YouSaid · the spoken record

Rob Hamilton

lines on the record: 46
first: 2025-08-06
most recent: 2025-08-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, Anchorwatch.com. Policy, you can sign up for a newsletter. You can reach out to agent agent at anchorwatch.com if you're interested in a policy, if you're on the commercial side, didn't mention it So, if you want to run your own custody solution and kind of go tap it in and leverage our infrastructure so you don't have to go figure out how the Bitcoin stuff works, you just want to run your own banking infrastructure. Like we're in conversations with multiple people right now around that. You can reach out to myself at rob at anchorwatch.com and then Becca at anchorwatch.com.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Entire vertical and industry that I think it's a bad rep because you have state mandated health insurance and you have state mandated car insurance and all these things. But like foundationally, it's such a beautiful way for just making Bitcoin a safer asset for people to hold and have all these other positive flywheel effects too on capital formation.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ships doing spice trades all over the world, it underwrote the expansion to build the United States of America. Like the financialization of capital markets for risk and like one of my favorite things is when people say that insurance is fiat is one, it predates fiat currency by hundreds of years. And two, it's the ability for you to be able to take risk in the world and being able to step forward and like take chances and not be totally destroyed if one thing goes wrong. It is a massive capital for capitalism. It's just a massive.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can custody my fund somewhere and it's insured. Like you're talking about consumer protection, right? Like how it's being managed today is not it. It is a live, we're in the Wild West days of the early formation of just Bitcoin as an industry. And it's gone because there was no better option. And this linking of the capital markets, there's a massive financialization and opportunities to make money and put Bitcoin to work as a productive asset. But it also just at the end of the day protects consumers. So it's a very virtuous alignment of this piece of insurance. just as the one piece like insurance started like”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Want the addition Income stream. And also, it's distributing the risk so all of the treasury companies aren't using the same three players. And the nature of like, how our tech is being leveraged, you can have the best of both worlds. You can have an enterprise level security solution that has to co-sign, but they can't abscond with the funds without you coordinating”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I view this as structurally. This is where Bitcoin custody is going to go. And that's why I talk about these treasury companies becoming the new version of Bitcoin banks, because they will have a pool of Bitcoin be able to underwrite this risk. They'll be safely understood. It's aligned for them.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Through risk distribution and the fact that you can get for every, you know, no insurance carrier is dollar to dollar or Bitcoin to Bitcoin back because then the unit economics don't scale. But if you can prove over a long enough time period with your actuarials and your provable loss rates, how scalable and kind of like the expected rate of returns, you're able to start modeling that out. And you can offer that in different tranches too. Like this is where the entire world of insurance comes in, where you have maybe the first dollar loss has a much higher yield because you're more likely to have some loss versus no loss. And then you actually have a whole yield curve. It's called a risk tower in insurance, right? Let's say if the losses are over a billion dollars, then my tranche of capital starts paying. And that has a lower yield because it's safer because up to a billion dollars, you don't have to pay out a penny. But if it's over a billion dollars, you have to start paying, right? So this is like the many layers of financialization to be kind of built out and discovered and kind of like flesh through. But I also at the end of the day.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are two things I'll say. One, it's ultimately a market force, right? When everyone thinks of insurance, they're usually viewing it as the customer buying insurance for someone, there's a certain rate of cost to get the insurance. The other side of the desk though is I have this massive pool of capital as an insurer or a reinsurer and I need to deploy this risk into different buckets and each of those get me different kinds of returns. Property and casualty, which is kind of like one half of the insurance bucket, but the other half being life and health insurance. So property and casualty, which is kind of the world we live in, reinsurers are earning low teens, mid-teens as their average return on equity in capital for this stuff. And that's just like how that works, how it's going to work in our market. It's a new market. So who's to say, right? But it's going to be a supply and demand dynamic of what are people willing to pay for their insured custody and then balancing the supply and demand curves on both sides and finding out what that market clearing rate is. But