A day in Texas with Bitcoiner Dan Held & Nicole Behnam

How did you find out about Bitcoin?

My buddy paid me back for a beer with one of those little gold coins you see, like, you know, the cassacious coins, the, you know, in the news articles. Those little gold coins? Yes, it was one of those. And so this was back in like 2012. So Bitcoin was like $10.

I'm so jealous. Oh my God. How heavy is this? Dan?

There you go. You almost got it. I think it's as tall as you are. Hold on.

Almost.

Almost. What's up, guys?

Hey, what's up, guys? Look who's here.

You shooting some guns?

Okay, wait. Tell me what I need to know. I've never done this before, so I'll.

Take you step by step. First thing we need to do before we go in there, we gotta protect.

Our ears and our eyes.

So I first discovered, you know, Bitcoin NFTs all that stuff on Clubhouse. And I for sure thought it was a fad. I thought possibly a scam. I saw my friends moving to Twitter spaces and they were still going. And these are people that they wouldn't just stick around for no reason. And so I got involved and, you know, I started becoming a part of the community. And I'm like, how do I enter this space authentically without being pretentious? And my background is an interviewer. So I'm like, let me just go in. I'll be the interviewer. I'll ask the dumb questions and it'll help people who are entering the space because I'm not afraid to ask the dumb question.

It.

Wow.

Smell it.

The noise and the smell throws me.

Away from World War II. So really, I'm just going to load this thing up for you. You know how to hold, right? You're right handed. Yeah, I've got an ar, so. Okay, yeah, perfect. Yeah, it really doesn't move all that much. I may not even put my hand on your shoulder if you don't need it. Cool. Yeah. Let's hop in there. All right.

All right.

We're shooting the German MP40, a German submachine gun from World War II. It's a vintage item.

Dan, this is the side of you I've not seen before. I did not imagine this a teddy bear.

This is the Texan side of me.

Shocked, alarmed, appalled.

My normal life is. Is in Austin here. Austin's got a pretty great standard of living. So, yeah, I feel super comfortable. I feel like I've hit those. Those goals when I was younger, go wanted to go achieve. See, that wasn't that bad. No, I just, I think with money always more, you know, and so that's always, I think, like a humbling process of thinking through. Am I. Am I happy with what I have? And so, yeah, I'm very happy with what I have. I say a very large percentage of my identity is associated with crypto. I've been in the space 10 years, and so this is something that I believe is important for humanity, and that's my life's mission, actually. You mailed this to your ex boyfriend anonymously though. Yeah, exactly.

Anonymously.

Yeah.

Smart.

All right, ready to go?

Ready to go.

Cool.

Let's go.

He's grabbing us. Ryan. Yeah, we've seen a Nicole, but she got distracted.

Yeah, that's terrible.

Oh, hey, sorry. Nice to meet you.

It's Gunner. All right, so this is my friend Nicole from la. She's got to get all Texas out, so I took her shooting guns. We're gonna go get some tacos, but we need to get her some cowboy hats, some cowboy boot. And this is the place to get her a cowboy hat. So what do you recommend for.

Anything's good, typically, I'll say, you know, let's look at your color profile, the shape of your face, your shoulder width. That helps determine, you know, brim length, ground shape. Also just things that generally complement your image. Have you ever played with color?

How much. How much is the yellow one, by the way?

1350.

13.

Oh, that's it. Dan can afford that?

Yeah. Let's see. How much bitcoin is that? That's point. That's point one bitcoin. No, that's 0.03.

And eth is actually dropping right now. So it's almost one eth.

It's almost one eth. Yeah. In your ethereum world. My bitcoin world, yeah.

Which is interesting to think of it that way. It's much easier. Easier to spend 18 than it is to spend 1350, by the way. It's. It's a super weird thing in our world.

It's easier to spend like an NFT. You'd go buy an NFT for $20,000.

But I've bought an NFT for $20, Thousand. But if you asked me to spend $20,000 on almost anything, I'd be like, that's serious.

What's the most expensive NFT you've gotten?

I bought a goblin for about 20,000 recently. What's the part that takes the longest design? Okay.

Yeah, Depending on, you know, sometimes it's like ideation versus just, you know, slapping things on.

Yeah.

Like, my brand name's Troubadour. Spanish for troubadour. Singer, songwriter, storyteller. Once you had to tell a story about your life. So I ask everyone to fill out this profile, looking for overarching themes of your life, significant numbers, travel stories, quote song lyrics. And we build all that into the hat through symbolism. So everything on there is an extension of you.

It's all intention.

I had no idea that it was like that, that you did that. Does everyone do that, or is that just your thing?

That's my thing.

In the world of NFTs, I love that artists can monetize their work to the extent, you know, that they can make a living off of it and even, like, get rich rich the way they couldn't before. I know a ton of artists that are able to, like, put their kids through school now and do things that they didn't even dream that they'd be able to do because of NFTs, and so that's been really cool. But also, when I got into crypto, I learned a lot about financial literacy, and I'm still learning. Those hats are amazing. Like, they're beautiful, like a statement piece. But to come and actually, like, sit down and think about, like, lyrics and.

Themes, why you say it's, like, proof of work?

Bitcoin, Dan. How the dad joke?

I immediately just had three children. That's.

Such a gentleman, Dan.

I'm a Texan.

I love it. Welcome. Hey, Dan.

Hey, Nicole.

How are y' all today?

Hey, Good. Welcome to Austin.

Thanks for having us.

Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome.

It's my favorite food store. Really wanted to get Nicole all Texan'd out, so we're doing. We did. We looked at cowboy hats earlier. Now we need some cowboy boots.

Okay.

Learning more about bitcoin and understanding where we are currently helps drive that conviction long term. So, yeah, it's through learning more about bitcoin, where I felt like I had a better understanding of it, and through that, I felt a stronger conviction.

Being in the spotlight in this field aligns you with some of the smartest people out there in the world and some of the dumbest. It's cool. It's interesting. Sometimes I'm a little worried about, like, things that I do or things that I say.

It's scary being on that. We're on the edge of, like, Lori and destruction, because you can be canceled or something you say, or you can have, like, Elon Musk retweet you or something.

So how much is a boot like.

This so the Abu right there is 590. That's our base price. We go up to 2,000. And that depends on if you get fancy, if you get exotic skins, all different.

So this one is 500? 590, yeah. Okay, cool.

All right, Nicole, which boot you gonna choose? You've got your brown ones, and you got the black one. What's the hesitation?

I like the length here.

Okay.

I like the design here, but it's like, I already wear so much black.

Gotcha.

That maybe I should just go with the brown.

The brown is nice because the brown has, like, that suede look to it. It's a little bit softer, so. Yeah, it does look really good.

Are you telling me I need to be softer? Is that what you're saying?

You're kind of intense. You're, like, really toxic on Twitter sometimes.

How? How I'm so nice to you, rubbing.

Your NFTs in our face all the time. Come on. Come on. Just relax.

Well, how are you about bitcoin?

Okay. Maybe I get a little bit intense too.

How about we both soften?

How about we both soften? I think the world's telling us that.

The brown is what we need. Okay. All right, let's do it.

Awesome. Let's get you set up.

Decision made.

Cool.

Wow.

So they look great. Thank you.

For you.

So.

Thank you.

It's your choice. Do you want to wear them out or do you want us to box them up?

Let's box them up.

Yeah. So I'm going to take care of your payment right here.

Sweet. Okay, cool. But I have to ask. Can we pay in bitcoin?

Sadly, no. But because you walked in and mentioned it, we'd never thought of it before, but now I'm intrigued.

Okay, cool.

So I'm gonna give you my business card and hope that the two of you get in touch with me so I can learn more.

That sounds good, but, well, I guess we'll have to pay with 30American dollars for now.

Fiat.

Fiat.

Rose.

Fiat currency.

No. You know, I used to think Fiat when I first heard it. I'm like, are they talking about the car company?

Oh, and it's a bad car.

Did you see the Fiat Twitter account where they were like, why does everyone hate us so much? I saw it because of Fiat.

Yeah, I saw that.

I feel like it's very empowering to even be able to think about these new structures where we don't have that centralized control control, you know, that's. That's ultimately why we're here.

Yeah. And I feel like Bitcoin really is truly the only fully decentralized currency.

The way I phrase it is that the other ones trade off decentralization to do more cool fun stuff.

Yeah, you know that's kind of the. And that's cool too.

That's cool you know because bitcoiners could be. And this is I think like this is where a lot of bitcoiners don't question the nature of bitcoin. What if bitcoin has over optimized security or decentralization? It could be over optimizing for that. I admit that could be a flaw in our thinking in the bitcoin community or maybe them trading this off is okay. But I do think bitcoiners are right long term. If states attack crypto you want to be as strong as possible or decentralized as possible. But they could be wrong. They could maybe states never do attack crypto and you could trade off a lot of decentralization but we won't know until that happens.

Yeah, I mean where we're going to be in five, ten years, who knows? Who knows?

Yeah.