rev (00:01.676)
Here we are again, local Bitcoiners. Rev Hodel here. I'm back with Reed. And tonight we've got Biddish from the Cleveland, Ohio meetup culture. We're gonna talk to Biddish and learn all about the amazing things that they've been able to develop over the years doing the Cleveland Bitcoin meetup. And normally I would lead in with a story about a meetup, but

I was actually sick and I missed the Chicago BitDevs, which I would have normally attended last Thursday. And so tonight I'm gonna talk a little bit about something else. And that is parallel systems. So there's been this this parallel systems thought, you know, the Meshadel, all these things has been coming up for me a lot lately. And you know, when you have Bitcoin and you have Bitcoin itself is a parallel system to to begin with.

So if you're gonna want to build parallel systems, well, Bitcoin's already got you covered. And all you gotta do is figure out how to use it with somebody else, and there you go, you've got a parallel system, just two people. And so my favorite example of this for myself is the corner store down the road for me. I've spent years going into this corner store. Every time I go in there, I say, Will you take my Bitcoin? Will you take my Bitcoin? Will you take my Bitcoin? And eventually they said yes. And so

Before we started recording here, I stopped at the corner store and I bought a couple beers. And the Bitcoin that I used to buy those couple beers was from the gracious support of the listeners right here from the boosts. Now how cool is that? I take I I I record an episode, I put value out there, the value comes back to me, and I can take that Bitcoin and I can spend it right with another Bitcoiner, another local Bitcoiner local to me at the corner store.

And get this beer and drink the beer while I record another episode. That sounds like a circular economy. And the cool thing about it is that I have an opportunity to earn those sats that I spent with that corner store back. Because when they're short on eggs, they buy eggs from me. If I have if I'm unable to sell the eggs, I got too many eggs in my my fridge and I need some space. I can take them over there. And when they pay me for those eggs, guess what? They pay me in Bitcoin. And then when fall comes, and if I've got some lamb available and they're up for it.

rev (02:29.442)
They buy land for me and they pay in Bitcoin. And so the Bitcoin is bouncing back and forth in my own peer-to-peer universe with this guy over there at the corner store. And I've managed to create a parallel system for myself. And so you can meetups create an opportunity for everybody to do this where you can build a relationship with somebody at the meetup. You can build relationships with people that you meet through the meetups, and and cooperate together and build a parallel system. And it doesn't have to be something with a

a rule book and a leader and all of this stuff. It's just peer to peer digital cash, just operating outside of fiat. And so that's all I have today. Reed, how about you? Do you have any meetup adventures or anything going on with meetups for yourself?

Reed (03:14.814)
So is your does your corner store guy does he go to your meetups?

rev (03:18.892)
Yeah, he does. and he brings stuff in from the corner store and he sells it and he usually you know, he doesn't get there quite often, so it's pretty exciting when he does because he's got a lot of he they make smoked meats and sausages and stuff there. They kind of have like I wouldn't say it's a butcher shop, but they have a kitchen where they prepare food. And so they bring some of that that prepared food in and it's tasty and people enjoy buying it.

Reed (03:20.372)
Nice.

Reed (03:24.039)
Awesome.

Reed (03:41.535)
Cool. So in terms of my meetup, so I talked about our last meetup the last time, and our next meetup actually is not until definitely a few weeks from now. so I don't really have a meetup story either, which is kind of funny that neither one of us of of all the episodes, this is kind of our first one where neither one of us really have a good meetup story. and tomorrow was both the Albany meetup and the new Connecticut meetup.

They're both tomorrow. And my original plan was to go to one of those. and that plan has been you know, it's it's not gonna happen anymore. My boys have a piano concert, and so that was I didn't have that on my calendar. And so that's what I'm gonna be doing tomorrow, which is still fun, but not a Bitcoin meetup. So I kind of thought I would take my little minute here. since we're gonna be I we have we're gonna have a packed show in the second half talking about the V for V stuff.

And I wanted to slip in just a minute to talk about some of the developments that we've been implementing for the website. So our website continues to get new features. So one of the things the I guess the big first thing to talk about here is if you haven't noticed already, we've rebranded. So on the podcast stream, you'll see a new logo. on our socials, you'll see the new logo, a new background. Those

We have been working with Soul Exporter on for quite some time actually. And we're really happy with the way that it came out. And so we're really excited and we've gotten all the logos and the branding, those are all now integrated into our website. And the other big addition that we have to the website is we now have a supporters page.

Now the supporters page is a little bit different than our stats page. Our stats page, you know, that's where we collect a lot of numbers and things like that. But the supporters page is really a page that's dedicated to the people who support this show. So in terms of people who are sending us value, that would be the boosters, the streamers, the zappers, you're now all recognized on the supporters page. and there are so many of you that we decided to come out with

Reed (05:58.473)
different tiers of supporters. So we have for those of you who have boosted or streamed us over a hundred K Sats, you're in the top tier. That would be the sovereign tier. then we have the next tier down is the Frontiersmen. That's 69k sats plus lifetime. We have the Trailblazers, which is twenty one K sats lifetime. And then for everybody else who's ever streamed us or boosted us to any sats, you're in the Pioneers category.

each one of these categories actually has its own Noster follow pack. So if you want to follow everyone who's boosted our show, our community, you can go do that with just a couple clicks. And now you can add all these people to who you're following on Noster. we also have other people who have supported the show, like our show guests. Show guests have their own section. So if you're ever trying to find, who who's been on the local Bitcoiners podcast, well now you can find them.

and on our supporters page. So those are some of the big changes that we've made to the website and I'm happy to talk more about those when we get to the V for V. but I think for right now, right now is a good time for us to introduce Biddish. So welcome to the show, Biddish. We're really glad to have you on. if you'd like, why don't you take a minute and introduce yourself and tell us about your meetup.

Bit Ish (07:22.712)
Yeah, hey. glad to be on with you guys. it's really cool to be here. you know, I'm I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing. I'm a fervent believer in, you know, local circular economies, small groups and you know, in-person communities. I think it's vitally important and I think it really moves the needle like when it comes to culture and you know and everything else that builds around that.

So anyways, a little bit about about me and us. you know, I'm I'm I'm here representing Cleveland Bitcoin. you know, we we've been around for a handful of years and we've grown pretty steadily and fast. I think there's a really big thirst in our area for not just Bitcoin, but just community in general. finding other people that are like minded with similar sort of belief systems, and you know, and and and and it's it's people from all walks of life. one of the things I find

you know, really cool. meetups have all different kinds of flavors. I think different meetups are comprised of, you know, just a certain whatever group of people that happen to be there. and for whatever reason, you know, Cleveland, we're pretty diverse. We have we're we're primarily like a social meetup. so it's just people from all different walks of life, from all different places, just all with the sort of general

similar sense that something's wrong and that's there seems to be an answer in Bitcoin, right? And so from there, you know, we we we just sort of got together and hung out. made sure to meet up once a month, same time, you know, same place every time. And it just kind of grew from there. you know, and we we from there we sort of moved into

You know, we kinda thought about like what else can we do? not just sort of meet and hang out, but you know, what can we do to move things forward? you know, we've tried different things, we've tried educational stuff. You know, we we do we've we've actually gone and talked to some gold bugs at the Pico Top of Bitcoin, trying to get them to to convert to Bitcoin. we you know, we've we've done all kinds of outreach and sort of community.

Bit Ish (09:41.6)
Efforts. but then we've also done a lot of circular economy stuff, which has been kind of an interesting road for us, and I'd love to talk a little bit about it because I think we're a little bit different. A lot of the guys that are doing circular economy, they they have a lot of producers. So they have you know homesteaders in their group and they have people, you know, making stuff right then and there. but for us, we're almost like a reseller economy. a lot of us have

found ways to sort of import goods into the into the area from meetups across the country and then you know resell them here you know and help you know save on shipping or whatever it may be but essentially bring value you know into this whole Bitcoiner economy you know through other means. so you know we're we're really just a a kind of a ragtag group putting on different events and just trying to just trying to be out there and be vocal.

And and you know, letting people know that hey, Bitcoin exists and and you know, it's it's here to help everyone.

Reed (10:46.068)
So yeah, I know we wanna you know, of course circular economies are on our agenda. Definitely we wanna hear more about that. But I'm gonna take the opportunity while we're still at the beginning of the episode. One of the things we like to kind of cover a little bit and and we don't do it like religiously, but it I always find it fascinating if people can tell a little bit their meetup origin story. So I'd love to hear like what how did you get involved in meetups? Like how how how did the Cleveland meetup start? Like did you start it? Did you inherit it? Like what's your path been like?

Bit Ish (11:14.776)
Yeah. So that's a funny story. it started because my so we were kind of coming out of COVID, right? it was around that time period. And and my wife said to me, she goes, I'm sick of your face. can you please go find some friends? and so what she did was she actually went on to meetup.com Hey, there's a bunch of Bitcoiners meeting up on Friday. And this is like maybe a Monday or Tuesday. And she goes, they're all meeting up on Friday, so you should go talk to them. And I'm like, Okay, fine. She's like, Top stop talking to me about Bitcoin.

I don't care. Go find some friends who care. you know, jokingly and everything. So she basically kicked me out of house. and so that that day, you know, there was a telegram handle on there. So I messaged that and then it was just crickets. Didn't hear anything back for days. And then it wasn't until like Thursday, you know, and and one of our one of the guys messaged me and goes, Hey man, this was Friday a year ago. So

That was the absolute last meetup that they had because it ended up being just the two of them. And they the two of them had been meeting for a year and nothing had happened. And so it sort of fell apart. So, you know, we were kind of hang hanging out online, chatting all day. And I said, look, man, this is like first time I've really even chatted with Bitcoiners. I've always been a silent Bitcoiner my whole life. I bought and stacked and did nothing else, right? I said I said, let's just meet up, let's talk Bitcoin. You know, I need to get out of the house.

Let's, you know, if it's two of us, it's two of us. And low and you he he threw it out on Twitter, social media, whatever. And the next thing, you know, we we show up there and next thing you know, we had ten people. we even had like three women, crazy, right? so we you know, and from there we said, you know, this was a great time, you know, we were we were hanging out all night and we said, Look, let's just do this every month, same time, same place, because

How did you guys find us? You know, that was super random. I feel like other random people will find us as well if we just stay consistent. And so so we did that. So we still to this day, years later, still meet, you know, second Friday, 7 p.m. you know, second Friday of every month. And and we haven't missed one yet, you know. we even had a storm roll in, which knocked down all out the all the power out of like multiple towns in the area.

Bit Ish (13:39.608)
we still in including our, you know, regular meetup, we still ended up meeting up and had about seven people show. So it's, you know, and so it's we have a really fervent group of hardcore Bitcoiners who really care, I think, about the same things, you know, that really care about community and everything like that. And so so so having that sort of big core group is giving us the ability to, you know, try different things and

you know, experiment a little bit with how how we can get organized and how we can reach out to other people. so it's been it's been a lot of fun. It's been very interesting.

rev (14:16.238)
So like as I'm sure the the trajectory is probably similar to many of the other meetup organizers that we talked to and it started off as just meetup on a regular basis. All right, we got people coming, but then once people start coming, the the consistency kind of gets too consistent and now some variety needs to be introduced in order to keep things fun and exciting. So what do you have like any

What are some of the fun things that have evolved into the meetup over over the course of the years that it's been going on to give that variety to to make it a little bit more fun? I know you guys do the flags, and that's that's a pretty fun thing that we started. We've actually taken that here at South Bend and taken that example. We've got a flag for the South Bend meetup, but there's what what are some of those fun things like the flags? You could talk about that too. Just let us know, yeah.

Bit Ish (15:07.022)
Yeah, yeah, totally. So like I mean, so our I think, you know, our our main thing is we're we're a very social meetup. And actually, you know, myself and a couple other organizers, we actually, you know, ha have done a lot of event planning type stuff in the past. And so what sort of put us on the map, I think, was our halv a while back. And we had a hundred people show up. We, you know, we're at capacity, we're sneaking people in the back.

And we even it it and it was a huge success, even though we got kicked out like an hour early by an NFL team. They came through, you know, paid the paid the venue, said we just wanna be there. and and the funny actually the funny story is a random anecdote, but as we were walking, I was cleaning up, one of the one of the players looked around, they're like, Hey, is there a Bitcoin party here? Shit, you know, we we we'd we'd hung out with them.