what I find so fascinating about it is that insurance gets its leverage not through kind of lending and borrowing, but”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We live in a world where no one really uses time locks except for the Lightning Network right now. And if you could start thinking about this, like we started with insurance because it's so foundational to the custody and the safety of it. Any financial product, a Bitcoin bond, if you want to do coupon clippings and locking up the principal and like over time, it's also almost like an on-chain native yield curve too. Like Sailor's doing it with all of his different preferred offerings on the financialization side. You can mirror that on the technical side and just start taking coins out of the circulating supply. And it's very safe understood tech. Time locks have been in Bitcoin for over a decade. It's how the Lightning Network works. This is not, I did not in my basement discover or implement time locks. This is something that's very just codified into how Bitcoin operates and runs. And this is kind of like.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's fascinating about this too, a small path step back into time locking Bitcoin, the 5,000 or so Bitcoin on the lightning network are time locked, most Bitcoin isn't. You can leverage this tech and you can actually start locking up the float of supply of coins floating out there into these kind of financial contracts and arrangements. And we could build that out where like this is your insurance pool. We have certain tranches of being able to pay out. Maybe you have a coupon clip from a share of the premiums that gets time locked and earned to you over time. And you're starting to take coins off the market again. Like literally the coins cannot move until like these certain covenants or certain restrictions are open and available.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're talking This is the original idea Beck and I got really excited about building Anchor Watch. We realized we had a sequentially build out steps to get there.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just say it was just Anchor Watch and it was just us managing keys for other people, we'd be the same exact position as all of the incumbents. All of the risk is sitting in one spot.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. And this is the asymmetry and what we're able to offer and why we were able to get the underwriting authority we did at $100 million. Because if it was just”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where they have liabilities that extend really far out, it's just structurally a better way to get that exposure and the nature of how our product works is also a nice yin and yang because let's say Preston, if you're a customer and you had an issue that doesn't impact the rest of our book. Whereas if I'm just ensuring coinbase. Likelihood that an incident for a file claimed happens just at Coinbase and it's only going to be for $20 million and not like all of the money is like you have a high concentration in a couple key players whereas for us we're enabling that risk distribution so you have more than just the big four or five custodians to help managing this stuff so this would be likely to get exposure on both ends on the capital side and the buying and the selling of insurance”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The understanding of like there's so much capital sitting out there that is looking to get Bitcoin exposure and they are statutorily blocked from doing it. So you walk in and they're like, yeah, I'll take a zero percent coupon to get the call option on Bitcoin all day with a portion of my balance sheet. And it's a perfect thing too when you think about it. Insurance companies have a massive duration problem.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the reason why is that because if you are familiar, remember with the FASB accounting rules, there was a certain statutory standard on how you would do all of this gap accounting for Bitcoin. And it would be very, you would have to mark to market at the lowest price. In insurance, at a very high level, the health and strength of your insurance company is how big your surplus is. And that gives you leverage to write more and more policies the more you have in reserve. Today, in the United States, insurance is a state-by-state regulated industry. And there is a self-directed, like a self-regulatory body called the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. So every state and territory sends their own insurance commissioner. And there's this loose governing body. Bitcoin is an unadmitted asset, meaning if you have a billion dollars of Bitcoin on your balance sheet for your insurance company accounting, you get zero dollars and zero cents credit on it. But these convertible bonds don't fall under that. Registered bond of a publicly traded company. And so now you can get.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody else on the other side is losing. And really interesting intersection of this too is the convertible debt notes, which was Sailor's first move. Yes. I'm going to take my cash move by Bitcoin on the convertible debt side. The largest buyer of the convertible debt is Allians, the insurance company”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also just love the juxtaposition to crypto, where the whole critique the whole time was that you were doing unregistered flyby night securities. And it turns out doing a registered security and just going through traditional disclosure processes and running an honest operation and doing that is actually the capital unlocked. Like who would have thought that doing your audits and doing your quarterly filings and doing all these things and just running in a buckboard business is actually the way you unlock the next tranche of institutional capital. It's massive”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The same amount of security and overhead to be able to manage that, right? So it's a great business where you get to accrete all of this right to your bottom line as a SaaS business. But if you view Bitcoin as a capital asset, The actual fix to this is a risk transfer in insurance market of Bitcoin actually being treated as such. As a capital ass”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your entire asset of what your company is worth is sitting somewhere else. It's like if I was Apple and all of my proprietary tech in my asset was sitting in Amazon somewhere. It's sitting somewhere else, right? And you're at the mercy of them. And I think that's just viewing Bitcoin, and this is kind of like the evolution of the ecosystem. Bitcoin has been viewed up to this point largely as a software technology play. And that's why people charge it like a SaaS model where you walk in the door. It's a SaaS model, but we charge you based off BIPS of like how much the money is worth, even though at a certain scale, it doesn't cost you understand Bitcoin. To be able to send one Bitcoin to it versus 10,000 Bitcoin to a single address.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is what we're mitigating around these different keys, these different setups you having a named policy, being able to have this comprehensive set of coverage. I think this is just an obvious step as the ecosystem and capital formation matures. Like with all of these treasury companies, I've talked about like it's almost like the initial capitalization of Bitcoin banks. I just view it as like you have these like you have these corporate entities that are accumulating massive amounts of Bitcoin and it's going to get to a place of baturation where they're going to want to do things with that Bitcoin eventually as the arbitrage opportunity closes and they now have a large Bitcoin position, they're going to want to do other things. You're going to want, I think foundational to all of these is the custody of the asset itself.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What I'll say actually for those that are more interested in holding ETFs, I always throw this out as an interesting consideration. Fidelity, self-custodies. So if you're actually thinking through a risk distribution lens and you want to hold Bitcoin ETFs, have exposure to FBTC because they're at least not correlated with this entire segment of risk. And this is like, this is something in insurance and in gambling. I used to play poker, this concept of risk of ruin. You never want to be in a position where one assumption falls apart and it has this larger cascading effect of like irreparable loss.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes into the market for Bitcoin today, what we've had is risk distribution. Like you could have a multi-sig. All of your eggs aren't in one basket. But actually, the financial contract of risk transferring has been non-existent. And so on that insurance side, and even taking, we've been talking about like the individual inheritance, I do this as just like corporate governance and control. Why would you not want to have your money secured somewhere where maybe you have a trusted person who's able to step in kind of in a role that we're sitting in, but also know that baseline, that money can't move unless you explicitly authorize it cryptographically, right? And I think that's like kind of the big leap of what we've built out here. We can have multiple users, right? You can have your CFO and your CLO and your CEO all have different accounts, each holding keys, being able to abstract this out. And if your business is managing Bitcoin, I think fundamentally the biggest risk of these treasury companies in aggregate is something were to happen to the coins being customized.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're talking like a fraction of a percent of coverage. You don't know as an individual retail customer if people have seniority in the debt claims, typically larger account holders get seniority in debt claims in the event that you're an unsecured creditor and something goes wrong. So you're at the back of the line. You're not named in the insurance policy directly. What we did was the bundling of this tech of securing your coins and tying them to your insurance policy gives you that full risk transfer. Risk transfer in buying and selling insurance is a whole segment of risk management that has been entirely non-existent.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, it ultimately comes down to understanding and in control of my own assets and risk management around that to tie this into the insurance and the risk piece, the ETF's largely used Coinbase, a lot of the treasury companies use Coinbase. There's maybe three, four players out there of where these funds are currently sitting today. And for me, I view this as an aggregation of risk and the insurance coverage that exists at these players is fractions of a pending on the dollar. I think it's public that Coinbase has somewhere like 3 to 350 million dollars. Of cover for their assets. One, they have like tens of billion, hundreds of billions. I think it's in assets. I think what is the number back at like 300 billion between Bitcoin and all of the long-tailed crypto assets $400 billion.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, what I was exactly on that point, the risks pulled us back to the insurer because we've been going into the tech side of this. The reason I've been self custody Bitcoin for over a decade, the reason why I do is this understanding of managing my own risk, right? And that the reason why I would want to hold an iBit versus spot Bitcoin personally, it has like”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, people get to this place in Bitcoin where you're the Bitcoin guy. And so I've had a deal with grieving widows. Parents of kids, and it's not a place you really want to be in, right? And so independent of Know what we're talking about with our product, just like make sure you have an understanding and you've actually tested your backups and your recovery process. You could have it just be like, pretend you don't exist and tell your loved ones to make sure that they can access your Bitcoin, right? Like these are just things that are just part of your ongoing hygiene. I like what we've built as a way to kind of clean that up and make it very have a trusted person who's able to step in and help you out, but independent of however you choose to hold your Bitcoin, I think it's an important factor. Also”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One last thing I'll show is it just trustily settles on Chen. I'll save the audience for this call, but this is actually what a Bitcoin native smart contract looks like on chain. For those that are listening audio-wise, I'm pulling up the transaction on Mempool space. And these are all of the different spending conditions dested And it's all natively settled on Bitcoin, right? This is not trust me. You can independently verify the execution of how this all runs and manages. Way where you don't have to worry about that, right? So it's just an interesting concept of taking a traditional financial contract and also just extending the programmability of Bitcoin to offer new kinds of financial services.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be able to recover those funds for you, right? And this is on the technical side how it all gets executed. There's a lot of people that just paused the tape.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Technically, what we have here, this also turns into a really great inheritance protocol. We can actually have your funds be recoverable where if you have a beneficiary, you have a spouse or you have children, in the event you were to pass and your keys are now gone, right? Because effectively, like no one knows where they are, you can actually enable inheritance protocols where your heir doesn't need to know anything about how Bitcoin works.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You could lose all of your keys, and then we can have contingency availability. For our ability to recover your funds for you. And this is a really powerful concept as we were building out the product is understanding that the distribution of fees as distribution of risk to be able to unlock the traditional insurance players like Elds of London to feel comfortable underwriting this risk. We're able to Underwrite a policy of $100 million per customer out of the box today. That's for each individual that we have the fighting line capacity to go up to. And we can even go higher. It's just more of a manual process, right? So I could throw it over to Becca shortly, talk about the insurance, but.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next layer is in the last month of the policy, day 335, this is an interesting, has several properties. We call this our recovery layer. It is a two of three from Anchor Watch, and it's one key from our recovery partner. And today we have Coin Corner based out of the High of Man. They've been a Bitcoin exchange in business for 10 years. They have a long track record of keeping customer funds safe. It is us plus them who are able to move the funds. And then finally, day 380 after your policy has expired and the tail has expired and your policy is over, it goes to your sole control. Now, to take a half step back up to layer three, just to explain how this actually operates under the hood, when Beck and I initially designed this, we were thinking about, okay, if someone breaks into your house and stole all of your keys, this is a new concept in Bitcoin where your keys can be lost, but the Bitcoin isn't lost yet.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Broke into your house and your places where you're storing your keys and starting making you forcefully sign things, the money can't move because we haven't signed yet, right? That allows us to have an opportunity to step in and make sure everything is above board. It's kind of within your policy expectations. There are certain things that we enable already as security features of one whitelisted addresses. And two, your velocity control. So a majority of our customers actually opt into something we call the Hodle discount, where after you set up your vault, you do a test transaction, we disable the send button. People are like, this is my long-term cold storage. I just wanted to be able to look at it, maybe at renewal, I'll update something, right? But I don't have to worry about it. This is the then the next use of what it actually looks like to leverage time locks, 180 days, six months into the policy. We go from a customer two of three to a customer one of three, which gives you extended flexibility in the event two of your keys have gone missing. We're able to, with one of your keys and two of our keys, be”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just at the start, you know, at the high level one half step back, you actually can have multiple vaults for different, maybe different levels of control or just your own accounting. You want to have segmentations of funds. But within the dashboard itself, just a cumulative view of what your holdings are, your transaction history, pretty straightforward. Your address book of previously used addresses, where your money is currently sitting on chain with your labels. And then we would have like policy details for like your insurance policy, payments you've made. But this right here is actually where I would want to take the attention to. This is how our vault works out of the box today. And quickly looking through this, when the policy gets bound, it's a two of three from the customer key set. And then there's an anchor watch key set, which operates as a two of three as well. So at first, if you want to move your money, day one of the policy, that's that two of three from you as the customer and the two of three from us at anchor watch. This enables several just security things of one, hypothetically, if someone”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rob, can you pull it up on your, I'll make sure I'm sharing for people that are listening to this and not seeing it on YouTube, I would highly encourage you, go pull up the YouTube video of this discussion. For me, like really, really important for this idea of institutional custody moving forward. So I have it live here. This is our dashboard of Trident Bault, right? I just put in now for those at home, this is running on Bitcoin's test network. I'm not casually moving around two, three Bitcoin at a time just on a hot wallet in my house. And the only difference is one, it's on the test network, and two, for the sake of expediating demos, we have hotkeys just to show conceptually how it works rather than making everyone pull out their either their cold card or their ledger and try and get all of these things.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for me, the first time I saw this demoed by Rob was up at Bitcoin Park. And, you know, I was walking around and Rob, you know, tapped me on the shoulder. He's like, hey, I want to show you something. This is really neat. And I was like, oh, okay. So I think we were upstairs or wherever. And he pulled out his laptop. He's like, check this out. And he's showing me this graphical user interface. And he's showing me like the if and then statements of like an institution. He'd be like, what if you wanted your CFO to be one of the signatures? But for him to sign, he also needed the CEO or whoever. This was the moment where I'd heard countless times. Bitcoin's not programmable. You can't do any like what we're describing here. You can't do that on Bitcoin. And Rob was like, you know, I forget who you said the source was, Rob, that was talking about MiniScript. And then you were like, oh, well, let me play around with this mini script thing. And then you go in there and you're building like all of these things. So what I want to do is”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the conditions will change in how you can spend the money. And so we leverage those Bitcoin native time locks in the security of the vault itself, leveraging the same exact mechanics that the Bitcoin network uses for the difficulty adjustment. And the really interesting part of our tech is after your insurance contract expires, you don't have a relationship with us anymore. You unilaterally can take the money yourself and walk away. So unlike any other custodian, you're getting on the phone, be like, hey, I'd like my money back, please. Are you going in the UI and sending in a Bitcoin address on chain it natively settles just to you at the end of the day”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about this, this is how the difficulty adjustment works. How does the Bitcoin network know that two weeks passed, or more than two weeks, right? And for those at home to understand the difficulty adjustment, every two weeks and you have 144 blocks a day on average because it's every 10 minutes, every 2016 blocks, the Bitcoin network says, okay, we've mined what should have been two weeks of work. How long did it take? Did it take three weeks? Okay, it's too difficult. Let's decrease the difficulty adjustment. Did it happen in 10 days? Okay, we're finding blocks too quickly. Let's increase the difficulty adjustment. So what we are able to do is we're able to leverage that timestamp that the miners put into the block as a means for the time locks. So some people may be familiar that you can time lock based on what the current block height is. We do time locks based on the calendar date because this is one of the interesting innovations when we were designing the product realizing is if you have an insurance contract and it's dated for a year, you need to know a year from now.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then inevitably the questions would come and be like, well, what happens if I lose more keys? We then leverage another property of Miniscript, which is time locks. But this is just a fascinating, trivia effect of how Bitcoin actually works. Bitcoin is an entirely endogenous system. It's self-referential. Preston, if I send you Bitcoin, it's only because someone previously said me Bitcoin or I mined a block, right? Everything is like Is the whole blockchain concept of that you have this entire canonical history that's all within the system? The one thing that exists outside of Bitcoin that enters the Bitcoin protocol is the timestamp, the miners put in the block header when they find a new block.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The brain of American heart, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's like a lot of pieces here, right? On the insurance side and the tech side, the very compressed version just for how it technically works, we leverage a tech stack called MiniScript, which originally came out of Blockstream as free open source software in 2018 and 2019. And then without getting too much in the mechanical details, it allows you to express more of the feature set of Bitcoin and the main things we're leveraging it for are a multisig of multisigs, right? So for the start of the policy, you as the customer have a two of three, we have a two of three, we both have to sign. And instantly, you can think about that from a security mindset Anchor Watch cannot unilaterally move the funds, which means that you have to kind of like at start be able to authorize it.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was our first investor in America. We were like trying to figure out a good name, and the domain was available, and I just pounced on it immediately.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a Lloyds of London cover holder, meaning we are direct agents of Lloyds of London, we do the underwriting, we do the distribution, we oversee the product. And with that, we're able to take the best of both worlds of having making the most of Bitcoin as the asset itself and with the best quality insurance market that exists out there and bringing those two together to provide comprehensive coverage, understanding that you are able to at the end of the day have safety and knowing that your Bitcoin will be there. And if something were to go wrong, you directly are named as a beneficiary of a policy that's going to directly remunerate you.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No matter what happens, right? And the other part of that is we have this custody tech we can go into more that I would say is like very advanced and kind of leveraging the feature set of what Bitcoin can do today without a fork or without any changes. And then additionally tying that with a traditional financial contract of insurance. And so for on the insurance piece.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin, though, since it doesn't have that same physical nature, you're able to leverage it as programmable money and things like a multi-signature, right? You can don't have to have, you can't two of three your bar a gold. You can't split it up like that, but you can with Bitcoin. And what we did was we kind of extended the principles of Bitcoin as programmable money to enable greater fidelity and control and redundancy to make sure you can access the Bitcoin at the end of the day.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one else's problem, right? And the long vision when we started the company back in early 22 was ultimately as Bitcoin continues to mature as a financial asset, risk markets like insurance are going to develop. It is an inevitability when you think about it, as everyone likes to most compare Bitcoin to as like a bar of gold, you can pay to have your gold custodied somewhere and part of your custody fee is insurance in the event that something goes wrong, right? And how this extends into the actual custody management of it is Bitcoin often sometimes gets cultivated like a digital bar of gold. And there are trade-offs for something being physical versus digital physical. You just physically watch the thing, you put it in a vault, you put armed guards in front of it, you have to physically access it.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, maybe just to level set at a high level. Who are we? I'm Rob Hamilton. That's my co founder, Becca Rubenfeld. And we're the co-founders of Anchorwatch. Anchorwatch is an old nautical term referring to the crew of sailors who watch the ship at night when you're at port or you're at dock or at anchor in the middle of the sea and just kind of watching over the ship, making sure everything's okay. And that's how we do our role, right, when it comes to Bitcoin and custody. Now, the thesis that we've had since we started the company was around this idea of tying in risk markets to the underlying Bitcoin itself, right? Bitcoin is a 15 plus year journey up into this point, all of the security practices people talk about with multi-sig, seed phrases, hardware wallets, all of these things came from a place of there was no insurance market. You're doing what's in insurance is called self-insuring. You're owning the risk. It's your money. You mismanagement. It's your problem.”
2025-08-06 · We Study Billionaires · BTC246: The Future of Insurance using Bitcoin w/ Becca Rubenfeld & Rob Hamilton (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT