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Alex Leishman

lines on the record: 53
first: 2024-02-28
most recent: 2024-02-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It's stressful, right? Especially now. Imagine you've worked on Bitcoin and it started as this project and you've worked on it for maybe years for free And all of a sudden, the biggest ETF launch ever is now betting you did a good job. It's actually a pretty wild thing. So, yeah, it's an interesting dynamic.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope, I think the only last thing is I think it's important as new people comes to Bitcoin. They always remember that at the end of the day, there is this software project that a Bitcoin core that is powering this whole thing in many ways. It's a thankless job. These developers are doing this because they love it, not because the pay is amazing. Always remembering that this whole empire being built is being built on this open source project that people have worked on and put blood, sweat, and tears in for the love of it and not being afraid to sort of like dig into that, see what's happening, see what's really powering all of this.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think overall, Bitcoin is in this adolescent phase. Big changes are happening in its life. It's trying to understand it all and figure out sort of what it is now. It's not quite at maturity. It's not quite sort of this beautiful grown person who knows who they are. But it's also not a child anymore. It's not this baby little toy project. And so I really think we're in the adolescent phases of Bitcoin and there's going to be a lot more drama.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think this is something that's going to be at people's homes. And really for me and sort of the professional world, I think it has, if it connects people better, if it allows people to unlock more creativity or feel like they're in person together, or it truly does bridge those digital distances instead of talking to a screen, you're immersed in you're with your colleagues, you're with other people. If they're able to accomplish that, even if it requires being plugged in and you to wear this thing at your house, I mean, that's pretty interesting. And instead of experiencing a 2D world, you can sort of experience a 3D world with this interface. I mean, it's hard to predict how this plays out. Maybe it's Apple's Lisa again. Maybe it's Lisa 2. We'll see. I don't have one. So I'm going to wait a few generations personally.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The form factor, yeah, I think this concept of spatial computing is going to open up a whole new category of ways to plug in. I think it impacts business and remote work probably more than the consumer side initially. And then it kind of spreads into consumer world. I don't know exactly what it looks like. I think that the devices have to get cheaper and slimmer and smaller and better. And what we haven't seen yet is the creative army of developers shipping stuff for this. And so I think in the next few years, we'll get a sense of what these things can do once developers have time to build new software.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's happening? Whereas, in contrast, you have AI, you have one leader, they ship a product, and it's very clear what it is. And so I think Google's really dropping the ball here. My guess, if I was abetting man, I would bet that they have a new CEO within a year or two. And if the board is smart, they bring in somebody who's going to act like a founder, whether they're a founder or not. They're going to find their satya. They need it, or it's in my opinion, kind of game over. It's just going to be a slow, like.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just as a CEO, as I've sort of built the chops, I also get better at sort of pattern matching, effective leadership at other companies. Not to say that I'm really the best judge of things, but from what I can tell, Google just doesn't have strong leadership It seems to be a culture of multiple computing factions and a very messy, and that shows in their product strategy and in their marketing, their AI strategy is, in my opinion, sort of unforgivably fractured and crippled. They have lots of different AI products. Every time they have a blog post announcing something new, it's like, is this real? Does this exist? Can I use it? It has a new name. And now there's like five different AI things at Google to keep track of. The blog post is written by like three people at Google. It's like, who's running the show here?”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, things are changing quickly. I don't know how it all plays out, but I'm quite bullish. But Bitcoin always surprises us.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Micro strategy is basically running itself as a smarter ETF. They're opportunistically borrowing against their cash flows and issuing shares to buy more Bitcoin. And they've actually outperformed Bitcoin in the last year alone. So that's another interesting.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's valid. I think it's also, I think the pipeline fully hasn't been opened yet from what I know. We're still in the early days of DETF being sold, right? These financial institutions at the end of the day are often like selling products to their customers, so the people they're managing wealth for. And so the ETF is still very new for most of the big private banks and institutions. They can't yet sort of the advisors can't go tell people, hey, you should buy the CTF. It's not yet part of any real model portfolio in the United States. I think we're still in the very early days of this institutional pipe and it's going to continue to get bigger. Micro strategy is an interesting thing because if that hits the S&P 500, then what? Right? Like that's an interesting dynamic as well. Microstrate is an interesting company in contrast to an ETF because unlike an ETF, which has to follow these very strict rules.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that seems to have been a year long trend or so, which I think correlates to just an upward tick in price as well. But it is interesting at the end of the day, I can say with confidence, I mean, what we're seeing at River is people are just generally buying and holding. There are days where we see a good chunk of sellers. As the price goes up, right, some people sell, right? Some people when institutions need cash for one reason or another. Sometimes they're, you know, I've done well enough. I kind of want some dollars now. I want to buy a house. I want to take my principal out and now just let the rest ride. There's always more sellers as the price goes up, but I do get the general sense that we're coming to a point where people are kind of like, I'm not selling anytime soon, right? We're going to see where this goes. So I don't know how much supply is going to be there if these inflows continue like they do.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw that chart about OTC balances, and I kind of don't know how that was calculated because it's not like OTC desks are all just, they have a stack of coins and they're just selling them over the course of years. They're buying them here and selling them here. So I don't really know sort of what was behind that calculation”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really 30 years of any real experience trying to secure something digital. We're still very new to this. So it's an interesting dynamic.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Custody's hard. It's a hard thing to get perfect. You're constantly trying to defend against the longest tail risks you can think of. And there's no such thing as zero risk. And with Bitcoin, unlike pretty much every asset that the financial industry is used to, one hack and it's all gone. There's no recourse. There's no government, there's no money printer to bail you out. Like the Bitcoin's gone. Every other ETF, it's a security. It's a centralized ledger. So there's a hack, they just revert it. And so it's actually the first time we actually have something like this. I mean, the most comparable thing is like a gold ETF and you're trying to defend against someone stealing the gold. But humans are pretty good at securing physical things at this point. That's a multi-thousand. We have thousands of years of knowledge for securing physical things. So securing physical gold is kind of relatively straightforward and it's also kind of hard to steal a lot of it. With Bitcoin, I mean, humans only have”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think that one of the unappreciated aspects of why Coinbase is by far the biggest selected custodian for all these ETFs is you can kind of just get everything in one place. You have this battle-tested custody. You have all the prime brokerage and order execution. You have the most liquid U.S. regulated exchange all in one place. So the operations are simpler if you go with Coinbase. Now my guess is what happens over time is more people as the ETFs get smarter and used to the operations of buying and selling Bitcoin, custodying it, all of those things. My guess is they probably start to split up their custody a bit. I do think if I was running one of them, I would be splitting it up between a number of institutions just in case. But that does add complexity to your operations. But I think that's we'll see.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. They're looking at their demographics All these banks know you have to get young people in the doors. And anyone under the age of 45 now wants to be able to access Bitcoin. And if you don't support that, you're going to lose their business. It's just the market will work.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it is interesting because, in many ways, those guys are not on our side and have worked against the industry in some capacity on the regulatory front. I think it's maybe good. I think it's a good thing that the banks are going, hmm, you know, maybe we should not be totally averse to this stuff. And I think what's happening, I think really the big change here is that before the banks had an excuse to not support buying Bitcoin for their customers, I said it's not a regulated asset. We don't have the infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. But now all their customers have a very legitimate reason to say, you know what, we want this ETF. You better support that or we're going to take our business elsewhere. And I think that's probably what's behind some of these dynamics.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hacked, right? It would be bad news for everybody. And we're just sort of cementing that too big to fail. Custodians. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out and how that impacts the political dynamics of consensus decisions and forks and things like that. I hope it doesn't, but we just don't know. But it has been interesting to see the competitors in the ETF space. I mean, I really like the bitwise guys. They said, you know what? We're going to make our addresses at Coinbase custody public. We're going to push them to support SegWit instead of legacy addresses. We're going to donate 10% of our revenues to core development. So they're really pushing the needle, you know, pushing things forward. I'm a big fan of the bitwise team where I think we're entering a new era for Bitcoin. And so we'll see how it plays out.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the ETFs definitely make a 6102 attack much easier to accomplish. And by 6102, we mean the government confiscating Bitcoin like they did gold back in the 30s. That's a major downside of the ETFs. To the average person, I would always recommend just buying the actual Bitcoin. It's a lot. Why not have that optionality? It's just as easy and you pay no custody fees. It's kind of a no-brainer if you're just the average person. If you're an institution or you have a private bank and you need all sorts of extra financial, you need to be able to leverage trade options, borrow cheaply against it with the rest of your assets. You're running a hedge fund, like things like that, the ETF makes sense. It fits into sort of the existing protocol of the financial system. That's sort of the two different paths. From a honeypot perspective, I mean, there's already been this kind of big open question. Coinbase has already been a pretty big honeypot, right? Like we're already at a point where before the ETF, if Coinbase was”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tapro No, but you could argue, right? It does. So depending on how the layer two is built, it could be another way to transact Bitcoin or a stablecoin using Bitcoin to pay the fees because they might build it more like a polygon instead of a lightning. So you wouldn't need to worry about liquidity and things like that. There is a future where these things are potentially how we help scale self-custody Bitcoin to the rest of the world cheaply, but the jury's still out.