshops and stuff, getting these hands-on skills is pretty cool. And so what if we kind of coordinated this at a larger scale, not just for one local meetup, but ⁓ made this workshop style event available to ⁓ the broader

meetup culture. And so we're doing the kind of the test run of it this weekend. Out a couple of like two and a half hours away from me. But we're going to be spending the night over there and ⁓ working with some some firearms, ⁓ doing some permaculture design, ⁓ overviews, ⁓ some potential animal processing, we'll see if we can get that lined up, but just these hands on type skills. ⁓

Bitcoiners just getting together and really sharing ⁓ what they know with each other. And so we're calling that Bitcoin Community College and by the next recording, I'll hopefully have a story of how that went. But I'm super excited to try this out and to see if it makes sense to do more of these as time goes on. Reid, how about you? What you've been up to?

Reed (02:19)
Man, that sounds awesome. had never even, you most of the time I feel like with the Bitcoin meetups, right, we get, when you think workshops or you think Bitcoin community college, you think, we're going to be setting up a cold card or we're going to be, you know, stamping our seed phrases into metal or, you know, doing some sort of Bitcoin or only skill. But obviously there's all these tangential skills that are just so important to have if you want to really be self-sovereign. Right. And that's really what

because that's what the Bitcoin community is all about. So that sounds really cool. I can't wait to hear how that goes. ⁓ So for me, so our next meetup, we're still looking out here at ⁓ May 17th, six o'clock, Heavy Culture Cooperative in East Hampton. ⁓ That'll be our next meetup. And ⁓ I don't have too much to add since we just recorded last Friday. So this is the closest recordings we've had together before. ⁓

However, I did have a chance. So I mentioned on the last episode, how I was thinking about kind of retooling our website to get a little bit more Anoster integrated and to be able to have that be our platform to allow our community members to be posting stuff for sale. And so that way we can all kind of see what everybody has. And I was going to kind of like whitelist everybody. So I know who, whose stuff is going to be listed for sale on the site. And, um,

So Augie reached out to me, Augie from KCBitcoiners, who was on the show in episode five, and we've stayed in touch with, obviously. ⁓ He reached out to me and was like, hey, I talked about on the episode this Bodark tool. And it's really what it is, is it's a way to take the KCBitcoiners website and fork it and start porting it over. And they're trying to make the process easier and easier for other meetups. ⁓

But the real thing that's changed that kind of got me going is they've added a whole bunch of new features and there a lot of the features that they've added are the exact ones that I've been talking about. So I think that's going to be the new plan. The new plan is I'm going to try out the Bouddhark tool and fork it and be able to provide feedback to them and be, you know, not, I don't think I'm the, wouldn't be like the first guinea pig. I think that they've helped a few other meetups get set up on it, but you know, if there's feedback to the process, hopefully I can provide that and.

And then hopefully I'll get a better meetup website out the other side that I don't have to go and really do a lot of restructuring myself. So ⁓ yeah, I think that's going to be the plan and looking forward to it. So another shout out to Augie and to the Casey Bitcoiners. I think that's going to be a good addition for us and Western Mass. So Sean, welcome to the show. ⁓ We'd love to...

Shaun (05:04)
Thank you so much.

Reed (05:06)
Yeah, I'd love to turn it over to you and just hear a little bit about your meetup, of course, and then your background and anything else you want to share to get us started.

Shaun (05:13)
Sure, well, okay. Yeah, thanks guys. Thanks for having me here. I'm excited to talk about Bitcoin and of course Bitcoin meetups. ⁓ As you mentioned, I've run the ⁓ Niagara Bitcoin meetup ⁓ based in the Niagara region of Ontario. So specifically we do meet currently or we mostly have been meeting in Niagara Falls but not exclusively. So Niagara being sort of the region that we live in, sort of like how you have the Western Mass.

Maybe that's a general region in Massachusetts, Niagara, the peninsula right here across the border from the Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York side of things. We've been meeting since November of 2022 was our very first meetup. And we meet on the third Wednesday of the month, usually. So based on my schedule, sometimes it's the fourth meetup and every once in a while it's fourth Wednesday and sometimes it's the second. But we try to stick to the...

Reed (05:49)
you

Shaun (06:09)
third Wednesday of the month, and we throw in a couple of bonuses here and there ⁓ from time to time. So we've been having lot of fun ⁓ talking Bitcoin, learning things, doing a bunch of ⁓ mostly social meetups, also some in some other formats as well. ⁓ Basically got started because I went to a different meetup, right? I had never really heard of meetups before. And then during the pandemic, I don't know how

various degrees of lockdown you guys had, where you guys live. But here in Ontario, the lockdown was a little bit longer and maybe a little more extreme than other parts of North America. at some point, I'm pretty sure 2021, there was a meetup held in Hamilton, which is not too far for me. It's sort of between us and Toronto. it's a city, it's about an hour drive for me. And it was...

was a meetup at Tahini's. I don't know how familiar you guys are with Tahini's. It's Canadian business, a great Bitcoiner who ⁓ runs that company. And they had a meetup there at Hamilton Tahini's. And I'd never been to a Bitcoin meetup before. So me and a friend, we just drove on down. And at the time, pretty sure there was still like a mandate. You had to wear face masks. But we went in there and there wasn't a single Bitcoiner wearing face masks. Just every once in a while, there was a regular person trying to get a shawarma.

it would walk in and I think they'd be like completely stunned that there's I'm gonna say 40 to 50 50 guys and girls in there talking Bitcoin Ali the owner he was serving serving brisket all the food was covered by my tahini's it was just a great time right so obviously I had a great time there got to meet new people talk Bitcoin and that was sort of planted the seed I guess well the meetups are cool they actually had another meetup I think the

I'm not sure how much later than that, it was at a different Tahini's. That one was in London. And that one, you may have seen coverage of this, but that was the meetup or the event where one of our candidates for prime minister came and he paid for his shawarma with Bitcoin. So that was cool. I got to be there for that. ⁓ And of course, had a good time at that meetup as well. later, I kind of wish, so at the time I'm like, well, I wish there was a more regular meetup that I could go to, right? As you might expect. ⁓

Somewhere in between there You guys familiar with bull Bitcoin. I would imagine so bull Bitcoin greatest exchange in the world and So they actually have a referral or like an affiliate program called the Bitcoin missionaries and I became one of those and We would have like conference calls different people we would get on a on a call with Francis with other members of the team and they were just Throw throw like just tell us what's coming up new talk about new

new products or new things coming on. And one of the things they said during one of these calls was if you guys are thinking about starting a meetup, do it and you know, we'll, we'll help you, right? We'll give you, we'll give you, you know, support to start it off, whatever you need, things like that. And I thought, well, that's pretty cool. ⁓ and around that time as well, there was another fellow in this area, right? In Niagara. And I somehow got, ⁓ I had been doing some like Bitcoin one-on-one type, ⁓

educationals just because I'm super passionate about Bitcoin and I like teaching. even during the pandemic when like getting gathering in groups of more than 10 was completely illegal, I guess we would have met like in an underground, not literally underground, but at a movie theater. We were just in there and had a pact that was 40 40 plus people learning about Bitcoin. And looking back, of course, I can't believe I was teaching stuff when I really didn't know anything other than Bitcoin was great and it had limited supply. And this is how you get it.

But another guy reached out, said, well, I'm doing like a lesson. And I said, well, that's cool, because I do the same ideas. And he's like, why don't we maybe do a meetup, basically. I kind of floored the idea of meetup. Between the two of us, he's like, yeah, let's do it. Let's make this happen. So between him and I, we picked a location in Niagara Falls. Again, picking Niagara Falls because it has a good location close to the border. If people wanted to come over right on the main highway, if people wanted to come from Toronto, Hamilton, St. Catharines.

Basically easy to get to, ⁓ sort of a destination if people wanted to come to Niagara Falls and check out Niagara Falls and then come to a meetup, they could. Stuff to do for everyone. And yeah, so we made our first meetup happen, I think November, well it was definitely November, but early November of 2022. We ⁓ had like 25 people there, it was fantastic. ⁓ During that very first meetup I talked about, I met Dee from CoinKite, he came down, brought a cold card to give away, so maybe that pulled some people out.

⁓ turned out that there was actually another meetup that already kind of existed in the Niagara region that I had no idea about. I kind of didn't do a ton of research. ⁓ and so a lot of those guys came out as well. So turns out many of them are sort of crypto focused a little bit more than, than I wanted to be, but it still great to have them there. Some of them still come out to this day, to our meetup as well. And both those meetups still run, ⁓ in different locations, different cities, but they are still both happening. ⁓ yeah, that's, ⁓ and then we started out with that meetup.

Then December was after that, so I didn't run a meetup in December. I'm like, well, it's Christmas time. Maybe people won't come. The next January, during that meetup, somebody had said, well, wish this, was just like a social hangout, right? Like many of our meetups might be. And a lady was there. It was obviously her first time. She didn't know a ton about pickling. And she said, oh, I wish that this was more, like there was more of a chance to learn. So what I did was in Niagara Falls, a friend of mine have a church there. He's a pastor of a church.

And I basically got the use of their church basement. And that was their meetup format for the next little bit. Starting in January, 2023, we had like a little lesson for about an hour, bit. I would kind of prepare something. We'd talk about that, ask questions, whatever. And then just so happens it right across the street from that church was a bar restaurant. And then we'd go over and hang out. Anybody who wanted to, could go across over there and hang out. So we did that for like seven or eight months. And then one day,

So we, you I asked people, do you want to learn about? We kind of covered all those topics. And then one time there was like three people, only three people total that showed up. And we were talking about lightning or something. And then like, well, maybe we want to change this format up a little bit. You know, this is, I'm kind of doing a lot of work to only get two or three people out. And then I think the very next meetup, there was a better attendance, but we went to go across to that bar and it was about 830. And we walk in and they're like, actually guys, we close at nine now. And we're like, oh, well, this is no good.

Right. And one of the guys happened to know, well, up the street, there's a different location. We went up there and we hung out. We had a great time. And that's sort of been was our location. That was, you know, these called the usual suspects. Now that's where we've been meeting. We met there for almost a year after that just turned it kind of into more of a hangout ⁓ social Bitcoin meetup. We still have would have teaching and learning opportunities, ⁓ I guess, answering questions one on one. ⁓

Yeah, I don't know how much farther you want to go on the story of ⁓ the whole thing or if you got any questions from there, but.

Reed (13:32)
Yeah, no, that's awesome. I love hearing stories. one of the first things, because you said you started November 22, right? Is that what you said? Yeah, dude, was 2022 was like the year of the Bitcoin meetup. That's when my meetup started like a month before yours. Like we started September, October, something like that, 2022. Yeah, so there was something about...

I feel like part of it was a magical time for meetups too, because we were all cut, like, you know, even if it was a little different here in America, let's say, ⁓ you know, we were all coming out of that terrible kind of period of time. And everybody was just looking to get out and get together and to do stuff like that. And we had all been kind of trapped inside learning about Bitcoin. I don't know, I've always said, you know, I feel like the government really overplayed their hand on that one.

Shaun (14:28)
Hmm

Reed (14:28)
You know what I mean? Like it just like how many people, how many Bitcoiners are class of 2020 Bitcoiners? You know, it's just a magical time for people to kind of wake up and realize that, you know, the state is not on your side here. And that this, you know, this is not necessarily, you're not necessarily in a system where you have people who are, who really have, ⁓ you know, your best needs in mind when they're trying to lay down these rules and stuff. So, ⁓ yeah, it's just, you know,

Maybe that was part of it. yeah, I'm glad to hear that Bitcoin meetups, it seems to me like they're finally starting to make a little bit of a comeback. But yeah, that was definitely prime time for Bitcoin meetups back then.

Rev (15:11)
So in episode three we had on Boomer, I'm not sure if you know Boomer, does the Ottawa meetup and he mentioned that kind of right around the time that he was getting his started, this was also when those Canadian trucker protests were happening. Now does that, I don't know if that, I can't remember when it was, if it was in 2022 or, but it sounds like.

these meetups that you were going to, there was all of these rules and restrictions going on. And like Reed was saying, there was a little bit of ⁓ selective non-compliance going on. Where it's like, dude, this mask stuff is ⁓ ridiculous, and we're going to get together whether you want us to or not. And so I'm curious if that was taking place before the protests, or ⁓ if that came to...

pass afterwards. what I'm getting at here is it just sounded like there was something going on in Canada where people are like, we've had enough. And the Bitcoiners especially were just like, dude, we got to do something here.

Shaun (16:13)
Yeah, absolutely. I'm pretty sure both the meetups that first ones were sort of after that. I feel like there was still a mask mandate for the very first one. And that was probably right around the tail end of the same time after the truckers protest. Things had kind of happened. And then sort of that was the catalyst to bringing the end to some of those things. And while I think we were technically violating rules by not wearing our masks to that first one and I could be wrong. It's been a long time. If anyone wants to correct me in the comments and say, actually, you know,

Most people still wore masks, but we weren't supposed to. I really think we were though, because I remember people being pretty shocked that we were in there with no masks. But ⁓ yeah, I think that was sort of just right after that when pretty much everybody was sort of finished with it, they wasn't officially, the government wasn't finished with it just then. Definitely the second one though after that, everything had been gone. There was nothing underground about the other things later on ⁓ from those meetups, although hopefully there were some meetups.

that did continue happening ⁓ illegally in Canada during the time. I'm not sure. As far as the Ottawa, I don't know Boomer super well or at all. I don't think we might have met at a Canadian Bitcoin conference briefly, but I will tell you that ⁓ like sort of the Ottawa Bitcoin meetup Twitter page and maybe even their ⁓ meetup page. I'm pretty sure I just liberally copied or like, you know, just cut and paste and then change some things, right? I used very much use their format ⁓ and made that

into what I did for when I started the Meetup up, made a meetup.com and made a Twitter page particularly. I was definitely taking a look at Ottawa because I knew that they were a Meetup that was happening, so I used theirs. So thanks, Boomer.

Rev (17:56)
Now, another thing you were kind of talking about was ⁓ the sort of, sounded like at the beginning when you got the meetup going, there was a lot of enthusiasm and like, because you had kind of been cross pollinating maybe, and you had made some connections, this sort of brought the initial ⁓ wave of people through. then, if I'm understanding it correctly, as you got more into the educational component, and we're trying to find a home and everything, the attendance dwindled down.

Reed (17:57)
Yes.

Rev (18:21)
And it sounded like maybe that was a little discouraging. But at this point, have you ⁓ kind of come back, swung back the other way and you've got like a good group of regulars now and how is it going as far as the meetup today?

Shaun (18:34)
Yeah, terms of attendance wise, definitely. Yeah, early on with the education, I think it was a mixture of, you we were coming into the summertime, right? So starting in the winter, coming into the summer, people just have, you you got long summer evenings here, right? And people want to do stuff. If it's a nice day, do they really want to go indoors to a church basement and learn about Bitcoin? Especially if they're already been like some of the guys who are coming to the meetup had been Bitcoiners longer than me, right? So maybe they're not like, well, you know, I don't really need to know the basics of, you know, self-cost, right?

The people who came, I think got a lot out of it and I'm glad we still glad we did those for sure. But I think that affected the attendance a little bit. Nowadays, absolutely we have, ⁓ know, much more steadily we'll have it like nine or 10. It's kind of like the minimum now ⁓ as the, know, sort of like now the nicer weather kind of brings more people out because we can, you know, they don't have to drive through a snowstorm or whatever to get to ⁓ out to Niagara Falls or whatever. So yeah, we.

Like last meetup, think we had 13, but we kind of go up to like 15, 16. At some of our special or bigger events that we've done, we've had as many as like over 30, almost 40 different stuff. But we definitely have a group of regulars who are like some of them from the very who've been coming out since day one. Some of whom have sort of just picked up over the years. And it feels like we almost always have somebody new showing up as well. One or two new people. Last meetup, we had two or three guys that hadn't been out in like six months and they're back.

So no, we've got a pretty solid group of people here. Unless it's an actual snowstorm, which has happened and then was just me and two other guys, I'm not too worried we're going to have a group. the thing is, now I don't worry. I wouldn't even be worried about attendance, right? When we're doing a social hangout, we, if, long as one other person shows up, I'm having a good time. It's still a meetup, right? Like, you know, if it's just, whether it's, if it's 12 people, I mean, I can't really talk to 12 people in the course of two hours, right?

three people you can. So it's just a different meetup. It's not worse, right? You get a chance to get to know somebody better or go more in depth on topics that people are interested in.

Reed (20:44)
Cool. So one of the things, I mentioned this a little bit before we started recording, but I happened to catch a little bit of your backstory. But before we get into, ⁓ I sort of would like to give you the opportunity to share a little bit about your experience about how you found Bitcoin. before we do, I think I had heard also that you did a little bit of, ⁓ like, I guess maybe I'm not going to know the right term here, like financial planning stuff or like financial education stuff, but like outside of Bitcoin, just like regular

Like, how do you get yourself out of credit card debt? Like, that type of...

Shaun (21:17)
Yeah, yeah.

So good research on that one. That was a while ago. as America, I I'm not sure how big Dave Ramsey is in your part the neck of the woods, but I'm sure many Americans are familiar with and everybody might be familiar with Dave Ramsey and his concepts of getting out of debt and being anti Bitcoin, anti sort of anti a lot of things that maybe we would be fans of. But back in the

I went down to Tennessee to his training course. I became a Dave Ramsey certified financial coach. I worked with a buddy of mine who lived just over the border. I did a little radio. He had a radio program on. We did a little radio with that. And then I did do financial coaching. I just help people out and sort of the side hustle. Never was my main job. But just from a Dave Ramsey perspective, right? How to get out of debt. So Dave's got those seven baby steps, which to this day, I will still say that the first

⁓ Three baby steps are great, right? You want to stop overspending, know, get yourself an emergency fund, start getting yourself out of debt, right? And even for somebody who's, you know, wants to be into Bitcoin, can't, probably shouldn't be buying a ton of Bitcoin if you're also going more into debt each and every month. If you can't pay your bills, probably not, shouldn't be buying Bitcoin. So that's why it's even more important to get yourself on a good financial footing because otherwise you're not going to be able to get nearly as much Bitcoin as you otherwise would, right? Now, of course, you

Once you get stabilized, should you go into debt to buy Bitcoin? That's a whole nother story, Dave Ramsey would say, certainly not. But maybe I would disagree with him these days. I definitely do disagree with him a little more than I ever used to. ⁓ for certain people at certain times, he does a great job of bringing a good message and a message of hope that people do need. And that, course, I think Bitcoin is hope as well to a lot of people. So it kind of does tie together, even if Dave Ramsey is pretty anti-Bitcoin.

Reed (23:14)
Yeah, so the reason why I wanted to bring that up is because I actually had floated that to some of the guys in our meetup. So we have kind of a lot of Bitcoin beginners and stuff like that, but I was trying to think of how do we get more people in, but also how do we reach out into the community? And so at the time we were discussing, hey, should we think about starting a 501.3c? If we did, what kinds of things would we do? And I thought that that would kind of be a great, like,

thing for us to try to offer to the community. It's just like, hey, free, you know, what'd call it? Financial coaching, where it's just like, look, we're not here to show you Bitcoin. Like we just want you to get into a better place financially. Like if you're underwater and you can't like, you feel like you're, you know, you literally don't know what you're going to do month over month. It's just a terrible place to be in. And so if we could say basically just at the end, Hey, by the way, this was brought to you by.

Shaun (24:05)
Mm-hmm.

Reed (24:12)
the Western Mass Bitcoin meetup or whatever. And then it just kind of like puts that seed in people's head where it's like, ⁓ like we didn't talk about Bitcoin at all. You were just trying to help teach me about personal finance and stuff like that. So it's not something we ever pulled the trigger on. We haven't actually done that, but it was an idea. I still like the idea. I'm not exactly sure how we would pull that off or if we would need some sort of credentials or something to do that, but... ⁓

I don't know, it just seems like, like you were saying, like a logical kind of crossover.

Shaun (24:43)
Yeah, I will say I don't think you need, I'm pretty confident you don't need any kind of credentials to say, make a budget, stick to it, get out of debt, right? The real basics, that's ⁓ what you need there. You need the credentials when you start saying, giving financial advice, probably like buying Bitcoin, but ⁓ depending on what you're saying, but yeah, for sure.

Rev (25:07)
So the one thing that I was kind of thinking too is ⁓ when you had this help with ⁓ Bull Bitcoin at the beginning when you were working with Bull Bitcoin, that was probably a good marketing avenue. But since then, how, because this has kind of been a ⁓ challenge for meetups right now. There's so many different places to ⁓ essentially broadcast that you have this meetup out there, meetup.com, Avento, Luma.

you know, and now we're thinking that Noster is kind of the end game. That's where we're trying to point everyone to. But as far as marketing goes, what's been your strategies or what have you found to be effective?

Shaun (25:47)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and ⁓ you guys have definitely been encouraging me to get more onto the Noster side of things. I do have a Noster for myself and for the Meetup, I sort of like you guys were talking about two episodes ago, just the for the for the Meetup one, it's just one post a month, right? Hey, here's the Meetup, right? Whereas you can do so much more. So I've been encouraged to sort of step that up a little bit by you guys, which is great. ⁓ I started out with Twitter because that's where I was most

comfortable already that's sort of where I learned a lot about Bitcoin so like I already had a little bit of a presence on Twitter and then On meetup as well on meetup.com as well to me. It just kind of made sense Maybe it was because Ottawa did it don't know but If people are looking for a Bitcoin meetup, and we do always talk about meetups Probably if they Google Bitcoin meetup their meetup comm is gonna be one of those things Actually some of the other things you mentioned there. I've never even heard of Luma. I don't know what Luma is but meetup

⁓ you know, was good other than it has a cost, right? ⁓ but every time I thought, you know what, I don't know if I want to renew my subscription for meetup. A new person shows up and they found it through meetup, right? Like so commonly people are finding us that way. and including some of our longest, ⁓ the people who've been around the longest, that's how they first found us. ⁓ I, I personally think that's a great place to start. When you want, whether you want to expand out to all those other things you can.

I have also got a Facebook page for the meetup because, know, certain, like people who are a little older, that's maybe how they find things. And then also on Instagram, I made a thing there so I can share photos or different things. Sometimes just share memes. People can see it that way. And then, like I said, Twitter is probably the next and then Nostra, I occasionally try to remember to go on there and post things and send some zaps.

Rev (27:42)
So you're really getting those tentacles out there into the normie world looking for the Bitcoin curious. And you're trying to draw them in ⁓ through. I mean, man, that's a lot of different places to be kind of poking around and being ⁓ active in. But.

Shaun (27:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I definitely am probably

too online, even though, you know, whatever. So I, some of those places I am anyway, and I'll just send it out. I will also say, ⁓ Club Orange app, right? Formerly Orange Pill app. I'm just, glad that that just scrapes meetup.com now, right? So I don't have to make a separate poster, but I've totally had people, multiple people find our meetup that way and come out too. So that also works.

Rev (28:25)
So before you, go ahead, Reid.

Reed (28:25)
Yeah, what?

⁓ was just going to chime in real quick with, ⁓ you know, one of the positions that I've been taking on this is definitely, you know, if especially meetup.com, because I feel the exact same way as you. I've almost canceled meetup.com like five times. ⁓ But every it's where it's the funnel. it's, it's outside of word of mouth. Okay. Word of mouth is our number one. That's how most of our new people find us, but it's not even close. The second one is meetup.com.

And so I'm like, I don't think that we can get rid of this. so one of the things that, I, and I think you agree, like we're saying, you know, you don't have to get rid of that. That's your funnel for new people. What we're kind of pitching the Noster side is at least at this stage, like maybe someday that'll be like where the new people find you. Certainly it's not going to be today. Maybe there's some Bitcoiners on Noster who will find you that way. But again, the numbers are pretty low. Mostly what you get from it is discoverability because these events.

can be broadcast everywhere and they can be integrated into websites. Like there's no paywalls, there's no barriers. It's like the easiest thing ever to integrate into, you know, if people are making all these maps of like, where are the Bitcoin meetups? Like one of the common places that they're going to pull from is they're going to pull from Nowster and they don't have to worry about the paywalls. They don't have to worry about scraping stuff. They just pulled the JSON right off of the, you know, right off of the WebSock connection through the relays.

And that's it. That's all they need. Now they have all your data. yeah, we, I don't think that we think everybody should like cancel all their existing methods. It's more just like, Hey, just tack this on.

Shaun (30:07)
Nice.

Rev (30:08)
It's there's so many, a lot of people are, are that I, you know, that I'm in communication with are trying to come up with their own way of aggregating these meetups together. And, ⁓ it's like, well, a really low hanging, a low lift way to do it is to just use Noster, right? And if, if you make a, an event for a meet, you know, an, ⁓ an event kind, you get to hit the right kind on Noster and you put your meetup out there now.

that meetup can go, it's available in all these other people's little apps or what they're doing for their website. And it creates this ⁓ really easy integration where the meetups are just everywhere for the people that are building these tools. like we're talking about, you're not going to find the Bitcoin curious through the Noster meetup events, but I a lot of people are just on Noster, they're seeing, they're hearing about meetups and they just haven't taken the...

the jump yet, because maybe it's an hour away, maybe it's an hour and a half away. And they need to be like, it needs to be in their face over and over again and create these incentives, right? If they, like you said, if there's a cold card giveaway, now they're like, all right, I'm going, finally, they're going to show up. And so then you're getting these, these Bitcoiners, they're already Bitcoiners. They're just waiting to connect with everyone locally. Anyway, so you have this really cool

orange pill story. kind of alluded to it a little bit. And I'd love for you to lay that down because it is one of the best that I've heard.

Shaun (31:45)
Well, thank you, I guess. It is a little unique. just quick by way of backstory, like, so one thing for me is I did already have a pretty solid foundation in like Austrian economics. So some of that Bitcoin stuff that some people come to Bitcoin and find that they start learning about real economics. I did already have that. it's sort of like I was already ready to find Bitcoin. I had just had to sort of see it in the right light. I already ignored Bitcoin in 2013. I had ignored Bitcoin in 2017. Like I had

heard about it and dismissed it. Then in 2020, so in my day job, my nine to five, my fiat mining job, I've worked with, ⁓ you might call them juvenile delinquents, here we'd call them young offenders, basically kids in jail, kids in conflict with the law. I've done that now for about 28, 29 years. But in February of 2020, young person from Ontario, from Hamilton managed to steal

From a billionaire in California via sim swap. He stole a 1500 Bitcoin and I think 3000 or 30,000 Bitcoin cash that have to double-check originally. I didn't realize how much Bitcoin cash it was actually more Like a lot, but maybe about the same in value, but like it was a lot but to me 1500 Bitcoin was what you know that really hit me and people came to me and they're like Shawn because they again they knew sort of knew I knew a little bit about finances like how much is that worth so I had to Google it

I think at the time that he first came to us, he had stolen 14 million in Bitcoin. And then as that year went on, of course, 2020, early 2020, you got to after this is after the covid crash when he actually got arrested and came to us. So in May, the price was still pretty low. But by the end of the year, the price has started to run. And, you know, but I think at one point Bitcoin was up to almost 60,000 US at the time.

So, you know his 1500 Bitcoin became significantly more in value. So again because it was COVID ⁓ There was no normally we have a ⁓ high school teachers come in and teach the kids But because it was COVID the teachers wasn't safe for them to come into our facility But I mean I was there I had to show up to work every single day But I was teaching the class or at least sitting in the teachers chair making sure the kids did their work That kid sort of sat right in front of me so I could ask him questions

What's like, how do I buy Bitcoin? Where do I go? And he was sort of saying, well, you could go to Coinbase or Kraken. And I tried and I was trying to buy the credit card and he couldn't do it until eventually I did find a Canadian exchange that worked shape shift, I guess. ⁓ And I was able to make a purchase ⁓ that way. So then I did I did own Bitcoin. first, actually, first, our wealth simple came out with the option to buy it, which is like your Robin Hood. So I had some like paper Bitcoin.

You couldn't even, you had to change it to fiat to move it or whatever, right? You couldn't even move the Bitcoin. But then January 2020, 2021, I finally got my own real Bitcoin that way. you know, again, watching this kid sort of like understanding more about his story, how much Bitcoin did he have left? So it was never really clear because the police did a full SWAT raid on him, got some of the keys, sort of got unlocked laptops and got some back. But I knew that he had a bunch.

still left over, at least he claimed to. So that was kind of, you know, it's an interesting way to find Bitcoin. I don't think he ever really understood what it was that he owned. think he would, obviously he's just a teenage kid, right? So you can't expect them to really get it. But yeah, I'm kind of, I don't know, it sucks for the person who lost all that Bitcoin. I don't know if they got any back or not, but it worked out for me and that's how I found out about it.

Reed (35:33)
You're a mute riff.

Shaun (35:34)
You're muted there.

Rev (35:37)
So I really started interacting with Bitcoin around that same time. And I was like incredibly paranoid about getting hacked, you know, ⁓ because I didn't really understand how it worked, right? So I was just, and a lot of the associations with it, you hear these stories of ⁓ people ⁓ losing their Bitcoin for one reason or another. So I was like very cautious to the point where, ⁓ you know, I was probably overly cautious. It slowed me down my acquisition, right? The phase where you just start to learn how to...

actually buy it. So I'm just curious when you hear, ⁓ when you learn about it from somebody who's essentially a criminal at that point, ⁓ what kind of mindset does that paint for you when you start to try and figure this out?

Shaun (36:23)
Yeah, so I was also, I don't know if I was going say paranoid, maybe I was, but like one of the very first things I've learned how to do, like, you know, like when I get into a new, whatever it is, new thing, I do tend to kind of go all in on that sort of like my, I don't know if it's ADHD, but it's like my personality. So I'm to go all in, right? Whether it's, oh, it's online poker or it's Jiu-Jitsu or it's Bitcoin. All right. So I'm going to go all in on that. And that's what I did. I was just watching a ton of BTC Sessions videos.

One of the first things I figured out how to do was make like a multi-sig wallet, right? Cause I'm like, well now a SIM swap is impossible, right? And I'm like, well, I don't have to worry anymore, right? I don't use the same setup as I used to at all or whatever, right? But like ⁓ once I figured out, okay, if I have my keys offline, then what happened to that guy can't happen to me. And multi-sig is going to make that even more impossible, right? So ⁓ yeah.

I think it was good in the sense that ever since the very beginning, I've sort of had that mindset like, yeah, it can be stolen if you don't, but it's up to you to hold it responsibly. Right. And that's something I've been teaching at my meetups or harping on. Right. Ever since day one is, you want to have self custody and you want to, you know, you want to own Bitcoin only and you want to have self custody of it. Offline self custody being better, you know, than a hot wallet, but even hot wallets better than on the exchange. Right. And of course, bull Bitcoin preaches the same

same things that was natural that way that you have to take custody of your Bitcoin through them.

Rev (37:54)
Now, and so there's some things that ⁓ like this, like you said, this kid had ⁓ some of it got found, but he still had keys somewhere else. And so maybe as you're learning about this, you're like, wait a second. So how did they not get it all? ⁓ Did like learning from him kind of really unlock like some of the real ⁓ beyond Bitcoin just being money, but like the cool things that you can do now that this money is digital. ⁓

Did that kind of shed some light for you?

Shaun (38:24)
Yeah, absolutely. Like just the idea of having the private keys being the ownership, right? Anybody who can get that, right? If I find any of your seat, like either your guys' seed words, that Bitcoin is just as much mine as it is yours, right? Not legally, right? I'm stealing it, but like would own it. I would have just as much control as you would, right? And that's, you know, that obviously was part of, you know, figuring that out. And at the same time, I'm figuring out the scarcity of it, right? So he has, you know, realizing he's got 1500 of all that's ever going to exist.

This is crazy. And even if he's only got 600 left or 300 left or whatever it is that he told me at various times, it's still a lot. And I did encourage him to give it back. I don't think he did. Pretty sure, and sort of a funny story, and this is also something that helped me learn a little bit about security. Obviously, this is not just a jail for cyber criminals. This is a jail for teenagers, but there are serious criminals.

Some of them are aggravated assaulters, but even also murderers. And this kid was sort of a, as you might expect from the kid who did Bitcoin hacking, was sort of a nerdy, soft kid, right? It's not really the best environment to come into. I found out later, I think after he left, talking to this one of these other guys, this big kid happened to be in there for very serious crime. He had sort of been, he paid him protection. He paid him a Bitcoin for protection, allegedly, okay? But.

I think what he did was he gave him the seed word and so that kid put it in and he has it in a wallet. But that kid didn't know enough, the guy who was the protection, didn't know he then had to move it. Because once the thief got out, and he is long since out, he just took it back because he was still on the same seed phrase. So obviously that helps you understand the same concept. Whoever's got the seed phrase still controls the Bitcoin. So yeah, again, that wasn't the smartest move.

⁓ If he thought he was ever gonna meet that guy again, but that's what he did

Rev (40:25)
Well, that's some like really high quality education in a strange way, right? You get, you kind of get the crash course of like the real ⁓ cool uses of Bitcoin and sort of learn like, okay, so if I don't want to get my Bitcoin stolen, I can see what happened here. it's insane to start off in multisig, right? Like to kind of jump right into that. So very cool.

Shaun (40:47)
Yeah, I mean, first

thing was like a blue wallet, regular single stick blue wallet, but basically right after that, I started figuring how to use a couple of phones and got myself a cold card and making things happen. So it worked out.

Reed (41:03)
It makes me think too, it's so weird to think that depending on how you hold it, Bitcoin can actually be really, really easy to steal or really, really hard to steal, Because this kid, even the state couldn't even get all of his coins, right? You'd think that they have this overwhelming amount of physical force at their disposal and yet that's it. They couldn't get...

But then, it's like you say, right? It's all you need is the key and then it's like the easiest thing ever to just yank it back. it must have been a weird... That's why I think we wanted to bring it up because it's such a unique way. Like almost no one learns about Bitcoin in such an adversarial environment, right? It was all under this like super adversarial conditions that you're watching it play out in real time. Just such an interesting and cool way to...

Shaun (41:37)
Mm-hmm.

Reed (41:59)
to learn more about Bitcoin.

Shaun (42:01)
Yeah, well, it was definitely unique for sure.

Rev (42:06)
So a lot of times at meetups, there's a lot of really, if you're going to a Bitcoin meetup, you're pretty deep in Bitcoin generally. You're getting the new people in and stuff, but the regulars, they're probably ⁓ up to something cool. And a lot of times, you get this mix of five to 10 different people that are all up to something cool in Bitcoin, interacting with it. And it can create this magic. ⁓

circumstance, right? That can't exist anywhere else because these people are actually getting together in person. And so like, for example, in the Southwest Michigan meetup that I go to, it's the closest one to my place. It just so happens that a lot of us are really into like homesteading and permaculture. And we're all like doing this food production stuff. And so that just makes this magical space at our meetup kind of be like a farmer's market or a market every time where I'm pretty much picking up a grocery run every time I go to that meetup. ⁓

So I'm just curious if there's like anything with the Niagara region meetup that has this magic going to it that makes it unique.

Shaun (43:10)
I mean, I think unique. don't have the the farmers market aspect to it. That's for sure. Although we did, we have had people bring things to sell. ⁓ One guy would come from our like he would drive from London, him and two guys would drive from London. Right. So that's about this is London, Ontario. It's over two hours. Right. They're driving two hours to our meetup. He would bring some like laser engraved coasters with really awesome Bitcoin, ⁓ Bitcoin logos and stuff on him. And so he would sell those there, which is awesome. People would

We basically we have a, what I would say, I don't know if it makes us unique, cause it's probably true about any meetup, but we would just have a lot of people with a lot of different areas of expertise, right? We don't have like, all four of these guys are all coders or devs, right? Like even, we've obviously within that there could be variety, but like we almost are all in completely different things. Some people are really into like that homesteading mindset. And if you have a question about, you know, raising chickens or like growing sprouts inside your,

in your kitchen or things like that ⁓ or like general preparedness. Those are the one or two people as the people to talk to. Right. If you're talking want to talk about like setting up ⁓ quality Bitcoin security, right. Making like really doing ⁓ good self custody. Maybe that's me and one or two other guys. So there's some people over here. They've just been in Bitcoin for a long time and they know a lot more about some of the history or things like that and been through some more cycles. ⁓

but also just we have a variety of people from different professions, right? I would say our meetup skews a little bit older, like 35 plus, right? So people are already established in what they do. And we have a lot of just people we can talk. So sometimes our meetups, especially when it's just regular guys, we don't talk much about Bitcoin. We're talking about other things that we're interested in, right? Sharing that knowledge with each other, which is pretty fun.

Rev (45:06)
So you get this great kind of cross aggregation between the best skill sets that everyone has. And so collectively, the whole group gets stronger, I'm sure, then. If someone needs a custody solution, it's like a custody solution is kind of a sensitive thing to discuss on the internet or something. So it's like, I know you. I've been meeting with you for years. Maybe I can bounce some ideas off you about this new custody setup that I want to try.

Shaun (45:15)
Absolutely.

Mm-hmm.

Rev (45:35)
That's a great resource, you know? And you just, once you like, you just can't get that kind of stuff unless you go meet people in person. And that's kind of what I just think that these meetups can, can there's so much to offer there. Cause you never know ⁓ what, what, who's going to show up and what kind of interesting interactions are going to happen. What kind of networks that get created from it.

Shaun (45:42)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely.

Reed (45:59)
It reminds me too of what you opened the show with Rev, right? With this Bitcoin community college idea where that's what we're doing. We're coming together to teach each other. If somebody's got a skill, it's the type of thing that we all want. We want more skills, especially skills that lead to more self-sovereignty. so obviously there's lots of Bitcoin skills that we can learn, but there's other skills too, which is so cool. ⁓

So I had one other thing that I wanted to ask you about because I guess you're working with all these kids, right? So one of the things, and it's not exactly obviously the same environment, but I'm always curious like what teenagers these days really think of Bitcoin. So I have a couple of teenagers myself, my kids are teenagers now, and they really don't think a whole heck of a lot about Bitcoin, that's for sure.

And my kids, of all the kids in the school probably have more Bitcoin knowledge and yet they still are like, no dad, we're not talking about that with our friends. ⁓ What do you think about how that generation or that age of kids, would you think they're interested at all in learning more about this kind of stuff?

Shaun (47:14)
I'm gonna say it depends and probably, but like I say, probably not too many. And to be fair, like at that age, you know, cause if you're a Bitcoiner, you probably have a long-term thought process, right? You're thinking about years in the future and that's why you're investing in this technology that's gonna last. And is, you know, it's not really a short-term thing, it's a long-term thing. Well, teenagers in general are skewed to thinking, you know, short-term ish, right? Their brains aren't fully developed.

Then of course, the teenagers I work with are even more short term thinking than that. And that's why they get themselves in trouble. They think robbing a bank might work out and be a good financial move for their life. When of course it is a terrible idea. Do not do that. ⁓ But I have done Bitcoin education with some with these kids, right? So I've got ⁓ been to El Salvador. I got some the me premier Bitcoin course material and I've run through that with a group of kids and offered it to, you know, everybody. And then we might start off with five or six. And at the end, you got one.

who's actually interested in one kid will just come along because whatever it's something to do. Right? So like it's very rare that you get a kid who cares enough and also is sort of sharp enough to kind of go and move with that. Now in general, obviously my son knows a lot about Bitcoin. got a teenager as well. ⁓ One of his, one or two of his friends are at least a little bit interested, but most kids don't care. ⁓ I would say like in terms of

Because I work with some people who are younger as well, right? To me, it seems like the 20-somethings aren't that interested either, right? They're like, well, Bitcoin is old technology. And that's, course, what they're thinking because it's been around their whole life that they've been thinking, right? Like, if you're 25 years old, Bitcoin's kind of been around forever, really. So that's Bitcoin, that's old. But this is new, right? I can do game stuff or whatever. I can be betting, sports betting or polymarket or whatever the equivalent is. Some of those kinds of things like...

In inflationary times, people are driven to take more risk. Bitcoin probably doesn't even seem like it's risky enough for young people. They probably don't really get it. And when I talk to kids, like, oh, can make, if I'm just talking about investing in general, can make like 15 % in a year. So if I had a thousand bucks, I'd make like what, $150? Like, what's the point? It's like, they don't think it's it's completely.

not a factor to these kids. So, know, unfortunately, because it's for them that, you know, some of us are stacking for sure. I'm sure you're stacking for your kids future. I know I am. Rev, I don't know if you have kids, but if you did, you'd be stacking for their future too.

Rev (49:52)
So the Meet Premier Bitcoin is actually something that hasn't come up yet. I think this is actually a really great, like a lot of meetups, if you want to take the step away from just the social meet and start adding this educational component, especially if you're getting a lot of new people interested, the Meet Premier Bitcoin curriculum is like a really easy thing to integrate into the regular meetup structure, Where I've, there's a guy, Bart,

at the grassroots event a couple years ago. And he had started to do this, his meetup was basically just around this curriculum. That's how it started. And he got some people that took it through all the way to the end. And it wasn't like he was able to like craft the curriculum to where he could get it down to like each lesson was a half hour of the meetup, you know, and it's just a great way to ⁓ integrate some educational content where you don't have to go looking around and trying to figure it out. Like for example,

Shaun (50:43)
Nice.

Rev (50:52)
in the South bend, Indiana meetup, the one that I run, ⁓ we're starting to switch over to the Socratic seminar, style thing that Reed's been doing. And, ⁓ so now we're like, okay, we want to put some topics up here, but what the heck, where do we start? And so we're kind of like, what, what even resources do we draw the information from? Because I don't want to, you know, when I'm putting links out there, put links to, once you click that link and you start browsing in that other, the website, the other shit that's on there,

for them to ⁓ find shitcoin stuff or just bad information. So you have to really curate even the source material very ⁓ thoughtfully. So that way when people go trying to dig deeper, they dig deeper in a positive direction. Now this me Premier Bitcoin thing is like, it takes all of that question out of it, where it's just this curriculum is set and you've got this flow that you're going through. ⁓ But it sounds like you haven't necessarily integrated that with your Meetup per se, it's more ⁓ at work.

Shaun (51:48)
Yeah, I mean more at work. So when the meetup format like is there meetup like once a month that you'd be doing that it seems like a really long time to stretch that curriculum out. I think what I would love to do it's just I don't know I haven't found the time yet is to say like hey sort of like how I used to do as we talked about the Dave Ramsey thing right Dave Ramsey's big product I guess was Financial Peace University. I think it was 13 weeks at a time might be eight now but eight weeks in a row you're going to show up and do this course. I think that would be

Ideally how meet premier Bitcoin would get run is like hey guys or whoever is interested You know, you've got every Monday night for the next two months. We're gonna go through this course, right? And that's obviously more of a A time intensive thing if you want to dedicate yourself to that, but that would be ideally I think how that would run but I mean, there's no it's open source. There's no rules You can do whatever you want. It's a perfect for like hey, we're gonna do this this part of this for whatever if your meetups once a month It would still totally work

Right? It is just like, it is a long time to spread that material out, ⁓ but it's better to get it however you want to get it than not at all.

Rev (52:55)
Yeah, exactly. It just gives you a direction where it's like you start here, then you go here, then, and so you lead people on this Bitcoin journey in a curated, you know, curriculum style rather than just like this month, it's here's the gossip of the month that was happening on Twitter. And so we're going to go into quantum now and you're bouncing around month to month all over the place.

Shaun (52:57)
Yeah, for sure.

Right, right, right. Yeah. Definitely.

Yeah. Yeah.

Reed (53:18)
Yeah, one of the things I thought before, you know, because I talked to my kids quite a bit about Bitcoin and one of the things that it kind of blows my mind that it doesn't mean more to them, like it feels like it should mean more to them, kids by almost any measure are very much excluded from our entire financial system. Like it's incredibly difficult for them to participate in any way.

Like you have to be over 18 to do almost anything meaningful with your money. ⁓ know, like even like I remember when my daughter turned 13, it was like, holy moly, she can get like this cash app debit card thing that they rolled out this program for, you know, and I had to like be a co whatever to get her into the program or whatever. But finally she could have Apple pay on her phone because she wanted to like go to the donut shop across the street from the school and like buy something.

Shaun (53:51)
Mm-hmm.

Reed (54:16)
And she didn't want to always have cash on her. And so it was just like those little things. I just, it feels to me like when I'm talking to her about it, it's like, when you have Bitcoin, you know, you need no, no permission from anyone. Like there is no walls. Anybody can use it. Kids can use it. You could be five years old. It doesn't matter. You just get a wallet on your phone. You don't even, there's no age verification. ⁓ and so that was always something that I thought would resonate more with kids, but

despite me bringing it up so many times, it seems to never, never really cross over.

Shaun (54:51)
I will give a suggestion. Well, I don't know if your kids are of the right age or not. Maybe they're too old. But to anybody who's listening, I would say as soon as your kids are, they might not have their own phone at a younger age, which would be better, right? If your kids don't have a phone, that's great. But as soon as they're kind of of an age where they are semi-responsible, like, my son's been getting his allowance in Bitcoin or a portion of his allowance in Bitcoin since for like the least of the last four years, right? Ever since kind of I discovered the lightning network, right? Like, you know,

A portion of that is you would kind of getting allowance to do the chores around the house. 20 % of it is coming in Bitcoin, right? So learning how to use that. And, ⁓ you know, he has his own multi-sig wallet that he's I send it to, I control one key. That's where his savings go to, but his sort of spending money is in the lightning. But those are the kind of things if you've got kids, as soon as they're able to, you can, of course, give them a cell phone that has no connection to the Internet and they can or sorry, no like apps or whatever, and just turn on the Internet to ⁓ receive the sets, turn it off after.

So almost any age you can start teaching your kids. ⁓ I think that's a great way to go. And it certainly worked out pretty well for him since we started that at the depths of the last bear market. He's been pretty pleased with his returns and like the dips don't bother him at all, which is kind of neat. He's already gone through a cycle ⁓ before he turns 20. Which worked out pretty good.

Rev (56:13)
So you've been ⁓ doing a meetup for four, almost five years now, right? Coming on five years. And I'm sure when you got started, it wasn't like you had this grand vision of like, I'm going to be running a meetup for, you know, this, this many years and I'm going to start here. And eventually this meetup is going to accomplish these goals. But maybe now that you've been doing it for some time and especially seeing the way that the, the, culture that that's bubbling up around the meetup.

Reed (56:13)
yeah.

Shaun (56:34)
Mm-hmm.

Rev (56:42)
is starting to mature. are there, is there any bigger picture, any bigger vision that you're seeing ⁓ as something to work towards moving forward with the meetup?

Shaun (56:54)
Well, one of the things that I want to keep working towards is like Bitcoin sort of merchant adoption. And I kind of cut myself off in terms of like the history of our meetup a little bit earlier on. ⁓ Sort of like right where I cut off, we had been meeting at the social meetups, whatever, which is great. Another local Bitcoiner. if you'd look at if you see me on any podcast, his name is Brad Bradley Mines on Twitter, right? He's got the having report podcast. ⁓ So he's local to Niagara as well. And he kind of like

came alongside me and sort of like became like my co-meetup organizer there, which is fantastic. And we moved to a location where through his connections, got them, the location was accepting Bitcoin, right? And so it was a bar, restaurant, you could go there and pay for your beers with Bitcoin, right? Which on its own brings in people, right? People who wanna try that out, they've never done it before.

The location also, again, through Brad's work, they had a Bitcoin Well ATM right in there. In sites, we're having our meetup. Someone would usually at the end of the meetup get up and go make a transaction. People could go over and learn how to use Bitcoin Well ATM. ⁓ So using the way that it wouldn't cost nearly as much to use your ⁓ account through Bitcoin Well. Don't use regular Bitcoin ATMs, I would say. But like, so that was really cool. And also like we've got other locations in the region that are accepting Bitcoin.

and I'm excited to see our, hopefully get our, our meetup to move around and be able to have that meetup at some of those. Right. ⁓ so yeah, we met at the Riverside Tavern there for over, over a year. They accept the Bitcoin. Unfortunately, the business sold and the new owners got rid of the Bitcoin, ATM and they didn't want anything to do with Bitcoin. So then we kind of lost that. But, ⁓ last summer we did a bonus meetup over at, Canal Side Cones. ⁓ they accept Bitcoin.

What we did there was have the whole, I think we had whatever, 10 or 12 people show up and some of those people had lightning already. Most of them did not. So what I did was I said, all right, download this wallet. I think I said download Blink Wallet. And if you give me 20 bucks, I'll give you $21 in Bitcoin to encourage people to do it. And then everybody go order your food, either whether it's ice cream from the ice cream part or there's another business there, which is like a fry truck with burgers and stuff.

I started accepting Bitcoin as well because I'm like, well, those guys are doing it. Do you guys want to do it? And that night I was able to show the guy running. He's like a 60-ish year old guy. like, here, this is how you use CoinOS. And he's like, well, that's pretty easy. I'm like, yeah. So we got that running and everybody there paid for their food with Bitcoin, which was probably one of my favorite meetups that we've ever done. And some of them is their first time ever spending or using Bitcoin at all, which I thought was pretty cool. ⁓ And certainly,

That was the first time that that that one worker had ever accepted Bitcoin and probably the most Bitcoin that the ice cream shop received in one day, which is cool too. Right. So it's been that ice cream shop is definitely the most reliably able to accept Bitcoin, looking to accept Bitcoin. People go there because they accept Bitcoin, which works out pretty cool. like that's the one I'm not too worried about at all. Right. Where are some of the other ones that we've on boarded? You kind of have to hope that the right person's there or whatever.

You know, so that's sort of like what I'd like to see more more local businesses accepting Bitcoin and then we can kind of move our Bitcoin or meet up, you know, or have extra meetups at some of those locations for that whole pretty much as long as the riverbank was accepting Bitcoin. That's where we had our meetup because I wanted to support a business that accepted Bitcoin. Right. When they were gone, we've gone back into Niagara Falls there as well to our sort of our original social hangout spot, one of them, which has been working out fine, but they still don't accept Bitcoin. So.

It's not great, but still a fun time.

Reed (1:00:51)
I think that's the right way, right? To onboard the business. I think we might've, I might've mentioned to you a little bit before the show started, like I haven't gone around and done the business onboarding. And part of it is because the last thing I want to do is onboard a business and take all this time and hold their hand and get them set up and then have me be their only customer or like me set them up and then not be going there as consistently as I used to or something like that. And then they have no one.

who's accepting Bitcoin. So I think that's really the right move, right? Is to get a whole group of you to like go like all at the same time and like try to encourage your meetup attendees to frequent these businesses that are accepting Bitcoin because that's the way they're, you know, if no one's using it, what's the point in having it, right? So I like that strategy. That's a good one. I'm have to learn from that.

Shaun (1:01:44)
Yeah. And for that, just want to share this. This is one story about the, again, about the ice cream place. I think it's just such a crazy fluke scenario. So ⁓ one of the things, I don't know how familiar you guys are with Coinos, but we've, you know, one of the Coinos guys that came out to our meetup one time, gave a talk, ⁓ great, you know, great guys, Cole. And of course Adam's really good too. But so I had set them up with Coinos and they have, ⁓ they give you your business a little printer that prints out receipts, right? So.

Rev (1:01:45)
Well, in-

Shaun (1:02:14)
that's helpful to have, because then if you're just throwing a till and you can balance at the end. Well, they had changed their Wi-Fi, so that meant that the thing no longer worked. So I'm like, well, I'll come out and bring my computer and I can, you know, hard wire, like connect to it and I'll get it fixed up for you. I'll get some ice cream. So I just show up and the owner's not there. It was a friend of mine. He's not there. It's just like a teenage girl who's sort of working the ice cream store.

And I just happened to, I'm like, got the thing from her. I'm like, Hey, thanks. here. Next thing you know. So this girl, don't think has ever taken a Bitcoin transaction yet, right? She's whether she's new or just she hadn't had the opportunity. Next thing you know, a family, a guy with like his kids and his mom and his dad, probably eight people showed up and he's there expressly because they accept Bitcoin. And if I wasn't there, they wouldn't have been able to, but I just happened to be right there sitting like within six feet of where they were ordering. I'm like,

Well, you know what? is luckily for you on the year. And I'm like, this is unbelievable. Number one, it's a great story to show people other businesses. Hey, if you're accepting Bitcoin, people will come just because of that. Right. Especially if you have a good location. Right. And it's something that sort of makes sense. Like, hey, grab some ice cream from that ice cream store instead of Dairy Queen over here. They accept Bitcoin and ⁓ just, you know, it worked out so cool. I just thought that was fun.

Rev (1:03:38)
So the Tampa Bay episode ⁓ that it was, I think what was that episode eight, I can't remember. But ⁓ they were kind of talking about bounty programs where they were now they've got this 501 C3 and all of this. They've got like a little bit of a treasury to work with and everything. But this is another kind of reason that as a meetup organizer, as Bitcoin meetups can develop these treasuries to create bounties like this.

Now with this square integration, where people can kind of turn on accepting Bitcoin through their square ⁓ terminals, ⁓ now you can create bounties for people to go out and start to talk to, know, hey, do you accept Bitcoin? Find the ones that have turned it on. so ⁓ bounties aside, right, just the idea of like going and sniffing out the people with square and who has turned it on.

And then from there, there's this meetup in Indianapolis, and these guys are doing what's called the lightning social. So once they found the, and this is very much like what you've already described. Once they found these square merchants that are accepting Bitcoin, they sort of mob them. They do a meetup where they all go to that one place and they just buy a bunch of stuff with Bitcoin there. so, I mean, there's been these waves in the past, right? Where, ⁓ you know, it gets into the pop, the

the popular cultural lexicon that, ⁓ it's cool to start accepting Bitcoin. And you might increase your business by accepting Bitcoin. Maybe this was like around 2015 or something that this was happening. ⁓ people started going there and the Bitcoin was happening and then it died off and the businesses just turned it off and never figured out how to accept Bitcoin again. It was just water under the bridge. And so you do have to make sure that once you do get this business onboarded, like Reid was saying,

that there's some momentum there that continues and that there is like continual business done in Bitcoin to get them to stick around. But anyways, it's just so cool that ⁓ these ideas and all this stuff is sort of happening. It's like the discovery of fire, right? ⁓ Fire was discovered in multiple places, ⁓ you know, historically at the same time, like very distributed geographically. And so it's like this Bitcoin adoption ⁓ is kind of bubbling up.

Shaun (1:05:45)
you

Rev (1:05:58)
in these different places and all we have to do is just get the culture together, get the group together and go out there and let these businesses know that, we're here. Yes, there is ⁓ some economic activity around Bitcoin.

Shaun (1:06:11)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's one thing too. I don't know if you've got plans to or hopefully somebody will come out at some point, but Vancouver, Canada has a tremendous Bitcoin meetup out there and they have like, let's say like a hundred local businesses that accept Bitcoin. And that's something that they'll do on like, I think like a Saturday. Hey guys, we're gonna go and we'll just go around visiting Bitcoin. You can do your shopping as we go, right? So like whether it's a walk or just a ⁓ community, like a meetup get together thing.

Let's go spend some sats and things like that. And that's what I'd love to be able to do around here too, right? Like, hey guys, let's go here for dinner, here for coffee. We'll go over here for ice cream, right? And maybe, you we'll go over to this gym and I don't know, buy creatine, cause that's one of the businesses, they onboarded themselves completely. ⁓ But like a local gym now accepts Bitcoin as well. I don't know how we'd start off with a workout. I don't know, but we could make it happen.

Rev (1:07:07)
Instead of like a bar crawl, it's like a business that accepts Bitcoin crawl where you like craft the whole day, you know, and you just like, we start off in the morning, we get coffee, then we go over here for lunch. That would be super fun, you know. ⁓

Shaun (1:07:18)
Yeah, and some of them are bars. So

then at the end of the day, you're doing both.

Rev (1:07:24)
yeah.

Reed (1:07:24)
That's a great idea.

Rev (1:07:26)
So, and I think like the other example with Vancouver, It's Coinos is like, those guys were like the boots on the ground, just like doing the work. And they have a huge incentive too with the wallet, right? They want people to be using their wallet and the businesses to be using it. But they put the work in to go and onboard all these businesses. And so a lot of people, when you're getting started with Bitcoin and you really, you find that

Shaun (1:07:36)
Yeah, that's where they're from, right? So yeah.

Rev (1:07:53)
It's so much more than just money. It is a culture. It's a revolution. We're the pioneers on the frontier kind of mentality. And then you start to think, well, I'm not a developer and I can't do any Bitcoin mining stuff or I'm not good with nodes. What can I do for Bitcoin to help Bitcoin? And it just takes one dedicated person in an area to go and just continuously sniff around and encourage people to start accepting Bitcoin.

And that can be a huge contribution, you know?

Shaun (1:08:27)
Although I will say it's definitely better if more than one person is doing that, right? might be one person who's the catalyst, but I guarantee you in Vancouver, it wasn't just one guy going on. It's like, hey, I'm going to start and you guys do it too, right? And that's worked in even in, Niagara here, like, yeah, I onboarded a couple of these businesses just by saying, Hey, do you guys take Bitcoin? And they're like, what, how do you do that? Right. And that kind of worked for other ones. It's just word of mouth or Bitcoiners talking to the business people that they know, and then making that happen. Right. So

The decentralized model of spreading Bitcoin and merchant adoption is definitely a lot less work on one person. ⁓ And if you're the person who is going around to businesses, can get discouraging. think I have done that. I'm going to go to five or six businesses today. like everyone's like one person like, no, get out of here. I would never do that. I'm like, ⁓ okay, well, I guess I'm not going to frequent this business ever, but that's fine. Other ones were pretty open to it. And but they just didn't do it right then. But still you're planting seeds.

⁓ Which is still cool. If somebody else later on happens to ask, you ever take Bitcoin? They'll mentally go, I remember a guy came in a couple years ago. He was asking the same thing. Why would I want to do that? Right? So that's the mentality I have.

Reed (1:09:40)
All right, well, I think we're getting ready to transition here to our value for value segment. ⁓ But before we do, we'd like to offer kind of everybody here a chance to share either like final thoughts or key takeaways or maybe anything that you didn't get a chance to say. So, Sean, why don't you get us kicked off? Anything that you wanted to add to this conversation?

Shaun (1:10:01)
⁓ Okay. Yeah, I guess a couple one thing maybe is well first I want to say that our upcoming I don't know when this is going to be ⁓ broadcast, I guess, but our next meetup is the 20th of this month, May 20th, Wednesday, third Wednesday of the month, it is actually at a different location. And this is something from one of your other podcasts as well. someone was talking about the location, they weren't super happy with it. ⁓ I thought, well, it's okay, I can move the location. It's a good idea.

But it's a location where we can maybe have a little bit of a bigger space as well as a chance to move around a little bit more. We're going to be at Tailgate's Bar and Grill in Welland, Ontario. So back to Welland. And we're going to be celebrating Bitcoin Pizza Day, right? Because it's only two days before Bitcoin Pizza Day, the 22nd. I am a big enthusiast of celebrating Bitcoin holidays. And of course, the probably one of the top, not the most important holiday, maybe, which would be the halving. But one of the big ones is Bitcoin Pizza Day. I think it's a fun, fun way to celebrate. It's a good way to get new people out because people enjoy.

getting together and eating pizza, it's simple. It's not that expensive if your meetup happens to be covering the cost or whatever. So come on out to that 7 p.m. Wednesday the 20th at at tailgate's bar and grill in Welland. Check it out on meetup.com. NiagaraBTC.com. You can get to our meetup page that way or find us on Twitter NiagaraBTC. Also on Facebook and on Instagram NiagaraBTC. So that's that little promo there. But the other thing I would want to say is like

One of the cool things that's happened recently for us is just sort of like respond or like maybe spawned a new meetup to some extent. ⁓ One of the things that has sort of always been the case for our meetup being on the border like we are is that sometimes I like to call us the Niagara International Bitcoin Meetup because we do have one or two people coming over the border pretty regularly, right? Or usually it's only been one person at a time, but some people come over from the States. And one those guys recently,

He's been coming over for a bit and he's been talking about how he wants to get a meetup going and he's actually tried and sort of had nobody show up, right? Which isn't too cool. But like, just kind of kept encouraging him like, just, you know, do these sort of steps or like, what are the things, some of the things that you guys talk about here, like make the meetup page, make a Twitter page that sort of like, make it sort of general, like whether you want to call it, cause he's outside of Buffalo, but if you want to call it Western, like whether Buffalo Bitcoin meetup or what he ended up with Western New York.

So it's kind of got that general sense. So people aren't like, well, I don't want to go all way to that little town. But so he's got that going. And then just you just had it last Wednesday. And I was able to like broadcast it on sort of everywhere I could. And I hope and including speaking, sending it directly to some of the New York Bitcoiners that have come out to ours. And I actually had a great turnout on Wednesday. I think he had nine people, nine or ten people, including one guy from Niagara Falls, Ontario, that did make the drive over there.

so that's exciting. And hopefully like, I don't think it's, I think it's great to have big meetups, but I think it's also really cool to have smaller. And 12 person meetups that are more evenly distributed that way. Nobody has to drive an hour and a half to a meetup, right? Which is, you know, it's great for hardcore people, but you know, sort of normal people, they're not going to do that every month. ⁓ but if there's a meetup that's 20 minutes away, right. you know what? I can stop in for an hour. Right. So sort of spreading that.

Again, that's decentralized idea, even if you have a hub meetup or like you guys get together for some bigger things, whether it's that lightning social like you talked about or whatever. But like, yeah, like if there's people who are coming from a distance, I've always encouraged them, hey, you know what, you're driving an hour here. Why don't you guys start a meetup in Hamilton? Right. I would say to a guy, he ended up moving closer to us as he just comes to meetup. But this guy who's over in Western New York, you know, you definitely start that meetup, right? I'll do what I can to promote it. Some of us will come over, right? Like we did.

I'd like, I'd love to get over the next one as well. Um, but, I don't know, just encouraging people to do that. And in general, even if you're where there is no meetup at all, and just, if you build it, they will come is what I sort of always tell people. Like, so I know it's dating myself, let's feel the dreams, but, um, make a meetup, start happening. And again, even if it's just you and one other guy or two people, you're having a meetup and you're going to have a good time talking to Bitcoiners, right? I've never gone to a meetup and talk to Bitcoiners and be like, well,

I really wish I hadn't done that. No, it's always fun. You have a good time. You meet cool people. So get out there and get a meetup started. We're just totally up.

Rev (1:14:34)
Yeah, I'm going to sort of my whole thoughts on this conversation are pretty much directly related to what you just said too. It's just like, you're kind of like following a lot of the journey of many people that start meetups, You start off by just going to other meetups and then being like, well, shoot, well, first of all, I'd like to have one closer to me so I don't have to drive an hour and a half.

But I've also met some other Bitcoiners that are kind of in my range. And so they'll, when I do start this meetup, they can show up and then you follow this, this kind of it's good at first. And then it kind of, you try some different stuff and you can't necessarily nail down a venue and you haven't quite found the regulars yet. And so the attendance ebbs and flows and you're not quite sure like, all right, what am I really doing here? And, but if you just stick with it after several years, all of sudden now you're

you're onboarding local merchants and you're ⁓ really building ⁓ this resource, this community asset where people can come get advice on their self custody setup. They can come and learn because there's a guy there that knows all about homesteading and get some advice on how to increase their food sovereignty. And you see all of these connections starting to form. And so it's just, ⁓ it's encouraging to hear like, yes, this is a normal progression.

And for people that are just getting started with the meetup, like go ahead, go to some other meetups, meet some people. ⁓ They will kick your new meetup off, ⁓ help you out. And then from there, don't get discouraged when there's volatility, right? If anything, Bitcoin teaches us is like how to deal with volatility, you know? ⁓ And so this can happen in your meetup and just stick with it. And after ⁓ some consistency,

Shaun (1:16:16)
Mm-hmm.

Rev (1:16:23)
You're gonna get the fruits of your efforts there. Reid, how about you,

Shaun (1:16:27)
sure.

Reed (1:16:30)
Yeah, one of the things I taking us back almost to the beginning, you know, and I think we tied it together a little bit with what you guys are doing in Niagara Falls area is like, it's about like one of the one of the real benefits that you get from, you know, we've talked about Bitcoin meetups are like a community asset. Well, one of the big things that you can get out of that is like the skill sharing idea, right? Where people are all coming together and we're all kind of upping each other's game.

I've had people at the meetup come to me and tell me that they were like, oh, well, I had the Bitcoin and it was all good. I was stacking Sats and that was that. But now that I'm at this meetup and you guys are talking about all this crazy stuff that I didn't even know, now I'm kind of feeling like, if I'm going to stay engaged with you, I got to start kind of up in my game. Maybe I need to start a lightning note or maybe I need to go figure out how to...

We talked about onboarding merchants. Maybe we need to start going to do that. It's like the more time you start thinking about your meetup, and it's not just your meetup itself, it's what it is, is it's becoming your little community. And how do you make your community stronger? There's all these different ways that you can make your community stronger. But yeah, just sharing skills, learning, growing, becoming more sovereign as a community makes everybody...

like that much more robust and ⁓ prepared for whatever it is that we're all going to have to go through here at some point. So I think that's kind of what I was thinking about most when I'm trying to summarize what we did here today.

All right, well, I think with that, we're ready to finally transition here to our boost section. So, Rev, I don't know if you got some stuff queued up or how you're going to go through this this time.

Rev (1:18:22)
I got it. know, we have this awesome thing that you built in localbitcointers.com and that displays all of the boosts that we get from anywhere all in one place. And so I was able to find the point in which the new boost started. And so last episode we did something a little different because Spencer is doing bowl after bowl podcast. And so they do that. They live stream that podcast every Tuesday.

And so, ⁓ we were able to kind of like piggyback on his setup there and actually live stream the audio while we recorded to fountain. And so there was some boosts that came in live while we were actually recording. And so that's where I'm going to start tonight. And, and this means that, I mean, it seems like every episode we're getting more and more boosts. ⁓ and so it's amazing that. That this velocity is starting to pick up like.

We're doing it, guys. The Noster thing, the value for value stuff, we're creating some momentum and some velocity here. So it really is cool to see that these things are picking up. the point being is that there's quite a few boosts to read through tonight. And I'm going to just get started with it. So this one's from Live, and it's 333 Sats via Fountain from

Thought it was a chat up, but maybe it's just anonymous. It's from Cast-O-Matic.

Reed (1:19:54)
I

this might have been one of the boosts that was ⁓ we made a change. So this whole ⁓ live streaming thing that we did with Spencer was a really cool experience for both of us, but it was also a cool experience because we got to see all these different types of Bitcoin payments coming in. ⁓

One of the, think this was one of the boosts that it came in with no name on it. And I was going in and trying to figure out why, because the Castamatic link that it came with actually has a whole bunch of the payment information. So after that boost, that boost was a great experiment. And so now going forward, if you boost us from Castamatic, we will have all the correct information. So thank you for that.

Rev (1:20:44)
Yeah. And so then next up, we got a boost from our website, from localbitcoiners.com. And that was from Chad F and 33 others. ⁓ And he says, testing my web and LN fix on the site. And he was boosting the episode nine with ⁓ Sir Spencer from KCBitcoiners. And so yeah, the website, we had just kind of launched the boost feature right before

Reed (1:21:13)
It was like that day. Yeah.

Rev (1:21:14)
that episode went

live. there was maybe some testing was necessary. But now if you go on localbitcoiners.com, we've moved all the episodes. The first thing you'll see is all of our episodes. if you're listening and you're listening on Fountain or you're listening on someplace maybe that you can't boost and you want to boost, you can go to localbitcoiners.com. You can log in with Noster, connect your ⁓ NWC enabled wallet.

And you can boost right from there, and it will show up here in our feed. And it will bounce out to our NPUB on Noster. And you're going to get tagged. everything is going to be connected. The value chain will have a chance to react there. And so the next boost we got is 3,994 Sats via Fountain. ⁓ And it says, hell yeah, gents. Loving the show. Great guest. Hashtag 40HPW.

And that was on the episode with Sir Spencer, episode nine from KCBitcoiners. And I believe that was from Shadrack, although I don't see it here, which I don't know why. We're working through some of the kinks. Thanks, Shadrack. Next, we got a huge boost. OK, this is the biggest boost we've ever gotten. $42,000.

and 69 sats via podcast guru from Sir Spencer. so Sir Spencer says, thanks for having me on. Hope to continue to improve bowlafterbowl.com and continue to evolve alongside your local bitcoiners.com site. Iron sharpens iron. And I greatly value hearing what you guys are discovering on your value for value journey. Long live the value chain. And so Sir Spencer is definitely in the leaderboards now with that boost.

Um, and so thanks a lot, sir Spencer. That's, uh, it means a lot that, that, uh, we're working on this together and we're going to try and create some cool new stuff, some new options for people to interact with this value for value ecosystem and, uh, get some capital creation and velocity going. Next, we got, uh, 10,000 sats via fountain from Jordan. Um, Jordan is the, uh, producer.

over at the Ungovernable Misfits podcast, one of my favorites. ⁓ And so they're doing a lot of, if you don't know that podcast, they do a lot of content around, you know, self sovereignty, ⁓ privacy, open source, just kind of the deeper nitty gritty stuff that comes with Bitcoin. Really great show. I've been listening to it for years. ⁓

definitely part of the crew, Jordan in the Meshadel and all of that. These are the guys. ⁓ And so he says, looking forward to listening boys pre-boosting. And so he's just ⁓ given us some value in advance because he knows that he's going to get something out of it. Next, we got 100 Sats again from Jordan. And he said, fuck, I didn't know you guys did pain hymns. Keep an eye out. And so actually, Jordan has just ⁓ been kind of

sharing around an article or ⁓ I don't know if it's a Twitter thread or what you want to call it, but there's some information around ⁓ this really cool new thing with PayNims. ⁓ So if anyone's familiar with PayNims, basically it's a way for you to make a connection with somebody else on chain to where you don't need to give them an xPub, but they can generate a fresh address every time you want to do a payment with them. And so...

This makes it really convenient for people that you're paying with paying often ⁓ or transacting with often where you can keep the privacy ⁓ intact. You don't have to share so much. so one of the issues with this pain in ⁓ this, I fuck, can't remember the bit number, but the pain in bit is that there kind of needs to be a central ⁓ server that kind of holds that namespace ⁓ for there's a

pain and payment code, but you want to simplify that into a name, a recognizable name. And so what happened when samurai, ⁓ all of the samurai infrastructure got shut down is that pain and namespace got shut down at the same time. All the pain, the connection still worked, but you couldn't do a new one. And so the solution to this is actually ⁓ inscribing ⁓ this namespace on Bitcoin itself. So now you can always reference, there's no, it's

It's just embedded in Bitcoin and you can always reference it and therefore ⁓ these names will persist. And it's like one of the best use cases of actually inscribing data on chain that I've heard about recently. It's very cool. You guys should check it out. I'm struggling to remember. ⁓ It's Max Tannahill is the guy who has ⁓ accomplished this. So check out ⁓ painims and related to what Max Tannahill has been doing.

Very, very cool stuff.

Reed (1:26:25)
Yeah, and we integrated those actually, it wasn't like day one or anything, ⁓ but very early on in the podcast, we started getting people reaching out to us saying like, hey, you should accept payments this way or hey, you should accept payments that way. And it's like, ⁓ we, since day one, we've been trying to open up as many possible ways for you to send us value as possible, right? And that's why we're doing all this stuff with the website ⁓ is we're trying to open up all these different avenues. And so, ⁓

Pay Nims was one of the ones that I hadn't even heard of those when someone said, hey, you should check out Pay Nims. I was like, I guess I should go check out Pay Nims. And so that became, you know, I went and checked it out and learned it and got the show, you know, set up with it. And so now it's in the show notes. If you want to send us any ⁓ value that way.

Rev (1:27:16)
Yeah, and I guess it's worth talking about a little bit. the last, ⁓ the way I use paynims or the most valuable reason I'm using paynims is in relationship with my mining pool. Right? So I use Lincoin mining pool and Lincoin mining pool utilizes paynims. So now I don't have to change my payout address every time I get a payment. I can give them my payment paynm information and every time I get a payout, it goes to a fresh address and they don't have my xpub.

⁓ And this is like that's a pretty fucking cool thing to do, you know ⁓ Because like if you're if you're mining with ocean your ad you you're kind of disincentivized to change your address because your shares are building up on in relation to that address so then you have to roll the shares out of the old address and then Start getting shares in the new one regardless. The pain him stuff is very cool ⁓ There's a lot of good reasons to use it. It's important Next we got a boost

Reed (1:27:49)
That's a great use case. Yeah.

Rev (1:28:16)
100SATS from podcast guru from DeLorean, who is the co-host of the Bowl After Bowl podcast, and she says tests. Thanks for testing.

I wonder what she was testing. Probably just the... ⁓ well, there you go. Yeah. Dun, dun, dun. ⁓ Next, we got 3,333 sets. You should ding the bell. Does anyone have the bell? Ding, ding, And it's from podcast ⁓ guru, ⁓ DeLorean again. And she says, abundance mentality, open source everything.

Reed (1:28:31)
Probably her next boost because she's next on the list, right?

Got to get a soundboard for that.

Rev (1:28:56)
V for V takes commitment and consistency, but goes far beyond money. It demands responsibility of both value givers and value receivers, but leads to limitless collaboration and fun. Those experiences can be evaluated in monetary terms if mentally necessary, despite being priceless and great memories. And that was from the last episode nine with Sir Spencer. And she actually boosted this in live and we actually had a little discussion about that. ⁓

on the show if you want to hear what everyone had to say. So thank you, DeLorean, ⁓ the value, the value for value ⁓ info. Next, we've got 333 sats from CurioCaster, ding ding ding, ⁓ Eric PP. And there's no message along with that. So thanks, Eric PP, for participating while we were recording.

after that, we've got 1,112 sats via fountain from Shadrack. And he says, don't forget to hang build, enjoy together. Hashtag 40 HPW. And so, yeah, this was kind of one of the things that we talked about in the last show was where, you know, meetup start off as a hang hangout. And then you start questioning like, well, what are we really doing? Can we do anything more? But it's, it's also important not to lose sight of the fact that.

This is a social thing ⁓ at its core. Meetups are inherently social.

The next one we got is 333 sats from Cast-O-Matic. It's via fountain from Cast-O-Matic or with a Cast-O-Matic link in there. Oh.

Reed (1:30:43)
This is another one that was the, yeah, this is another one of the casematic

ones that was broken that is now fixed going forward, but at the time was not fixed. So these are what they are, they're kind one notes, but going forward, casematic stuff will be better.

Rev (1:30:58)
Yeah. And so the other thing that we're ⁓ playing around with doing is, is, ⁓ because there are so many of these podcasts, 2.0 apps, and, ⁓ now you can boost. You don't have to, it's, it's sometimes the friction, there's friction there. If you want to boost, right. If you're using one app, then you have to have an Albie account or you have to have some sort of wallet that supports key send, or there's all these like kind of pain points that you can run into. And all you want to do is just like boost the show and.

put it, throw down a couple of sats and send a message. And so, ⁓ we are now you can go to our website and do that. You sign in with Noster and if you're a lot of the listeners here are already using Noster, right? So it's like, pretty much every guest that we've had on the show has had a Noster, and pub everyone's using Noster, right? So come over to our website, log in with Noster. can boost right from there. And, ⁓ and it will show up on this feed. And in addition to that, like,

If you want, like maybe you're hearing this podcast for the first time and you're listening from antenna pod where you can't boost, but you can go on to, ⁓ we're hoping to integrate that. can go onto the website and then be able to find a link to our show on your favorite podcasting app and then add us to your queue there, but you can boost through the website, right? So now you don't necessarily have to ⁓ use a podcasting app that supports boosting.

to listen to us, you can just do the boosting over at the website. Next, we got 124 sats via fountain from Matt Finley. And he says, really great discussion. Well, thanks, Matt. Appreciate the boost. ⁓ Hopefully, we can continue to provide the value. And this discussion, if you listen, was also great. ⁓ Next, we got 5,000 sats via fountain from Matthew D. Matthew D is on all our leaderboards. Matthew D is one of our biggest.

⁓ contributors to our podcast. so thanks a lot, Matthew D in advance. But what Matthew D's got to say Thursday, May 21st at 6 p.m. Michigan BTC is having a party at the Devos place in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a political, it's political if that's your bag. You can find tickets at MisesBitcoinBall.com.

And so this is something that ⁓ Amber Harris of the Michigan Bitcoin Council has been working really hard on ⁓ with the Libertarian ⁓ Party. ⁓ And there it should be a pretty cool event. ⁓ They're definitely doing their best to make it a big a big thing, you know, probably ⁓ in line with that that sound money soiree kind of vibe that was going on ⁓ in Tampa Bay.

And so if you're in the Michigan area and you're around May 21st at 6 p.m., you should try and get to this event. It should be pretty cool. They're going to have some vendors there. You're to be able to buy some local stuff with Bitcoin. And so check it out. MisesBitcoinBall.com. Thanks, Matthew D, for letting us know about that. And I really this is this kind of that's the kind of boost that I'm like, gets me really excited. You know, that's kind of.

Talk about value chain, right? Now you're sharing ⁓ an event that you think is cool coming up somewhere, and now everybody gets to know about it. ⁓ And that is a lot of value right there. Matthew D sent us some value, but he also gave value to the listeners here, letting everyone know about that. So thanks. Next, we got 236 Sats via Fountain from God's Death. And God's Death is also one of the leaderboard. You'll find him on our leaderboards. And he says, thank you, gentlemen.

Well, thank you, God's death for continuing to listen and support. ⁓ Next, we got 112 sets from Nostra gang, who just has a heart emoji. Thanks, Nostra gang. And I don't know, maybe Nostra gang is going to be on the leader. If Nostra gang isn't on the leaderboards already, they're certainly working their way towards it. ⁓ Yeah, it seems like they're boosting a lot every episode. So really appreciate it.

Reed (1:35:08)
Getting close.

on the regular.

Rev (1:35:16)
⁓ Next we got 324 sats via fountain from Shadrack. Here's Shadrack again. ⁓ man, Shadrack is definitely a leaderboard ⁓ homie as well, it seems. ⁓ Shadrack says, build tools for the next generation. Teach the children to earn sats by doing shit. And so we talked about that a little bit on this episode too, where it's like.

Reed (1:35:37)
Yeah, that's perfect

fit for today, right? That's perfect.

Rev (1:35:40)
Yeah, it's, you you got to give the now it's kind of like the getting to alluding to like the minimum wage laws ⁓ kind of just eliminate certain jobs that are so low value that they can't even be ⁓ viable because minimum wage stops it. But you know, it's like kids can earn Bitcoin, you know, and ⁓ there's nothing stopping them from doing that. And if there's a Bitcoin culture and you've got children,

And I think Sir Spencer was even talking about that. And that's probably where the boost comes from is ⁓ that they're going to do a meetup at a place where kids eat for free and try and make it about education for kids. And this is providing the opportunity for the kids to ⁓ get started with earning Bitcoin before they can even mess with the dollars. ⁓ Huge advantage there.

Next we got 421 sats from Undisciplined via Fountain. And they said, great discussion about organic growth. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And that was on episode nine with Sir Spencer. And I will agree with that. mean, it's a permaculture principle, small and slow solutions. so ⁓ growing slow creates resilience.

create systems that are not brittle and they'll maintain some longevity. And that's if we're going to lower our time preference and zoom out as Bitcoiners, hey, we're not in a hurry here to have the meetup be a raging success overnight. Just build it slowly and follow the path that it takes you down.

Reed (1:37:26)
It actually makes me, thinking about it that way, right? Thinking about building slow, it actually makes me more bullish on all this stuff, right? Because it's like, sometimes I feel like Bitcoiners want mass adoption to happen tomorrow. And like we talked about on the show last Friday, it's like, we want everybody to come to Nostra because Nostra is the best, but that's not happening. And so if you think that that's what's needed,

Well, that can be a little bit discouraging, but as soon as you start switching over your mindset to this, we're just going to build at the pace that we're going to build at. And like the people are going to come over as they come over and like, that's okay. It's like, man, well, the future is bright, right? We're just going to build for the future that we want to see. And then eventually we'll just grow. We'll just grow into it.

It's been a good mind shift.

Rev (1:38:19)
Yep. Just all we have to do is just keep doing what we think is good and what we think is right and, ⁓ can't go wrong. And it's going to take time, but that's, you know, I, I, I often, ⁓ I love to use the fruit tree as an example, because that's what I've got. got a bunch of fruit trees and I planted these fruit trees at various times, but you can't plant a fruit tree, an apple tree, for example, and expect to get fruit from it next year.

Right? You got to plant that tree, nurture that tree, protect it and grow it to the point where it starts to actually produce the fruit. And so if we can take that mentality and port it over to a lot of this other stuff, ⁓ it changes the mindset. And you, you realize that, yeah, I can't get discouraged. I just got to keep doing the work. So great boost. Thank you. Undisciplined for that one. Next we got.

2,100 sets via fountain from Steel Matrix. And he says, thanks for the show. Well, thanks for listening Steel Matrix. And we hope to see you again. We're going to keep trying to do our best to get you that value back. Next, we got 5,000 sets via fountain from BTC Wrestle.

And so I don't know if we should tease this or not, but I do believe BTC Wrestle is scheduled to appear as a guest.

Reed (1:39:48)
This is true. We've got him on the calendar.

Rev (1:39:49)
So

BTC Russell, you will be hearing from him. He's been boosting some really great boosts along the way, ⁓ but look out for the show with BTC Russell coming up. And he says, great, great rip fellas as usual. I always come away with new ideas for my meetup. And so, you know, maybe since BTC Russell has been listening in advance of his appearance, he's just going to like lay down the hot fire of all the synthesis of.

to all these episodes combined together. Not to put pressure on you, on you, you BTC wrestle, but thanks for the boost.

And BTC Wrestle's a Meschedel homie too. ⁓ the Meschedel support is really strong. Definitely appreciate everybody at the Meschedel. Next, we got 100 Sats via localbitcoiners.com. All right. And so this has an end pub that is ⁓ not rendered. So it's a bunch of numbers and letters. And test boost.

Reed (1:40:48)
I'm looking at it now too. It looks like it's not rendering out a lot

of apps. I'm not sure why. Maybe they haven't filled out their profile information.

Rev (1:40:54)
Are you,

yeah, a a unique end pub. Tell us how you, how you managed to get that to happen there. And pub one P G five W K H sorry, I'll stop. All right. Next we got a 124 sats via fountain. ⁓ and so this is another test boost using Chad F's boost me bitch. ⁓ and then, yeah, so, so Chad F has been working on a similar feature from a different website.

And I think Bowl After Bowl is also working on having this ⁓ availability too of just being able to find these podcasts and boost them ⁓ from outside the podcast apps, know, just having different ways to reduce the friction of boosting these shows and getting that value moved through conveniently and allowing these value chains to react. And so it looks like the boost worked, Chad F. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

And we got 209 sets via localbitcoiners.com from Chad F again. And now he's testing Primal Signer on iOS. So Chad F is really digging into our website trying to break it. ⁓ It's almost like, man, we should be paying him the stats back for doing all that work. Thanks, Chad F. ⁓ We're going to find a way for you to get some of that value back, definitely. ⁓ Go check out Boost Me, bitch. That's definitely one way.

Reed (1:42:10)
Yeah, this is all great stuff. 100%.

Rev (1:42:22)
100 sats from Fountain from Bullish Clips. So many good ideas, not even halfway through the episode, bullish. And so Bullish Clips has got the sats market. ⁓ We talked about that in episode five, I believe, when we kind of, yeah, it's kind of a reoccurring theme, once again, because Bullish Clips is ⁓ boosting all the time. So we got it, you know, why not mention it? It's a really cool idea.

Reed (1:42:38)
come up in a few episodes. Yeah.

Always boosting. That's right.

We'll be talking more

about it.

Rev (1:42:52)
You know, and I'm like very close. A lot of my products are not ⁓ internet products, right? Not very cool things to ship. ⁓ But I've got some things in the works in which might allow me to finally, for it me to make sense to join in on the bullish market. ⁓

Reed (1:43:10)
Hey,

that would be sweet.

Rev (1:43:13)
And so yeah, we'll be hearing more about that as time goes on. But for now, if you got something that's good to ⁓ sell on the internet, or if you're looking to buy some really high quality stuff from Bitcoiners, local to Noster, you can check out the bullish market.

Reed (1:43:30)
21st of every month.

Rev (1:43:31)
All

right, it's 21st of every month, all right. 321 sats via fountain from Alice A. And so Alice A sometimes ⁓ it seems like they render as Satoshi Chef as well. And we can't figure out why this is happening. Maybe there's two end pubs and they're boosting from separate ones. I'm not sure. But Alice A is saying that there's a

They're hosting a pizza night at the winery Thursday, May 22nd in Winters, California. So ⁓ the winery must be the name of the place. May 22nd, Winters, California. Pizza night. So is that pizza day, May 22nd? Is that the holiday? All right. So there you go. A pizza day meetup in Winters, California. Go check it out.

Reed (1:44:21)
May 22nd is Pete's day. Yep.

Rev (1:44:30)
Thanks. And once again, that is the kind of shit that I want to see, the events. Like, let's let people know what's going on so they can get out there and find their local Bitcoiners. 421 sats from Fountain ⁓ Hash Power Music. And so ⁓ they say, boost on behalf of the Cleveland Bitcoin meetup, value chain increases the velocity of value supercharging the flywheel. ⁓ And so the Cleveland meetup is definitely

When I was trying to ⁓ do this podcast on my own before I met Reed, I actually had ⁓ talked with and recorded an episode with the Cleveland guys. And so I do owe them a redo so that we can get their meetup out there. But the Cleveland Bitcoin meetup culture is amazing. It's exemplary. And if you're in anywhere near Cleveland and you can get out to one of their meetups, I highly recommend checking it out.

And Hash Power Music is involved with a lot of the V for V ⁓ DMU stuff going on with the music stuff too. So you should definitely check that out. That's what I'm saying, dude. The Cleveland guys, they got it figured out. They're like integrated into Noster, into the value for value stuff. They know what's going on over there. Next one we got, ⁓ shit. ⁓

Reed (1:45:51)
Sweet.

Rev (1:45:56)
421 sats via fountain, once again from, from hash power music. And he says, read, this is what we do with musicians in real life. They won't get it right away. And it depends on what stages are in each artist is different. It's not usually about money. Talk about other stuff like publishing and distribution. If you need support through the journey, reach out and we're relatively local to you and happy to help with all of it. Well, so there you go. That's what I'm saying. Those guys know about.

Reed (1:46:22)
That's what I'm looking for. That's fantastic.

Rev (1:46:25)
the music stuff. So check out Hash Power Music. Yeah.

Reed (1:46:28)
Great advice.

As I continue down that journey, I will absolutely keep that in mind. Thank you for that.

Rev (1:46:36)
And it's just so

cool. it's the, the culture that can go along with music is so much more powerful. feel like in, so much more, ⁓ Engrained in us as humans, you know, like to, to commune around music, ⁓ there are songs that are literally like thousands of years old that we still sing or maybe not thousands of years old, but like a thousand years old or something from like,

plague or something, right? From the 1500s, whatever. so music is super powerful and it's a very important part of building true Bitcoin culture. need musicians and we need places for them to play and people to go watch them.

OK, next up, we got 421 stats from Fountain Hashpower Music again. He says the deeper social connection with your audience is extremely important. Noster plus podcast 2.0 communities ⁓ equals massive value that Spotify cannot replicate.

And yeah, it's like we talk about this. It's like Noster is a location on the internet. Spotify is not a location on the internet. You're at like someone's house, you know, like you're in their business inside their storefront. You're not free to do whatever you want there. But like Noster is like, it's the park and it's the mountains and it's the woods and it's the rivers and it's the streams. And it's all that shit that you can just go and fucking run into people at with the public square. It's the commons. ⁓ and so

Reed (1:48:14)
unexplored territory.

Rev (1:48:16)
Yeah, the frontier. And so you can go there and you can just do this shit. And you combine it with the podcast 2.0, which is this RSS feed kind of uncensorable self-hosted thing, right? It becomes, ⁓ like you said, impossible for Spotify to replicate. What we're doing here is new and it's the future. It's the frontier. It's great. I'm having a lot of fun participating in it.

Reed (1:48:18)
The Frontier.

Rev (1:48:44)
Next, we got 209 sets via localbitcoiners.com. so it's Reed, you're just boosting about ⁓ the Bitcoin boost bots or the boost bots have been ⁓ made public. So you linked the GitHub link to that. So now if anyone's interested in how our boost bots work ⁓ and I guess maybe you should talk about it because I don't really exactly know.

Reed (1:49:10)
We've gotten

questions. We've gotten questions about it before and I wasn't sure like what the best way was to like, it certainly wasn't something I was trying to keep hidden or secret or private. I just wanted to do it in a way that was responsible and made sense and would actually be useful to someone else. And so that required me to like do a little bit of cleaning up because all this stuff happened like very organically and in the moment and they were all.

These had all kinds of hard coded weird stuff in them and then needed to get cleaned up and sanitized. And so ⁓ I was finally able to get to that. And I thought it would be a good, now that we've gotten a bunch of these lessons learned in from the last episode, it kind of makes sense for me to throw it out there. for those of you who have been asking, Hey, how did you build that? Or how are you dealing with this? Or how are you dealing with that situation? Now, at least you can either go look at the code yourself or go ask your agent to go look at the code, which is.

honestly what I did. I didn't actually write these things. But if you're interested, now you can go check it out.

Rev (1:50:18)
Yeah, and hopefully people can use that as like maybe even a reference. I don't know how it works, but like if they want to try and build these boost bots themselves, now they can at least see roughly what we're doing.

Reed (1:50:31)
An example implementation,

Rev (1:50:33)
Yeah. Next, we've got 2100 sats via localbitcoiners.com. And this is Reed again. ⁓ If you like this episode, should definitely check out Boomer. He's got a new podcast, the 49th Parallel. There's a link, a font link there. And so yeah, Boomer is a fellow Canadian. We mentioned him earlier in the episode. They've got a cool new podcast with Business Cat of the Rock, Paper, Bitcoin podcast, which

Fundamentals is also a part of that. And so you can see that this whole ecosystem, we're all connected together here, ⁓ really kind of creating some cohesive cultural ⁓ lenses through which we can learn from each other. And so Boomer's podcast, the 49th Parallel is kind of looking into the more interpersonal and relationship aspect of like, once you have Bitcoin, how does that affect your relationships and how does that change you as a person and how do you think differently?

It's definitely a food for thought type of a show to listen to. So I recommend I listen to it. I like it.

Reed (1:51:38)
I just start, so I threw that boost out today actually because ⁓ I started listening to it today. And so I listened to their first episode. I really liked it. It's going to be one of my regulars now for sure. So figured I I boosted it along with the boomers episode to episode three. So that's, that's the connection there.

Rev (1:52:00)
OK, we got another. We got just a couple more. Yeah, next we got three hundred and twenty four sets via fountain and it says no comment with boost. And that was on episode one. So someone went back and listened to episode one. And so that's the cool thing is that you can go ⁓ you could boost from any episode, an old one or a new one.

Reed (1:52:01)
Alright.

we got some more. Go ahead.

Rev (1:52:26)
and you'll get it, you'll get red on the most recent one. And this is kind of like some of the little bit of the gamification stuff that we'll get into with the leaderboard stuff. But like, if you're a guest on our show, you're getting splits, right? And if you're a guest on our show, you have a Bitcoin meetup. And if you want to promote your Bitcoin meetup by boosting our show, you can boost the episode that you're on and you get a kickback from that boost ⁓ in your splits and you get to promote the show at the same time.

And so that's just like kind of one of these weird things that you can do, go back to an old episode, you get read on the most recent one and you get like some value back for that.

And so there's ⁓ another boost, 324 sats. I'm assuming it's from the same person because of the number. And they're boosting episode four as well. And then another ⁓ boost of 324 sats. this, I wonder, so now it's coming up. It's Shadrack. And so Shadrack is definitely trying to game this, I think, where he wants to get on that most episodes boosted leaderboard because he's just going back and boosting maybe all the episodes that he hasn't boosted before.

Reed (1:53:32)
yeah, that's gonna work.

Rev (1:53:37)
And so he boosted episode six and then he boosted episode six again and then he boosted episode seven and that's all the boost that we got for tonight.

Reed (1:53:50)
All right. Yeah, dude, some of these were coming in like while we were recording. So that's great to see. All right. So let's transition over and talk about leaderboards for a minute. So ⁓ like I said, I'm very glad to be able to share that all of this stuff is now ⁓ out there on our GitHub for the, it's actually the same GitHub that has our webpage on it is where we store the bots.

⁓ And so you can dig in and see how we're actually collecting all of this information and ⁓ putting it together to build these leaderboards. So our first leaderboard is about our most popular episodes. And how do we know they're the most popular? Not by downloads. We know they're our most popular episodes because these are the ones that have received the most sats. So if you're new to the show and you don't know where to start, ⁓ probably this would be a good indication of where to start because

Sats are the signal, is the way I like to say it. And so our top boosted episode of all time was only from a few days ago, which is episode 9 with Sir Spencer. Now, so the total for that episode is now 75,872 sats, which is absolutely incredible. Now you probably caught on the boost reads, one of those was a huge boost, biggest boost we've ever gotten. But even without that boost,

Episode nine would be almost cracking the leaderboards already, which is impressive considering it was only a few days ago. ⁓ and so again, so that was with, ⁓ sir Spencer and that was where we talked about, ⁓ growing slow, build strong communities. And it was with he's from the Casey Bitcoiners.

All right, second place is Augie's episode. taking over Sir Spencer took over the episode nine, took over the top slot there from Augie. But Augie's still holding it down in second place with 63,625 stats. That was with episode five. And episode five, if you remember, the meetup is the farmer's market. Still remains one of our most popular episodes.

Rev (1:56:09)
Yeah. And so, ⁓ the KC Bitcoiners, if you're in the Kansas city area and you have not been to some of these meetups, they're good. You know, you can tell there's been two guests on the show that have, have been repping that, that meetup culture with tons of that'd dude, they got it going on over there. ⁓ so definitely try and make your way out to Kansas city. And actually Kansas city does like these block party events where like, they do the kind of this regional meetup.

Reed (1:56:14)
yeah.

Rev (1:56:37)
structure that we're talking about where it's create like once a quarter or every so often a bigger thing and that you can like Make a trip to just go just to go to that event You know, even if you're not local to Kansas City just to go experience the culture down there It could be something worth considering

Reed (1:56:58)
All right. Third place episode one, episode one, the pilot episode got a ton of love, ton of support on episode one, but episode one, as we've said before, is a great place to start. If you're on your big, if you're looking to start a meetup, maybe you don't know where to start. That's where we kind of break down some, some of the good lessons learned that we've gotten over the years. think we, we kind of pulled a lot of information off of the GitHub page that we have, which is another great ⁓ resource for you, which you can also find on our website.

⁓ But episode one has got 60,523 sats and that was an episode with no guests. It was just Rev and I to get things started off.

All right, and fourth place.

Rev (1:57:41)
Is this a good opportunity

to kind of talk about what the splits ⁓ and how, like, if we don't have a guest on that we do the third split. it's like one third goes to rev, one third goes to read, and then one third goes to the guests. And if there's two guests, then they split the third, so on and so forth. But if there's no guests, then a third goes to this Primal wallet. And this is kind of a cool thing that I've never done before where we both have the keys.

that Primal Wallet, you know, so we like co-own the wallet and what we're doing with those, right, and the NSEC. So it's like, are both co-owning this cooperatively, which is cool. I just never have had any opportunity to do this in my life. ⁓ And so what we're doing with the Sats in that ⁓ Primal Wallet is now we're trying to push the Sats back out.

Reed (1:58:16)
and the answer.

Rev (1:58:40)
via zaps and eventually once I log in a fountain or whatever, or maybe it'll be easier to use Boost Me, bitch, or something. And I should check that out, but use some other way to start boosting other shows that ⁓ we find valuing. And so like an example of one thing with this website that we put up with localbitcointers.com, it's new and we can't nearly test it ourselves to find all the bugs and everything.

and get feedback. Like we only see it from the way we're looking at it. But you know, if you're going on that website and you're seeing it a different way, we want to hear about that. And so when someone basically went on there and tried some stuff and said, Hey, I, you know, this is my feedback. And I was like, Whoa, all right. Thanks for the feedback. I boosted or I zapped them. And then I said, you know, anyone else, like I renoted it, anyone else that's got feedback, I'll zap you for some feedback. And ⁓ so this is one way that you can.

Not only are you adding value to the show, if you go on our website and you try it out and you play around and you boost the show, but for doing that, we've got a ⁓ budget there to push more stats back in your direction. And once again, this is the value chain, right? We want to keep the velocity high, everything, the transactions flow. And ⁓ at the end of it, there's more capital built than there was before. So that's just what I wanted to say about it.

Reed (2:00:04)
Yeah, the shared wallet thing is pretty cool. I actually kind of thought it might break. Like I thought the wallet might not like having multiple states or whatever, but it's been totally fine. So maybe that's another feature of the Spark stuff that they implemented. I'm not exactly sure, but it has been working smooth. Fourth place is episode two. This was GC and James and their episode, episode two was 47,071 Sats.

⁓ And that was the title of that episode was Meetups are the ultimate web of trust. And ⁓ yeah, we had just that continues to be one of the great conversations that we had. ⁓ A whole bunch of really good clips came from that episode. But, you know, actually I want one point I wanted to bring up. I was thinking about bringing it up during the boost. I didn't really get a chance. One of the cool things I was thinking about with with all the stuff that we're doing here is, ⁓ you know, a lot of meetup groups out there have an end bug.

⁓ but maybe, and I think Sean mentioned it earlier. It's like, yeah, I've got an end pub, but it's like one, one, you know, message per month. And honestly, you know, I feel like I've been there too. And it's like a little bit hard when you know, you're blasting this message out to your, like, you're like, you know, 12 followers. It's like, you know, what is the point of this? But if you boost the show now, all of a sudden we're blasting out your end pub to a, to a wider audience.

And then we're re-noting that from our accounts to a wider audience. And now people are going to be like, ⁓ this Meetup has an end pub. Let me start following your end pub. So it's a really good way for people who maybe you're not on Nostra all the time, or your Meetup isn't on Nostra all the time, and you want to start getting it out there that you actually have this end pub. This is a great way. Get on the value chain, boost the show, and that's another way that you can try to get your... ⁓

your follower count up and try to get a little bit more discoverability for yourself.

Rev (2:02:06)
Yeah. And and pub in general is like a good one. It's, it is something to follow for like content. ⁓ it's not just going to be related to stuff to local Bitcoiners, the show I'm going in there and I'm definitely trying to, to curate the stuff that I think is relevant to anyone that would listen to the local Bitcoiners podcast. ⁓ like the, the, whenever that BISC thing happened, that that's on there. You know, if there's any meetup, any event thing that I'm finding,

⁓ that's going to end up on our feed, you know, across an oyster that I'm coming across. like, there is, ⁓ reasons to just come check us out in general. ⁓

Reed (2:02:51)
All right. Fifth place is episode seven. That was another rip with, with Rev and I. I think that was the one where we talked. That was when we really started leaning heavy into the value for value. So how meetups can benefit from value for value, Noster and value chains. So that's rounding out the top five episodes of all time, ⁓ which is now, so this is episode 10. So this is our top five list is going to now become half of our episodes and it will continue becoming a more and more exclusive club, more episodes that we drop.

And that came in with 39,227 sounds. All right, so that was our first leaderboard. Our second leaderboard is what I like to call the Rider Dice. And we started talking about it a little bit because it sounds like Shadrack is coming for Matthew D here. But we made a couple changes. our listeners who have boosted the most episodes all time, that's what this leaderboard is.

And it used to be the top 10, but it was kind of a lot. And also with so few episodes, it was just a whole bunch of big ties, right? It was like a huge tie, like a whole bunch of people had three episodes, a whole bunch of people had four episodes. So we cut it down to the top three with ties, right? So if there's five people tied for third place, you'll all be listed. The other thing we did to this boost or to this leaderboard is Rev and I were both in leaderboards because

We're constantly in there testing out all these features and doing all these test boosts and trying stuff out. And we felt like, well, that's not exactly what this is all about. And so I've hard coded in manually excluded Rev and myself. ⁓ And transparency, now it's on our GitHub. So you can see that. ⁓ So the listeners who have boosted the most episodes all time, starting with Matthew D, eight episodes.

Matthew D is going to have to go back and figure out the one episode that he missed just to keep Shadrach out of the number one spot here, I think. ⁓ God's Death is number two. God's Death and Shadrach are tied for number two with five episodes each. And War Time coming in with four episodes is in third place. So thank you as always to our Rider Dice. And yeah, I think some of the people are starting to figure out.

how to get on this leaderboard. We're gonna have to figure it out. If everybody's tied for first place, how long the list should be, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we get there.

Rev (2:05:22)
And so, mean, so Shadrack and Matthew D have got, really, God's Death is just, ⁓ he's a lot like Pies to me, you know, where he's in there, he's boosting, God's Death is not just consistently boosting our show, but he's consistently boosting a lot of shows. And so God's Death is just like, he's a participant in this value for value culture. ⁓ And so he definitely deserves recognition just for that, just for.

the guy who's like, I'm listening and I'm pushing that value back. ⁓ But Shadrack and Matthew D. So Matthew D has white paper soap. And as I say, every episode, ⁓ I get my soap and some tallow bomb from Matthew D and I like it a lot. And he will sell you that stuff. He's got a website, white paper soap, check it out. And Shadrack is doing a, he's doing a lot of stuff, but.

Recently, he started doing a podcast with ⁓ the ⁓ PASNIA radio network. ⁓ And so they're doing like a monthly kind of news recap show. And this news recap is like more about this second realm concept where, you know, how do we exist in the second realm, Mestredale, this whole way of thinking around how do we build these parallel systems?

start building them now so that way when shit really hits the fan or if things really start to crumble, you're already in a good spot. You've already built up your connections and you're participating in the community. So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, this ⁓ second realm, Meshadel concept, you should definitely go listen to what Shadrach has to say with Rayo 2 over there on ⁓ the Pasney RadioNet.

Reed (2:07:18)
Hell yeah. All right, let's go. Let's go to the final leaderboard. possibly our most important leaderboard. These are our biggest supporters of the show. Our biggest supporters with their one-time boosts. So these are the biggest single boosts ever sent to the show. And as I mentioned last time, I'm thinking of these as because we're going to go back and read off your message that was sent.

with these huge boosts. This is a message that if you have something that you'd like us to bring up on every single episode, all you got to do is just get onto the leaderboard and we're going to read off your message every single time. ⁓ right now it's at the very end of the show and maybe it won't always be at the end of the show. We'll talk about different format structures and maybe we need to get your messages displayed more prominently. We'll see. ⁓ But for right now...

Let's start at the top here. So biggest boost of all time is from episode nine, Sir Spencer, 420.69. So 42,069 sets. And I know we already read it off, but I'm going to read it off again anyways. So this was from Sir Spencer, be a PodPass guru. Thanks for having me on. Hope to improve bull after bull.com and continue to evolve alongside your local Bitcoiners.com site. Iron sharpens iron.

I greatly value hearing what you guys are discovering on your value for value journey. Long live the value change. So get ready. I feel like you're going to be hearing that one for a long time. thanks a lot for all the support, Spence, and it was great conversation. We were so glad to have you on as well.

Rev (2:09:05)
Yeah, and they've got, so they record every Tuesday. And so I just recently, listened to their most recent episode ⁓ today. ⁓ And yeah, they bring a show that is, ⁓ they've got so much cool shit. Like I said, they record live. And so like, if you listen live and you boost live, then there's like a bowling pin sound that goes off and then a disco ball that turns.

And so they're really, ⁓ taking the possibilities of, of what you can do with the boost and what you can do with this value for value interaction and create cool, gamification of it all. And it's the, if you only listen to the podcast to check that out, it's worth it. But beyond that, they're also putting out all kinds of really interesting news stories, a cool spin on everything, lots of cannabis culture, ⁓ promoting the, idea that

this cannabis stuff is good and okay, you know, and kind of talking shit on the stupidity around a lot of what's going on in the country right now in regards to cannabis ⁓ adoption or laws and all that. So it's a show that's definitely worth listening to.

Reed (2:10:22)
All right. And still, and so in second and third place, previously first and second place, is Bitcoin is for Everyone, May 22nd, May 23rd, 2026. So the first one was 12,020 Sats, and the second one on the same episode, episode five, was 11,010 Sats. ⁓ So I'll read off the boosts from those. So the first one, join us at the largest Bitcoin-only conference on the West Coast. Bitcoin is for Everyone, May 22nd, May 23rd.

Pizza Day weekend in Portland, Oregon. Bitcoin is for everyone dot com. Use discount code NOSTERINSIDER for 21 % off. And their second boost on the same episode was ⁓ the Portland Bitcoin group has meetups six times a month. Come check us out.

So yeah, so these are another couple of boosts are gonna be up here for a little while. I'm glad that there's still time. If you wanna go to Bitcoin is for Everyone, this is perfect time to start checking it out. We got a few weeks left. And so head over to, I wanna make sure I get the website right again, bitcoinisforeveryone.com and check them out.

Rev (2:11:42)
Yeah, it's going to be a great conference. ⁓ It's so hard for me to even like leave the homestead for even just like a day, you know, with all the irons in the fire that I've got over here. But if I could have some access and some freedom in my ⁓ ability to travel, I would be, this would be on my list ⁓ of a thing to go check out. It's... ⁓

You can just imagine some dude that runs six Bitcoin meetups a month putting on a conference. How bad ass is that conference going to be? You're going to get good vibes if you show up over there.

Reed (2:12:24)
All right, fourth place is Otis Bittmeier, 10,420 sats back on episode one. And let's read off his boost. So, ⁓ I'm thankful for the Southwest Michigan Meetup where like-minded humans gathered together in downtown Benton Harbor on the third Thursday of every month for fellowship and meaningful conversations spanning many domains. I leave inspired to continue building the world I want to see. Join us if you're in the area.

and thank you again to Otis Bittmeyer.

Okay, and last on the list is We All Eat with 10,020 sats. Also episode five, so three of our top five were all on episode five. It's no wonder why they were in first place for so long on the other leaderboard. ⁓ All right, and We All Eat's message is, LFG, get out and go to your local meetup. Find a meetup when you travel. Can't wait to see you fellas at Lake Satoshi in a few months.

Lake Satoshi is going to be another topic I'm sure that we're going to be talking about as that continues to get closer.

Rev (2:13:39)
Lake Satoshi is like the pinnacle example of the regional meetup, in my opinion. It's such a killer event. Otis Bittmeyer is going to be there, no doubt. ⁓ you know, selling his sound coffee and just hanging out. And, you know, we all eat, of course we'll be there. it's, these kinds of regional events are the opportunity for all of the

meetups that you couldn't necessarily, it's a little outside your range, but you know there's cool Bitcoiners over there. When there's a regional meetup, now you get to go meet those people. And as we were talking about tonight, once you start to meet those people, you never know if they're going to have some expertise, some intellectual capital, some experiential capital that you can gain access to. And maybe you can share something with them and all of a sudden,

the culture gets a whole lot stronger. There's a huge building of cultural capital through these regional meetups. ⁓ And yeah, it's so great to see that the Michigan Bitcoin culture is here with the podcast Strong. I mean, it makes sense since I'm really heavily participating in the Michigan culture, but it is a great one. ⁓

It's kind of one of the reasons why I love Meetup so much is because the Meetups here are so great. And so I really do appreciate all the folks in Michigan who are listening and boosting and coming to the Meetups and making it what it is.

Reed (2:15:24)
Well, so Sean had to drop off and so thank you again, Sean, for coming on. It was a great conversation. Really enjoyed learning more about the Niagara Falls, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, learning about their meetup, hearing about his background. This is another good episode for the books. You got anything else, Rev, to close this out?

Rev (2:15:50)
I think that, you know, it's, just feel.

We didn't talk about price at all tonight. And we don't talk about price often. But at this point in time, the price is trending upwards. And the way I operate with Bitcoin, they say that you shouldn't operate with your emotions. You should remove your emotion from ⁓ the price. But for me, when the price starts going up, I start riding high, man. I start feeling good.

And I think this is true of anyone who's paying attention to what's going on in Bitcoin. When the price goes up, you feel fucking good. You can't deny that. And I can feel it, and I can see it everywhere that I look. all this value for value interaction that we're getting, all of the excitement around the vibe coding, right now, things are feeling good. And I just am so grateful that

Everyone is sharing that vibe. So let's keep rolling with it.

Reed (2:16:58)
Hell yeah, man. Vibes are high and yeah, we'll keep the sets flowing.

Alright.

Rev (2:17:09)
Well, all right, roll the outro.