I think a couple of them were getting paid in Bitcoin. So it was kind of it was a really interesting thing. you know, if we maybe had crossed paths for another 10 more minutes, you know, things could have been different. But but it was but n nonetheless, it was a really good time and it really kind of put us on the map, you know. It showed that hey, we're here, you know, we're doing something. There's people that actually you know care about Bitcoin, so come come. And and people started coming out of the woodworks, you know. it was it was interesting because

You know, we've been running for several years several years, and every single meetup, we have I would say probably twenty to fifty percent new people every single time. Someone who's just never been to a meetup before, who's never shown their face. and then we started getting, you know, and then the other half is like the core group. You know, we see these guys every single time. but we've grown to the point where now, you know, people have their own lives. There there's there's people that I consider sort of OG Cleveland Bitcoiners who have not met.

other OG Clinton Bitcoiners. just because, you know, even though they've all been part of the group for years, but you know, sometimes ships in the night, that sort of thing happens. And I think that's part of actually what makes things interesting. because someone could have been here, you know, been a member for a year, you know, they come maybe every every three once every three months, right? And then someone else comes every other month. They don't end up meeting each other, you know, until half a year down the line.

Bit Ish (17:25.366)
But it but keeps things fresh, right? It keeps, you know, kind of people rotating in and out. but then from there, you know, we we try to do a lot of other stuff. we we, you know, we did educational stuff because a lot of people were asking, they said, Hey, you know, we'd love to learn more about Bitcoin. A lot of the people that find us just Google us. They find our website and 'cause they just have a question about Bitcoin or something's happened. You know, we'll one time we had a guy he he he messaged us on on on on the website.

He said, Yeah, you know, we bought I bought like fifty thousand dollars worth of liquor using Bitcoin. And the the the liquor store says it never showed up. I couldn't find it, you know, and we're going through all these issues trying to figure out what's going on. They was reaching out so randomly was a desperate sort of thing, like, hey, like figure this out. And I thought and I thought to myself, well, this should be the easiest thing. I mean, it's it's transparent, like let's just look it up. Right. So I just say, Hey, give me the transaction number or transaction ID. We pulled it up, saw that, hey, yeah, it landed in the wallet.

Turns out the guy just needed to update and inst install an update, refresh the wallet, and boom, there it was. Right. but you know, and it's just stuff like that where these random people will find us super thankful. I have no idea who this guy is. I don't know if he's ever showed up to a meetup. but there's Bitcoiners out there, you know, there's people that are out there and they're just looking for a place to land. and so so doing these parties and having educational events and and now we're sort of pushing that whole circular economy thing, having

unique goods available, you know. we got guys that do designs and 3D prints and all that sort of stuff. so so yeah, you know, just try to whatever, you know, we can come up with that that people think is fun, you know, we'll we'll try it out. See what happens.

Reed (19:10.29)
That's awesome. I it makes me think too of my we we had a halving party for our meetup and that is still is our that was by far our biggest meetup and and people still talk about it to this day. So So with with all the different stuff you've tried, is this stuff y are you still just doing one one meetup a month and you just do you just change it up or like how how do you get all those different types of meetups in?

Bit Ish (19:33.506)
Yeah, so we we we typically do just one meetup a month. and if we have any special events, we'll kind of do them, you know, two weeks later or something, kind of split the meetup whenever whenever possible. but you know, we'll we'll do a lot of sort of side stuff. Like we had a hundred K steak party. we had a second steak party, I think when we, you know, dropped down to like 69k or something like that. you know, we we just do a lot of you know fun stuff like that. We have we do picnics, you know, we'll do rock climbing.

and we have a lot of families in our in our our group as well. and so they'll they'll, you know, bring their kids and come out and and things like that. And yeah, so we just you know, sorry, Reed, I I kinda lost my train of thought. What was your question again?

Reed (20:20.628)
Do you are you doing more than one meetup a month, basically?

Bit Ish (20:22.552)
Yeah, sorry. So so yeah, so we we try to keep it to one a month because when we started doing two month with the educational stuff, it became a lot. it really became difficult because we had had people come in and and and volunteer, right? Ultimately people had to be able willing to teach something. I know everybody's got something to teach, but it's almost like pulling teeth sometimes to get people to step up and actually do things. so we try to do that for a little while. We turned it into kind of one off just whenever someone had a topic.

And it sort of fizzled after a little bit after that. but people are clamoring for it again. So maybe that's something that we'll bring back again, you know. you know, doing stuff about mining or you know, or or anything else like that. so but but but what this isn't related to the the number of meetups, but just kind of related to that. So that that first year that we were organized, we were meeting at one place downtown. it was really kind of an interesting just interesting story. So we're meeting there for about a year.

and it turns out there was another group that was meeting in Akron, which is probably 30 to 40 minutes south of us. and for the longest time we didn't know they existed, they didn't know we existed. And it wasn't until we started posting our stuff on Club Orange, so which is the Orange Pill app, you know, aka getting putting our name out there, putting us, you know, in other communities and things like that, reaching out, you know, they found us and

Turns out, you know, there was this whole other community of Bitcoiners, about as big as we were, meeting this whole time. And so we said, hey, let's combine forces or stronger together. and so we ended up moving our meetup to where they were, because they were kind of halfway in between. and then we sort of, you know, combined forces and and and all and and and built it bigger from there, right? We immediately doubled our size and everything. but so then for a year we were meeting at this other location, but they weren't very amenable. They were kind of just

you know, tolerating us. because, you know, we would put Bitcoin stickers on stuff and we would sort of talk about Bitcoin and we harassed the waitresses about paying in Bitcoin jokingly. You know, and the waitresses were cool about it, but but the ownership didn't wasn't really happy about us taking over an entire patio every you know once a month. but so then we decided you what we need to start meeting where we're want where we're wanted. so we found a better place.

Bit Ish (22:43.694)
Where these guys weren't Bitcoiners yet, but you know, they were interested and they were willing to, you know, hear what we had to say, why it mattered. and so so yeah, so we ended up moving to the third location. And we've had been there for about for a whole nother year. And at this point now we've grown to the point where we realize that we cover really big geographical areas. Because we have people that come in regularly from about two hours away at the most.

So Cleve from our two locations, Cleveland and Akron, are roughly, you know, 30 to 40 minutes away. So when we have someone coming in from two hours away to Cleveland, they're almost three hours to where we actually meet up. And so we've actually gotten to the point where we might actually need to be splitting out into chapters, where we're gonna have split back out into a Cleveland and an Akron chapter all under sort of the same umbrella. where, you know, we can probably capture more people, right? Like peep more people will be willing to these.

Because one of things we had also noticed people were kinda getting burnt out. you know, just being only a social meetup, the same crew, same people, same conversations, that does get a little bit dull. But we've noticed that, you know, at each geographical location that we go to, there's a whole different core group of people that show up, simply because it's just, you know, more accessible. And so what we've done now is now it kind of breaks it up. So even months were in one location, odd months were in the other location. you know, it gives people a little bit more breathing room if they want to just show up every other month.

you know, they can still feel like they've made every single meetup. and then further is that little thing where now you've got people in the group that don't know other people in the group, maybe they're from one chapter and the other. And it just makes it all more interesting when we have those bigger events where everyone gets together and everyone sees everybody. so so yeah, so so it's it's it's been very organic, right? It's it's all about what people want, what people need, where we're at and the type of, you know, the people that are showing up. You know, what do you what do you what do you want out of this?

rev (24:39.544)
So it I imagine that this this is where like the group chat becomes very valuable. Right. If you got people that haven't been at you know, haven't crossed paths at the meetup because they're just the frequency and the the way that people end up showing up means that they've been at both attending for a long time, but they may never actually have crossed paths at the meetup. But if there's a group chat and they're both in there, now they're e you've still able to connect to a degree. And so I know you guys have this

you you're using Discord right now. It's like actually one of the most active group chats that I've seen related to a meetup. do you find that that that's been a pretty valuable asset to the group?

Bit Ish (25:20.768)
significantly. So we s we actually started out on Telegram. It was just an absolute shit show. you know, getting all you know, spam and bots, and we had no way of, you know, sort of validating who was there and and and all of that. so we ended up moving to moving to Discord kind of begrudgingly because you know it's it's it's not the best solution. But it it gave us a framework for what we we could we needed, which was to have a public

link right where anyone could land in and they can come and ask questions, whatever. but they're restricted to a handful of channels. And then it was it isn't until they show up to a meetup, meet one of us in real life, someone you know in the group can validate that hey, they're a real person, they're actually into Bitcoin, they're not a scammer, that sort of stuff. Then you can get approved and you can see all the all the wider channels. And we break it up into we have a ton of channels, we break it up into all different kinds of things, different topics.

you know, we have you know a memes channel, we have an off-topic channel, we talk about health and wealth, we talk about you know, homesteading, we talk about you know, gardening, we talk about finance, we talk about stocks, we talk about memes and AI and you know everything that a Bitcoiner talks about really, it's all kind of there. and and so that keeps it very active because you have people who don't give a shit about some of this stuff and people who are just you know absolute gung-ho about others.

so it's really cool. Like I said, we have people that come from all over, right? So we have guys that are finance guys, we have plumbers, we have a guy that drives trash truck, you know, we have lawyers and and so everyone's got a little bit of expertise in something somewhere. so it's just become actually a really good resource. We have you know, a really good resource for whatever question you have, even if it's not related to Bitcoin.

so yeah, we find it extremely valuable. but it does actually create a whole nother problem for us, which is you know how you have ships in the night where people don't know each other, they don't actually meet each other. Well, we have a sort of parallel problem where we have people that know each other on Discord or know each other's screen names, but don't and know each other in person, but don't connect the two together. And it's really hard sometimes to keep track of where who who have you been talking to for the last month. Now we show up and you know.

Bit Ish (27:36.61)
And it's it's a recalibration sometimes.

rev (27:39.788)
I definitely have that same issue personally because I'm in all these different group chats for all the meetups that I go to and then a bunch of group chats for other meetups around the country. And you know, if I end up at especially the ones that I go to locally, you know, I'll be talking to someone for a while and they'll be like, dude, I'm so and so from the group I'm like, Holy shit, I d sorry, dude, I never met you before in person. So I w you introduced yourself as your first name and instead of your nim, so hi I'm sorry, I didn't know. Yeah. And it definitely comes up a lot.

Now I I imagine too, like so if you've got the first level is like public. Anybody can get in there just to f find the group, interact with the group. So there is like some discoverability layer to the group chat. Like it helps the discoverability of the meetup, which is cool. I think I I've been hearing a lot of bad shit about Discord. I personally don't like using Discord. You know, I hope that there's like a better Lindy type of thing that will come up in the future that's more sovereign and less KYC or whatever, like less

manipulable from the central party, but so you've got the the the initial layer, right, of public. Then if you come to the meetup you you get kind of you unlock the actual group chat. Is there a is there an even deeper layer? Is there an inner sanctum for like the the organizers or like the people who are stepping up and willing to like try and co op like of do the event planning and all that stuff?

Bit Ish (29:01.314)
Yeah, and in fact there sort of is. the Inner Sanctum is for the the the the people who who who come in and donate. So we have actually we have an organization that we created which is sort of our fiat front, so to speak, right? we call it Stackworks. and it's it's a you know it's a registered company and everything like that. we're working on the 501c3. We've been working on it for quite a while now. but it's just, you know, life getting in the way. But

You know, making it a 501c3 so that anything that we need to do that, you know, faces the public on a fiat front, we have something that sort of insulates the group. and and so, but at the same time it also helps us build up our treasury. You know, we we have our own sort of Bitcoin treasury that we we use to pay out, you know, for for events and and things like that. And so, you know, anyone that that sort of contributes to that fund, they're also a donor. And so we have a whole nother, you know, separate group in there.

for donors where a lot of times, you know, we're when we're making club decisions, we tend to sort of open it up to everybody. The admins will discuss it. before any major decisions made, everyone else can sort of have their opinion. but it's nice to have another area where those people who have really put their money where their mouth is, right? And really stepped up to that next level to support the group and you know, be a part of you know, that value for value exchange, right? Whether you're stepping up

with with money or or coming in and and and you know, helping to organize and doing stuff, you know, you have a little place to to really chat and and and sort of hang out with the people that that you know are really, really the ones that are there for the long haul.

Reed (30:41.554)
Dude, that I know, that so parallels what you know, we we've been going down this whole value for value road with this podcast and and you're so right, you know, and we have had podcasts before where we talk about how there are value for value concepts that you can bring to Bitcoin meetups. And even just as something as simple as an exclusive group chat for for people who actually donate, that it's that's a very, you know, low lift.

You know, 'cause it c it doesn't have to be, you know, you have like a big complicated or it sounds complicated to me. I don't really use Discord, but like with lots of different channels and rules and stuff like that. But I mean you could just have, you know, a signal chat that's completely separate and this is hey, w you get invited here, you know, only if you become if you send us some sats. so I think that's that's a really great low level lift idea of how you can bring some value for value concepts

to a an in person physical Bitcoin meetup.

Bit Ish (31:41.912)
Yeah, absolutely. And and and it's important because like at the end of the day, you know, all of to put on events and to do stuff takes funding. You need to have money to do it. you know, it's it's just it's not free. I'd love love it to be, but but that's just not the case. And so having some sort of mechanism for your the club itself to generate income gives you the ability to do more, to do bigger things, to be more public facing as well, because I think that's also important.

you know, a lot of meetups tend to just sort of be this little group in and of itself. And it's great, you support each other and you have like-minded people, but you know, we have to also realize like the bigger battle is out there as well. and so you know, the the people that are around you, like the guy at the corner store, right? Like we need to be out there and talking to those people, the people that you you commerce with on a daily basis.

I think that's super important. anybody that you're exchanging value with in the you know, in clown world, bring them over, you know, talk to them about it, help them understand. you don't need to orange pill the world, but just orange people the peop you know, the ones that are directly around you really.

Reed (32:51.87)
So let's before we switch too far off topic 'cause I know we have we have a whole bunch of different stuff we want to talk about. I do want to make sure that while we're still talking about your meetup, I I've got questions and and we'd like to hear more about some of these circular economy things that you've got going on because I really like the way that you framed that, you know, because I I would say personally for me, like my meetup, it sounds like maybe it's a little bit similar to yours. Like we don't have a lot of people, like nobody's bringing in eggs to ours because nobody at our meetup has chickens.

You know, so it's like we're you know, we're all trying to figure out what to bring. We did start some stuff, so we have like a page where people can post stuff. but people are kinda all struggling to figure out what what they should bring and what people at the meetup actually want to buy. So it sounds to me like w you guys may have cracked at least part of that or found something that works for your meetup. So I'd love to hear more about that and and how that's going for you guys.

Bit Ish (33:48.344)
Yeah, I mean I think our our our major philosophy around it had always been just just focus on the things that you want, the things that you need, right? So think about and I think the way it kind of came about, really, at least for my end of it, was there was some stuff I wanted to buy from Bitcoiners. And unfortunately they're across the country and shipping's expensive. you know, I can buy one of them and pay one shipping, or I can buy ten of them and pay one shipping.

And so I thought to myself, well, if I want this, other Bitcoiners probably want this as well. You know, and and that quickly then led to, okay, now we have all these events and we have giveaways and baskets and different things that we want to, you know, have. Well, we need goods for that. Well, we can't just ask people to, you know, donate one off or whatever. Let's let's start almost like a treasury of stuff, right? And we can go around the country.

use, you know, quote unquote economies of scale and and yeah, not massive, but you know, we can order a few items. And so at that point, so I c sort of put it out there to people and I said, look, if you're gonna buy something from a Bitcoiner, whether it's Soap Miner, you know, or you're gonna guess Moshi or, you know, whatever it may be, great ghee, you know, if you're gonna buy something, buy a couple more because I'm sure somebody else is gonna want it. Put a little markup on it for your time, you know, we and then we all s essentially split the

the shipping, give a little bit back to the club because we provide this venue for you to be able to do this. and then, you know, and then then that sort of grows that economy. it was you know, so it just started out really, I think someone I I want to say it was like with Oshi actually. Someone maybe had had had, you know, gotten a couple extra jars and said, hey, this is stuff is awesome. Does anybody else want some too? You know, I had reached out to Satoshi Coffee Company, you know, because I drink coffee

you know, every month, but they sell three pack. So I said, Hey, I'll buy a three pack and sell two of why not? Right? And and and it just kinda kinda went from there.

rev (35:54.594)
That's so fascinating, man, that you can take b there there is enough products and stuff that are desirable for Bitcoiners.

It's like, yeah, I can go get Ghee at Costco or I can get the best ghe and pay with Bitcoin from some other Bitcoiner and support the Bitcoin circular economy. And so it's like Noster all these things, these offerings are big enough on Noster now to where as a meetup you can kind of get a a a bulk shipment of it and everyone gets access to those products without having each person paying for the shipping individually. It's a that's a really awesome

way to do it. And so how so you said there's a little bit of a a payout to the treasury. Like the Treasury takes a little bit in coordinating this or for the marketplace or whatever. So that's like one example of generating a little bit of SAS flow. It's like the the club is providing some value, you can kick some value back and and keep this thing going. Are there some but outside of the donors in that are there some other ways that you guys have been providing services or generating some SAS flow?

Bit Ish (36:57.89)
I mean, generally speaking, that's what we've just kind of been doing. a lot of it has really been on the backs of people just volunteering their time, right? Volunteering their goods. We've we reach out a lot to sponsors just in the Bitcoin community, right? So we have a lot of different companies and different people who who'll you know kick in stuff here, you know, whenever we have an event or anything like that. 'cause it just helps everybody else out, right? people have found a lot of a a great sort of lifelong products.

that they start using because they won something at one of our events. you know, we'll we'll put together sort of gift baskets and you'll have, you know, five or six items from different different Bitcoiners around the country. a lot of times people find something that they love and they're like, wow, this is even better than what I've been using. You know, we had we had that had that story with Soap Miner. you know, somebody won some soap, used it and said this was life changing for them. So and and you know, and now s now Soap Miners got a a customer for life.

So it's so it's that's been pretty cool. and it actually something else that was a little bit interesting, that this is kind of a recent happening, because we've been pushing so hard on this circular economy button, you know, we people started making some stats. And so other people saw that and they're like, hey, you know, I'd like to kind of get in on the action. I'd like to make a couple stats on this side, but what can I do? And it really got people's wheels turning. And and one of the guys reached out and he said, Hey, my my brother is not a Bitcoiner, but he's got 60 chickens.

You know, and would anybody want some fresh eggs? And you know, the group chat kind of exploded, like, hell yeah, like everybody wants fresh eggs, you know, especially for sats. and so that's the kind of sort of sort of out-of-the-box thinking that can happen when you when you just have the inspiration sitting there, right? He may never have thought to ask his brother for eggs or anything like that had we not been going down this path. so yeah. So well, you know, a lot can happen if you just sort of just try and see.

But you know, you never know.

Reed (38:57.598)
Sweet. Yeah, man. That's I it it's inspiring. And so hopefully people hear this message and and start to realize, I mean, we've said this in other shows, but hopefully, you know, the more examples that we can put on the over the airwaves here of how you can get a lo a local circular economy started in Bitcoin, like these are all thing like any meetup can do this. Like this that's it's such a good idea. Right. Well it's not even that, right? It's just if you order something, just order more than one. Like that's such an easy thing to do.

Bit Ish (39:18.158)
Yeah, anybody can go and buy and talk, you know? Yeah.

Reed (39:28.704)
so I think let l I I'd like to pivot a little bit. And so one of the topics that I wanted to definitely make sure that we covered, we've talked on several episodes about the idea of like regional meetups. So it's like what you've got your meetup and there are other meetups in your area. and so a bunch of meetup organizers have started to go more all in on these like regional type meetups. And I know that you have

like this Midwest Bitcoin Summit coming up. So would do you want to tell us a little bit about that and about like how you're involved in it or like what your role has been and and trying to get that conference or summit going?

Bit Ish (40:13.006)
Yeah, so this is the first year. we're we're not we're not exact we're not organizing it per se or anything like that, but we are definitely involved. it's coming out of the Columbus area, but it's the Midwest Bitcoin Summit. It'll be the first one. and we figured look, if we're if there's gonna be a meetup in our, you know, in our backyard essentially, we need to be involved as much as we can, push this as much as we can, because if we don't do it, there won't be a second year. you know, and so

Having that representation in the area, that really puts a lot of awareness out there, right? To let people know, hey, it's not just us in Cleveland. It doesn't matter where you are, if you're in the region, there's probably a meetup somewhere near you. You know, so you can you can get there and you can do it. There's more Bitcoiners out there than you know, you're not alone. you're not the crazy one thinking that things are broken, you know. And so just having all of that out there has been great. it's actually interesting because they're also

Pairing with like the largest cannabis convention sort of thing in the region as well. I guess it's kind of sponsored or run by similar groups of people. and so there's a whole other group of people who could benefit greatly from using Bitcoin, you know, that are now going to be sort of ingrained into all of this. so that'll be really exciting. and then what we're trying to do, you know, we're gonna have a booth there,

We're gonna do our whole circular economy thing. And then that's actually something I kind of wanted to reach out also to Noster while I've got this platform here, you know. if anybody has any goods that they want represented at the the Midwest Summit, reach out to me. I'm Bidish, you guys know me. you know, and and I can have some of your goods over there and we can help sell on your behalf and we'll figure out we'll figure out some deal, you know. because

It it'll be really cool just to be able to showcase like, look, th this is what Bitcoiners can do across the country. you know, there's there's all this cool stuff. We don't need everybody else. We've got a circular economy. We're good here, you know. so yeah, and and and we're also putting together well hopefully putting together an after party sort of thing. you know, you know

Bit Ish (42:35.172)
Cleveland Rocks, so hopefully we can do some something music related, but we'll see. That's that's early days yet.

rev (42:42.338)
Yeah, I wanted to ask about if you guys had been able to work any music into the meetups because I know you're pretty involved in some music stuff, but there was a thing that I wanted to kind of piggyback on of just kind of general assessment of the the recent stuff we've been discussing, and that of course I like permaculture and I always think about permaculture and this integrate rather than segregate principle just is like ringing so true to me right now. And and kind of going back to the beginning where I'm talking about parallel systems, it's like you guys created

The Cleveland Bitcoin meetup. And all of a sudden, here comes Noster. And Nooster's got a bunch of products. And the Cleveland Bitcoiners want products on NoSter. And so it's like two parallel systems now, if you integrate them together, supercharges it. And then you can take that same concept and you can say, Hey, we've we've already proven that when you put your products over here to Cleveland, people want them. And I'm gonna come over here to the Midwest Bitcoin Summit and allow, you know, now you can

further integrate that in a different level at a regional level. and so th I don't know, just the integrate rather than segregate thing just keeps coming up over and over again. It's like if we can think about ways to take all this cool shit that we're doing that seems like separate worlds, No stir, Bitcoin meetups like, no, that that stuff needs to be linked together. And so anyways, the the music stuff, dude. So have you guys been able to do any shows or

I know I know you're like really interested in the the decentralized music s thing. You've got the the hash power records or hash power music going on. what's been happening with that?

Bit Ish (44:16.184)
Yeah, I mean it it's V for V music, which is just you know, it it as a Bitcoiner it only makes sense to me, right? ever it should be value for value. Music's one of those things that music is culture. That's why I say music is culture. And you know, culture is probably one of the most important things that are out there because it really sets traject trajectory on everything that we do, you know, as people. You know, we can have technology be a certain thing, but if the wrong culture is applied, you know, bad things can happen.

and so if the wrong music is out there, so to speak, right, if the message is is broken, if things are, you know, aren't aren't right, you know, that reflects in the music, that reflects in what's, you know, what what we hear and what people are listening to. so it's a really good barometer for where we are. and so that's something that's worth supporting, right? Because I I think it's something that's gotten perverted, it's something that's gotten sort of broken because of how music is discovered.

You know, when you when you discover music nowadays, it's it's there's an algorithm that tells you, hey, this is what you want to listen to. you listen to this, so I'm gonna give you more of that, and that sort of thing. And then it ultimately sort of creates this system where you know, certain types of sounds get more clicks. So more artists then create that same type of sound, right? Because they need more clicks. and so people are now writing music for computers, not for people.

and and then and that sort of destroys culture, it right. It it it it creates this artificial culture that that is controllable and you know that the powers that be can can slap on top of you and and suddenly now you're you're docile and obedient, right? So so so I think you know it's it's vitally important that we save music and that we we we support independent artists and everything like that. because that that's really where our voice is. and so

you know, and going back to sort of connecting disparate systems and things that don't seem to be related. Well, I think this is super related. I mean, like, you know, like I said, music touches on the way we do everything. Money touches on how we spend, how we interact, right? Nasser ta touches on how we, you know, we connect with other people. meetups connect us physically. All of these things are all all the same.

Bit Ish (46:43.682)
you know, just different mediums of the same thing, which is just human connection. So it's it's you know, so so I don't know where I'm kinda rambling with this, but it's it's you know, it's just it's just some in my mind it's it's just something one of the most important things that we could you know, we should be focusing on.

Reed (46:59.08)
Yeah, I was excited to hear about this topic too. I I know you've listened to our show before, but I it I don't I'm not sure if you've heard like my a story a little bit. So we ha we have a new venue. It's I guess it's less and less new every month, but we've met there like three times. And it's a it's a concert venue. It's like a local small concert venue. And it's amazing. The people are amazing. It's a a cooperative, so it's

you know, it's like co owned, like community owned and and they share a lot of stuff with the artists and they're getting very involved and and a lot of different things and we're just a bunch of random Bitcoiners who happen to find that they don't have shows on Sundays and that's when we do our meetups. And so we have their this place. And so I've been trying to learn more about I was like, man, this is if I was ever going to learn about the value for value music scene, you know, this is the time to start learning. So I've been kind of lurking a little bit.

trying to listen to some podcasts, trying to get more plugged like just trying to figure out the scene. It's not a scene I had ever really explored before. So I don't know, I guess I'd I'd just really like to hear more about Hash Power music and what you guys do, like what role you're fulfilling in in that ecosystem and industry and and yeah, I guess just about the value for value music scene in general.

Bit Ish (48:19.512)
Yeah, so the ecosystem's really cool right now. there's just so much technology that's happening, right? When we're if you think about like the early days of Noster where you know, apps were just coming up and people were doing stuff and it was just really exciting, sort of a similar thing is happening on the V for V music space right now, where we have tons of new artists coming in all the time. you know, we had Wright said Fred come in recently, you know,

you know, the the the ones I'm too sexy for my shirt, you know, those guys. so yeah, so you know, we have some big names coming through. a lot of new music shows, new music podcasts have started popping up. You know, Avi started doing his Sunday brunch. And so like the whole ecosystem is just getting more and more robust as we go. you know, it feels like up into the right sort of situation. and it's just it's just really cool because it's it's it's a parallel universe to what already exists.

you know, with Spotify and iTunes and stuff like that. You have real live concerts, Live Nation, Ticketmaster, all that sort of stuff. We have that on our side as well. In the same way that, you know, Naster has decentralized social media. We have decentralized music. we have, you know, one of one of the events that Hash Power Music has put on recently a couple months back was South by Worldwide, right? And so that was like a a big streaming extravaganza sort of thing.

Think of it like a three-day festival, you know, a music festival. and we just do that, you know, as digital natives, right? We have our digital money that we can use, that's programmable, that that we can create more interactivity, we can create something better than what they've done, right? We can have the live concerts that everyone loves. If you want to show up, you can show up, pay your ticket, and you go. It's just like any other concert. But now we've got them streaming. And not only are they streaming,

But you know, you can interact with the with the with the bands on stage. They can see your comments live. You know, you can sh you know send it and and tell all your friends that's watching as well, right? You can interact with them, you know, we can have live triggers where you can make things happen, like you can kind of direct the show from home. and all these cool interactivity things only goes to build more community, create more stickiness, and just get people more involved and be feel like they're really a part of something.

Bit Ish (50:44.056)
Right, you're not just passively watching a show, you're not just passively listening, but you're, you know, getting involved, you're commenting, you're talking to other people, you're sending value, you know, and and and and posting it, and it's going everywhere. And then other people are reacting in other areas, right? Like you might be watching on the chat and people are talking about the chat, but if you boost in, it goes to Noster, and now people are talking about another thread. it was really cool just to see that all these different sort of webs of connectivity.

that that come out of the technology that we've put around it. so I think by reimagining everything this way, you know, that's kind of where where I I see hash power sort of sitting in the whole of the ecosystem, right? You have the podcasters who are sort of, you know, pulling, curating the music, you have the artists that are coming in and bringing the content. You have the fans that are listening and and and paying and and supporting the ecosystem. And what we try to do is sort of bridge a little bit of that fiat world.

Bitcoin world gap. So we have, you know, different companies in in in the fiat world, record label where, you know, we we look for artists and that's what we do. We try to find them and we we look for the best talent that's out there. But in part of what we do there is we also sort of assess like, hey, are these people gonna be amenable to Bitcoin? Are they the type, you know, who are going to be who are gonna want to sort of self-host and

And and and bring the stuff, you know, matters into their own hands. Are they sick of the system? Are they, you know, and when we find you know artists that are like that, we start the conversation, we sort of ease in the orange pill. you know, we sometimes we'll show them Noster, we'll show them Bitcoin, we'll show them Lightning, we'll show you know old concerts that we've done. And oftentimes that gets people hooked because they're like, Well, look, I have a way of making all the same money I used to make, plus this Bitcoin thing, plus a bigger audience of fervent.

supporters who don't care if my music sucks. You know, they just want to support me because I support Bitcoin. And that's just the craziest thing to them. But so it's it, so yeah, so we sort of bridge that gap, right? We try to bring people over and try to, you know, and then and then and then we make the events fun. You know, we try to come up with innovative ideas to, hey, you're not just streaming. It's not just another Spotify, right? There's more to it.

rev (52:59.566)
Well and what really makes it different the the big different like the incentive right for the musicians to come and participate in this, all that connectivity and interactivity is possible in Fiat, right? But what makes it really special is the the payments, right? And when w because the zaps and the the Bitcoin can come and flow, in addition to it going there there's no friction there in the payment.

In addition to that, you can programmatically split everything out. And and like this is one of the reasons I think why the music industry is so broken is because the venues are all gated by all these these big the money flows into one place and there's a lot a lot of trust that has to be happened. There it's just the money gets stopped at one place and it's up to them to pay everybody out appropriately. And same thing's true with the labels, right? And so then ultimately there's a lot of well, but actually, you know

We would you you should be making this much, but there's this guy to pay and this guy to pay, this guy to pay. And you're like, dude, I thought I was I thought I was getting something more than that. And so now you can just let the the stats flow directly to everyone for the deal that they've made for that event. And so this also kinda dude one thing that's kinda interesting, all right. Reed's got a a venue for a meetup. I'm sure if there was you could come up with a venue for a meetup, like and a place where people could play music.

And so what if you combine this the shipping issue with Noster with a tour, right? So the band goes on tour to all these meetups and at the same time they're muleing some Bitcoin merch, right? Instead it they're like picking up stuff from one meetup, taking it to the next, and now they they can actually make even more money by like at their merch table selling the hot items from the meetup that they're at prior. and so I don't know what that becomes, a carnival, a fucking

Bit Ish (54:48.706)
Yeah, just it's a

rev (54:52.066)
You know, it's it's something differ it's not just a band going on tour anymore, right? But that that's just one idea that that popped into my head while we were

Bit Ish (54:58.254)
It it's really funny you bring that up because so I at one point I was talking to Shatterak and I was talking to him about his A to B T C company that he's been working on. you know, where essentially we're trying to build out a couple of different things, see see if we could sort of my idea was that hey, let's connect that with meetups, right? Because ultimately if you've got a trade route that you can run on a monthly basis coast to coast.

Making stops wherever, much like what you're talking about with the band, right? whatever traveling group, a circus, doesn't matter, right? If they're going from A to B around the country every month, well, they can bring stuff with them. And if we connect up with all the meetups and we say, Hey, each meetup organizer, let's figure out a system where you can have your guys order stuff from our list of vendors, right? That are part of this route. And every month,

This guy's gonna go around, pick up, drop off, pick up, drop off around the country. And every month they'll drop off all the orders for your meetup from all the different vendors. And you know, maybe it's a slow shipping option. Maybe you put in an order and you gotta wait a month to the next meetup to get it. But hey, you know, you we're splitting one shipping cost essentially across every meetup across the country, as opposed to each person paying shipping on their own.

so it's a really interesting concept. And then when you kind of take that next step further, right? Like rather than paying a guy to just be the the shipping guy, why not piggy that bat piggyback that off of other things that are happening meetup to meetup? You know? one of the ideas that we had even sort of been throwing around was you can then create sort of like what is it, the Uber Eats or whatever, postmates, whatever you want to call it, one of those things, right? If I happen to be driving down to Columbus tomorrow.

Hey, anybody got anything that needs to go down there? I'll bring it with me as well. You know, throw me a couple sats for gas. so it's there's a lot of things that can happen. we just need to kind of think creative creatively as well as collaboratively.

rev (57:05.996)
And this kind of stuff has already been happening to a small degree here because I'm traveling around a lot. And others are too. And so it it is kind of like a hey, I I it's more of like I I left my thing at the last meetup. I'm gonna be at this next one. Can you bring it to me? And and sure enough, somebody's able to do that. But if somebody's able to do that, they're probably able to bring other stuff. And and we've we've even we've we've I've talked about this in other episodes, but we've been experimenting with like giving each other a stock of product to sell.

when we go to each other's meetups and everything. And the the issue there is we don't have the splits figured out physically yet.

Bit Ish (57:44.887)
Yeah, I mean

Reed (57:44.926)
Well that's actually go ahead, sorry.

Bit Ish (57:48.356)
I mean with like with what we can do with V for V music, right? You're able to essentially create splits using RSS feeds. there is I see no reason why that can't be used as a similar system. you essentially have a database, something that records what the splits need to be for it could be for pro shipment, it could be per whatever, it doesn't really matter, right? it could be like an overall, hey, this is the overall agreement for everything. but either way, you can put those into feeds, they automatically split out.

and and you know and there you go but having having the ability to sort of to do all of this creates I guess kind of like a little bit of an extra magic right because that that's something that that couldn't have happened in in in that fiat world where you know you can't have these direct payments direct splits across a complicated system and so all we really need so we already have like you said people sort of doing this on an ad hoc basis

People are just kind of informally doing it. Well, all we really need is some sort of formalized structure, an application or something that can essentially organize all the orders, you know, by meetups, or you know, organized by, you know, vendors, and then just something that can essentially show the data that's already out there in an organized fashion and sort of quote unquote central coordinate it.

but it could be decentralized, you know, it could run on relays and everything like that, right? You post notes that are orders and things like that. you encrypt it. Let's see.

rev (59:20.974)
Well yeah. It sounds a lot like a a noster nip ninety nine marketplace. Right? With with you know, much like the Discord channel, if you want access to this marketplace, you have to follow you have to com you have to qualify some level of web of trust or be whitelisted in based on some criteria, right?

Bit Ish (59:25.87)
Yeah, absolutely.

Bit Ish (59:43.298)
Yeah, and and it's really cool because you know, just kind of imagining it further, right? You can have, if you have an application that sort of runs all of this, you can have meetup organizers who each have their own white labeled version of this application, which that they can use to organize specific orders within their group, right? So that keeps that privacy. So other groups don't have access to that. But as a vendor, right, they could have a separate sort of portal or whatever it may be that shows, hey, where are my orders coming from broken out by meetups.

where they need to go. They won't ever have that data of each individual order necessarily, right? You might, you know, be a NIM that buys it online. But now you kind of fix this problem where like, hey, if I want to order something from this guy, I've got to give them an address, you know, and I don't want to dox myself. I might be willing to show up at a meetup to pick up something, right? It doesn't necessarily dox where I live. and so that's really solves that issue as well. so it's really cool because you can kind of segregate

the need to know information programmatically and everything else just sort of runs in the background, connected through the relays, through through notes and everything like that.

Reed (01:00:53.908)
Yeah, and so we're you know, we're we're we're a podcast. this is you know, and we've been playing around a lot with like all this value for value stuff and splits and we've got all these features cooked into our website and those are similar but slightly different than what we have going on in the RSS and Rev and I talk constantly about this it like topic of the splits. Like how how how do we do this? How can we get this to be smoother? you know, we have issues with

you know, certain wallets at certain times maybe aren't working quite right. And some of the underneath, like plumbing, is complicated sometimes. And I happen to be listening to your podcast with Avi on Sunday brunch and you mentioned something called the split kit. And so I I I tried to look into it a little bit. It looks like maybe you need to sign up before you can find out what what it's actually all about. And so I was like, well if you're gonna be here

Is like could you tell us a little bit more about that? Like does that solve some of this pain that people feel and and trying to do all these splits?

Bit Ish (01:02:00.312)
Yes and no. it solves some problems and it introduces others, like a lot of these things. so what the split kit does is it it's run by Stephen B. he's a big music guy on the RSS side of the world. He does have an Auster account, but he he runs it's his thing that he rolled because he basically had the same issue and he said, We need something that works, especially on a large scale, right? We were actually able to use split kit and split out, I think, on the so big concert.

Reed (01:02:07.964)
Only trade offs, right?

Bit Ish (01:02:29.71)
It was either that one or the satellite skirmish or one of the satellite whatever shows. but it was a good, you know, thirty to forty splits or something insane like that. and it it worked flawlessly. But the way it works is essentially you've got, you know, a centralized server service running somewhere else. And when you pay, you pay that service, that service then has a list of everyone else that needs to get split and it runs it automatically and splits the payment out from there.

so it's a pretty simple sort of solution. it doesn't fully solve everything though, right? Because at the end of the day, you're running a centralized service. you know, that that if that goes down, well now all your splits go down. so there's there's still some some some stuff to work out, but it's it's going down the right path, right? Finding these solutions that kind of get us there, and then we can kind of iterate from there. it's

One of the one of the problems that I I see in Noster, trying to use Noster for splits, is you have to pay each split separately. So even though it looks like you're split out across however many people, it's still multiple clicks. so having something like split kit, you know, which which I think even if it's not split kit itself, right? You can probably roll your own sort of similar thing, whether, you know, and for your for you guys especially, you have your own show. Well you could, you know, you can host it.

yourself and then you you know there's a lot more reliability there if you're kind of rolling your own thing. so there's there's different options and different ways to do it. but yeah, splick it which is one one one solution that we had on the music side.

rev (01:04:07.79)
Split kit makes a lot of sense, like to trust that centralized server for an event. That's okay, right? You you're just looking at a few hours for this this payload. But if if it's like over that is not necessarily the solution, maybe for a long term trade route that you know, that kind of a situation. But at the same time, does this do the split kits does it does it maintain the metadata too to all the the splits?

Bit Ish (01:04:16.547)
Exactly.

Bit Ish (01:04:36.654)
Yeah, so I think it it runs both well it depends on how you send it really, right? Because it the the the the aim is always to preserve as much as you can. And it's really just the rails that you send it on that matters. So if you're sending stuff over zaps and stuff like that, you're kind of character limited. it's not gonna push a lot of the metadata along, you know, that it would that that you normally would want. but it also depends on if you even want the metadata, right? Like for a concert or something, a lot of that stuff doesn't really matter.

need to know what show they're boosting and stuff like that because I know it's this one. For podcasters it may be different, right? Now that being said, if it also runs keysend on on the receiving end of it. So Keysend is a lot more reliable and pushes through all of the metadata. But the the difficulty with keysend is not that many wallets support it. So if you want to pay with a you know with you have to pay with a keysend wallet and not many people use that. Most people have LM address.

So we it it's sort of like a chicken in the egg, and and ultimately I think the real answer is we need more key cent development because at least when it comes to these sort of payments, invoicing doesn't make any sense because the guy who's sitting up on stage playing music isn't going isn't sitting there with a tip jar with a pad of paper writing a receipt for each tip that they get, right? Because that's ultimately what you're trying to do with invoicing on Lightning Network.

What you do is you have a tip jar sitting there that's open for business, and anyone can come in and drop money into it permissionlessly. Right. And that's what Keysen does. And so there hasn't been a lot of development on that simply because it hasn't been as necessary. But I think as we move forward in the b moving from HODL to spend and replace to Bitcoin circular economies, right? We need a better pay push method, a way to force a payment with

permissionlessly. and so that that think that it's it's needed not just in music, right? It's needed, I think, in the commerce space. So so if any devs are out there listening, like, you know, take a look at Key Sense, see what we can do there. Because I think there's, you know, there's there's a lot of stuff that we're missing when it comes to Bitcoin adoption, that that can be really powerful there.

rev (01:06:53.24)
What it I mean, really what I it feels like, man, is that we're right at the the edge of the tipping point of this incentives necessary. We talked you you mentioned the word silent bitcoiners, right? You were a silent bitcoiner. It once these incentives get great enough, now it makes sense there's enough value here for the silent Bitcoiners to start

showing up and and saying, hey, yeah, I'm gonna join you guys in in the actual Bitcoin culture and participate and we're gonna create the parallel system.

Bit Ish (01:07:25.72)
Yeah, I mean it's it's it's human nature to say, hey, let somebody else do this, right? but when you're so so so most people get into it and they just start stacking, they stack and they stack, and they don't do anything with that because someone else is gonna figure it out and it'll be worth something later because someone else did something. That's just kind of human nature to do that. But when your stack gets big enough, when you get to a point where you're like, hey, I can't rely on other people to figure this out, like I need to do something about it.

you know, that's when people start getting involved, right? Like you said, the value grows, right? There's something to lose now. and then in the same way, on the other side of it, right? Now not only do I have this like risk value that's growing, but now I have a resource value that's growing. you have before, as you know, it was just you sitting there. What's the point of going out and orange pilling when you're all by yourself? What does it matter? Right. there's no, there's no sort of motivation to do it, and you're not gonna get anything out of it.

But when you're amongst a community and you're amongst a group, you have you realize there's a whole group of people that are thinking the same way as you, now you can start to build. Now you can start to create culture and community and go beyond just like living for yourself. and you can actually start doing something about it because now you've got you know, power in numbers. You've got more people around you who can actually affect things.

And so so the so the the more you get out there and meet people and talk to other Bitcoiners and meetups obviously being the ideal place to do to start something like that, right? The more you go to meetups and everything like that, the more you're connecting to the community, the more resources you have, the more value that's out there, you realize there's more value out there waiting for you to pick up if you just go and get it. You just have to put in a little bit more effort, marginally more effort, and you get marginally more reward.

You know, and and and and that's something that I think a lot of people hopefully, you know, will come to the real realization. Hopefully a lot of Bitcoiners come to that realization.

Reed (01:09:24.244)
Yeah, and I think you know, just looking so we're you know, we're getting here towards the end of the first half of the show. and you know, it was really great learning all this cool stuff you have going on. And so if I was gonna kind of give my quick, you know, maybe key takeaway, I guess. I I just found I wrote this I I jotted this note down and it's so funny that we just started talking about it again here at the end. 'Cause I jotted this note down way at the beginning of the episode, is that so if you started out as kind of like a silent

Bitcoiner, you know, now like all this cool stuff that you're doing, this all started with you going to that first meetup. Right? So it's like the meetup was the entry point into everything else that you have going on in in Bitcoin. And I just think that's just like such a cool arc. you know, just knowing that it was the Bitcoin meetup that that started you on this path. so I you know, I'll turn it over to you, Biddish, I guess. you know, what what were kind of some of your

maybe key takeaways from this discussion or other things that you wanted to tell about on this podcast that we didn't really have time to get to or any other kind of key takeaways or thoughts?

Bit Ish (01:10:32.76)
Yeah, I mean just I mean just real quick on what you said there, Reed, like absolutely you you don't know what the future holds, you know, and sometimes it's one little thing that you do that changes tr the trajectory of your whole life. you know, when I when when my wife was yelling at me to to go meet some friends, I never expected all of this, right? I wouldn't be on this podcast, I wouldn't have s ever met any of you guys, probably never would have gotten on Noster, I wouldn't have done, you know, the the the millions of things, hash power music wouldn't have been a thing.

Literally nothing that I'm doing that's like everyday my everyday life now would never have happened had I not, you know, finally stepped out the door. And you know, I'd been a Bitcoiner for quite a long time since there, you know, like since the since before that. So it's it's one of those things like what does it take to get you out of your shell and what you know, to get you there? And it's it's it's those incentives, right? What do you I didn't want to get yelled at by my wife anymore. So you know, I wanted to stay married. and so

So I you know, I just hope that I guess, you know, any sort of like takeaways i is like I I hope people find inspiration. because you know, there there's like we talk about here, there's there's parallel systems that are happening right now that are being built, that are being created. there's massive opportunities to to become something, to do something, to move the needle, to to matter in this world. and I feel like

Of all the spaces you could be in, Bitcoin is where you're the most empowered. Doesn't matter who you are, what you know, you know, any of it. Like you could be a total nobody, a total fuck up, but if you sort of buckle down and like learn the lessons that Bitcoin teaches us, reflect those against the systems that we know exist and see what works, learn what doesn't, and and just you know, make build a better world from there. it's it's totally doable. I know it's kind of pie in the skies.

Talk, but like, you know, reflect on your own life and the things that you do, you know, with all these sort of like big words or whatever concepts, but like, you know, distill that down and and see what change you can do in your own life. You know, move the needle just a little bit.

rev (01:12:47.286)
And I'll jump into that perfect segue, man, 'cause the the parallel systems start with one interaction. That starts with you going to the meetup for the first time and meeting those guys and and and getting it started. It starts with me going into the corner store and just over the course of a year just building a building up a peer relationship to where now I've got one little bit of a parallel system connected together.

And then after that, once you got one, you build that out. And at the same time, you find other ones. And then you integrate those parallel systems together. And before you know it, we've got shipping services, we've got music tours, we've got everything that you could want. but completely in a bare a Bitcoin-based parallel system. And it's beautiful what we're creating. It's it's really happening, you know, in a small way, but small and slow solutions, right? Let's just take this one step at a time.

The parallel systems exist right now. Those silent Bitcoiners that are out there, you got a lot to gain by coming and joining us.

Reed (01:13:51.609)
Hell yeah. All right. Well, I guess that kind of wraps up the first half of the show. which is, you know, we're we're so glad, Biddish, that you could join us and and thank you again. And I think you said pre show that you're gonna hang out for the the V Viv section. So I'm gonna get that section kicked off here and you know, feel free to chime in. You know, you might know some of these people or maybe you've listened to some of these episodes, so you know, if you wanna chime in on any of these, you know, we usually we spend a fair amount of time here.

interacting with our audience and and really trying to just recognize our supporters for all the cool stuff that they have going on because they have cool stuff going on. It's really actually awesome just to get to know our community better through all these boosts and zaps and and everything, you know, we get to know the people who are listening to the show. And so it's been really fun.

Bit Ish (01:14:41.028)
Yeah, I mean look, the the the boost and reading the boost, recognizing your supporters and all that sort of stuff, that closes the value loop. that's that's part of the whole V for V thing, right? Because if someone's supporting you, it's not a one way street. You need to recognize them and and show them that thank you and you that you care, right? So this so I'm I'm definitely sticking around for this because this this I think is vitally important.

Reed (01:15:03.812)
Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, that's great. yeah, and and you know, we're we're one one of the reasons why I guess I'm still going on here, but one of the reasons why I've been it it's been so interesting to lurk around the V for V music space is for that exact reason. Like we're trying to learn all this stuff and who better to learn it from than than the people who have been implementing this for, you know, for years really. so yeah, we're we're trying to hope to take some lessons away.

From this, from the Value for Value music and and maybe some of the stuff that we're kind of experimenting with and playing around with, maybe those will be lessons for for other people that that they can pick up, like examples of how you can interact with your community. All right, so let's let's jump in. So we usually start off our value for value section with our leaderboards. And so we've got three different leaderboards.

And for those of you who listen to the show, you guys get to hear me go on my normal little spiel here about some of the leaderboards. So the first one that we're going to talk about, these are our top boosted episodes of all time. And so once again, for the f you know, manyeth time that I've mentioned this, the reason why this leaderboard is cool is because if you don't listen to all of our episodes, you know, we're recording episode sixteen. And so that's a lot of episodes. Maybe this is your first episode, and you're like, wow, these guys have

A cool podcast. I'd like to go back, but you know, sixteen episodes is a lot for my my cue on my podcast list. So if you're not sure where to start, a great place to start is our top boosted episodes, right? These are the episodes that our community has found the most valuable. And so if you're looking for a place to start, this would be a great place. So we have some changes, some shakeups here with the leaderboards. we had a lot of action over the last week and we're really excited

To be able to talk about some of this. So we're gonna get into it a little bit more here, but episode two, which by the way, episode two has been on this leaderboard consistently. I think they've been on every single week. So episode two is a long time. That's a long time favorite. but with the help of basically a single boost, it has rocketed to the top and it's way out in front. So we have now episode two is in first place.

Reed (01:17:25.996)
with one hundred fifty two thousand three hundred and sixty nine sats. And so that was again so episode two was with G C and James from Jersey City. the episode title was Meetups Are the Ultimate Web of Trust. And boy, we hit on some awesome topics in that one. And we have clips that have been going around on on Noster and

You know, apparently this is one that our community just loves this episode because it's now in first place overall. So if you haven't checked out episode two, definitely go back and give that one a listen.

next on the list is this was our top spot last week. So this is episode fourteen with Source Node. And this too was supported by, you know, a big boost. but that's part of the that's part of the fun of these leaderboards. You know, if you have a favorite episode, you can just you can get that episode to rock it right up to the top of the list. with just you know, we're calling these big boosts, but you know, this isn't like life changing money or anything. You know, you can you can move these things up the list with

you know, some definitely some of your hard earned sats are gonna have to go towards that, but hey, if you wanna get if if you really think that this is the best episode, you know, that's what you can do. So SourceNode, he sent us in some sats on that episode and we've got a hundred and twelve thousand thirty six sats. and that t episode title was Permaculture for Bitcoin Culture with SourceNode from Greenville, South Carolina.

third place is go ahead.

rev (01:19:00.971)
And I don't well, real quick, I don't know if it's entirely fair to say that SourceNode boosted his own episode to the top because it is kind s Sovereign he he Sovereign is the one who technically boosted it. So I don't know if it was it was Brandon Carpellis who put that that down. I don't think it was SourceNode who put the who did the payment, right? Maybe it was, but anyways.

Reed (01:19:15.538)
Actually you're right. And

Reed (01:19:23.806)
Source node dig send a big boost, but it was to Johnny's episode. Right. Yeah, he boosted the Charlotte episode. So you're right. That was good that's a good call on that one. Yeah, so that was sovereign.

rev (01:19:28.171)
Right.

rev (01:19:35.553)
Just I mean, just to keep it ev 'cause there are you know, this is a game, right? We want to make sure that the rules of the game are known. And it's not that there isn't a rule that the episode guest can just boost their episode to the top, but I don't know if Source Node necessarily did that.

Reed (01:19:49.491)
They can though. Fair enough. third place. Third place is episode nine with Sir Spencer, another longtime leaderboard episode. And that one is clocking in. man, they're just under 100k sats. So ninety-eight thousand six hundred eighteen sats for episode nine. And again, if you didn't remember from all the other times I've read off the leaderboards.

this was episode nine is growing slow build strong communities. KC Bitcoiners. so that was the episode really that kind of got that was when we really started getting our butts in gear with with all the value for value stuff. Spencer is what was really an excellent resource for us. He's been a mentor in some capacity to us as you know, we're new podcasters. So we're we're still learning this this whole system and

That was a great episode for us. but it was a great episode for our listeners as well. we covered a ton of really good topics there.

Bit Ish (01:20:53.028)
Yeah, that was actually one of my favorite episodes as well, just because I I I know Spence as well. You know, I love everything he's doing in the V for V music space and everything like that. you know, he he he worked with me on on South by Worldwide. He was instrumental in all that. I mean they do a lot of heavy lifting over there in Kansas City.

Reed (01:21:12.86)
And they sure do know the value for value ecosystem, right? They've got all the different tags and the splits and they support all the different types of things. And we've actually been talking about actually moving platforms just so I mean not just, but we we really want to start doing more of these things. and I guess we're we're implementing our own permaculture principle here and we're we're going slow and we're taking our time and we're building up our base.

we want to make sure that we don't do this in haste. We will do it with some planning. So definitely a great episode though.

Fourth place is episode fifteen. So just last week with BTC Wrestle. really one of one of my favorite episodes that we've recorded. And we hit on a bunch of topics that we don't normally get a chance to talk about. They can be a little bit difficult to talk about at times, like talking about Bitcoin privacy, which was a big topic during that show. but but anyway, episode fourth place.

Episode fifteen with BTC Russell has eighty thousand seven hundred ninety seven sats. And the title of that one was Privacy Is Sovereignty with BTC Russell from Columbia, South Carolina.

rev (01:22:29.281)
You know, and it's really great to see all the support for that episode because BTC Wrestle, our guests all get a split, but BTC Wrestle put his split in to support the families of the samurai developers, Bill and Kiony. And so, it's it's cool that that everyone's come out and and gave that episode some love. So, you know, in a small way, we're we're helping, you know, these guys that have dedicated their their lives and now they're locked up.

to to give us some tools that make our Bitcoin that give more utility to our Bitcoin, right? That that allow us to use our Bitcoin more effectively. And I really appreciate everyone that's boosted that episode for that.

Reed (01:23:13.096)
Yeah, so I just just doing some quick math here. So that means that episode, twenty six thousand sats of of those sets are going to Bill and Keone's family. so again, if you want to support the samurai devs, boost episode fifteen with BCC Wrestle. That's a great way to give back to the show, to to get recognized on the leaderboards, to become a supporter on our new supporters page that I talked about at the opener.

and to support the samurai developers' families. So love to see it.

rev (01:23:47.276)
And how cool would it be if that was the the number one, right? So every every week we say the hey, the number one episode is in support of the samurai guys. That would be pretty sick. I'd be proud of that.

Reed (01:23:51.592)
This is true.

Reed (01:23:58.643)
That would be sick. Well, it's a call to the audience, I guess. We'll see if we can if we can drum up some support there for episode 15. And finally to wrap out our top boosted episodes is episode five with Augie. This is another one that's been a perennial all star on our top list. it's now down to the fifth spot, but it was as high as one or two for a long time.

so episode five is clocking in at sixty-four thousand eight hundred eighty-four sats. and that one is the meetup is the farmers market with Kansas City, Missouri. And that was really where we started pulling the thread on these circular circular economies. And and it was for me personally, I'll talk about for me, it was eye-opening to it was when I realized you you know how e i building a circular economy, it doesn't have to be

this big, you know, you all you have to do is just bring something to the meetup and you've now started a circular economy. and there were so many examples given in that episode. that that was really after that was right right when we started for our meetup. The next meetup, I started floating the idea. We got some concepts, we sketched out some ways that we can post things online. And that really all started from talking with Augie. So thank you Augie for that.

And that kind of rounds out our top five episodes.

rev (01:25:25.569)
The only thing I'll add to that is that episode one is now off the leader the the leaderboard. But if you're if you're just hearing this podcast for the first time or you're new to new listening, if you are interested in starting a meetup or finding a meetup or learning a little bit more about the what a Bitcoin meetup kind of is, what it takes, episode one is where you get all that information. Just start, just listen to episode one.

And then go jump around to these other top episodes because episode one is if if you're interested in starting a meetup, that has got all the the nuts and bolts. Just go over it. So check that out.

Reed (01:26:02.281)
Definitely covers the basics. Alright, let's move to our second leaderboard. So our second leaderboard, these are our ride or dies. So these are the listeners who have boosted the most episodes all time. So again, a ride or die in my book, these are the people who have been listening to all of our episodes, interacting with all our episodes, boosting all our episodes. And so this is true, right? So these are the people.

rev (01:26:23.275)
The true pioneers

These are you're you're now on our supporters page, right?

Reed (01:26:31.548)
Absolutely. I mean, if I didn't make clear at the opener, right, so anyone who's boosted the show any amount is on our supporters page. And so certainly our ride or dies at the top of the list here are definitely up in some of these guys are in some of the actually I don't I didn't actually verify that. but they could be up in our t in our higher tiers here. So certainly Matthew D is so that's so let's start up at the top.

rev (01:26:53.997)
Right.

Reed (01:27:00.274)
Listeners who have boosted the most episodes. So we've had fif we're recording episode sixteen, so we've had fifteen episodes. And we have two people who have boosted every episode. and that is it always starts here with Matthew D. And so Matthew D, thank you for being such a longtime and and really epic supporter of our show. We really appreciate you. And you have been the consistent number one leader for this leaderboard, since we started it. So thank you and

We appreciate that you're continuing to keep your streak alive.

Reed (01:27:36.281)
And Tide for first is now Permanerd. So I think it was last week's episode where w Permanerd had had gone through and and ripped the boost off on on every single episode because he started to get into the gamification aspect of the show, which is great. and but last week the c there was a couple episodes that got we found out they got put in as anonymous. But they were very clearly permanent.

And so we did a little bit of debugging, we did a little bit of retooling, and in fact it was a a a a bug on our website, which is now corrected, and the stats have been also corrected. So Permanerd, thank you for your continued support of our show. and Permanerd has his own podcast, the Yada podcast, You Are the Algorithm. And you know, they talk about our show all the time over there too. And so we hope that we can show the love back.

And to you guys, you know, Rev and I are both longtime listeners of of your show as well. So thank you again, Permanerd, and you're right up there with our rider dies.

rev (01:28:43.425)
That's just another example of integrating the systems together, man. We're all we're we're doing this together. This is a culture.

Reed (01:28:53.512)
Rock on. So next on the list, so this would be technically second place, since we got a tie for first place. So second place is Shadrach. Shadrach also longtime listener, boosted ten episodes. Thank you, Shadrach. And then third place is Noster Gang, who we it seems like we hear from every week. I'm sure we have listened you know, I'm sure Noster Gang's been boosting us on the regular here for quite a while. but

has clocking in at nine episodes. So thank you for your support, Nasser Gang, and thank you also to Shadrack.

rev (01:29:34.317)
So Shadrach says that he doesn't boost an episode unless he listens to it. So that means that Shadrach has has missed some. Shadrach, you need to go back and listen to some old episodes, man. Get up on that, get to the top of the leaderboard. What's going on? I know you're busy, but just trolling you a little bit, Shadrach.

Reed (01:29:34.408)
And I'll just say

Reed (01:29:53.631)
So we have had people in the boosts question, I thought, you know, I really feel like I've I've boosted a lot of shows, like how am I not in this list? So if you'd like to know where you are in this list, we have a couple things on our website now. So if you go over to our stats page on the website, you can see, first of all, it'll show you a little bit deeper, so it'll show you the top ten list.

We only read off the top three on on the show here, but it'll show you the top ten. but also you can in the episode leaderboard, you can if you're logged in with Noster, you can there's a a a view that you can see just your s your stats for your n pub. And so it will tell you how many episodes you've boosted, it will tell you how many stats you've boosted, just if you log in and and you can click on your NPUB. So

If you're questioning, I you know, maybe I should be on this leaderboard, you know, or just like what happened to Permanerd, maybe you have boosted every episode and it just hasn't come through. And so if you feel like there's something maybe wrong or we've gotten something wrong, you know, reach out to us. You know, we were able to find some bugs and fix them in the past, and we'll certainly do that again if there's other problems. All right, which brings us to our last leaderboard.

this is the up the leaderboard that we get a little kind of the most excited about, I would say. this is kind of a a new concept that we sort of dreamed up here. we of course don't have ads on this show. we shill our own stuff, but we also mostly what we like to do is we like to shill the stuff of the people who support us. And so this is all this is the value chain in action. So we have this leaderboard here for the single

biggest boosts ever sent to the show. And so we like to call these our ad reads because not only are we reading off the people, but we also go back and read the boost. So if you send us a huge boost, we're just going to read it over and over again every single show until you're off the top five list. So the top five boosts we're always going to read off.

Reed (01:32:05.138)
So what we've had so far now we have two examples of people who are actually using this as ad reads. And so we have a new one tonight. We have a new number one overall biggest boost ever sent to the show. I kind of thought last week when Sovereign sent us a hundred K sats that that would be the number one for a long time, and I was wrong. It only lasted one one week. So we have a new number one top boost for a hundred and five thousand sats on episode two.

And that comes in from BTC Jackalope. So BTC Jackalope is he's actually a member of my meetup. And so he is a longtime listener also. He's a longtime listener, but he's kind of new to to supporting the show. he doesn't normally listen on Fountain or anything like that. So he has been using our website and his he's now resurrected his kind of Noster account and he's now g putting some miles on his Noster account.

just so he can interact with the show. So thank you again to BTC Jackalobe. And I'm gonna read off his boost here. So we've got 105,000 sats via localbitcoiners.com from BTC Jackalope. it says Escape to the listening loft cabin in Wilmington, Vermont, a modern two-bedroom retreat featuring a signature vinyl record listening loft, luxury bedding, and a peaceful deck. Perfect

Perfect for skiing at Mount Snow or relax or a relaxing getaway. Pay in Bitcoin and get twenty percent off. Visit listening cabin listeningcabin dot com for more information. So there you go. So thank you again to BTC Jackalope. And again, that boost came in on episode two, which he has repeatedly told me is his favorite episode that we've recorded.

rev (01:33:58.764)
And so if you go to BTC Jackalope's NPUB, you go to his profile, you'll see he's got kind of like some pictures of this over there. he's got some more information over there. And if you do want to take a little trip, you know, and check it out, I'd imagine the best way to get in touch with him is just like comment on that thing and say, like, hey, I'm interested, or you know, because most of DMs are are not the the best all the time.

But yeah, just try and just try and comment on that note. I think that probably the best way to to start a discourse with him. Maybe he'll give you his signal handle or something, you know, and you can move from there.

Reed (01:34:38.536)
Yeah, and if you if you want to reach out to him and and you can't get a hold of him, you know, I can try to help facilitate. But also he's got that website, listening cabinet sorry, I keep saying that wrong. listening cabin dot com. And I think that there might be ways to reach out to him there.

rev (01:34:53.59)
yeah. There you go. Yeah, go to that. I I missed that part. Sorry guys.

Reed (01:35:00.754)
Alright, let's move on to number two. So our number two biggest boost of all time. this came in on episode fourteen. And so this boost came from Sovereign. And so Sovereign is that's the company that Source Node works for. And so we had him on for for episode fourteen. And so he decided he followed up with Sovereign.

And they actually kind of liked the pitch of, you know, we're a local Bitcoiners podcast. We talk to Bitcoin meetups. They feel like their company has a a decent overlap with with our audience. And so they pulled the trigger on, you know, this big boost for the show, and we're happy to read it out. So I'm gonna read it out now. it is a hundred thousand stats via localbitcoiners dot com. So again, coming in from the website from Sovereign, and it says, Here's what I'm thinking.

Sovereign focuses on helping individuals, families, and companies integrate Bitcoin into their personal and professional lives with confidence, recognizing the crucial role it plays in the broader economic picture. If you want to dig deeper into self custody, node running, or point of sale implementation, Sovereign has your back. Thanks to all the meetup organizers out there for helping for for keeping the grassroots Bitcoin ethos alive. Go to sovereign.io spelled S O V R E I G N.

for support on your Bitcoin journey. And again, that was on episode fourteen, perm culture for Bitcoin Culture with source node.

Reed (01:36:40.222)
So yeah, love love to see it. Love to see our community taking advantage of these you know, these evergreen boosts that we're gonna read every week over and over again until they're off the leaderboards.

Reed (01:36:54.994)
Alright, next boost is from BTC Russell. And so BTC Russell sent us sixty-nine thousand four hundred twenty-one sats, sixty-nine four twenty-one on episode fifteen. And so just like we were talking about before, so this is BTC Russell's episode. So a whole big chunk of those sats ended up going to Bill and Keone's families for helping them out while dealing with that.

stressful time in their in all of their lives. So BTC Russell, his message is let's see, so this one came in on fountain. So 69,421 sets via fountain. And it just says, attend your local meetup and if there isn't one in your area, start one. Local Bitcoiners is an essential part of my 40 HPW, BTC Russell. Well thank you, BTC Russell, and we thank you again for coming on the show.

we had a great episode with you, we had a great conversation with you. And we hope everybody goes back and checks that one out if you haven't already.

rev (01:38:04.055)
Privacy is sovereignty.

Reed (01:38:06.728)
Hell yes. All right. Fourth place is Sir Spencer, Wolf of Kansas City. So he Spencer sent us 42,069 sats on episode nine. And that was his episode. And sorry, I lost my place a little bit here. Let me get to his boost message. So his boost came in via podcast guru. And it's from Sir Spencer. So thanks for having me on.

I 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 again, that was on Growing Slow Build Strong Communities, KC Bitcoiners. So yeah, if you haven't checked out Bowl after bowl yet, bowl after bowl is another

podcasts that we like to talk a lot about. They're kind of a show that we have a lot of respect for and we really enjoy the content that they have and we've learned a lot from them. And so they also have a really cool website that you can do a bunch of different things on to help support the show. So yeah, if you haven't checked out bullafterbull dot com, definitely go check it out.

Reed (01:39:23.698)
Alright, and then our final largest boost of all time is from SourceNode. And Source Node sent us twenty two thousand two hundred twenty-four sats on episode twelve. And his message is rather short. his came in also from the website and it says Johnny's hot sauce is the bomb, which it is. And that of course he boosted

Johnny's episode, which was leveraging social capital in Charlotte and Peru. and that was with Johnny, who's Delgado's Fuego.

Reed (01:40:02.709)
So thank you to all of our our show supporters. And if you haven't checked it out yet, if you've boosted the show in the past, if you've sent us value of some kind, as long as you've tagged us with your NPUB, you are on our supporters page. and actually, you know what, I spoke too soon. Even if you didn't include your N Pub, you're still on our supporters page. you just you know, there's more interaction and more tools possible if we've got your NPUB, but you know, you're still listed there. So

head over to localbitcoiners dot com forward slash supporters and you can see everyone who's contributed to the show. And we'll be talking about more about that stuff in the future. So that rounds out our leaderboards. And so Rev, if you're ready, I think we can start going over the boost we've brought in since last week.

Reed (01:40:54.856)
You're on mute, sorry.

rev (01:40:56.855)
Hell yeah, man. That was cool. That there's a lot of shakeups on the leaderboards. And it's great to see that people are interacting with the show in this way and really thinking about the leaderboards. That's it's it's it's good feedback. We appreciate it. it's a lot of fun. Let's keep having some fun. And so we're getting into the boost here, and we got first off 500 sats via fountain from Slywalker.

No comment with boost, and that was on episode 15 with BTC Wrestle. Next up, we got a thousand sats via localbitcoiners.com. Alright, localbitcoiners.com. I like that. From Perma Nerd. Perma Nerd says, another banger episode. Is is that still what the kids say? If you aren't listening to Local Bitcoiners podcast, you should be.

Hashtag Yada. And that was on episode 15 with BTC Wrestle. And yeah, you should listen to the Yada podcast because they they have a permaculture section in there. And I can't talk about permaculture on this podcast as much as I'd like to, so you can let those guys talk about it over there. You can learn a lot about permaculture if you listen to the Yada podcast. Next, we got 69421 via Fountain.

Reed (01:42:05.982)
That too.

rev (01:42:20.033)
We can all we all know who this is from from BTC Wrestle. attend your local meetup and if there isn't one, start one in your in your area, start one. Local Bitcoiners is an essential part of my 40 HPW. And man, it was awesome to have you on BTC Wrestle. I think that we touched on a lot of subjects that people need to hear and and and just realize that, you know, privacy is not an on-off switch, it's it's a path you walk.

And just get started now and you can do you can do better and better as time goes on.

rev (01:42:54.237)
Next, we got 494 sats via localbitcoiners.com from Reed. And he says, Hey Chad F, how are my nip37 G UID tags looking? Thank you for the PR. And so Chad F has helped us by saying, like, hey, dude, you guys can do a little bit better here. Reed, do you want to talk a little bit about what was going on with that boost?

Reed (01:43:19.368)
Yeah, I wanna yeah, I wanted to I I guess I didn't even get a chance to when we were talking about the supporters page. But yeah, so Chad F has been working on something I think with the fountain guys, maybe just or maybe just with Oscar and Mary. but they have been working on a way to try to come up with a consistent boost kind of format that will show up in all the different clients that support the podcasting two point boosts.

So they have this NIP seventy three tag where you can tag the shows in the episodes, basically podcast ID, which is that's what these G U ID tags are. And so he submitted a pull request to our site, which, you know, because our site's open source, it's on GitHub, and so he spent some time with it and actually submitted a PR, which for me, and I know I've talked about those on the show before, like, you know, I use the AI tools.

It's been a great learning experience for me, but like, you know, I'm not a real I'm not like a real dev here. So for this is the first time anyone's ever submitted a pull request on a GitHub repo that I started. So that was pretty cool for me. And so thank you, Chad F. And we really appreciate it. And we've got it merged in. And so now we're we're supporting these nip seventy three tags. And he did reach out and said, Yep, they're showing up for him on Boost Me Bitch, which is his

podcast boosting website, which I think both of us have used before. So definitely happy to support that and thank you again for supporting our website.

rev (01:44:55.819)
That's a great example of the value chain right there, you know. Submit a pull request and then boost the show and then we get to to make sure everyone else is on the same page. That's cultural capital propagation. next up we got 121 sats via fountain from Silas Thornbrook. Says great rip. And you know, Silas Thornbrook is an excellent curator. So if you're into a lot of the stuff that we talk about on the show, Silas Thornbrook following him.

You'll see some good content there. That guy's curating a lot of great stuff. Next up, we got 500 sats via fountain from code. No message, just value. And so code, I c yeah, I did say you could you could add a message. That's cool, dude. If you don't want to keep if you just want to just add the value, we love it, dude. And we appreciate your your contribution to the show and to participate. Next, we got 5,000 sats via localbitcoiners.com. anonymous, and it says

The first Thursday of the month, Troy meetup is happening at the Orange Pill Pharmacy, Thursday, July 2nd, 928, Town Center Drive, Troy, Michigan, 7 to 9 p.m. And so this is kind of the the I know the guy, maybe it is the guy, and maybe he wants to stay anonymous, so I won't say his name.

But this guy started a pharmacy, started accepting Bitcoin, and then started a meetup at the pharmacy. It's kind of an interesting venue for a meetup, but they bring food. it's a good time over there. I've never been, but I know many people in the Michigan area that have been there. So if you're in that Troy area and you want to check out Orange Pill Pharmacy, meet a meet a a true Bitcoiner, you know, guy who's really trying to earn Bitcoin, live on Bitcoin, and participate, there's plenty of other people to meet as well. check it out.

That's Thursday, July second. Thanks for the boost. And that was on the episode 15 with BTC Wrestle. Next we got 209 sats via localbitcoiners.com from Permanerd, and he says, shout out to the Comex Valley Meetup. It was a great experience. It was my first time, and everyone was very gentle with me. Looking forward to doing it again. And that was just a general boost via the website. And yeah the

rev (01:47:14.303)
And if you go listen to the most re recent episode of Yada, which I think is entitled Canada is Why or something like that. I think it's Canada is Why. Yeah. But he he details this whole meetup adventure. It's his first meetup. And because he was listening to the show, he was prepared. He was very well prepared for that meetup and he was very sick he had a very successful ic incre it

Reed (01:47:25.076)
It's got Canada in the name. I can't remember what it's called either.

rev (01:47:43.079)
extremely positive experience. So go listen to the Yada podcast to hear that story. all right.

Reed (01:47:49.576)
Definitely a great story. You can't miss that one.

rev (01:47:53.634)
Next we got a one 101 sats via fountain from Noster Gang. Good morning, and thanks again. Purple Heart, Orange Heart, Headphones emoji. And that was from episode 15 with BTC Wrestle. Thank you again, Noster Gang, for your continued support. Yeah, you're you're you're participating a lot elsewhere. You're not not just boosting our show, you're boosting a lot of shows and keep up that good work. That's the value chain in action. That's the velocity that we need to see.

Reed (01:48:10.728)
Right or day.

rev (01:48:22.725)
to build the capital in this fledgling economy, this fledgling parallel system. Next we got 201 sats via local big bitcoiners dot com from myself, Rev Hodel. and I'm I'm once again showing off the features of this boosting mechanism promoting my meetup. And I say the the South Bend meetup is the first Thursday of every month. Next meetup is July second. Post your meetups at localbitcoiners dot com forward slash meetups and I've got a link to the the noster

no the the the noster event for the meetup with more details on it if you want to get to the south bend meetup. just the point is here guys is that you can you can really leverage when you boost you can you can get so much more value out of it if you take a little bit of extra time and you embed a noster note in there. You could promote your your your favorite noster note you could promote a product you could put a an event in there you can put anything in there and it will render and it will come out to our our feed

And we'll be able to renote it and and get them the word out. So a meetup how anyways, leverage leverage noster.

Reed (01:49:28.39)
And and I'll just say, like we we obviously want to lean in as much as we can into the knockers nostro ecosystem because then everything becomes intercompatible, right? Like I was talking about on the supporters page where you can boost us without an NPUb, that's fine, and you'll still be on the supporters page. but if you do boost us with an N Pub, you know, now you're in the follow packs, right? Now people can start following your you on social media or you know, maybe they can find all your Nip ninety nine products, right? Maybe you're selling stuff.

Or maybe you have a meetup posted. Now people can start to find your stuff. But I will say for the meetups too, if you don't have if your meetup isn't on Noster and maybe you really don't want your you I I don't want I have too many things in too many places. I'm not going to do the Noster thing. Well that's fine too because we have a button that you can just paste in your meetup.com link or your website link or any link to whatever place you've got your meetup.

Because at the end of the day, really what we want to do here is we want to promote Bitcoin meetups. Nasser is is a great interoperability layer. but you know, that's what we're all about here on this show. So we're trying to make it as easy as possible for you guys to boost your meetups so we can talk about them and hopefully get some more people out at at your meetup and really get the community recognizing all the cool stuff that you guys are doing. So just wanted to throw that out that we do have those some additional tools on the website, even if you don't have

your meetup listed on Noster.

rev (01:50:53.803)
Yeah, go in there and click around. You know, just just poke around a little bit, post a meetup. It'll be fun. We'll talk about it. Next, we got 133 sats via Fountain from Wartime with no comment on episode 10. Interesting. Wartime went back and is boosting episode 10, which is with Sean, the Niagara Canada meetup. And that was the evolution and development of a meetup.

And so thank you, Wartime. I wonder if you're trying to find your way onto the leaderboards here. Next we got

Reed (01:51:26.088)
I think you you know, you you you mentioned that episode, I think, recently. 'Cause we were we were talking that one's kind of a sleeper episode. That was we both really liked that episode and it it wasn't showing up on a lot of the leaderboards, so

rev (01:51:38.06)
Yeah, it's it's the one that like if you want to hear the story of somebody, like really who just lays it out step by step of when how they started a meetup and how it unfolded over the course of several years. this is a great episode because he just talks about all the kind of challenges and all the transformations and paths of succession that have led it led the meetup to to becoming a a flourishing thing. and it just goes to show you that the small and slow solutions do work. You know, it's it's a excellent

It's an excellent episode. next we got 500 sats via fountain from William the French, WTF. What would you would you give this economic model for small UBI for all citizens a read, please? It's not an income replacement, rather an enhancement for all.

something to smooth over the transition AI is going to cause. Your critical eye would be welcome. Cheers. And he has a link to cheers WTF. Signed WTF. And he's got a link to an article in here. And I read this article and I actually I I thought that maybe this was too deep of a conversation to get into on the boost section. WTF but I did ask other people to weigh in with their opinions on Noster

And they've con commented below that. And I actually kinda anyone who did participate with this call out got a a zap of four hundred and twenty sats. So in the future, if you're if you're hanging out looking at our feed and looking at the boosts, if there's like some something that you want to interact with like this, you will get zapped. Like this is another way of of us putting that value back out there because we want William the French to get some information on this question. But ultimately, William the French, my answer to the question is that

UBI, it's it's the story of the government intervention. when when you have a centralized intervention, you create you solve one problem and you create more. And there's this I don't know who I heard this so I heard it on some Bitcoin podcast at some point in the past, but it's it's generally the story of like, okay, there's a pro a Cobra problem in India. And so the the Indian government puts a

rev (01:53:56.405)
a a law and a bounty out that everyone that kills a cobra gets ten cents or ten dollars or whatever a a price per head. And so instead of people going out and killing all the cobras, people just started breeding cobras and selling them to the government and actually made way more fucking cobras than they would have had if they had not put this this rule in place. And so I think UBI in relation to inflation causes the same effect. Whereas if you just give out money freely

No matter what mechanism to people, everybody who has a business knows that there's free money floating around and prices will naturally naturally rise based on this knowledge. It doesn't even have to be a market dynamic. It's literally just an informational thing. Like you're just me as a business owner, if I know that everyone's getting free money, well, you could give some of that free money to me. So like I'm gonna raise my price. I know everyone's got a little bit of money to play with. Anyways, that I I think that's why that UBI is a bad system.

And will ultimately cause more problems than it solves.

Reed (01:54:59.028)
And I'll just say I I I did not get a chance to read the the article. Apologies for that. maybe I'll I will go back and give it a read. But I would say in general I agree, Reb with with with your take on it. when when governments get involved in in redistributing wealth, it it messes with the way the free market is supposed to work. Right? So it's you're messing with the the regular market signals of that's supposed to be able to be

A decentralized, open way of letting humanity give proper pricing signals to to whatever it happens to be in the marketplace. And so yeah, injecting a whole bunch of cash into the system, even if you just gave if you just gave it out to everyone equally, well it you know, all you're doing is you're just adding another zero and and nothing actually changed. Right. So all the prices just like Rev was talking about, the prices go up,

and and nothing really changed in the end except you know, the government felt that they could get more involved in your life and and make you more dependent on on them in some ways.

rev (01:56:10.091)
The poor people are still poor and everyone else has to pay more for that. It just doesn't make any sense. Okay, next up we got 2121, 2121 sats from Orange Dad. And Orange Dad says, here's a free tool for people running Bitcoin events to get the word out and save time. Primarily for posting on Twitter or X. the idea is that.

You already put the time in to get your event on Luma, Meetup, or Satlantis. Paste the event link into the tool and it creates a post for Twitter and Noster as well. And then he's got a link to the GitHub. So that might be an interesting thing to get to blast your meetup out there. Check it out. Thanks, Orange Dad, for that that tool you've been creating. This is a perfect place to let everyone know about it. Give it a try. See check it out.

Reed (01:57:03.784)
I'll check it out. I mean we that's one thing that I don't do a great job with is like sending out reminders and stuff like that for for meetups. So if that's a tool that can help out with that, that would probably help us as well.

rev (01:57:16.309)
Yeah, and you never know. You look at it and you're like, all right, this is this is open source. Maybe you're maybe you can submit a PR and be like, dude, all right, you got something going on. Let's make it better. Let's work on this. We can all cooperate here. We can we can integrate the the parallel systems together and and just solve all the the friction, just reduce the friction. Next we got the big boost, 105,000 sats via localbitcoiners.com from BTC Jackalope. Escape.

Escape to the listening loft cabin in Wilmington, Vermont. A modern two-bedroom retreat featuring signature vinyl rec record listening loft, luxury bedding, and a peaceful deck. Perfect for skiing at Mount Snow or a relaxing getaway. Paying Bitcoin to get 20% off. Liz visit listeningcabin.com for more information. And that was from episode two. Bitcoin meetups are the ultimate web of trust.

Reed (01:58:11.006)
So can I can I sorry, can I can can I tell one more story about this place that I've I I could have told this before, I just kinda forgot. So one of the cool things so he's into he's a big music guy, I'll be honest. Like he's the guy that I talk to the most probably about a lot of the music scene in general. And so like he's a musician, he's been a musician for a long time. and so we like to talk about that kind of stuff. So he's got this listening loft cabin of course, and one of the things that he likes to do

And and apologize, dude, if you're not doing this anymore, but I know in the beginning when he first had the place, anytime someone would book it, he would reach out to them and ask what their favorite album is, and he would go get the vinyl and have it for them there at the cabin. So they could put on their favorite album on the record player. And then, you know, it would be then it would just live in the collection, like at the cabin. So he gets to grow his music collection of what

people who might be staying there might want to listen to. And they get this cool perk where they're getting their favorite album. So it's just gonna it's it's kind of a cool almost V for V type type concept that he's going on there. So it's another just another feature.

rev (01:59:26.729)
Awesome, dude. I I it sounds enticing to me. I wish I I could find a way to get off the homestead for more than a day. Next, we got 420 sats via fountain from undisciplined.

Even more than the norm on Noaster, I was struck by how much calmer the conversations are on Stacker News than is typical on social media. So, Undisciplined thinks that Stacker News is even more chill than Nooster. and Stacker News has been a place that I've been kind of interested in for a while. I'm d I j I'm just still baffled why they wanna silo it off and not integrate. If they've got this great community over there, why not just join Noster and

Immediately now the friction is gone and I can just go participate. Now I gotta go set up a stacker news thing and just go to Stacker News and I anyways. Stacker News is probably cool. I I once again I haven't checked it out personally, but I've been interested in it. Next we got and finally this is the last boost. 222 stats via fountain from bullish clips. Come visit the bullish market on Sunday, June 21st from 9 to 10 a.m. Central Time.

virtual farmers market event where we use Bitcoin as money. There will be tunes, auctions, door prizes, Bitcoin faucet, and the most and most importantly, amazing products from Noster merchants. Excuse me. If you decide to buy something, post about it on Noster and tag bullish market for a 1,000 sat zap. And that's from episode 15 with BTC Wrestle.

Reed (02:01:04.466)
More value chain concepts, right? So if you if you go out and if you go out and talk about the bullish market

rev (02:01:05.835)
Ha ha

rev (02:01:12.365)
sorry, I thought I was muted.

Reed (02:01:17.576)
You're good. More more value chain concepts. So if you go out and talk about the bullish market on Noster, you can get a thousand SADs up. And so that's a that's a great mechanism. And of course he's boosting us here on this show so we get to talk about it. And it's you know, we talk about the bullish market all the time. I'm planning on being there. I know I've said that for the lap the last two and life kinda got in the way and I wasn't actually able to go, but

I will be there as far as I know. I'll be there Sunday, June twenty first. So looking look definitely looking forward to that and thank you as always to to Bullish, longtime supporter of the show.

Bit Ish (02:01:57.828)
You know, I'm sitting here listening to you guys. That's all right, man. I'm sitting here listening to you guys read all these out, right? And talking about parallel systems and value chain and all that. I thought it was so cool because some of these big boosts, they're really getting some mileage, right? They're getting read on the leaderboards and they're out, you know, on on the boosts and everything like that. it just seems pretty cool. Like there just seems to be so much value stacked up, right? Once you get all these systems integrated together.

rev (02:01:58.156)
And that rounds out the boosts. sorry, go ahead, Biddish.

Bit Ish (02:02:25.932)
Any one action you do returns, you know, tenfold.

Reed (02:02:31.984)
Yeah, that's where we're we're trying to lean into these tools as much as we can and and you know I think that we're I I we we keep saying it, it seems to us like it's working, right? We're we're getting the interactions, we're helping our supporters by getting their message out there, you know, and we're recognizing them to the best that you know, to the best of our ability. We have basically the whole second half of the show is a value for value show. and you know, we we love it.

It's it's fantastic for us to get to know our community members. We feel like we know a lot of these people now. we get to talk about all their stuff, so it's it's been a really great adventure.

rev (02:03:13.985)
Well and and this is very similar to how nature works, you know, the the the plants all are able to cooperate and they're able to figure out their their territories and they compete and everything, but ultimately what happens is that the agr when I've I've had this, I've done this. I've planted trees on their own with no other support species around it. And then I planted a food forest with a bunch of plant support species around these these trees.

And guess what? The trees grow way better with the support species around it. And this is what the value for value thing does is that you everybody is is winning by being in this ecosystem together. And the the plants create the velocity through the root exit through in in the soil, right? And the soil is the medium in which we are transacting, right? We are communicating. It's Noester and it's Bitcoin.

And so we've got really healthy fertile soil and all we have to do is increase the velocity of our transactions and we will grow together exponentially than being off on our own.

Reed (02:04:20.84)
What a way to wrap it up. A permacul no better fitting clothes than to close out on a permaculture principle. So all right. Well, thanks, Rev, of course. And thank you again, Biddish, for for coming on the pod. We really liked you know, learning about all the stuff you got going on and thanks for hanging out for the V for V section. So I guess any anything close us out with from either of you guys?

Bit Ish (02:04:47.758)
I just I just want to say thanks for having me on. you know, I appreciate what you guys are doing. I think it's super important. and I think it's, you know, it's all all these connections that you guys are making right now, it's really creating this base, like you said, the fertile soil that that that's needed for everything else to grow above it. And and as long as we have, you know, that that permaculture knowledge, right, to know that complimentary planting works and matters, you know, we we find

Find the way it all fits and then it's like you know, this is we'll we'll have an incredible garden. So

Reed (02:05:24.019)
Awesome.

rev (02:05:24.184)
Beautiful. Roll the outro.