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a lot of people who want to do the G-Gen gambling stuff? And so I think the approach of these projects is basically why not do this but drive demand for Bitcoin off of the base chain. And that's the general idea.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New opcode in the Bitcoin blockchain, which obviously may or may not ever happen. And that's kind of needed to make it purely trustless to move the coins back and forth. The idea is to have these layer two blockchains, kind of the sidechains vision from blockchain, basically, that can do all sorts of other stuff with smart contracts and DeFi. But instead of ETH as the main currency, it's Bitcoin. I think that sort of for the average Bitcoin user who's not into DeFi or stuff like that, These things are only interesting in the sense that if they are to succeed, their impact, you know, my gut tells me the impact is overall positive in that it probably ends up pulling a lot of that development away from all the other altcoins, basically gets to a point where you don't need any other chain. If you want to do all the DGN gambling stuff, you can just use a Bitcoin L2. And the reality of the world is there.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really fits well into this L2 conversation we're having, and by L2, I mean layer two. At the end of the day, all of these projects are working towards a future where you can transact and do things with Bitcoin off of the main Bitcoin blockchain trustlessly move Bitcoin from the Bitcoin blockchain to these layer twos and back. And these layer twos are the general sort of direction these new layer two projects that aren't lightning are taking is basically looking a lot like Ethereum layer twos, but using Bitcoin as the base currency instead of Ethereum for those people who know the ETH space, right? They're basically trying to build like a polygons of Bitcoin. And so the general idea there is that using some clever cryptography and a lot of these guys at the end of the day probably want a soft fork and an”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. But I think it's easy for Americans to underestimate demand for dollars. I mean, most people in the world to date have not had access to dollars and they've only had access to some really crappy fiat currency in their own country. So instead of holding dollars, they have to put all their life savings into like a condo or something.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think sort of if Tether is going to succeed and not get shut down, it is going to be because the US government wants them to.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, and that's where we're sort of in this interesting position, Preston, because we can see that if the U.S. government wants to continue to spend as they have, they should welcome Tether with open arms. I mean, this is like the best thing that's ever happened. But what's funny is sort of it's unclear because the government isn't this one entity, right? You have sort of like the OFAC AML people who care about money laundering. But at the end of the day, you have Treasury knowing, you know, doing the math too and knowing that, hmm, okay. Tether's got $100 billion in treasuries. Okay, interesting. I think that it depends on who wins. Tether's has been playing along with the feds and shutting down Tether addresses that the US government doesn't want.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I have no information. I don't know the tether folks. I think it's totally up to them. I do think that other folks from what I've heard, they're big Bitcoin believers. And I don't know Paulo's specific opinions on the Lightning Network. But I'm hopeful. We'll see. The Tethers are in this interesting position. They're kind of like the kingmaker of layer twos. Like a layer two. Now the Lightning Network has been able to be successful without a stablecoin to date. But every other layer to all these Ethereum layer twos aren't very useful unless there's Tether. Tether can basically make it L2 big or not.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem. And a lot of the criticisms of Lightning are somewhat unfair because they're saying, well, Lightning doesn't solve this, but what does? I mean, people used to point to Tether on Tron as being this cheap and instant rail, but now it's like a dollar per transaction. You can't have a global decentralized, no one's figured out how to have a global decentralized censorship resistant payment system that's incredibly cheap to use. It just hasn't been, it's not a solved problem.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I completely agree. So, you know, at the end of the day, do we want every human in the world to be able to self-custody their Bitcoin in a centership resistant way? Absolutely. Should we be paralyzing ourselves or criticizing ourselves into just endlessly because we can't support that today? No. The Lightning Network is a part of that future. It is not going to solve that future completely. There's going to be other things that step in some of those will be custodial solutions. In fact, the vast majority of people will probably use custodial solutions because unless society completely deteriorates, people want to be able to trust institutions. What matters is that you can exit if you really need to. And I think other technical solutions will come along to help people for whom it's very important to be able to self-custody who don't have much money. We're just, you know, there's just no silver bullet for that. It's a very challenging technical and economic.