STACKING SATS WITH BUY THE CAT

distributed ledger me and my friends are gonna have servers at their houses and We're all gonna keep track of who's having you know loans coming in loans coming out or money going out and if I lose a date It's no big deal because it exists in these other spaces and I literally thought he invented blockchain I was like He comes running up to me. This is like October 2016 I wish I looked it up because Bitcoin was like 500 bucks back then He comes running up to me in the spring and he's like age Have you seen what's happening with Bitcoin and all I knew was from five years earlier? I'm like Bitcoin. Why do you care about Bitcoin? And he said that's the first blockchain. That's the first distributed ledger and that's when the light bulb clicked This is like May of 2017 so now Bitcoin's like off the races a few thousand dollars and at the same time My buddy who is big and in the banking world he said hey you've been buying any of this Bitcoin and Ethereum stuff And I was like no, he's a go download a coin base account today and get started and buy some so I bought some Bitcoin Bought some eth didn't really know what was going on I just saw like everybody was excited. I'm sure many people remember like thanks Give me a 2017 was insane Everybody was talking about Bitcoin And then the market kind of crashed. I just let it sit in my coin base account I really didn't do much with it and then it was in 2020 when COVID happened I thought hey Bitcoin having things gonna happen again And that's why I really went down the rabbit hole and started reading like the Bitcoin standard and really being drawn to it Understanding money printing, you know the devaluation of the dollar, you know the debatement of our currency All of those things really drew me to Bitcoin And so my wife and I did the most degenerate thing possible. This is not financial advice Like I'm gonna be clear We took $50,000 as an equity loan in our house and we bought a bunch of Bitcoin and some other alts too But primarily Bitcoin still to this day of the coins are biggest portfolio holding And that's when she's the even more hardcore Bitcoin or the main believer Wow And that's kind of how it started and then I Started meeting friends. I started this ex account five years ago in 21 It was very active during the bull and then I got hired full-time to work in the industry in 2022 As the you know a different role first now I'm head of protocol partnerships at global stake And so we're an institutional validator operation And You know just met more people along the way and honestly that's why I was drawn to buy the cat When I first saw it because I thought okay Hey, this is a really novel idea I admittedly bought Zcat first because I didn't know what was going on with the the whole stonk thing And then I saw buy the cat I go this is even better for me like you know Bitcoin right like I mean I can earn Bitcoin so Started buying buy the cat then you and I connected and then I found shout out to everybody who's here right now Because we have an incredible community. I see so many diehards mazi bonzi Growing squish obtain cuck norris magnetic fast is some great people in here that I've seen posting all the time So shout out to you guys because you are the heartbeat of what we're trying to do So I've talked way too much especially as the host So I'm gonna turn over to you. I would love for you to share your story And then we can kind of just talk about what we envision by the cat being going to the conference and some of the other cool things that we got planned Yeah, I got into Bitcoin many years ago. I can't remember if it was like 2011 or 2012 or 2013 or what Because it was so long ago But yeah, I've always been interested in philosophy and asking fundamental questions like What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of physical reality? What is the nature of mathematics etc? and What is money is one of those fundamental questions and if you're asking a question like what is money? then Of course to understand what something is you have to look at the strange edge cases and Bitcoin was and Still is definitely a strange edge case stretching or Concept of money. So I looked into it and found it really interesting way back then and Yeah, for some reason like tons of my friends were like obsessed with Bitcoin Early on. So that's also how I got into it uh They were like mining Bitcoin There was one of my friends who started mining it on his personal computer and then he like started mining it on a bunch of specialized mining hardware and then He ended up realizing that oh shit This is using a lot of electricity and generating a lot of heat and he was like He ended up actually selling all his Bitcoin Because he's a very hardcore environmentalist and he didn't think it was sustainable for For Bitcoin to use all that power that um Yes, that kind of selling all this Bitcoin, but yeah, just tons of my friends were like obsessed with Bitcoin Way back when and at the time I had That big Environmental objection and I also And I also thought okay. Maybe the politicians can get their acts together and Stop printing so much money. I didn't think printing money was inherently bad I still don't think it's inherently bad But uh over the years I just ended up realizing that like okay Democrats or Republicans it does not matter uh the politicians are Always just gonna continue printing all this money and uh There is no way to fix the problem Other than taking away their ability to print money and the way to uh take away Their ability to print money is by adopting Bitcoin Form of currency that um the government can't print more of Uh, yeah, so I guess it was just like a gradual conversion process for me where I got into it very early on Then as the years progressed I'd uh get more and more into it every single year No, it's amazing everybody has very unique stories about how they found Bitcoin What what attracted them to it and I've heard just an entire range of stories In fact very similar story one of my co-founders and my boss and friend Rich He had looked into mining Bitcoin probably not quite as early as you guys are doing it and He kind of at the end of the day he decided not to because it was right at the edge when You you started to need GPUs you couldn't just run it on a CPU you probably needed GPUs before asix And he said oh my my electric bill is gonna go up and it's probably gonna be like an extra 500 dollars a month I'm gonna have to pay is it gonna be worth it and you know of course looking back now he's like I wish I had done it You know because the returns would have been just incredible And one of his friends that was actually is a very he's a he's not like you completely undocked um Big big big big coin whale and he was Active when Satoshi was active on the chat boards. So we're talking, you know 2009 2010 Was very active on the chat boards and still to this day is a big big holder um Yeah, so again We're about if 15 minutes in or so or quarterway into the conversation I do have a hard stop before because of a meeting But if you guys have questions, I want to give a shout out to to Questzilla. I just saw your Uncle Sam by the cat video. That's really dope So thanks for sharing that under the comments But if you guys have any questions that you want to ask us? Do you want to ask by the cat like by all means I'm gonna try and keep an eye on Especially on the main by the cat account if you guys are posting comments to the space that he put out You know, I'll try keep an eye there If you guys want to come up and join us in the conversation I did send the mic to a couple Close community members if you want to jump in and and join the conversation share your big coin story We'd love for you to do so We also have to talk about the meme coin side of things right? I think this is an equal part of the by the cat movement where you know, there's a really fun and playful aspect about What the community's doing in terms of just generating some exquisite meme content some classic static memes Some credible videos that are being put out bondsies here Like bondsie get my attention immediately because of some of the stuff that I had seen with the video Grondle Phomo's another good example of somebody who's just crushing it with videos um So if you guys you know, let's talk a little bit more about the meme side and what we're gonna be planning for Bitcoin Amsterdam And then again, if you guys want to join us by all means don't be shy No one's gonna you know, it's just a space if you want to come up here and and kick it with us By all means send it request and we'll get you appear on stage Yeah, you're entry to meme coins. Let's talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, so about meme coins So for many many years I totally hated meme coins. I thought they were completely ridiculous They made absolutely no sense to me at all But then uh towards the end of 2025. I realized I was like wait. I've never actually done a very serious deep dive into the meme coin world So I figured like okay, I should do a serious deep dive into the meme coin world and I I think that's what happens to The majority of bit coiners They never actually have done a deep dive into the meme coin world They just immediately heard the concept and immediately thought that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my entire life. There is absolutely no way I could ever imagine that having any value whatsoever So they just ignore it, but then I did a deep dive and I got really obsessed and have basically spent like all day every day Obsessing over meme coins ever since like the end of 2025 and Like helping run a number of them that I've gone to like millions and tens of millions and have some of them have Donated to good causes to like cancer research. I've always looked for ones That I think have the potential to like go mainstream and interest the world at large and yeah, so Since I've been obsessing over meme coins for the past year I've also like told some of my Like a bit coiner and like tech crypto Friends about the meme coin stuff too, and it's funny most of the time what actually ends up happening is that The like Bitcoin and like tech crypto people that they're so shocked to hear like Someone actually saying good thing about meme coins that they're like yeah, I'll actually listen to you And oh wow that actually does sound like a good interesting idea. I can finally See the value in these and I just had some Weird block over my perceptions for ages However, there definitely are also some people who are just like Completely impossible to convince whatsoever and no matter what you say they've Already made up their mind like I have this friend who's been into crypto since the 90s Well before Bitcoin even existed and this guy is like one of the most Brilliant people I know And I have all I've had all kinds of great conversations with them about all kinds of topics But it's like if I bring up meme coins with them it is just like Completely impossible to have any dialogue whatsoever This guy hates meme coins so much that he even thinks Bitcoin itself is a meme coin And he even thinks that That gold physical gold itself is a meme coin because he thinks Gold's real utility is only a tiny percentage of what it actually is And he thinks that the majority of the financial Value is just is just financial speculation of the same sort that occurs when people Especially it on meme coins So that guy who thinks that Bitcoin and gold are meme coins and he hates Bitcoin and gold because they're meme coins That that guy has to be like one of the most extreme anti-meme coin people in the entire world But But surprisingly a lot of these like serious crypto people are actually More open to meme coins if you actually have a A real conversation with them about it The problem though is if you try and contact people on x uh What happens a lot of the time is they just see a comment from a meme coin account And their brain just classifies that as oh comment from a meme coin account that must be spam and they ignore it so So having actual conversations with people are a lot more effective than x comments and hopefully stuff like Ryan going to represent us at a Bitcoin Amsterdam One of the biggest Bitcoin events in the world will be really helpful for half