Visualizing Bitcoin with TC | Ep. #104

I had sort of this idea of a new way to visualize Bitcoin and wanted to create sort of a web block clock, so to speak. And that was the inception of the Time Chain Calendar Project. Probably for a lot of people, they look at this for the very first time and it's like it kind of clicks maybe on another level that conceptually you got it. But now like when you can see with your eyes. Oh, what's Bitcoin doing today? Oh, it's up or down X percent.

like that's not bitcoin anybody providing true value to the world doesn't want anything but bitcoin because they begin to recognize the value that they're producing there's so much bullshit out there and there's so much deception the call is on you as a human being to like activate your brain and you gotta parse through some of this stuff and identify the truth and the signal amongst a overwhelming amount of noise

hey everyone michael here with the bitcoin way podcast thank you for tuning in today on the show i have tc of time chain calendar this was honestly one of the most unexpected coolest interviews i've had what this guy has built is incredible if you think you understand bitcoin but it's just kind of all in your head he has created a visual tool that we actually show here in the podcast such an awesome, awesome tool. I think I'm going to spin this up, show it in my office, make sure I

have it on my desk, something. I'm going to figure it out. But we also talk about his views on self custody, running a node, mining. And we have a really interesting back and forth on his unpopular opinion at the very end. So stick around for that. You're going to love this episode. Hey, everyone. Like I said in the intro, I've got TC here. TC, welcome to the Bitcoin Way podcast. Hey, nice to be here. Yeah, I'm excited to chat.

So this I mentioned in the intro, but Tarantula introduced us and I was looking for a guest because he had some things fall through. But I think I stumbled across a good one here, man. You've been in the space a long time. For people who aren't familiar with you and your project, why don't you just tell us, obviously not who you are, but sort of what's your background? How did you get into Bitcoin? How did you find it?

Well, I sort of consider myself a class of 2017. It like late 2017. It was around that time. I have a long background in web development. I've been making websites and in the sort of like tech software space for a long time. And around 2017, I was sort of jumping around different startups. And I was working at one point for a startup that actually they did a they actually did an ICO. They had a token. And I suddenly found myself in my my line of work.

I found myself surrounded by people who were very interested in Bitcoin and crypto. And so I kind of caught the wave of FOMO towards the end of that 2017 bull market. And that was my my introduction to the space. I I got into Bitcoin. And I also unfortunately got into a lot of the other shit coins and, you know, those distractions. And to me, my whole first cycle was really marked by just getting my feet wet and not really fully understanding what was going on there.

I sort of languished through the bear market of 2018, 2019, but I did sit on my hands. I held on to my Bitcoin. And I would say around late 2019 and going into 2020 and all the COVID stuff, that's when my eyes were really opened. And I really started focusing on Bitcoin exclusively. And my project came about a couple years later as I was sort of in between jobs.

And because I'm a web developer, I had sort of this idea of a new way to visualize Bitcoin and wanted to create sort of a web block clock, so to speak. And that was the inception of the Time Chain Calendar project. That website's been live for about three years. And that's what I'm sort of exclusively focused on work-wise these days. Very cool. So I guess I got a lot of questions I could ask from there.

I'm always curious when I talk to someone who's been around a lot longer than me, because I'm class of 22, and it probably wasn't until halfway through that year that I really kind of focused on Bitcoin only and that. How have you viewed the changing of sort of, I know people don't always like this term, but the Bitcoin community, Bitcoin culture, like, are we materially way different today? You know, when you look at, you know, X and the correspondence there versus 2017, 2018.

Yeah, I would say it's different. I think there's always changes in the world around us. And the undeniable thing is that it feels very different now than it does five, six, seven years ago. you know, good way or bad way or, well, I mean, I think there's a, there's a perspective that says that, you know, I think every generation goes through its crises and feels like there's existential threats and witnesses, big changes. And I feel like we've been through that. It's,

it's kind of a strange thing. We we've all been through a really intense, uh, last five, six years. And, uh, I think as a result, the world is a little different and people are seeing things from a different perspective. But the one thing that I notice after several cycles in Bitcoin is just noticing how every cycle, there is a new slice of the pie. There's a new demographic coming through, a new group of people that bring in new perspectives. And then we also see the landscape

change. Bitcoin does evolve. There's new aspects of the protocol, new projects that come along that really, you know, introduce new types of activity. And so we're constantly seeing this sort of fly wheel of new participants entering and older participants tend to either stick around or fade off into the distance. So those narratives change, the narratives that really capture people's attention and help guide people's actions, those things are always changing. So yeah, I see a

big difference. Even since 2022, there's a real different feeling. And I think that's where, again, it's important, I think, to pay attention and see what's going on out there. But I think every Bitcoiner is called to really identify where they are on their own journey and work towards figuring out what the next steps are or what the next kind of actions to take to further their own understanding, their own conviction and find the right way to proceed with Bitcoin.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's been an interesting journey. I think when I first got into Bitcoin,

I was listening to certainly like mainstream podcasts had been recommended and that kind of thing. It feels to me like the amount of like pure signal and the emphasis on, you know, things like Like with the Bitcoin way, like our bread and butter is helping people, training people to take self custody. We don't, you know, KYC, hold their keys, none of that stuff. And I, you know, I found the Bitcoin way as a client like two years ago and got into it.

And now I see more and more alternatives to that. And it feels like we're deviating. And I don't worry about the future of Bitcoin, but like the, I don't know, the level of conviction that future generations of Bitcoiners are going to have or classes of Bitcoiners are going to have around some of these, what I view to be like very fundamental principles, like running a node, like self-custody.

And long term, I think the bright orange future happens when people put in the work, they put in the time, and they don't use some proxy as their version of adopting Bitcoin or whatever. Do you share any of those concerns or that sentiment, or is that not something you really think about very hard? Yeah, I mean, for sure. I see these cycles. I mean, that word is used all the time, and there's different cycles that are occurring.

Um, I believe you're going to continue to see these, you know, volatile kinds of like bull and bear markets result in, like I was saying before, all these different demographics of participants, new people coming in. And we all know when you're new, you don't really understand it. It's one thing to actually get the idea to acquire some Bitcoin. and then you learn, wait, there's all these different sort of form factors.

And really, you have to do some work and you have to study and you have to learn to actually end up with the real thing. And there's all of these sort of Bitcoin adjacent things and paper Bitcoin. I mean, that's really what this last cycle has highlighted.

there's so many places for people to kind of find themselves on an off ramp and they feel like they're within Bitcoin or they have Bitcoin but they really don't and then it's usually up to some kind of chaos or volatility whether in the market with price that scares people and they sell and they don't hold on to it or in so many cases that we've seen over the years failures that occur

You know, people leave their, you know, supposed Bitcoin on a platform and then the platform implodes or goes insolvent and suddenly people get rug pulled and we see those things happen again and again. I feel like that's sort of the predictable unpredictability that you can count on.

And the way to get off of that sort of, you know, going in cycles of, you know, sort of being led by the nose, being led by your emotions is to shore up your understanding and learn how to actually interact with this technology, how to actually own Bitcoin yourself and attain some sovereignty.

You know, that's really the thing that I feel like it takes most people so much time to actually appreciate what it is that they need to achieve and why that solution is so much more important than some short-term price changes. You know, because it's like moths to a light every bull market. You get people who are looking for, oh, wow, I can just do a simple thing and get rich.

you know most of those people don't last they don't stick around and it takes a little bit of critical thinking and time before most people come around to this perspective that there's a much more important uh reason to be in bitcoin i i mean i completely agree the the other path what i will say though is what i found is so i went down that kind of rabbit hole that you're describing like i started to study Bitcoin, understand the underlying fundamentals technically, understand the macro

picture. Wow, this is all incredibly screwed up. Where I've gone more recently that I think could be a path for people who are maybe, I don't know, less curious technologically, they are going to spend quite the time to dig into that. It's not their background is I've gone down like more the historical rabbit hole, looking at sort of power structures throughout history and analyzing like our current environment through a very different lens than I had historically.

And what I what my life has basically become is even if I didn't understand Bitcoin to the extent that I do, I I understand you could understand it enough to say this is my vote against all of the other chaos in the world. I'm done opting into the other system. And that other system consists of, you know, big food, the military industrial complex, politics. I mean, there are so many facets of that other system.

and if nothing else if you understand nothing about bitcoin except it is the hope for defeating many of those things like to me that would be the impetus for many people to come into bitcoin and so i think there's there are actually multiple ways to get into it i agree with you though the more you dive into what bitcoin is understand how it works the more elegant it becomes and uh i think it's much easier for your conviction to grow in that way i don't know if you make any

comment on that. I want to get into a time chain calendar. Yeah, no, I just, the last thing I would say is it's, it's the initial thread that when you actually find that thread and you start pulling it, it leads to all those other threads that are connected. You know, the, the monetary system

really is at the foundation layer of so much of our society. And, you know, if there's deception there and if there's you know true leaks there you know you you participated in it taking for taking that system for granted your whole adult life until suddenly you realize wait a minute that system is corrupted and and really broken uh and then you you dive into bitcoin um that's the beginning of a very powerful shift in perspective that really does change your perception of

everything in our world around us. So, I mean, it's a, to me, it's a, a part of a real sort of evolutionary path for us as humans, as individuals and collectively. So none of that is in most people's minds. When they first just come up, they get drawn in by number go up and they, they get excited about profits. There's actually quite a big leap to get over to this other frame of mind where I would argue there's just much more important

things going on there. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Tell me about time chain calendar. So,

uh, this is a project you've been working on for how long did you say? So the website's been live for over three years. Um, I did just launch a mobile app that's also available on the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store that was launched coming up on six months ago. So basically, Time Chain Calendar is this project that I started to attempt to visualize my own mental model about Bitcoin. I had acquired a device that a lot of people are

familiar with called the Block Clock. It's made by the company CoinKite. It shows you the block height and it's a lovely sort of desktop or bookshelf piece of hardware that you display and it updates and it shows you what the block height is. It can show you the fiat price of Bitcoin and a lot of other bits of data. It's a really cool piece of hardware. And I had one of those. And I was just enjoying staying aware of, you know, what's going on with Bitcoin and,

you know, realized at a certain point I wanted to see more. I wanted to actually evolve that concept to make it, uh, on the web so that it could actually update real time and include all these other aspects of my concept of Bitcoin's protocol. And since I was a web developer, I had the skills to be able to start manifesting that. So, you know, I basically just saw the giant block height number and I saw these circles as a way to represent these cycles that are going on in

Bitcoin's protocol. And when the website was first launched, there was only two circles. There was the orange circle and the red circle and the big block height number in the middle the orange circle is the blocks to the halving the red circle is the blocks to the next difficulty adjustment so that was where it started and uh i've just steadily evolved it from there it's got five circles in the interface now uh interesting yeah we could dig into it more so so so does this

relate when when uh when tarantula introduced us on x um i said hey what would we chat about you said bitcoin is the best monetary system only because of its nature is an immutable state machine also it's a global synchronization mechanism and calendar for the human race that i assume this is this is all one sort of concept that you're you're describing here is that yeah so there's actually a couple key concepts in in what i said there by the way

You want me to try pulling this up for our audience? Sure, go ahead. You start explaining. I'm going to get this pulled up. Right, so let's talk about the calendar thing first.

You know, I didn't spend that long naming the project, but I arrived at this perspective of Bitcoin as a calendar. You know, it's a really cool concept to think of Bitcoin as a timekeeping mechanism. And the design of the interface on time chain calendar actually evokes kind of a clock for a lot of people. But it's really, to me, it's kind of functioning like a calendar. A couple different reasons is because a calendar is a way of graphically displaying sort of nested time frames.

So when you look at a typical calendar, you're looking at days within weeks and weeks within months and months within a year. And that sort of series of boxes in a typical calendar really does kind of help you watch your own progress through the course of that time scheme that humans have agreed upon. So you have a calendar on the wall and you maybe cross out each day as it completes.

And to me what I doing here with Time Chain Calendar is displaying a series of nested timeframes relative to Bitcoin protocol And what I was really delighted by and now I very clear about this is kind of part of the purpose of the project is over the last few years that I had Time Chain Calendar live to the public, I see people referencing block heights, using this as a tool to figure out what block height my kid was born at, or what block height did I launch my business?

What was the first sale that I made or miners that maybe the first block that they hit as a miner and so on and so forth. And there's so many different references for that. I mean, artists, a ton of artists that note the block height when they finish a painting or a piece of art.

this is a a novel wildly exciting new timekeeping reference and it's less of a clock and more of a calendar in the sense that as these moments are associated you know something in your life you associate with a bitcoin block height that ends up sort of becoming a parallel reference that as you continue to pay attention and awareness to Bitcoin, it brings Bitcoin more into your life. I feel pretty confident that in the future, humans are going to be using this as a way to

coordinate. That's another aspect of this too that's really, really powerful, I believe.

You know, we have moments in human life that we celebrate around the globe, and yet they tend to be divided up by just time zones. Think of New Year's Eve every year, and the fireworks go off at midnight in each respective time zone around the world. So what should be a singular moment is really spread out across 24 hours. Well, when we have like the having, for instance, or some other specific block that everyone's paying attention to, that's a singular moment

that is experienced by every human around the globe. And I think that's really, really exciting and really powerfully important because I imagine a future where human beings all over the globe can coordinate an activity around a specific block height. And that can be something that we all have consensus over and we all experience and witness. And it can function as like a signal, a trigger even for whatever. Use your imagination. Think about what humans might want to coordinate

over. So a lot of ideas for me that really make Bitcoin a really powerful resource and new vector for human activity and time chain calendars trying to tap into some of that.

that that's a really interesting concept because so sort of my uh parallel is i don't i don't think about the dollar denominated price of bitcoin now the way that i did you know when i got into bitcoin right like you know i'm thinking in terms of do i have more sats today than yesterday and and so like that's that's a that's a measure of value it has nothing to do with something external, like in seconds, minutes, it's like a singular metric that we can use.

So could you describe, I mean, I've got the page pulled up here. Do you want to sort of describe what it is that we're looking at and maybe, you know, walk people through who are looking at this for the first time? Like how you design this? Yeah. I mean, right when I was finishing my rant there, I noticed that the block changed. The interface has a nice little rippling animation every time a new block hits.

And to me, that's kind of the real essence of the spirit of the project is something I refer to as Bitcoin awareness. Hey, look, there's another one. So right there at that moment, while we're talking, block 936420 was received by nodes all over the world. And imagine months or years even before we had made some agreement about, hey, at block 936420, we're going to do X, Y, or Z. And that moment just occurred.

What's amazing is that there's actually no mechanism in Bitcoin that determines when a block is going to occur. We hear this idea of 10-minute blocks all the time. I want to draw your attention to the circle that's kind of on the inside where it looks like a bunch of little teeny tiny dots or squares going all the way around it. It's just inside the red circle. Yep, that one. So that's the last 24 hours of blocks.

And if you just look at those little squares going around that circle, it's pretty obvious that they're not evenly spaced out. There's giant gaps. There's clumps of blocks. They kind of happen whenever they happen. They happen sometimes in a second or two. Sometimes it takes an hour or two. So are blocks really every 10 minutes? No, they're not. What there is is a difficulty adjustment that encourages the average

time for blocks to be as close to 10 minutes as possible. So what we see here is a visualization of the last 24 hours of blocks. If you just move your mouse and if you look at the other side of the circle, sort of at the eight o'clock position, you can see there was like an hour and 10 minute gap between blocks there. You know, you see that giant gap. So the whole point is this is an

interesting little detail about Bitcoin that you might never be aware of. If you just heard, hey, blocks are every 10 minutes, and you take that literally, you imagine the system as something very different than what it actually is. There's this randomness baked in. So that's what that circle with all those little squares is about. The red circle is how many blocks to the difficulty adjustment. The indicator's right at the sort of bottom at the six o'clock position. It's about

halfway through the current difficulty epoch. And in about seven days, the difficulty is going to change again. And what happens is that Bitcoin's protocol will measure what was the average time for a block since the last adjustment. So the difficulty adjustment happens roughly every two weeks. That red circle is about a two-week time frame. So what happens is the protocol, when it reaches difficulty adjustment time, it checks and sees, well, how much time has elapsed

since the last difficulty adjustment, divides by 2016 blocks. That's the amount of time between adjustments. And it will change the difficulty, which impacts how hard it is to find a block. What's amazing is last difficulty adjustment a week ago, we had a double digit drop in difficulty. Blocks were coming in more than 11 minutes on average over that previous two weeks, and the protocol automatically changes the difficulty accordingly. And so it's now 11%

easier to find a block during this difficulty period than it was the previous one. And as a result, blocks are coming in faster. Right now we're averaging under nine minutes a block, And if that pace continues, we're going to get a big difficulty increase in another week. This is fundamentally like the monetary policy of Bitcoin. This is the regulation mechanism in the protocol that actually governs the pace of blocks over a long period of time.

it's kind of a contradicting idea it requires a little bit of critical thinking to hold these ideas in your head at the same time the one idea is the blocks are totally random timing wise one to the next and the other idea is every roughly two weeks the protocol automatically adjusts the difficulty which impacts that pace over a long period of time so that remarkably over the entire chain, and here's a metric that's at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. It says time

chain since Genesis, 9 minutes 36 seconds since Bitcoin started. So since 2009, with a completely random process and only this difficulty adjustment kicking in every 2016 blocks to attempt to control the pace, we've remained remarkably close to a 10-minute average block time. And so this is, this is wild to me. It's like this balancing act of randomness and a predictable aspect of the protocol that balances that randomness with an adjustment that keeps us

relatively on track. And I'll just finish it with this thing, which I find really sort of

meaningful to me. I believe this is really important to Satoshi, obviously, because if you didn't have an adjustment mechanism like this and you had this random process and you had the remarkable increase in the number of people competing to mine blocks because we all know the hash rate just keeps going up you know more and more people trying to to win these blocks if you didn't have this adjustment all the 21 million would have been mined already probably

in the first few years because the blocks would have come faster and faster and faster this difficulty adjustment is so important to kind of balance out that increase in the competition and keep the block production close to 10 minutes. This is such a cool way of visualizing Bitcoin. We all have these concepts in our head. I mean, if you've done the work and you've done your research, you have these concepts in your head.

but seeing them in some sort of a graphical way is probably for a lot of people they look at this for the very first time and it's like it kind of clicks maybe on another level that conceptually you got it but now like when you can see with your eyes how this is working and it's really cool you're you pointing me to like the randomness like i know the blocks aren't actually can you know found every 10 minutes but i i forget that you know you have an hour spacing or whatever here

And then it's, you know, we had two blocks already over, you know, within a minute or two. Exactly. That were found. Like, it's such an elegant thing. So what's the, besides maybe giving people this sort of insight into, hey, this is really what Bitcoin is representing. It's like, I'm going to make it graphically for you. What's like the objective of this project? Do you think, I mean, are you trying to monetize it? Is your hope that people just, you know, download the app, log in, check it?

is like a way of maybe recalibrating how they think about time and documenting important moments in their life like what what what what to you is success well for me uh the project has become sort of my my complete work path um there's another block look at that um for me I work on this every day and the purpose of it is evolving the concept and trying to find the optimum way of representing Bitcoin from my own mental model perspective.

I find it truly impactful for myself. It's been over three years I've been working on this and literally I have it on my screen in front of me the majority of the day. There's times when I'm staring at it, and there's other times when I'm doing other things, but when a block hits, even out of the corner of my eye, I notice it. There's also a feature on the website in settings.

You can turn on sound, and you can have a chime, like a little bell ring or a little water drop sound every time a block hits, so you don't even have to be looking at it. you could hear that little signal that a new block came in. And what's happening over time is that I'm developing a awareness of Bitcoin as those signals enter my brain throughout the course of a day, day after day, year after year. It's something that I feel has profoundly impacted

my understanding of Bitcoin and hence my conviction in Bitcoin. So I see the value of having that signal. Think about this. How many people just look at a price chart every day and that's their signal? Oh, what's Bitcoin doing today? Oh, it's up or down X percent.

like that's not bitcoin that's literally um that that's order books on exchanges of traders who for the most part have zero conviction in bitcoin and they're just fiat maxis trying to pull off trades that that's not signal you know over a very long period of time we've all seen the log chart of bitcoin and maybe that's some signal but to me day to day to be staring at a price chart, you're getting, again, you're getting kind of led by the nose.

You're getting led by your emotions. You're not really seeing Bitcoin. But to see these blocks come in, I got to tell you, the last like two weeks has been amazing watching blocks come in super slow. We had over 11 minute average for an entire two week difficulty period. And I'm watching that the whole time, watching that is, is this an anomaly? Are the miners going to pick up the pace. During that period of time, there was winter storms. There was a lot of people

impacted by really crazy weather. The price also had a huge drop. You have to imagine there's some miners that just become horribly unprofitable at $70,000 versus $90,000. And so people have to literally unplug their miners because they don't want to pay a premium to mine Bitcoin. The point of mining Bitcoin is to get Bitcoin at a discount. And so when the price drops, there's certain less profitable miners who have to unplug. I'm literally watching that just simply by paying

attention to the pace of blocks. What is the average block time? And I see these blocks coming

in. Wow, they're coming in 12 minutes on average. Okay. And then it starts speeding up a little bit, but it ends up settling, you know, 11 minutes and however many seconds and wham, the protocol responds with dovish monetary policy well we're going to drop the difficulty 11 and now for the last week we're watching blocks race in and it's a combination of the lower difficulty and the weather cleared up a little bit so some people are kind of plugging back in and it's to me this is

this is very meaningful i'm like watching bitcoin itself and that to me is the purpose of the project. How I'm going to monetize and create products and run a company, that's all still being determined. But to me, the whole point of this project is to find that signal and try to isolate a ton of information and reduce it down to just the key metrics and signals that really

inform me of what's going on with Bitcoin itself. Have you considered turning this into a hardware product i i've had i've had ideas from people about that you know it really does evoke a kind of a clock and uh there's another block like that uh so yeah i've had a lot of people suggest well you know i would buy a hardware version of this here's the neat thing any display connected to the internet can display this website so that's one of the reasons i love the web is that

you can display it on a giant TV screen or a big computer display. You can display it on your phone. I've even seen people with smartwatches pull time chain calendar up on their smartwatch. So that's the cool thing about the web is that it traverses all these different pieces of hardware. I'm a software guy, so I'm probably not going to get into manufacturing hardware, but I don't know. Who knows what the future holds? Ask me in a year.

yeah i think the uh well i mean the what what comes to my mind is i would replace my block clock in a heartbeat with something like this if i had like a you know a mini display that's something i could certainly build however it would be really cool if there was some sort of a uh a layer of software on top of that like zooming in at you know a certain point like you know how you on the block clock it scrolls through like you know you can do dollar price you know um i don't

even remember what's on there anymore but there are like a lot of metrics you can show a lot of it's very much fiat sort of price chart kind of stuff though if you had something like this that like you could scroll through it zooming in on like the blocks to the difficulty adjustment like isolating just that ring and then you know it i'm sure it's not actually that hard especially with ai you could probably spin up a program to to do that for you but um man this is a it's such a

cool thing i got another little thing for you to try because we didn't actually get through all the rings i want to show you one more thing on the interface so at the bottom of the screen there's what looks like a little blinking handle that's a slider slide it to the left now you are in control of the chain and you can roll all the way back to genesis yeah if you if you let go it it loads the particular block so um move that slider to somewhere in the middle okay and then let go

And look, you can see the exchange rate on the upper right corner. You can see the information about the block. There's also a search function. Hit the double arrows. It just jump back to live And then on the other side there a little search button But you can also just click the big number in the middle of the interface and you can type in a block height So just type in 555-555 or something like that, and hit search, and it'll jump right to that block. You can also go into the future.

So click in there again and type 1 million. So 1-0-0-0-0-0-0 and search. and it's going to estimate block 1 million for you, this is an exciting thing coming up, is it's showing you May 1st, 2027 at 2.35 a.m. and you have an adjustment for the block time. So if we know that blocks over the entire chain were nine minutes and 35 seconds, you know, so see, exactly, you can adjust that and you say, oh, it's really April 13th. And so this is a powerful block estimation tool and a block lookup tool.

and so like i said before you know look up when your kid was born or when you got married or when you did anything during bitcoin's uh lifetime you can uh easily find things and there's a neat way to search by date too you can actually just click on the date or you can click on the search thing and you can dial in year month day time and uh search by a a moment in time uh so you know that's where this tool, this website and the mobile app really functions as a connection between you

and Bitcoin. It's like a resource for you to look up what's happened. It's a resource for you to sort of think about what's coming. Uh, it's a resource for you to kind of fine tune your own mental model. Like, what do you see in your head when you think about these things? You know, the, the, um, one more time, just slowly move that slider at the bottom. And you'll notice that the orange circle, which is the blocks to the having, right, that's moving back, but also the dark

orange circle on the very outside, that's the supply. And notice how, when it passes the top of the having circle, you just passed an epoch marker on that outer circle. And so you can actually really use this to kind of teach yourself and teach others. What is this relationship between the halving and the supply. You know, I love these kind of like unwrapping certain concepts like this, you know, pop quiz, you know, we have a fixed supply, 21 million. We've all heard the

right? 21 million. How is it a fixed supply? And the answer is the halving. That's what function the halving serves is that every 210,000 blocks, which is roughly four years, the amount per block that's issued is cut in half. And eventually, you're cutting two Satoshis down to one Satoshi per block. And then the subsequent halving after that, we're in the year 2140 by now, but the next halving after one Satoshi is zero Satoshis, and the supply is done. So it's that

having, that's the actual mechanism that enforces the ultimately fixed supply. So to me, just having a visual here about connecting those having cycles to the supply. And you can see the supply is at over 20, it's over 95% issued. So it's less than 5% of Bitcoin's supply is remaining to be issued. And to have a visual of that and to have a tool you can interact with to kind of reinforce the idea in your brain. That's kind of the purpose of this. I love it. I'm going to, I need to do a

little bit of research and how I would love to have something like sitting next to my desk. I don't have dual monitors, believe it or not. I'd love to have something sitting next to my desk that I can just see out of the corner of my eye every time a new blocks, uh, found. And, uh, it's just, it's a cool reminder of, of like, and I think it's a good reorientation to what Bitcoin is because there's so much in the news about price and what Larry Fink's saying about it and

sovereign wealth funds. And it's like none of that, none of that is Bitcoin. None of that is makes any difference in TikTok next block. Here's what's actually happening with Bitcoin today. So are there like instructions? Like I wouldn't have known to do this because I want to make sure people know that, you know, when they go to the site, there's a lot of stuff that I hadn't even noticed you could do. So it's, uh, it's part of my roadmap is developing

a little more tutorial material. Um, you know, that's why I like to take this opportunity every time I get on a podcast or something to just, you know, point people to those things, you know, the whole idea, it's a, it's a really simple interface, but you know, it's a little bit interactive and, you know, maybe it's calling to you to get a little curious and poke around and and try it out. You know, the really cool thing was, uh, I did this mobile app recently and the

mobile app is great. Just right in your palm to have this same functionality and be able to kind of look at these ideas on the mobile app. I did do a very simple little explainer, sort of five screens. When you first load the app, it kind of walks you through what the circles are.

Um, but I want to do more content like that to, you know, make it as clear as possible, But, you know, really, that's the sort of point of this is just I feel like it's really meaningful to have Bitcoin present to remind you that it is not all those other things. You know, the world out there does a great job of distracting us away from Bitcoin. And there's so much noise. There's so much FUD. I think it's a meaningful thing if you care about Bitcoin. Include Bitcoin in your daily life.

just making it present, just having it visible, just having that simple awareness. Sometimes it's not even conscious. Like if I have the sound on and it's a little water drip and I might be completely focused on something else. I'm not sitting at my computer, but I hear that little sound in the background. In my brain, a little pin was dropped right at that moment. And that's Bitcoin awareness.

That's like this thing I think we're all cultivating over time as we learn more about it, as we understand the importance of it. as we make these changes in our life to incorporate it and use that resource, use that tool. We all go through an evolutionary process. We change. So there's something really powerful about heightening our awareness on a day-by-day, moment-by-moment basis about Bitcoin. And that's what my project's trying to be part of.

Beautiful, man. Anything else you'd point to on this? Or we can start talking about some signal around some of these other topics that I was hoping to get to. I think we covered Time Chain Calendar pretty well. I just encourage people to try it out. Go check it out yourself. Awesome. I love it. All righty. Hang on. Let me stop my sharing here and log off here.

Okay. So we touched on this a little bit at the beginning, but like I said, at the Bitcoin Way, we're all about run a node, take self-custody.

We've been really pushing people to solo mine. lately, just to begin learning about some of this. I know these are all topics you have opinions and convictions on. So let's start with self-custody. Where do you stand? And you've also been around for long enough to have seen sort of probably an evolution of custodial solutions and

what people think of when they talk about self-custody. What's your general opinion or guidance that you would give to someone who's maybe newer into Bitcoin when it relates to self-custody? Well, I think the biggest thing and the most important thing is that when you're new to Bitcoin, self-custody is framed as an option. And I feel like once you reach a certain understanding about Bitcoin, it's not an option. It's not optional at all. It's required because

self-custody is actual Bitcoin ownership. Everything else short of self-custody is at best a limitation of that sort of set of property ownership benefits and all the attributes of Bitcoin that you get when you actually control it. And at worst, most other things are you just don't have Bitcoin at all. That's been the interesting thing about this last cycle is

the proliferation of all these paper Bitcoin form factors. You've got treasury companies, stocks, and there's all these options and futures and just so many different things where people feel, oh, I've got exposure to Bitcoin. No, you don't. You have exposure to the action on the exchanges, which I said it earlier, that's outside of Bitcoin. That's not Bitcoin itself. And Bitcoin itself is literally Bitcoin on chain. That's what it is. If you have Bitcoin,

it means you have the private key that controls a UTXO. That's part of the UTXO set. The UTXO set is the list of all the spendable Bitcoin. Every time there's a new block, that list gets updated. and the UTXOs that get spent are no longer spendable. They're no longer part of that set. The new UTXOs that are created from the new transactions, those are added to that list. That's it. That's the only thing that's real. Do you actually control a UTXO or some UTXOs

that are part of that list, that UTXO set of spendable Bitcoin? That's it. That is Bitcoin. everything else is some affinity scam in my mind compared to that so if you if you actually realize that you you realize okay i've got to figure out how do i actually create a private key securely and so that i know that it's mine and only mine and then how do i move bitcoin from somewhere else onto one of the addresses that that private key controls and only at that point

have you actually acquired Bitcoin? Yeah, it's been exhausting, if not frustrating for me to see the number of people who, up until like the treasury company craze, for example, I mean, you know, we had block, like, I mean, I was 2022, right? Like BlockFi, FTX, like all these things happen. Like I was there at the beginning, you know, the beginning for me was in the midst of all of that. But people who by and large are, you know, sending out some level of signal into

the world. And then immediately they're FOMO into treasury companies. And I'm, I'm like, you're, you're distraught. You have to remember, it's one thing if you've been around a while and you're like, I'm going to have some fun, speculate on a treasury company, you know, sailors got a huge stack, you know, maybe something crazy happens with strategy. Like, okay, go, go have your fun. What frustrates me is when I see these people talking about it so much that I envision,

what if I wasn't as deep down the rabbit hole as I am today? I'm just getting into the space. I see that this influencer, whatever you want to call them, has, you know, 100,000 followers, and they're talking about how they bought Nakamoto. And like people early on, you might

actually believe that that's how you Bitcoin or something. And to me, it's just such an incredible disservice, nevermind compromises your reputation entirely, because these things have not so far panned out to be the utopian investment options that people sort of peddled. But I don't know if you, maybe you're more patient than I am. It's kind of getting on my nerves at this point that this is still a thing. So what you're witnessing there, in my opinion, is really common human

human characteristics. I feel like people are, especially in today's day and age, don't forget we're in a fiat world that has cultivated this culture where people are essentially afraid of new things. They're afraid of responsibility. They're afraid of anything that requires too much effort. So I think we see a lot of that. And that's where all of these paper products really shine is their sales pitch is very well received. Oh, all you got to do is just buy

these shares on your brokerage account. You don't have to learn anything new. You don't have to

develop new skills. You don't have to learn about this protocol. You can just click and buy those shares and now you've quote unquote got bitcoin but it's it's it's the it's the bitcoiners who haven't shed the easy button mentality of the fiat world i guess you could say because that's what we harp on is taking self-custody is not that hard like we train p we have 80 year olds running their own node yep the problem is you have to have a degree of curiosity you have to

be willing to invest the time and you have to be willing to sit down and do the work I've got a, I've got a good metaphor that's worked in the past. And by the way, I have helped onboard, uh, an 82 year old and a 14 year old to using, you know, uh, Sparrow and cold cards and, you know, doing the real thing. And it's, uh, it's not hard. It does just require that, curiosity and work ethic. Oh, okay. I actually need to learn something new here. Let me pay

attention. What about the, the, the parallel of driving? Cause it's something I think everybody can relate to is that at one point in your life, you were a kid and you didn't really know how to drive. And then at some point in your life, you paid attention. Some people pick it up right away, But most of us, there's a transition maybe for a few weeks when you get used to, you know, controlling a car and driving a car around and flying down the freeway.

And if you think about the risk reward, I think we all know clearly what the benefit of transportation is, right? But we also know that it's one of the primary ways that people die in our modern society is on the road.

And so there's this massive risk. You're taking your own life and your loved ones in the car and people outside of the car's life. That's a huge risk that you take responsibility for every time you drive. And you take that for granted completely. Now, look at Bitcoin from that same lens. Here is something that's going to make a massive difference in your future well-being and the solvency and sovereignty of your family from a financial perspective.

it's got massive implications, there's something to learn. And to me, it's just a no-brainer once you figure out the value there, you figure out why I need this thing. And when you get on the other side of learning these few skills and these few key concepts, you realize, wow, it's actually not that complicated at all. It's not difficult. And these are not like rocket science concepts.

That's one of the things about the time chain calendar is I just visualize some simple concepts and suddenly it's like, oh, look, there it is. Of course, you just see it. You recognize it. You're not struggling with something vague anymore at that point. So I feel like there's a way to get through to people. There has to be a will, though. And people do have, just like when they learned how to drive, they didn't have to question, wait, why do I need to know how to do this?

obviously you want to you know take part in this amazing thing called transportation okay now we're talking about bitcoin and we're talking about sovereign money and we're talking about preserving your purchasing power you want to take part in those amazing things you got to learn something new and you got to learn the ropes and you got to get past you know standing on the sidelines and just calling an Uber. Well said. What's your take on running a node? So that's another one that

changed for me drastically, probably in my second cycle, where previous to that, I thought of running a node as sort of an optional thing. And I think that's a common thing when you're a new person, too. Maybe it's overwhelming because there's like several kind of buckets of knowledge and things to figure out. And so you might look at running a node as an optional thing. I think you get to a certain perspective with Bitcoin when you realize running a node is another one of these things I

don't believe is optional. I think if you control Bitcoin on chain, you owe it to yourself to run a node. You gain massive benefits of privacy and permissionlessness by running a node. And the simple fact is, just like if you don't have the private keys to the UTXO, you don't have Bitcoin. Well, if you don't run your own node, you're using somebody else's node because every Bitcoin transaction on chain requires a node. And so that's one of these realizations I had at a certain

point. I was like, wait a minute, I never thought about running a node. And that means every transaction I've done up until this point, I've been using somebody else's node. I've been sending the message to somebody else's computer and saying, would you please broadcast this to the network for me? Right? Would you please, you know, look up my balance? That's a crazy one. Think about every time you open a wallet and you want to see the balance, it's querying a node.

So if you're not running your own node, whose node did you just ask to look up your addresses and what the balances are there? I mean, some of these things are a little shocking when you see them from the right perspective. And so to me, it's a required activity. If you have on-chain Bitcoin, you should have your own node. Yeah. If you could come up with a way to visualize some of these concepts, I'd really appreciate it. So get in front of people and let them soak it in.

And then I mentioned mining Well you mentioned mining as a topic you be happy to discuss Are you mining Bitcoin Are you solo mining Do you have hosted miners your own ASICs What the status Yeah, I've been mining since the summer of 21. During 2021, if you look on a price chart, you can't miss it when we had that big crash in the middle of the bull market. That was directly related to China banning mining.

and at the time the majority of the hash rate on planet earth was in china and a ton of that hash rate got shut off there were also some monsoons and floods and storms that that led to more hash getting turned off we ended up having several difficulty adjustments massively downward because the blocks were coming in so slow because there was so much hash rate that came off the network so quickly. And that was a call to a lot of new participants to mining, myself included. I went

through that FOMO at the time. I'm learning about Bitcoin. I'm watching the difficulty fall. And I understood the concept that, wait a minute, the difficulty just dropped by 50% over the last month or two. It is twice as easy to find a block today than it was a couple months ago. I'm going to get into mining. And so I FOMOed into mining. I went through my own little experience of trying to run miners in my home.

Unfortunately, I live in a very expensive energy area and I quickly learned how uneconomical it is to try to mine at home where I live. So I was looking into options for hosted mining. I went through a really bad experience with a very well-known hosted mining company. I'm not gonna mention them. And I did end up getting my hardware back from them.

And at this point now, I'm partnered up with a pleb that I know who has a pretty large operation in a different area than where I live, where the, uh, the energy is quite affordable and I'm mining profitably, uh, with, uh, this person's help to

host me. And, and it's, it's, uh, in my opinion, another really sort of important thing at the very least to wrap your head around just to sort of understand the mining part of this whole, uh, system, you know, the, the, the random blocks we were looking at earlier, that's the result of the most furious competition on planet earth, which is right now at this very moment, every miner out there, every ASIC machine is just hashing trillions of hashes per second,

as fast as they can to try to win the next block. And it's this just mind boggling competition. It consumes a mind-boggling amount of electricity. And you're looking at a group of participants that not only understand the value of Bitcoin, but they've enacted business plans and expended capital and put plans into action. The mining cohort of Bitcoiners is one of the best places to find signal about Bitcoin. That's why I said when I'm watching the average time of

blocks, that's giving me real feedback about that landscape out there. And I don't live in a part of the country where there was this real cold snap, crazy weather, but I'm watching it happen via the pace of blocks. And so there's a real incredible perspective, I think, in learning these things, even if you never do it. And it may turn out, though, if you start learning about it,

you may realize, whoa, I actually have access to some cheap energy. You're suddenly operating with a new lens, a new perspective, and any situation you come across where previously you didn't see value. You might see value now. You never know. You might be the next person to take advantage of this and find this amazing use for energy that was disregarded because that energy couldn't be used in the sort of fiat world. Well, in Bitcoin, Bitcoin doesn't care where the energy comes from.

So you could be at the top of a mountain or out in the middle of nowhere. That was one of the cool things about hoddle tarantula who introduced us this guy is an expert at off-grid mining and he does just that he goes into these remote areas wherever you can get that really cheap if not free energy it's just the proof of work required to actually go get it set up an infrastructure and harness it and use it to mine bitcoin and it's a profoundly significant important part of

the entire Bitcoin system that we all depend upon. We all depend on this fierce competition over blocks to enforce security at the tip of the chain and to make sure that the creation of new blocks is something that is not pre-decided to come from one particular entity or another, that anybody has the potential to be the creator of the next block that gets added to the chain.

it's a it's deep and really exciting stuff there so i encourage people to look into it i love it man you you've helped rekindle my appreciation for the elegance of bitcoin i think here on this call um hey in the interest of time we're about an hour i i'm gonna blindside you here i forgot to tell you i have a final question that i ask every one of my guests and it's what is an unpopular opinion that you have you get bonus points if you offend

some Bitcoiners with it. Wow. Okay. Hyper Bitcoinization doesn't look like what you want

it to look like. That's going to be my opinion that I don't think a lot of people are going to like. I remember last cycle, there was a lot of talk of hyper Bitcoinization. And that represents this idea of a somewhat utopian future where Bitcoin has defeated the central banks and taken over the world. And we suddenly have this world that has hard money at the root of it. And it has an impact on reducing, if not stopping wars, and it changes people's behavior.

um i don't believe that's exactly how things are going to go and i think that what we're witnessing especially in this last cycle with all of this paper bitcoin wall street jumping in with both feet i think you're starting to get a taste of really what hyper bitcoinization is going to look like which is that bitcoin is amazing it's incredible it's a critical resource to harness as an individual, as a business, as a corporation, as a nation state, as a financial institution.

Every entity has that same incentive to figure out Bitcoin and to use Bitcoin and to plug into this system. So I think that's the thing I would say that might upset some people is that I think that utopian idea that all these corrupt people and vampires out there are going to just disappear because of Bitcoin? I don't think so. I think the vampires are going to use Bitcoin too, to their benefit. Everyone's going to use Bitcoin the way they want to use it.

And the truth is, is it's an opt-in system and you don't get to say how somebody else uses Bitcoin. So there's kind of a setup there for disappointment if you've got in your head too strong the idea that Bitcoin is going to make all these corrupt, bad things go away. I don't think it does. I think that's human nature, that corrupt tendency. That's human nature. And that's going to always find a way to surface. I think it might ebb and flow, but it never goes away.

I agree with that. For the first couple of years of my Bitcoin journey, I was a fix the money, fix the world guy. And I no longer believe that. I, I believe that if we can, I believe that human action is what changes the world. And what I'm hopeful for, I don't, I don't necessarily disagree with you. What I'm hopeful for is that having a base layer of money that everyone sort of has to

capitulate to because it is safe. It means monetary gunpowder analogy, um, might alter human incentives such that it makes it more, it makes, it gives a much shorter runway to the evil people to do their evil things. I agree with you. It doesn't eliminate the evil. It doesn't eliminate human nature. A new crop of evil will spring up when the old crop of evil has run out

of their Bitcoin, so to speak, or whatever the case may be. Um, I'm hopeful though, that we, we at some point reach a point where, uh, how would you, how would you say it that, anybody providing that true value to the world doesn't want anything but Bitcoin because they begin to recognize the value that they're producing. Like this is actually something that the world needs. It's not all of the fiat nonsense that we have in the world today.

And that sort of creates its own circular economy that you're forced to provide value and everyone providing value is accepting Bitcoin only. Like that's what they do. I think that's to me what hyper Bitcoinization kind of looks like in practice and probably the, you know, collapse of fiat currencies. I don't know how long that lasts or when it happens, if there's some sort of a, an alternate fiat system alongside a Bitcoin for a long time horizon.

But I think I broadly agree with you that at the end of the day, the world has been the way that we perceive it to be now for forever. There have always been evil people. There have always been power structures that, you know, suppress the rights of humanity, the natural rights of humanity. And I think Bitcoin is a tool that can fight much of that. but it isn't, uh, uh, it's not like a get out of jail free card from the constraints that humans,

you know, have by virtue of their humanity. Yeah. And I think that highlights a couple of things that highlights the responsibility that's required. You know, it's not a get out of jail free card. It's a radical set of responsibilities that you have to adopt and maintain it's, it's behavior you have to like adopt and keep going constantly. Um, there's also just, you know, maybe a timeframe aspect to it. I really feel like people, when they're new to Bitcoin, they see

everything through the lens of sort of memes. You know, I was showing you, oh yeah, 10 minute blocks. Well, actually, guess what? They're not 10 minute blocks. You know, you could do the same thing with almost every aspect of Bitcoin that you may have learned before. It's not actually 21 million. It's actually distinctly less than 21 million. You know, it depends what kind of like detail you want to

get into to understand some of these things in a more nuanced way. I think in regards to the hyper-Bitcoinization comment, maybe it's time there where I think some people have set their, in their minds, maybe in the next decade, they're going to see these wild changes and improvements. And maybe that's where I'm coming from a little bit more of a measured point of view, timing-wise,

that I think it's more of a generational thing. And maybe our kids or maybe our grandkids, or maybe our great grandkids when we're long gone are gonna figure some of these things out so we don't really see them in our lifetime i think that in the short term especially in the next decade or so you're not going to see shit coins disappear there's always an incentive for people to take advantage of and scam other people and you're not going to see central banks disappear

they've already shown us their ability to reinvent themselves and change form factor You know, that's what vampires do. So I think we're going to see just a continuation of a lot of those things. And really the onus is on you as an individual to figure out how Bitcoin helps you overcome those challenges. How does it help your family survive when maybe some of your neighbors

are going to really struggle to do the same? So it's a nuanced adjustment. It kind of takes the the glow off of some of the, the memes and, and tries to make it a little bit more grounded and real. Um, you, you got work to do and you have to, you got work that you have to keep doing. And, and then maybe you got a chance to, to have more choices and better outcomes down the road.

That's, that's more what I would say. I'll, I'll make one more comment on this. Uh, something I've said before is that I think there is a, we have several generations alive right now who buy and, by and large, don't have incredibly useful skills to bring real world value, right? It's like, if you look at like the growth of administration roles, like in hospitals, at schools, that kind of thing, where it's, it's just really unnecessary fat. It's only there by virtue of, um, fiat money

over-regulation. Right. And so I, where I think you're hitting the nail on the head, if this is, if this is what you're saying is it could be a couple of generations before, um, the upcoming, before an upcoming generation of people learning, going to school, being educated, recognize it's not about checking a box, passing a test, showing a diploma. It's about entering my working years with tangible skills that make me a productive member of society.

And until that exists, I think we like, I think that's maybe one of the positive externalities of Bitcoin, but it could be to your point, our grandkids, our great grandkids, something like, I don't know how long that takes. It depends on how far they kick the debt, you know, sovereign debt crisis down the road. It depends on how long they are able to play the charade. And eventually, I think we get there. But just, I think my encouragement to anyone listening is just

lower your time preference. It might not be your, like your life will, if you're 30, 40, even 50 years old, I think you're going to benefit financially from what Bitcoin will do over the next couple of decades, you might not get to experience some of the best of what Bitcoin provides because it's going to play out how it does. And that might not be as quick as many

people are hoping for. Yeah. I mean, in the short term, it's optionality. I feel convinced that you start looking at longer timeframes, five years, 10 years, 20 years, undoubtedly, there's going to be more optionality for you if you have Bitcoin than if you don't. Sure. And you don't know if that looks like just being able to increase your family's lifestyle and have a more comfortable life, or if it's a ticket on a private plane to get out of Dodge when things go sideways. You don't know.

but it's a I think that it's a really important set of thinking and concepts to adopt because I think that's what the world is calling for now there's so much bullshit out there and there's so much deception the call is on you as a human being to like activate your brain and you gotta parse through some of this stuff and identify the truth and the signal amongst a overwhelming amount of noise. You know, Bitcoin's an incredible way to start that. Like I said, the first thread to pull.

But, you know, for a lot of people beyond the financial aspect of it, maybe it's just that

sort of turning your brain on in a new way that is the biggest impact. And I think we all discover that after, you know, a number of years and after reaching a certain perspective on Bitcoin, undeniably you you've evolved as a as a human you're kind of uh in in a lot of ways a better version of yourself so that's what i i really you know i i i i'm driven by for myself and i hope anyone else out there who's discovering bitcoin and just getting into it like that should be

something that you you know notice after uh after time and it should really be your your primary incentive to keep going deeper down the rabbit hole. I love it, man. Alrighty. I think that's a good place to wrap up. Why don't you tell people where they can follow you, find you, find a time chain calendar, anything else you want to share? Yeah. Um, time chain calendar.com, the website and, uh, time chain calendar, the app on iOS and on Android in both of those app stores.

And you can find me on X. The project is at at TimeChainCal. That's C-A-L at the end. And then I'm also on Noster. You can find the Nipo5TC at TimeChainCalendar.com. That's how you can find the Noster profile there. But mostly just check out the actual app, TimeChainCalendar, and start getting some more Bitcoin awareness. I think that's the most I care about. You don't need to get a hold of me. You need to get a hold of your own Bitcoin awareness. And I'm hopefully trying to help with that.

So that's it. Well said, man. Thank you so much for being here. This has been an absolute blast. Really appreciate it. Awesome. Likewise. Cheers. All right. Take care, brother. And that's a wrap. Again, hope you enjoyed my conversation with TC. Go check out Time Chain Calendar. Such a cool project. You will absolutely become obsessed with it, is my anticipation. And give them a follow on XNOSTA wherever you are. And if you could, if you're enjoying the show, do me a huge favor.

Give us a like, subscribe, comment, share it with someone who you think might be interested. We would really appreciate you helping feed the algorithm to try getting high signal Bitcoin content out there. No suit coiners, no nonsense, none of the fiat games. And of course, go to thebitcoinway.com slash podcast. If you need help getting your Bitcoin into proper 100% self-custody, we can also help you with cybersecurity, privacy phones.

We've got a plan B residency option, and you can schedule a free 30-minute call with our team to learn more. Again, that's thebitcoinway.com slash podcast. Until next time, stay safe, stay sovereign, and remember the yield on Bitcoin is freedom. Thank you.