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so then you have these people sort of criticizing it, flagging the actual challenges with Lightning, and saying, oh, it's not a silver bullet. And so I think I think it's just been sort of a shift in perception and branding of the lightning network. It's actually capable of in the real people just actually starting to realize because it's actually being used now. And so I think actually all this criticism is a byproduct of people actually using Lightning now and Lightning's increasing adoption. People don't criticize things that aren't getting attention.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of To this, I think that Lightning was oversold by some people as maybe being the silver bullet. And of course, people working on it knew that wasn't.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, on the reliability side, I think that Lightning B2B, sort of as a way to move Bitcoin between all of these hubs, I think that's quite reliable today and is going to become increasingly reliable as the tech continues to mature. The protocol continues to mature. I don't think the jury's still out on how reliable, self-custody lightning is going to be for individuals And so that's where I would sort of kind of break the Lightning Network into two sides B2B custodial to custodial hub to hub Lightning, very reliable. Self-custody consumer lightning introduces a whole new host of challenges because you're trying to send to a cell phone that may or may not be online. And how do you handle all of that? So that Majori's still out there.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And on the few things, I would say yeah, for smaller transactions, absolutely. Everything in this space is about trade-offs, right? There's no perfect silver bullet. On-chain transactions have a high fixed cost. But it doesn't matter how much you're sending. Sending an on-chain transaction is you're paying based on how much data you're taking up in the blockchain, not how much money you're sending. With Lightning, you're paying a percentage-based fee. And that's a very small percentage. So for smaller transactions, it's much cheaper than a blockchain transaction. For larger transactions, it may not be.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if I had to bet right now, given Tether's popularity, if Tether does create a taproot asset, I do think that's going to be pretty interesting and compelling because Tether is huge. It's already got, I think, 90 billion. Maybe it's close to 100 billion in dollars. Or tether minted. I think if that happened, that would be pretty big.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, there's a trade on each end with the Lightning Labs approach, the taproot assets approach. That's just saying, well, no, we're just going to put dollars on Lightning. And it'll be more like a traditional stablecoin experience people are used to.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, those are separate things. They could technically interplay, but they're basically two different approaches for transacting in fiat over the lightning network, the universal money address being kind of using just Bitcoin over Lightning to settle off Lightning Network Fiat trades, whereas the Lightning Labs approach is to actually make the Lightning Network multi-asset. You could have lightning nodes with actual dollar channels or the tether channel, for example, instead of just a Bitcoin channel.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Medium of exchange, it's a slow growth sort of thing. So, Lightning Labs is working on bringing stablecoins to the Lightning Network directly. And then you have companies like LightSpark working on things like the Universal Money Address, which allows two exchanges, which allows a user of one exchange to send fiat to somebody on another exchange or app and Lightning Network is the connector between those two exchanges, and they're settling the trade instantly. So, for example, you could have a river user in the US send to somebody using a Mexican exchange and we would talk to the Mexican exchange, get an all-in USD peso exchange rate, and then send the Bitcoin, our user would pay us dollars. We would send Bitcoin immediately to the Mexican exchange and then the Mexican exchange would immediately convert it to pesos for the recipient. So you would have this international fiat transaction powered by Bitcoin behind the scenes without the user really knowing or caring.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're in dollars. Yeah. They're in dollars. At the end of the day, everything's kind of just priced in dollars in the US. And then more broadly around the world because even though the US dollar has inflation itself, it is far more stable than basically every other developing world currency. So that's why it has a hundred plus years of being this brand and having this dominance and this stickiness and network effect. So what we're seeing is Lightning is winning as a second layer payment rail for Bitcoin. But the growth in demand for Bitcoin as a sort of”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it is the world unit of account, the US dollar. Fiat is everyone's unit of account still. And it is a much more predictable price. And it's just a sticky protocol. You are a merchant in some country. Your goods aren't priced in Bitcoin. Argentina.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fiat transactions over the Lightning Network by using the Lightning Network as an instant settlement rail between two custodial exchanges. So there are two different approaches basically being taken to make lightning suitable for transacting in fiat, which is still what the vast majority of people in the world want to do.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lightning transaction numbers have been relatively flat the last few months. There hasn't been sort of some parabolic growth recently. We're seeing steady usage. And I think some of the early growth was driven by things like Noosters, Zaps, stuff like that. That sort of, we've seen some of that plateau. And I mean, the current reality more generally is Bitcoin really hasn't found product market fit as a medium of exchange. Sending lightning transactions is interesting. It's cool. It has its use cases today. And my take is that this is going to continue to grow as Bitcoin becomes increasingly adopted as a medium of exchange, which isn't going to happen overnight. And it's going to take many, many years. People at the end of the day mostly would prefer to transact with dollars. What we're seeing is a lot of the Lightning Network development activity is being focused on bringing stablecoins to the Lightning Network or facilitating”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That lightning report really does make its way around. I know that even sort of banking executives at large banks in other countries have seen this thing. And so kudos to Sam on our research team who writes that every year. The short answer is our position on Lightning hasn't changed. In terms of what we've seen on Lightning since the report, while we haven't done the deep analysis, Sam is actually about to put out just a follow-up because I think we launched that last October 2023.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so regulations on real estate, I think, were decreased. And that changed the prices. But I think on the food side, and I could be wrong about this, but some of the regulations were actually artificially depressing food prices because of export controls and tariffs and things like that. Other deregulatory measures may have driven demand for things like beef and wheat and soy and other agricultural products in Argentina by potentially opening up international demand.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my understanding, and I'm not by any means an expert on this stuff, but there's a large omnibus bill that Millet is trying to get passed. And I'm unjust clear of the status of it at this point. The goal is to delete something like 200 or so laws and sort of a massive omnibus deregulation. My understanding is that they have like prematurely sort of like eased restrictions without passing on real estate stuff. And so people are already sort of behaving differently because of that.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of the big financial companies. I mean, the distinguishing line between government, private, and public in the United States is also quite unclear in those kind of industries.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, like, it should have never probably been part of the government to begin with, but you now have this distribution of resources fairness issue, and it is quite complex. But I think an interesting takeaway for me was a lot of business people were not pro Malay because a lot of business people in Argentina were actually benefiting from the corruption. There's a whole swath of the business landscape in Argentina that's benefiting from all the corruption and the capital control.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know that that was something that upset Argentinians because I think if you actually listen to a speech at the WEF, it was very critical Of their average audience member there. I think that if I had to guess, that probably actually made him look good. Argentinians. But overall, the sense I get is there's a little bit of unrest here and there from sort of the elements on the left, but by and large, the majority of the country is very much like, let's try and get this to work. We just want things to be better. And so there were some protests and strikes while I was there, but it actually turned out to be very minimal, which is a sign that I think people are like, the stuff hasn't been working for us in the past. We have to try this new thing.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People know what Bitcoin is. In fact, the apps there are very interesting and very widely used, the crypto apps. The apps there are built for transactional use cases. And so, for example, Bello is a very popular app in Argentina. Manu, the CEO, is Argentinian, an awesome guy. And their app is not just an exchange for Bitcoin and stablecoins, but it's also transactional. You can buy things. You can make Mercado Pago as a very common payment rail down there. It's like you can go to a store, scan a QR code, and just pay the merchant with pesos. And so you can have your Bellow app, you have your Bitcoin balance. You can on the fly sell Bitcoin for pesos and then make your payment in pesos from your app. So the crypto apps down there are not purely for trading and speculative use cases. They're often deeply serving as somebody's primary wallet.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literal paper to US dollar cash. Wow. Yeah. The country is actually dollarized basically, like everyone really just wants dollars for savings. The peso is purely transactional. Saves and pesos, it's impossible.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and there's a number of parameters, right? There's sort of what legal jurisdictions are you exposed to, the smaller companies can get away with just kind of having cash under a mattress? The bigger companies have to are under more scrutiny and there's very strict laws there and capital controls. And so they kind of have to do what we would consider wacky things just to not lose their treasury. Like buying dollar-denominated debt from another big Argentinian company to hold in their treasury because holding dollars itself would be too complicated. There's all this wacky stuff. And people there, you know, often stored. Argentinians, I think, are the third largest holder of physical bills of $100 bills in the world. Lots of companies and individuals there save in literal physical cash, often in their home or often in vaults that aren't at banks. Like there's like vault facilities that people just put their cash in.”
2024-02-28 · We Study Billionaires · BTC171: Bitcoin Tech Update with Alex Leishman (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT