Latest / What Bitcoin Did / The Bull Market, Institutional Adoption & 2026 Recession? | Willy Woo

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The Bull Market, Institutional Adoption & 2026 Recession? | Willy Woo · What Bitcoin Did

• 0:00
  Bitcoin going from $1 trillion to $100 or more, that's the turning point.
• 0:06
  Bitcoin needs capital. If it's going to flip gold and it's going to flip fiat,
• 0:11
  actually that's what we're really talking about is ending fiat.
• 0:14
  Every cycle we're roughly 10x higher, you know, 10 to 100x more capital needs to move the price.
• 0:22
  We're at this precipice where money is going to be redefined by going from gold to energy secured ledger.
• 0:29
  secured ledger. Gold was an atoms secured ledger. It's a paperization of a liquidity crisis. It's a
• 0:36
  very, very recent thing since 1971. It doesn't go back 6,000 years. It's not going to go forward
• 0:42
  in the next few thousand years either. And that'll collapse soon. And that the social consensus is,
• 0:48
  trust me, bro, I'm good for it by the Fed, right? That's how we manage our ledger right now.
• 0:54
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• 0:59
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• 3:12
  Willie Woo, good to see you back, man.
• 3:15
  You were a regular on what Bitcoin did a few years ago, and I think the last time I saw you was in Sydney,
• 3:23
  which I think that was like 2023?
• 3:26
  Two years ago, I think.
• 3:27
  Yeah.
• 3:28
  How have you been?
• 3:29
  Good, yeah.
• 3:30
  You kind of stepped away from doing the podcast thing.
• 3:33
  Yep, I did.
• 3:34
  Why did you do that?
• 3:36
  Well, first we had our firstborn, right?
• 3:38
  And also it was a beer market.
• 3:42
  There was also, you know,
• 3:45
  probably off the back of Pete McCormick's show,
• 3:48
  like people started to recognize me everywhere.
• 3:51
  Like in, you know, random places.
• 3:53
  And, you know, I started thinking about OPSEC and having children and having the children there.
• 4:00
  We've got a second now.
• 4:01
  So I took some time out.
• 4:05
  And, yeah, I mean, it was part OPSEC.
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  It was also I thought that the profile got a bit too high.
• 4:13
  And I did want to take a break, you know, newborn, do a bit of concentration on family life.
• 4:19
  um yeah so and also we did this big because we're travelers in our family and we
• 4:25
  we um we took the opportunity when covid um sort of opened up again we we did this big world trip
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  and um it's really hard to um jump on podcasts and do you know content and so forth when all
• 4:41
  that's happening so so just for family time well um were you keeping tabs on bitcoin during that
• 4:46
  yes i was and oh yeah i forgot i how could i forget we i was i founded a um a hedge fund right
• 4:56
  a fund of funds and that took a lot of time um so that was like february 2022 so it took a while to
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  get that up and running and it was a deep sort of learning process for myself because you know
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  i didn't know too much about um the trade fire world and how do you build hedge funds and so
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  forth. So yeah, I was really busy as well. That was the other thing.
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  And how's the hedge fund done?
• 5:21
  It's great. It's great now. You know, there was a few lessons to learn, a lot of lessons.
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  You know, the hedge fund is around I'm allocating capital to the best managers in the space that
• 5:31
  are trading digital assets. And so, you know, we drew down initially.
• 5:37
  Yeah, that was a rough year to launch in.
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  Yeah, the idea was to be more market neutral and we thought we could put some directional
• 5:45
  allocation in there, meaning not actually have long exposure spot.
• 5:50
  It meant these guys should presumably be shorting the market, but it turns out directional
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  hedge funds don't really work very well.
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  And now we're three and a half years experience and we've got 700 managers tracked in their
• 6:06
  performances.
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  Yeah, it's very few of these guys that can actually trade the market in directionality.
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  Like 99%, in my opinion, are not investable.
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  But yeah, it's a big learning.
• 6:20
  So if 99% of the best traders are not profitable, how are people meant to have a single shot?
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  Well, I mean, these guys were quantitative, right?
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  So they're meant to be analysts building trading models.
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  and the computers make the decision
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  and you're hooking onto a feature,
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  like a little alpha feature.
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  When this happens, then we should be able to trade in
• 6:44
  whatever the formula is.
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  And it just turns out, in my opinion,
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  that our markets are so nascent, right?
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  And every three months,
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  the structure of the market keeps changing.
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  So you can't actually build a system
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  that's changing so quickly.
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  And I think only a very few people in the industry
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  that can actually do something that's robust,
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  meaning everything you look at before you put your money in
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  is making money, making money,
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  until generally when you put your money in.
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  And they start to carry some real RUM,
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  and then the market changes,
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  and suddenly they're losing a lot of money very quickly.
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  So, I mean, our funds are market neutral now,
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  almost like 98% market neutral.
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  We try to get the directionality out of it.
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  And so that's a big learning for us.
• 7:34
  When it comes to those like trading algorithms, will all that just be AI or is it already all AI?
• 7:39
  Well, I think it really, you know, if you think about a rent tech, you know, the other famous people that, you know, the mathematicians that sort of broke the whole industry and the maths guys started to build the most successful hedge fund in the world.
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  They were very early in machine learning.
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  And so I would say it's already in the space.
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  It's packet recognition over a lot of them are using the machine learning layer to adjust the core basic algorithm.
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  And then there's this new movement of black boxes, which we can't really run due diligence on.
• 8:21
  Is that black box because they're like neural networks and you can't actually tell what's happening in there?
• 8:26
  Yeah, it's something like that, right?
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  That saying buy, sell, we don't know exactly what it's doing.
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  Yeah.
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  And often we get these managers using it and we look at the performance
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  and we just can't allocate because it's too performant.
• 8:41
  We can't tell if it's a scam, we can't tell if it's-
• 8:44
  Oh, really?
• 8:45
  Yeah, it was a conservative fund, right?
• 8:48
  We're meant to be delivering a very nice, safe return in yields.
• 8:54
  you know yields had a really bad name in our industry
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  yeah but you can do it right we run three funds one of them is done with a
• 9:03
  private bank in switzerland and so it's all institutional grade and
• 9:07
  bringing those trade five practices in and you know for me looking at how
• 9:13
  you know yield was done in 2023 to 2022 it's just crazy what happened oh totally
• 9:21
  It's just like when we do yield here, you're looking at the manager, you send an independent person in to overview the operations, to look at any way through incompetence, malice, they can lose money, lose your coins.
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  And then it's independently audited, independently accounted for each month.
• 9:48
  all these processes have been around since the 90s and 80s
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  in traditional finance and the bank we work with
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  they were getting pressure from their clients
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  to get access to Madoff's fund back in the day
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  and they sent a team over to do this whole process
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  and they walked out in the first day saying this is not investable
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  and they were one of the very few institutions that protected their clients
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  from the biggest Ponzi at its time. And so these are the process you bring in. And that's quite a
• 10:25
  mature process. But in crypto, it's like a joke. Yeah. And presumably, there's still an amount of
• 10:31
  risk with that. But you just know it's like a calculated risk that you can understand.
• 10:34
  Oh, yeah, there's still risk, but we can see all the risks, right? And the risks are the
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  exchange counterparties, right? It's not going to be people giving billions of dollars to some
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  shady hedge fund. Yeah, or back in the earned products of 2020, I will go through and put it
• 10:51
  on, was it Gemini? And they re-hypothecated to Genesis Trading and then all the hops go. And
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  the next thing you know, it's with Alameda who was just buying DGN shit coins, big bags of it.
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  Yeah. And no one knew what was happening really. It's funny because at that time,
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  I certainly didn't see it coming.
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  There were a few people that did.
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  I still remember Pierre Richard called it out and said that FTX would fail.
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  And that was the first time I ever heard anyone say that.
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  And six months later, or whatever it was, he was right.
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  Oh, he said six months beforehand?
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  Yeah.
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  Yeah.
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  Because it was really shady.
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  I think it was around three to six months beforehand.
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  There was a big amount of Bitcoins that left FTX.
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  And SPF said, oh, we're just reshuffling cold storage.
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  and that was those transactions that went to Alameda.
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  And FTX was, you know, I worked with Glassnode
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  and they were a new onboarding to the data sets.
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  And I looked at that and I thought, oh, we're probably still,
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  you know, Glassnode is still working through the bugs and stuff.
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  But it was real, you know, and no one,
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  no on-chain person picked up on it, even though it was in the chart.
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  And I was trading on it, right?
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  I was trading on it at the time.
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  On FTX?
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  Yeah, that was my main exchange that I traded on.
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  And I noticed that there was a run on the bank.
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  The balance of Bitcoin started dropping, but not in a big data era kind of way,
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  but a granular like, well, these guys know something.
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  And so I got off.
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  The first thing was I sent the data, the chart, to a hedge fund manager
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  that had SPF on the cap table.
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  and they were the closest people I knew to FTX
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  and they said, oh, don't worry about it.
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  They've got billions in the bank, nothing to worry about.
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  So they should have known, right?
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  Turned out, only the inner circle knew.
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  But I pulled my money out thinking even in the 1% chance
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  that these guys are wrong, it's not worth it.
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  Totally.
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  And so I got off 48 hours before.
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  Oh, damn, it was close.
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  Yeah, yeah.
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  Because that run of the bank started like maybe four days beforehand.
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  So with what we do now, we wrap it.
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  We wrap, we monitor all of these exchanges.
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  Because though a lot of them aren't properly regulated,
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  we have a blockchain that's like a 10-minute live audit.
• 13:27
  Yeah.
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  The funniest thing about FTX at that time is everyone was saying
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  how good their OPSEC was because no one knew where their coins were
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  and it just turned out they had one.
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  Oh, my God.
• 13:35
  That was crazy.
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  That was the wildest time I think I've had in Bitcoin in terms of just the unexpected
• 13:43
  consequences of what was happening.
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  It was pretty fun.
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  Oh my God.
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  It was.
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  So everyone's, you know, he adopted all the, you know, the celebs.
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  The press was just puffing him up.
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  And I think of this as like one in 10 year event.
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  Hopefully that's the last one because it's getting quite robust now.
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  Yeah.
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  Very quickly.
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  The last one was Mt. Gox, you know, but all the other stuff in between just PALS compared to FTX and Mt. Gox.
• 14:12
  Yeah, I wasn't there for Mt. Gox, but watching that as someone who just has Bitcoin in cold storage, I mean, it was entertaining for sure.
• 14:19
  Yeah, right. Yeah. Except like the market was crashing.
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  Yeah.
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  Well, I was near the bottom anyway.
• 14:27
  Yeah. Maybe let's take a fast forward from there. What do you think of how the Bitcoin
• 14:32
  market's matured since 2023? I mean, so much. I think the biggest thing has been BlackRock's ETF.
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  I think before that, if you were to look at the bigger picture of $900 trillion of wealth assets
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  and Bitcoin at the time was only $1 trillion.
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  Most wealth managers would be potentially risking their jobs,
• 15:05
  their client base if they recommended Bitcoin.
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  And then when Larry Fink opened that up, they made it, you know,
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  he moved Overton window in a way kind of like he,
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  a wealth manager could now recommend Bitcoin.
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  And I was talking to, you know, we work with the Swiss private bank and the banker there who's been there all his life, you know, managing wealth said that I had visited him a year beforehand.
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  And he said, you know, I'm not a believer in this Bitcoin stuff.
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  A year later after the ETF, he said, I just bought some.
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  and the reason why he bought it was because I know exactly what happens with this.
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  Once it's on that ETF, once BlackRock's on it,
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  I'm going to push this product out to the world
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  and everyone will market Bitcoin.
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  And so I think in terms of Bitcoin going from $1 trillion
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  to $100 or more that we all think about, that's the turning point.
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  So the industry's matured, the infrastructure's matured,
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  after FTX.
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  Exchanges always wanted to hold the coins.
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  Now it's even Binance is now offering custody solutions
• 16:29
  where the coins are held in a tri-party manner.
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  It's not on the exchange and it's mirrored in.
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  And so that's much more institutional.
• 16:37
  So that's rolling through.
• 16:39
  You've got people like Fidelity offering custody
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  and that's mirroring to the exchanges.
• 16:43
  So TradeFi is coming in and hardening up the exchange rails a lot.
• 16:49
  And obviously, it's not my warehouse, but you just see how the new administration has just unlocked everything.
• 16:56
  Everything can move forward.
• 16:57
  Bitcoin can be considered when taking out a real estate loan.
• 17:03
  There's a lot more coming, I think.
• 17:06
  And just recently, you can hold it in your 401k, I think, in the US.
• 17:10
  I mean, I know you obviously can through the other instruments.
• 17:14
  I didn't know you could hold it directly in your 401k.
• 17:15
  You can in Australia.
• 17:16
  You can self-custody Bitcoin in your retirement fund in Australia.
• 17:19
  It just came out, I think, a couple of days ago.
• 17:22
  So it's not implemented yet.
• 17:25
  But yeah, I don't know the details exactly what it is, whether or not it's a –
• 17:30
  That's a massive thing.
• 17:32
  Can you hold a BlackRock ETF of Bitcoin in the past?
• 17:36
  In a 401k?
• 17:36
  Yeah.
• 17:37
  I think so, yeah.
• 17:37
  Okay.
• 17:38
  Then it must be like self-custody.
• 17:40
  Hey, I'm not, I haven't looked at it.
• 17:42
  I could be wrong on that too.
• 17:42
  I don't know.
• 17:43
  I've not seen that.
• 17:44
  But like all these things are just Bitcoin maturing.
• 17:49
  With the ETFs, obviously you kind of made your name
• 17:51
  with on-chain data.
• 17:53
  How much do they impact what you can do
• 17:54
  and what you can actually see on-chain?
• 17:56
  Is it still a useful tool?
• 17:58
  Oh yeah, it's great.
• 18:00
  You know when I did the when I was on the show every month here with Pete I think Onchain was four years old The early signals were 2016
• 18:13
  So it's another five years, nine years into it now.
• 18:16
  And it turns out that most of the stuff that we were doing,
• 18:20
  a lot of it's good for narrative.
• 18:22
  You can say the whales are coming in and this sort of stuff.
• 18:25
  But in terms of pricing signal,
• 18:27
  it's only a small subset that really works.
• 18:29
  But it works great.
• 18:32
  Because I see even today,
• 18:34
  a lot of people are tracking the flows into the ETFs.
• 18:41
  Well, it's only a subset of the flows.
• 18:43
  Turns out it's a minority.
• 18:45
  Why is that?
• 18:47
  I don't know why.
• 18:48
  It's just, it's small.
• 18:50
  It's probably one-fifth to,
• 18:53
  that's significant,
• 18:54
  but one-fifth to one-tenth of the daily flows.
• 18:56
  The majority of Bitcoin that's flowing is naked on the network.
• 19:01
  It's not wrapped up in equity wrappers.
• 19:06
  But even so, you can think of the ETFs in aggregate
• 19:09
  are just a closed sort of box.
• 19:14
  And if people are buying and selling inside that, it's neutral.
• 19:18
  If they want more, then more is coming across their membrane.
• 19:21
  That's a demand.
• 19:22
  And you can look at that.
• 19:24
  But we have something better.
• 19:25
  We have a UTXO set and you can look at every single coin that's moving across the network.
• 19:31
  So you're not limited to looking at the small black box that's run on Wall Street.
• 19:35
  You're looking at the entire network.
• 19:37
  Just because someone's buying or the family offices are buying inside these ETFs instruments,
• 19:45
  we could have Asian whales dumping by the tens of thousands and doesn't tell you much.
• 19:51
  Usually Asia's more sophisticated than the trade historically.
• 19:55
  Asia has more capital.
• 19:59
  I think it's roughly, as an estimate,
• 20:01
  Asia equals Europe plus America combined in terms of liquidity.
• 20:05
  Really?
• 20:06
  Yeah.
• 20:06
  And you'll see that that's starting to be recognized
• 20:08
  because post-COVID token 2049 started blowing up
• 20:14
  and I started seeing Americans, Europeans turning up to this Asia conference
• 20:18
  because there's so much that's happening there.
• 20:21
  But, yeah, back to the point is that we have a UTXO set.
• 20:25
  So we can look at the flows across the entire network and know the capital coming in any day of the year.
• 20:34
  RAOUL PAL, Are you surprised that this bull market, I think one of the things that make it different to previous ones is that price is ripping, but mempools are empty.
• 20:43
  Yeah, I haven't looked at mempool for a long time.
• 20:49
  The thing is, I haven't looked into mempool to go, why?
• 20:55
  But you must be seeing less activity on chain though.
• 21:02
  I'm not tracking the stuff that's irrelevant to me.
• 21:06
  me. The relevant things to me are wallets or the activity of the wallets. I'm only now tracking
• 21:15
  liquidity flows. So I don't care if it's like 500 wallets instead of 50,000 it used to be.
• 21:24
  I'm looking at how much capital. The capital is what moves it and that's getting bigger and bigger
• 21:28
  and bigger. So that gives you an idea of what's happening. Maybe we're moving to layer twos. You
• 21:35
  might call an ETF layer two. But ultimately, most people are finding use and not using the main
• 21:43
  chain apart from a clearing chain, I guess, between all of these other layers, ETFs being one,
• 21:52
  I would say. So you're seeing less transactions, but much larger transactions, which is obviously,
• 21:58
  I mean, that makes total sense with the kind of institutionalization of Bitcoin.
• 22:01
  Are you surprised that this cycle we've not really seen retail come in in the same way
• 22:06
  yet?
• 22:07
  Or do you think that will still happen?
• 22:08
  Yeah, I think there's been a few surprising things, right?
• 22:14
  I think retail will come in.
• 22:17
  I think they've always been there.
• 22:19
  It's just they're not really moving the needle.
• 22:23
  And every cycle we're roughly 10x higher or in the early days, 100x higher in price, which
• 22:30
  which also means, you know, 10 to 100x more capital needs to move the price.
• 22:38
  And like the reality of the wealth distribution,
• 22:43
  when you talk about what does retail have,
• 22:46
  what does the concentrated capital pools,
• 22:50
  which still might be, you know, owned by retail,
• 22:54
  but going through, you know.
• 22:56
  ETF wrapper.
• 22:58
  Yeah, or in a pension fund.
• 23:00
  or it's retail money but it's managed by a manager who's like deciding,
• 23:06
  yeah, let's put a 3% allocation into Bitcoin and then boom,
• 23:10
  you've got billion size tickets.
• 23:17
  I think those are the things that are mattering now.
• 23:22
  Even talking to Daniel Batten, the work he's done with pension funds,
• 23:26
  sovereign funds, looking at the capital pools they have,
• 23:30
  I think the number is around $30 trillion that they manage out of that $900 trillion.
• 23:37
  And for a lot of them, they can't allocate to Bitcoin because they believe that it's bad for the environment.
• 23:45
  It's against the ESG agenda.
• 23:47
  So dismantling that, these are the things we have to dismantle in the industry is all the barriers stopping the big capital pools,
• 23:55
  which are still owned by retail ultimately
• 23:59
  but managed by professionals for that to really come in.
• 24:02
  But I mean, that makes sense.
• 24:04
  And Daniel's doing an amazing job at combating that narrative.
• 24:07
  I also think maybe with like Larry Fink's change of positioning,
• 24:11
  maybe ESG is going to become a less relevant thing
• 24:13
  that people have to consider before allocating capital.
• 24:17
  Like he's kind of backed away from the ESG narrative
• 24:19
  and moved towards the Bitcoin narrative.
• 24:21
  And I think also with AI and high-power compute
• 24:23
  and everything that's happening there,
• 24:25
  the kind of mining flood seems to be going away.
• 24:27
  I don't know if you're seeing the same thing.
• 24:29
  Yeah, the mining flood on energy use?
• 24:32
  Yeah.
• 24:32
  Yeah, yeah.
• 24:34
  I actually think it's going away with Larry.
• 24:38
  Larry would have a big impact, I would say.
• 24:41
  You see the media switched,
• 24:43
  and I think that might just be around Larry
• 24:47
  and who owns all of these.
• 24:50
  I think, what is it?
• 24:51
  BlackRock has 15% voting power of the entire equity markets in the US.
• 24:55
  Is that true?
• 24:56
  That's insane.
• 24:57
  Yeah, because they manage, what is it?
• 24:59
  What's the number?
• 25:00
  10, $14 trillion?
• 25:01
  Trillions of dollars.
• 25:02
  I'll find out.
• 25:02
  Yeah, there's only $110 trillion of public equities in the world.
• 25:12
  And I talked to someone from BlackRock who actually did the voting, right?
• 25:21
  BlackRock make, you know, they manage other people's capital,
• 25:28
  but who gets the vote?
• 25:30
  BlackRock gets the vote,
• 25:32
  even though shareholding is by their investors.
• 25:34
  Yeah.
• 25:35
  And that's very powerful.
• 25:36
  And I think they're pretty high on all the cap tables,
• 25:39
  including the media companies.
• 25:41
  I mean, that's one side.
• 25:42
  And the other side is the pure research
• 25:43
  that people like Daniel and his cohort are doing.
• 25:46
  I mean, I just looked up $10 trillion under management.
• 25:49
  And whenever you look at the major shareholders in any company, it's always them at the top of them.
• 25:55
  And people like to put that down as a conspiracy, but it's just to do with size.
• 26:00
  Yeah.
• 26:00
  And I think we always think BlackRock is buying.
• 26:04
  It's not that they're buying.
• 26:05
  Their clients are buying.
• 26:07
  They're just the conduit.
• 26:11
  And I don't know.
• 26:13
  It's like when all of us buy, say, through BlackRock and we get no vote,
• 26:17
  I think that something should be addressed there.
• 26:20
  It shouldn't be BlackRock deciding on the vote.
• 26:23
  This is why people should just buy and hold self-custody Bitcoin.
• 26:26
  Well, it's got nothing to do with ownership and, you know,
• 26:30
  a media company or something.
• 26:32
  True.
• 26:32
  Yeah.
• 26:34
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• 26:36
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• 26:39
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• 26:42
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• 26:43
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• 28:41
  visit iron.com to learn more which is i-r-e-n.com so in terms of like the market maturing this time
• 28:49
  looking different um what are the key things you're seeing like with the on-chain data that
• 28:53
  make it look different i mean there's much less fomo right now it's very staged buying um
• 29:02
  the the capital inflows are very smooth um i've never seen them so smooth before
• 29:08
  I put that down to these Bitcoin treasury companies.
• 29:13
  Because they just buy us regardless of price.
• 29:15
  Yeah, it's like dollar costing average.
• 29:18
  Whenever the capital comes, they buy in a staged, and it produces a very smooth inflow.
• 29:27
  Whereas in the past, you'd get a little bit of choppiness and then a real run up as the
• 29:35
  FOMO comes in and everyone's chasing price and so forth.
• 29:38
  So, I mean, you still get those oscillations, but even as it's coming in, it's very smooth.
• 29:46
  It's like someone's got sandpaper and rounded out the chart. So I haven't seen that before.
• 29:51
  So that's dampening volatility both on the upside and the downside.
• 29:55
  It's, yeah, you could say that. I mean, it should do. Like there's a lot of impacts on price.
• 30:02
  This is what I call, liquidity flows is really the tailwinds that are either supportive or bearish on price.
• 30:11
  But how price moves relative to each hour, each day is much more tactical.
• 30:18
  And that's a different overlay.
• 30:20
  When you're looking at liquidity flows, these are the fundamentals.
• 30:23
  So it's very hard for the price to go against increasing flows coming in.
• 30:27
  but it can happen because you might want to like as you I say,
• 30:33
  say you're a very high net worth trading whale,
• 30:39
  you could bring the price down by selling and then liquidating a whole bunch of people and it will work down.
• 30:45
  So there's this sort of tactical game and there's,
• 30:51
  I get a whole heads up display, right? I've like, what's the profit situation here?
• 30:55
  here? What's the liquidation situation here? Are we overheated anyway through normal mean
• 31:01
  revert of, well, price is overextended in one way or the other, meaning I can't push
• 31:07
  it this way any further and it's got to rub a band back down. And so there's all this
• 31:12
  sort of tactical positioning between all the participants and then you can get a probabilistic
• 31:19
  answer of where the price might go in the next, say, three or four days.
• 31:25
  But then you've got the fundamental money coming in by the buyers.
• 31:29
  And that gives you the long term, it gives you a read over the next one, two,
• 31:36
  four, even six weeks out.
• 31:38
  And then there's this random walk game that's happening.
• 31:41
  So it's a bit complex, but it's a proper full picture of what's going on.
• 31:47
  And so in terms of like them being just dollar cost averaging every week or whenever Sailor's
• 31:52
  buying, which seems to be every week, what is that doing in terms of like the amount
• 31:58
  of leverage in the market?
• 31:59
  Because Sailor's taking a little bit of leverage, but he's very low.
• 32:02
  And without things like FTX, is the market in a way a healthier spot for that?
• 32:10
  It's a different type of leverage, right?
• 32:12
  We have like, you know, in these treasury companies, you have multipliers on your actual Bitcoin.
• 32:19
  So it's MNAV and it's traded around that.
• 32:21
  So you've got, if you're holding the equity, it looks like deleveraging when it goes against you, but you're not being liquidated.
• 32:30
  But then the question is, will these treasury companies be actually liquidated?
• 32:35
  If they are being, if they can be liquidated, then it's leverage.
• 32:39
  and if you look at the debt structuring
• 32:43
  under MicroStrategy, it's very robust.
• 32:47
  Their debt is 8 to 12 years out,
• 32:51
  meaning if they're in an exchange,
• 32:53
  they would be liquidated,
• 32:55
  but they can't be liquidated to 8 to 12 years out
• 32:58
  as long as they're paying their interest bills.
• 33:00
  I think they're zero anyway.
• 33:02
  So that's quite robust.
• 33:05
  Very little kind of standard debt in there.
• 33:09
  Um, and then you have things like Metaplanet and Metaplanet do this kind of synthetic ATM
• 33:17
  where there's one party here and there's Metaplanet here that's stacking bitcoins.
• 33:23
  Um, and this party here, um, is doing market operations and they're taking a big tranche
• 33:32
  alone out.
• 33:33
  And then they do this sort of, um, they sell out of this position using their warrants and
• 33:38
  they re-send money into MetaPlanet to buy Bitcoin.
• 33:42
  So what you actually have is this big debt load inside MetaPlanet, and then it gets paid
• 33:49
  back as the money comes back in.
• 33:52
  And in my opinion, that's in danger of being liquidated because if they get caught off guard
• 33:58
  at the very top of the market, the ATM system stops working.
• 34:03
  They can't sell it into the market because it relies on the price going up a little bit
• 34:09
  and they can sell and then send money in.
• 34:13
  So if you get that wrong footed and you've taken another like 300 million, it's getting
• 34:19
  bigger each tranche, and you can't sell it through, then you've got to pay that back
• 34:24
  by selling your Bitcoin.
• 34:25
  And there would be a partial liquidation of MetaPlanet if they don't time the market right.
• 34:31
  So with MetaPlanet, you're really banking on them timing the market.
• 34:36
  And they're very sophisticated.
• 34:37
  I noticed that their last buy, their last significant buy, they unloaded almost 300 million at the very bottom wick of Bitcoin when it dipped in the last consolidation.
• 34:50
  And it was actually at a price lower than what was printed on the exchanges.
• 34:54
  Is that them putting in that bottom though because they're buying and supporting the market?
• 34:57
  Yeah, they absolutely put in that bottom.
• 34:59
  Yeah. And so like, obviously, Saylor's like out on his own. He's gotten 600,000, whatever Bitcoin,
• 35:06
  maybe more, I don't know. The rest of these, like there's a very long tail of treasury companies
• 35:10
  after that. I don't assume after you get to like below the top 10 treasury companies, they really
• 35:15
  have a huge impact on the market because cumulatively the coins are like, I don't know,
• 35:19
  100,000 coins or something. Yeah. I mean, 100,000 coins, significant amount of coins
• 35:28
  in a soft market.
• 35:29
  We just saw 80,000 get dumped though.
• 35:32
  Yeah, we did.
• 35:33
  And it was in an upward part of the bull market
• 35:38
  with flows coming in.
• 35:40
  And the liquidity was there to hold it up.
• 35:46
  The question is, if the stuff starts liquidating,
• 35:48
  it's usually in the middle of the bear market
• 35:50
  when the market's really soft.
• 35:53
  And so that's going to have massive impact.
• 35:55
  I mean, that's why it's really important to measure the liquidity.
• 35:59
  Like in the bull market, you're sort of wheat, right?
• 36:01
  You're great.
• 36:02
  Like it's all coming in.
• 36:04
  Beer market's actually leaving.
• 36:06
  And then you dumping like 100 coins That pretty damaging to the market on price So are you quite skeptical about the treasury companies And do you think they will be the reason for the next bear market
• 36:18
  I think they'll accentuate it.
• 36:21
  I really like them because they provide relatively cheap funding for shorting on equity markets.
• 36:27
  Because if you're on MNAV of, say, five and you short that, well, MNAV is going to compress to one or below.
• 36:35
  So you get a 5x leverage without needing to pay for it.
• 36:39
  I mean, I say that a bit tongue in cheek.
• 36:42
  Most people don't like the bear market.
• 36:44
  I think that that'll add to it.
• 36:47
  But I think that most Bitcoiners think that this infrastructure
• 36:50
  and development of the market and the way in which the capital is coming in,
• 36:56
  we're not going to have these 80% drawdowns.
• 36:58
  I think also we need to look at where Bitcoin is now a $2 trillion asset.
• 37:07
  It's the newest global macro asset that's trading at scale to hit the world in 150 years.
• 37:13
  It's a global macro asset.
• 37:15
  It's not a separate thing on its own.
• 37:18
  And the global liquidity needs to be accounted for.
• 37:22
  And everyone's bullish because global liquidity, by the way, means money printing.
• 37:28
  Everyone's bullish because people are money printing.
• 37:32
  But we've never really seen a business cycle downturn.
• 37:36
  We have liquidity cycles, which every four years generally,
• 37:40
  that seems to be the cycle that nation states print at.
• 37:43
  But we have business cycle downturns every maybe decade or so.
• 37:48
  And we kind of had one in COVID, but it was a flash in the pan
• 37:52
  and there was so much injection of liquidity and it came in early.
• 37:55
  the last one before that was
• 37:59
  the world financial crisis
• 38:01
  which is what was etched
• 38:03
  into the genesis block really
• 38:05
  so Bitcoin's never experienced
• 38:07
  a business cycle
• 38:09
  downturn in a time when
• 38:11
  the US Fed is
• 38:13
  a holdout on injecting
• 38:15
  liquidity and so it's going to
• 38:17
  come in late so
• 38:19
  we don't know. Do you think
• 38:21
  that we're close to that
• 38:23
  to a business downturn?
• 38:25
  I would say pretty high confidence
• 38:28
  that that's going to happen by 26.
• 38:30
  Are we not already in one in a sense
• 38:32
  in that like of the S&P 500,
• 38:34
  really only the top seven companies actually matter?
• 38:41
  I've heard people say this is like an everything bubble.
• 38:45
  I'm not an expert in equities.
• 38:48
  I track liquidity.
• 38:50
  I think that
• 38:53
  I think the leading signs for a recession
• 38:56
  have already hit
• 38:58
  and a lot of this work is with SwissBlock
• 39:02
  which I work with today
• 39:03
  they're the kind of the OG secret trading firm
• 39:07
  behind Glassnode
• 39:08
  and Glassnode was actually spun out
• 39:10
  for the world to use
• 39:12
  even though they were using those
• 39:14
  the early work in that data
• 39:17
  in 2015, 2016
• 39:19
  so they're a global macro firm now
• 39:23
  and some people might know Henry Zeeberg
• 39:28
  who is the economist inside there
• 39:30
  and so he's tracking all the macro signals
• 39:33
  and in his words the economy's hit the Titanic
• 39:38
  hasn't sunk yet
• 39:39
  there's more leading indicators you could say
• 39:47
  than that one, the one that we've hit the Titanic,
• 39:51
  that's already fired.
• 39:52
  There's no going back.
• 39:54
  There will be a business cycle downturn.
• 39:58
  But we're not there yet.
• 40:00
  It's not sinking.
• 40:01
  And that's the best part of the bull market.
• 40:03
  Everything goes apeshit crazy and we'll have a blow off top.
• 40:06
  And we're expecting that in Bitcoin too.
• 40:09
  Everyone's expecting that because we're not there yet.
• 40:13
  But it will be coming.
• 40:14
  And even the four-year cycle guys will say it's coming in 26 because of standard four-year liquidity flows.
• 40:23
  Superimpose on top of that a business cycle downturn, which Bitcoin's never experienced.
• 40:27
  Then we've got to see what happens.
• 40:29
  So do you know what he's looking at that is the leading indicator for recession?
• 40:34
  Because in 2008, obviously, the housing bubble was the thing that killed the market.
• 40:39
  Does he know what he's looking for in 2026?
• 40:42
  Yeah, they're based on economic data.
• 40:48
  I think housing is in there.
• 40:50
  It's global economy type stuff.
• 40:54
  Like you best talk to him.
• 40:57
  But yeah, it's more, we can get him on.
• 41:03
  He's pretty knowledgeable about it and he's done some exceptional calls.
• 41:07
  Yeah, like in the zoomed out picture, they're exceptional.
• 41:11
  When everyone is bearish, he says, now it's going,
• 41:16
  he said the S&P is going to recover back to here and go way higher.
• 41:20
  And it's so far played out when everyone was saying, no,
• 41:24
  this economy is broken.
• 41:26
  So, yeah, there's this set up, right?
• 41:33
  Liquidity cycle coming back down.
• 41:35
  business cycle downturn
• 41:38
  we've got our treasury companies on top
• 41:40
  that are exhibiting high MNAVs
• 41:43
  so if you're holding those equities
• 41:44
  you're going to have that compression
• 41:46
  and then we have the potential
• 41:49
  for these Bitcoin treasury companies
• 41:51
  the weakest ones to be liquidated
• 41:54
  if they're overextended
• 41:55
  because these guys are doing
• 41:58
  you know like four year bonds
• 42:02
  convertible bonds
• 42:03
  or some of them not at all
• 42:05
  meta planet, it's like real time really. So yeah, so you need to look at the details of
• 42:13
  the structuring, but I think some of it will be liquidated.
• 42:16
  So the interesting thing there is that it feels like on one hand, you're saying the
• 42:21
  structure of the Bitcoin market's changed. Like maybe like people talk about super cycle or
• 42:25
  elongated cycle, whatever that is, but the structure has changed and maybe that's just
• 42:29
  reduced downside and upside volatility. But then you're also saying potentially we'll have like a
• 42:34
  2026 blow off top. What do you see Bitcoin doing in the next, say, 12 months?
• 42:40
  Yeah, so I'm saying it's like a superposition of all these impacts, right? And I think
• 42:46
  structurally, Bitcoin's solid, whereas in the past, we had these big downswings. The attribution
• 42:54
  to a more robust market, let's say, is there's that.
• 43:03
  And then we've got your standard liquidity downturn,
• 43:07
  but then we've got a business cycle downturn on top.
• 43:09
  And some of that all, maybe some people say,
• 43:12
  oh, we only get a 50% bear market.
• 43:14
  Yeah, sure, if that was every other normal cycle
• 43:17
  that Bitcoin's existed in the 16 years,
• 43:20
  but we don't know this thing called a business cycle downturn
• 43:23
  and its impact on Bitcoin.
• 43:26
  And Bitcoin happens to be the most sensitive
• 43:28
  of all the global macro assets to liquidity changes.
• 43:32
  And so if we've got that,
• 43:36
  then we don't know how that,
• 43:38
  you know, add more drawdown to the 50% you think,
• 43:42
  whatever number you come to.
• 43:44
  So that's how I'd approach it.
• 43:46
  And when you're looking at kind of Bitcoin price,
• 43:49
  how high do you think it can go before this drawdown?
• 43:52
  It depends how long we've got to run.
• 43:53
  you know um if it's soon like if it's fourth quarter of this year um and if it's early first
• 44:00
  quarter then 140 to 160 if it goes into 2026 then um you know it could go way higher um
• 44:09
  so one thing i've been thinking which may be too simplistic is like if you look at the incentives
• 44:14
  of someone like trump who's got the midterms i think october next year or like uh third quarter
• 44:19
  next year. He's going to want to run the economy really hot going into that. So I assume he's
• 44:25
  going to pull out all the stops to make sure markets are flying. And so in my head, I've
• 44:30
  kind of had late 26 is the top of this cycle. Right. Yeah. You can see this already is that
• 44:37
  Trump wants lower interest rates, but Powell's like, nope, nope, nope. And the thing is,
• 44:44
  never mind how much power Trump has,
• 44:48
  he doesn't have the power to influence Fed policy.
• 44:52
  For that to happen,
• 44:54
  the Republicans would have needed to be in power
• 44:57
  for 12 years and outvoted the Democrats
• 45:00
  on who gets to be on the Fed board
• 45:05
  and have that qualified by Congress.
• 45:09
  So it's a pretty full-on thing to get full power of the Fed.
• 45:13
  and it's designed that way.
• 45:15
  So he could try talking it up,
• 45:19
  but unless the Fed actually changes rates,
• 45:24
  and in our opinion, it's too slow anyway.
• 45:28
  It's probably too late.
• 45:30
  The liquidity injection should have happened a long time ago
• 45:33
  and it's late.
• 45:35
  And the rest of the world is injecting liquidity, not the Fed.
• 45:37
  So we'll see.
• 45:40
  So other central banks around the world are printing money right now?
• 45:43
  Yeah, yeah, global liquidity is going up, but it's not coming from the US as such.
• 45:47
  So do you think Powell's been wrong on this call to not lower rates?
• 45:50
  Yeah, we think so.
• 45:52
  We think so.
• 45:54
  Henrik's very outspoken, saying this is a really bad setup right now that he should be printing.
• 46:02
  And we don't know why he's not.
• 46:03
  Inflation's not so high.
• 46:05
  Yeah, inflation's not.
• 46:06
  But we know that money printing does lead to inflation.
• 46:09
  And obviously, Powell knows that better than anyone because he's been at the helm while that happened.
• 46:12
  Why do you think he should be printing money?
• 46:16
  Because it's great for us as like asset holders, but is it good for the population?
• 46:19
  Oh, well, obviously printing money is bad, right?
• 46:27
  Like, I mean, on fundamental level, printing money is really bad.
• 46:32
  We know that as Bitcoiners, but in terms of an economy and how far it's going to wreck
• 46:37
  people in the short term.
• 46:42
  Right now, like the role here, you know, with the changing of the interest rates is really
• 46:49
  to buffer these really harsh drawdowns.
• 46:52
  That's the whole point of a central bank is to try and take the pain out of the market.
• 46:59
  And that's probably not the best move for the role of the Fed.
• 47:06
  We can debate whether or not the Fed should be able to dictate this.
• 47:12
  Obviously, as a Bitcoin, I don't think this is a good setup.
• 47:15
  Yeah.
• 47:16
  But yeah.
• 47:17
  So looking out, you're quite bearish.
• 47:20
  I'm bullish over the next few months.
• 47:23
  Yeah.
• 47:24
  I'm bullish.
• 47:25
  Short-term bullish, long-term bearish.
• 47:26
  I'm bullish.
• 47:27
  The audience shouldn't do what I do.
• 47:32
  I participate in the markets.
• 47:34
  So if it's bearish, I'd love to have a really bearish market.
• 47:37
  And if it's bullish, I'd love to have a really bullish market.
• 47:42
  Because I don't huddle that much, right?
• 47:45
  The thing is, I've been in these markets for well over 10 years now.
• 47:50
  And I think the number came out from Arthur Hayes on BitMEX.
• 47:56
  Only 1% of traders actually make any money on that exchange.
• 48:00
  And those are your odds.
• 48:02
  And so even if like for myself, I have some amount of capability where the market is at and where it might likely be to go, that didn't make me profitable until I figured out how to manage risk.
• 48:20
  These are so many things you have to learn.
• 48:22
  And so that's why we huddle.
• 48:24
  Right. But yeah, for myself, I'm bullish right now and I'm expecting to be bearish by next year, if not sooner. But I have no crystal ball off the top. The thing about these markets is the bottoms are very, very stable because that's when liquidity comes in. At the top, liquidity dries up. And when liquidity dries up, the tops become quite unstable. You'll see the volatility.
• 48:54
  and it's whipsawing around and it's highly emotional,
• 48:57
  that's very hard to predict.
• 49:00
  So it's good to be bearish late
• 49:04
  until it's really riding on the wall.
• 49:07
  So I don't know, everyone likes to pick a top price
• 49:12
  and it's almost impossible.
• 49:16
  If you get it right, you're lucky.
• 49:18
  and
• 49:20
  you know even like
• 49:22
  Peter Swift has it
• 49:23
  like is it Philip Swift
• 49:26
  there's
• 49:28
  the cycle
• 49:30
  top you know and it's a
• 49:32
  crossover of two magic moving averages
• 49:34
  and it uses Fibonacci numbers
• 49:36
  and that's called every top
• 49:38
  in the past even that it doesn't call a
• 49:40
  price it's like a
• 49:42
  timing signature
• 49:43
  so it's yeah
• 49:46
  top to heart if you want a number to go by and no one should be trading to a measuring number.
• 49:53
  So if you don't really hold Bitcoin, I know you've been trading for 10 plus years or whatever.
• 49:59
  Have you outperformed if you'd have just bought and held Bitcoin?
• 50:03
  I've outperformed, yeah. But when you say I don't hold, I'm always going to come. I don't hold for
• 50:09
  a year when it's in a bear market, usually a year, six months to a year. But I'm always coming back.
• 50:15
  I see.
• 50:16
  Right?
• 50:17
  Like I call myself a Bitcoiner because I'm a maxi.
• 50:20
  I think this is the biggest change in the world and it's going to take over and I'm
• 50:24
  going to be pissed off if I'm going to have less Bitcoins each year.
• 50:26
  Yeah.
• 50:27
  All right.
• 50:28
  And the biggest opportunity for me to get more Bitcoins is the bear market.
• 50:31
  Sit there in cash and do nothing.
• 50:35
  And so you might be in a long bear market then coming up.
• 50:39
  Yeah, it might be.
• 50:40
  It might be 12, 16, 18 months.
• 50:42
  Is there anything that either the Fed or just central banks around the world can do to stop
• 50:46
  this happening?
• 50:49
  Or is it too late?
• 50:50
  Well, Henrik would probably think it's too late.
• 50:53
  It's his wheelhouse.
• 50:56
  I think it's too late.
• 50:57
  Yeah, I'd say from data he showed me, I'm pretty convinced of his thesis.
• 51:01
  Yeah.
• 51:02
  So without them injecting crazy liquidity right now, which it doesn't seem like they're
• 51:06
  going to do, maybe this thing's already gone.
• 51:08
  Yeah, well, the indicator shows that it's too late.
• 51:13
  The economy is, and it's natural, right?
• 51:15
  Every 10 years, you do get a business downturn and it is fired.
• 51:19
  The question is how deep will it go?
• 51:21
  And you can do something about that.
• 51:23
  And if the Fed does their job by lowering rates to soften this ahead of time,
• 51:29
  then it'll be okay.
• 51:31
  Like COVID, they did that, but they did it too much, right?
• 51:36
  They printed too much money and now we've had to.
• 51:41
  But presumably if this market does start rolling over, they will step in and inject liquidity
• 51:44
  at that point.
• 51:46
  But you think that just takes time to get into the market and it means you have a 12-month
• 51:49
  bear market or whatever it is.
• 51:50
  Yeah.
• 51:51
  If it's late, I mean, it's a supertanker.
• 51:54
  It's going to turn around real slightly.
• 51:56
  Yeah.
• 51:57
  And people, myself included, think of Bitcoin as kind of a risk off asset as well as a risk
• 52:03
  on asset.
• 52:04
  a risk on asset. But to me, this is like long term savings that is almost like risk off.
• 52:09
  Do you think the market will see it that way and Bitcoin might actually perform well in that kind
• 52:13
  of macro bear market? Not in the short term. I called it the world's first
• 52:20
  risk on safe haven. It'll run just as well as a tech stock, but it's a safe haven asset.
• 52:28
  Yeah.
• 52:29
  But you'll see even gold crash, you know, world financial crisis, gold crash.
• 52:35
  Everyone sells everything to get to cash.
• 52:37
  How long did it crash for in 2008?
• 52:39
  I don't know.
• 52:40
  I can't remember.
• 52:41
  Was it a month, two months?
• 52:43
  So it recovered before everything else?
• 52:45
  Yeah.
• 52:46
  It recovered and went on for a three year bull run, I think three or four year bull run
• 52:49
  to 2012, right?
• 52:50
  Four years.
• 52:51
  Yeah.
• 52:52
  So, yeah, because the confidence was knocked in the banking system.
• 52:58
  And right now we're seeing gold run, right?
• 53:00
  And the confidence is being, I think, shaken in the US dollar.
• 53:04
  Definitely.
• 53:05
  And so, yeah, and this, Bitcoin's still quite new.
• 53:11
  It's not trusted by people who hold the 900 trillion.
• 53:16
  They need to see that play out in decades.
• 53:20
  I think it'll be great, right?
• 53:23
  If you look at it in sheer performance against gold, it just tears it apart.
• 53:29
  If you look at fundamentally what it is, gold's had its time.
• 53:35
  We've had 6,000 years of gold, gold and silver.
• 53:38
  There's a reason for it.
• 53:40
  Gold was our money.
• 53:41
  It was our de facto money.
• 53:43
  And what is money?
• 53:44
  Money is a ledger.
• 53:46
  People think money was this thing to assist barter, but it was a ledger.
• 53:49
  It was always a ledger.
• 53:50
  It was, I do you a favor, you do me a favor.
• 53:53
  It's social debt and it got formalized.
• 53:54
  It's the latest research on money.
• 53:57
  This whole idea that we used gold to assist barter
• 54:01
  is this philosophical thing not backed by evidence.
• 54:04
  So you've got this 6,000-year-old use of gold being the fair ledger.
• 54:09
  That meant the accountant couldn't diddle the books
• 54:11
  and give more money to himself.
• 54:13
  So if you at this situation they will have 6 years of gold being the de facto fear ledger And now we got we moving to the space age digital age space age and you got rockets
• 54:28
  every other day launching and the price per launch is dropping off a cliff and robotic technology is
• 54:34
  going through experiential claims.
• 54:39
  I think it's around 2040-ish
• 54:42
  that we will be able to start to showcase
• 54:45
  mining of asteroids.
• 54:48
  And they found an asteroid that was something
• 54:50
  like a thousand times world GDP with a gold on it.
• 54:55
  And so if you think you're going to secure a ledger
• 54:57
  with atoms, you're going to be mistaken
• 54:59
  because there's a lot of atoms around.
• 55:01
  There's no meteorites with Bitcoin on them.
• 55:04
  That's right.
• 55:04
  Right. And so Bitcoin's secured by energy.
• 55:08
  Right. And so if you, you know, for the scientists in the room,
• 55:13
  they know this because it's called the Kardashev scale.
• 55:16
  That's how you measure a technology of a civilization.
• 55:20
  And you see this in world GDP as we GDP goes up, energy use goes up
• 55:25
  because fundamentally the economy eats energy and raw material to spit out goods and services.
• 55:31
  and they get more and more sophisticated and we know that the latest stuff, AI, just eats this
• 55:35
  energy. So energy is always going to be scarce relative to demand. So you have to secure it with
• 55:42
  that. And we know that works a thousand years into the future. And so we're at this precipice
• 55:49
  where money is going to be redefined by going from gold to energy secured ledger. Gold was an
• 55:56
  the Atoms secured ledger.
• 55:58
  And right now we have this thing called a social consensus ledger.
• 56:02
  It's a paperization of a liquidity crisis.
• 56:06
  It's a very, very recent thing since 1971.
• 56:09
  It doesn't go back 6,000 years.
• 56:10
  It's not going to go forward in the next few thousand years either.
• 56:14
  And that'll collapse soon.
• 56:16
  And the social consensus is, trust me, bro, I'm good for it by the Fed.
• 56:22
  That's how we manage our ledger right now.
• 56:24
  But it's always been a ledger. It's going from atoms currently. It's the social consensus, trust me, bro. And it's going to go to energy. And that's what Bitcoin is. And that's what we're buying. We're buying money for the next thousands of years. And that money's got to expand from one to two trillion, two trillion today, to whatever money needs to get to. And that'll be usually equivalent of world GDP. World GDP is, I think, 110 trillion.
• 56:51
  so if world GDP turns to 500 trillion it needs to get to 500 trillion.
• 56:58
  So when you go through that kind of history of money you have 6,000 years of gold this sort of
• 57:01
  fiat blip that we live in now how do you see us transitioning from that fiat era into Bitcoin? Do
• 57:07
  you think there'll be a period where fiat is backed by Bitcoin before full sort of hyper
• 57:11
  Bitcoinization or how do you see that playing out? Yeah it's really hard to say it's really hard to
• 57:17
  So we don't need backing with Bitcoin.
• 57:20
  I can say that.
• 57:22
  The reason we needed paper notes to trade around gold
• 57:28
  is because it wasn't portable.
• 57:29
  You couldn't ship it around at the speed of light.
• 57:32
  We can do that with Bitcoin.
• 57:33
  So fundamentally, we can be using Bitcoin as the money.
• 57:39
  People think it's volatile, but it's not volatile
• 57:40
  when you're paying for it in Bitcoin.
• 57:42
  That becomes the unit of account.
• 57:44
  Given enough time, we're not there yet.
• 57:46
  we're still in the store of value phase.
• 57:50
  Probably will be for another 10 years at least.
• 57:55
  Maybe it will take another generation.
• 57:59
  But hey, we're talking about 10,000 years of money here.
• 58:02
  So 25 years.
• 58:04
  Yeah, it's okay.
• 58:05
  But we're lucky because we're at the forefront
• 58:09
  of this effect happening.
• 58:11
  And the guys that came in in 2011, 2012,
• 58:14
  you know, they got to buy the stuff when the market cap was, you know, in the millions
• 58:19
  instead of the trillions.
• 58:22
  So yeah, the Bitcoin's price is going to inflate, the market cap is going to inflate because
• 58:28
  it's being adopted.
• 58:29
  It's being adopted by corporate treasuries, adopted by nation states now.
• 58:36
  So I'm no doubt on the long run of this and I don't have any fears over quantum computers
• 58:42
  or that this technology will break
• 58:44
  because everything that can break can be fixed.
• 58:47
  Yeah.
• 58:48
  See, I can totally see,
• 58:50
  give it long enough time period,
• 58:51
  10 years or whatever,
• 58:52
  quantum being a threat,
• 58:53
  but we will just change things.
• 58:56
  There's already people doing work
• 58:57
  on the address signatures.
• 58:59
  I don't see that being a big existential threat
• 59:01
  for Bitcoin at all.
• 59:03
  When you look at the maturation of the market,
• 59:05
  we've started this conversation being like
• 59:07
  the Bitcoin market is maturing,
• 59:09
  but then at the same time,
• 59:09
  you're saying we're in the incredibly,
• 59:11
  incredibly early days.
• 59:13
  Like what does this market look like in 10 years time?
• 59:18
  I think it would look much more like how maybe gold is perceived, but with all the bells
• 59:23
  and whistles of a digital commodity that moves at the speed of light.
• 59:27
  That's the bit that's hard to predict, right?
• 59:29
  Because we've not had that before.
• 59:31
  But in 10 years time, it'll be accepted like gold.
• 59:33
  It's probably market cap will have exceeded or matched gold.
• 59:36
  It'll be taken seriously by everyone.
• 59:38
  It'll be the size of the US dollar.
• 59:40
  I think because gold is the size of the US dollar
• 59:43
  in terms of M2 money supply
• 59:45
  so I think
• 59:47
  let's call it the trade
• 59:49
  fight acceptance will be there
• 59:51
  then the question is what does it look like
• 59:53
  when Bitcoin becomes
• 59:55
  it does its thing because it's a beast
• 59:57
  it's a digital asset that
• 59:59
  moves the speed of light and it's got layers on it
• 1:00:01
  layer 2, layer 3
• 1:00:02
  and they're not
• 1:00:05
  you know they're somewhat
• 1:00:07
  self-custodial as well and
• 1:00:09
  even faster. We've got AI. I've said the problem with real estate is there's less people. The
• 1:00:19
  population is going to peak and it's going to drop. Whereas the population of people that need Bitcoin
• 1:00:24
  is going to increase because AI agents will be using this. So there's all this future facing
• 1:00:30
  stuff that's almost impossible, I think, to figure out. We couldn't figure out the future we live in
• 1:00:38
  today back in when the internet first came about and i think yeah that it'll take it'll take some
• 1:00:45
  time maybe you call it um like you know i used to say it takes um a generation to figure out what the
• 1:00:53
  medium what the medium is for like when we did tv shows um the first ones with radio were pictures
• 1:01:00
  and it took another generation to invent the sitcom and maybe we'd start that clock in 10 years when
• 1:01:07
  and you have general acceptance.
• 1:01:08
  And then you wait another generation
• 1:01:10
  and see what the population does with what it really is.
• 1:01:14
  And we don't know what it really is.
• 1:01:16
  We think of it as digital gold,
• 1:01:18
  but I've just said it's not digital gold.
• 1:01:19
  It's a ledger secured by energy,
• 1:01:22
  which will work for the next thousand years.
• 1:01:24
  So what can this thing do?
• 1:01:26
  Well, we can start looking at it 10 years from now, maybe,
• 1:01:30
  and see what happens.
• 1:01:32
  I love it.
• 1:01:33
  Yeah.
• 1:01:33
  So you're at short-term bullish, intermediate-term,
• 1:01:37
  bearish and that long-term ultra bullish oh yeah long-term i'm maxi right i think it's going to eat
• 1:01:42
  up a big chunk of wealth assets for sure um i've actually done this thing where i've um actually
• 1:01:48
  not i'm not self-custody anymore is that because of personal like security risk yeah that that i
• 1:01:56
  think you'll see a lot more people that have been in the space a long time um and now and they'll
• 1:02:01
  we were just in institutional day here at
• 1:02:04
  Honey Badger Conference and
• 1:02:05
  the banks are saying, oh the lollies whales
• 1:02:08
  are coming in and they don't want to hold their coins anymore
• 1:02:10
  because of the personal OPSEC
• 1:02:12
  that does not apply to everyone else
• 1:02:14
  everyone else should self custody
• 1:02:16
  because we want the
• 1:02:18
  custody to be decentralized, it's fundamental
• 1:02:20
  but what I'm doing
• 1:02:22
  is I'm selling a lot of this
• 1:02:24
  liquidity to go back
• 1:02:26
  into the ecosystem
• 1:02:27
  the startup ecosystem, the picks
• 1:02:30
  shovels, the things that will support Bitcoin's infrastructure moving forward so it can have this
• 1:02:36
  future, it will have this future. I like to be part of it. Also, the work with SwissBlock now
• 1:02:45
  is starting to ramp up. So as this whole institutional adoption is coming in, we think
• 1:02:53
  that the Bloombergs of this world will come in as well and they'll want to come in and represent
• 1:02:57
  the data from Bitcoin and represent that to TradFi.
• 1:03:01
  And we think that it's, you know, we've been doing this for 10 years and we'd like to have
• 1:03:06
  a shot at actually doing this very well native to the industry with the Bitcoin ethos.
• 1:03:12
  So we've launched a whole bunch of institutional grade publications.
• 1:03:17
  They predict price.
• 1:03:18
  It's using 10 year old frameworks that have been very robust.
• 1:03:22
  And I always spun up, you know, because my heart's with retail.
• 1:03:25
  so I've done Bitcoin Vector Lite
• 1:03:28
  the institutional product is Bitcoin Vector
• 1:03:31
  the Lite version is for retail to assist stacking assets
• 1:03:34
  and just giving a read on the market
• 1:03:37
  so you don't freak out when the market's pulling back
• 1:03:39
  you know okay it's cool it's doing its thing
• 1:03:41
  and that was expected and these are good prices to buy at
• 1:03:45
  so is this a rebirth of the substack?
• 1:03:49
  that channel's a rebirth thing but it's a different thing
• 1:03:53
  it's not for traders
• 1:03:55
  you can try and trade with it.
• 1:03:58
  It's pretty good.
• 1:04:00
  But if you're a trader,
• 1:04:01
  you should use an institutional product
• 1:04:02
  which for life signals.
• 1:04:05
  But the whole premise of this
• 1:04:07
  is to provide a data product
• 1:04:09
  that's going to represent our industry.
• 1:04:12
  And so right now,
• 1:04:13
  we're wanting to get the reach out there
• 1:04:14
  so that the data within Bitcoin
• 1:04:19
  and these digital assets ecosystems
• 1:04:22
  is represented within the industry.
• 1:04:25
  I think that'd be pretty cool.
• 1:04:26
  So when you say you sold your Bitcoin to put into some of these startups,
• 1:04:29
  do you think we're at the point where Bitcoin businesses
• 1:04:32
  will be able to outperform Bitcoin?
• 1:04:34
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:04:35
  Those that got in on the seed,
• 1:04:37
  the earliest investment rounds of Coinbase,
• 1:04:41
  which was a huge success,
• 1:04:43
  outperformed Bitcoin by a factor of 0.5,
• 1:04:46
  meaning they got half their Bitcoins back.
• 1:04:50
  My first investment in the space was Exodus Wallet in 2018.
• 1:04:55
  16, 15, 16, around that time, that outperformed Bitcoin by, it's public now, 2 to 3x.
• 1:05:03
  So I got two to three times my Bitcoin value back.
• 1:05:07
  And back then, Bitcoin was growing by 100% annualized growth rate.
• 1:05:11
  So it was really hard.
• 1:05:12
  And back in the Coinbase day, it was growing sometimes 1,000%, right?
• 1:05:15
  So it was really hard to outperform Bitcoin.
• 1:05:18
  Now, if you know what you're doing, it's still very high risk because a lot of these
• 1:05:22
  companies go belly up.
• 1:05:23
  but I think it's relatively safe bet
• 1:05:26
  that these companies would significantly do
• 1:05:30
  more than the two to three X
• 1:05:31
  if you get onto a winner
• 1:05:32
  and if you get a loser,
• 1:05:34
  hey, that was a good well-spent experiment
• 1:05:37
  to show this thing doesn't work
• 1:05:40
  or you've got to have a lot of failures for successes.
• 1:05:44
  And what are the kind of businesses
• 1:05:45
  that you're looking at?
• 1:05:47
  Mostly stuff that I can have a hand
• 1:05:50
  in with my existing knowledge
• 1:05:52
  with knowing markets, knowing how hedge funds work,
• 1:05:58
  a bit of crossover with the banking system and TradeFi.
• 1:06:03
  So, for example, I invested in DebiFi,
• 1:06:06
  which is the, you know, they provide a platform
• 1:06:11
  where you can get a private key,
• 1:06:14
  lock your Bitcoin into an escrow
• 1:06:16
  and get a USD loan or a fiat loan
• 1:06:19
  so you can borrow against your Bitcoin.
• 1:06:21
  but you can do it with a private key.
• 1:06:23
  So invested in that,
• 1:06:26
  probably going to do something in the space
• 1:06:28
  by providing some TradFi liquidity into that as well.
• 1:06:33
  That's like a perfect thing for me.
• 1:06:35
  Because you can get the lenders to come into the platform.
• 1:06:37
  Yeah, I'm in TradFi sort of,
• 1:06:39
  like with the overlap of hedge funds.
• 1:06:42
  And yeah, so let's go get some USD
• 1:06:49
  and send it to the Bitcoin as well.
• 1:06:52
  And that should be profitable.
• 1:06:54
  And I really like the idea of having a profitable business
• 1:06:58
  that incentivizes self-custody.
• 1:07:02
  The more self-custody people that are out there,
• 1:07:05
  the more I'm going to be able to lend to.
• 1:07:07
  So that's what I like about that one.
• 1:07:11
  It's a weird world, isn't it?
• 1:07:12
  I'm not self-custody, but I won't even encourage it.
• 1:07:14
  But you're trying to push it.
• 1:07:14
  Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  Yeah.
• 1:07:16
  Yeah.
• 1:07:16
  Well, if you're putting all your money into Bitcoin businesses, you've got nothing to self-custody.
• 1:07:21
  It's decentralized custody.
• 1:07:23
  It's just being spread out amongst a bunch of other people.
• 1:07:27
  They're holding your Bitcoin for you.
• 1:07:28
  Yeah.
• 1:07:29
  A lot of them hold Bitcoin treasuries.
• 1:07:32
  Even that de-risks it.
• 1:07:33
  Even if the startup goes barely up, you probably get the Bitcoin value back of what's in the treasury.
• 1:07:37
  Yeah.
• 1:07:38
  Are you investing in any of the Bitcoin, like the pure play Bitcoin treasury plays?
• 1:07:43
  Yeah.
• 1:07:44
  I hold MicroStrategy.
• 1:07:45
  I've invested in Adam Back's BSDR
• 1:07:49
  because it's a bull market.
• 1:07:52
  It's a bull market.
• 1:07:53
  MNav will expand.
• 1:07:55
  I don't want to hold that in the bear market
• 1:07:57
  because I expect to compress.
• 1:07:58
  But we've had that conversation around
• 1:08:00
  I'm not a hodler through the entire cycle.
• 1:08:04
  I think these ones will work really well as well
• 1:08:06
  long term.
• 1:08:08
  They will just have higher expansion
• 1:08:10
  and higher compression along the way.
• 1:08:13
  I do not like that it centralizes the supply.
• 1:08:16
  And I think that's a risk on the system.
• 1:08:19
  Yeah, I agree.
• 1:08:20
  I've struggled to get my head properly
• 1:08:22
  around the Bitcoin treasury companies,
• 1:08:24
  not in terms of whether they are sustainable
• 1:08:26
  as a business model,
• 1:08:27
  but whether it's good for Bitcoin.
• 1:08:29
  And the truth is,
• 1:08:30
  it doesn't matter what I say.
• 1:08:31
  Bitcoin's money for enemies.
• 1:08:32
  People can do with it what they want.
• 1:08:34
  But it's not the future that I maybe saw.
• 1:08:36
  Yeah, well, the thing with it is
• 1:08:39
  Bitcoin needs capital.
• 1:08:41
  If it's going to flip gold and it's going to flip fiat,
• 1:08:45
  actually that's what we're really talking about is ending fiat,
• 1:08:49
  it needs to get bigger and it's got to swallow up big chunks of capital.
• 1:08:53
  And so the ETS and these equity-based treasury companies allow easy access
• 1:08:59
  and they suck in from traditional bond markets.
• 1:09:05
  They're eating huge amounts of capital.
• 1:09:07
  So that's the good side.
• 1:09:09
  The bad side is that it makes Bitcoin more brittle because, hey, what if the US government decides this Bitcoin thing looks like gold?
• 1:09:19
  We could back it.
• 1:09:20
  We could back our US dollar with Bitcoin.
• 1:09:24
  We've done that before.
• 1:09:26
  Why don't we just nationalize all the gold back into our digital Fort Knox?
• 1:09:31
  And the low-hanging fruit would be all these public listed companies.
• 1:09:36
  They'd probably do it through an offering.
• 1:09:37
  but they can nationalize the gold
• 1:09:40
  and the Bitcoin
• 1:09:42
  and they've done it before
• 1:09:44
  so that's a risk
• 1:09:46
  That's not a 0% risk
• 1:09:49
  I could see that future
• 1:09:50
  It's happened before
• 1:09:51
  and then what happens when the big bags
• 1:09:54
  they didn't nationalize all the gold
• 1:09:56
  India had gold
• 1:09:57
  but they managed to put the money
• 1:10:00
  back onto
• 1:10:01
  into one location
• 1:10:04
  which means that you can then
• 1:10:06
  close that redeemability, which happened in 1921, you're back to fear. And so I think
• 1:10:14
  that that's a decent risk. The idea of going from fiat to Bitcoin and back to fiat is one
• 1:10:21
  of the scariest propositions. I know, right? We don't need that to happen.
• 1:10:24
  People will say, oh, we tried that before it didn't work, you know? And so-
• 1:10:28
  True fiat has never been tried. Oh, you know, true fiat is actually probably
• 1:10:35
  what holds the whole world up right now because when we cite all the cases of fiat dying in
• 1:10:40
  the past, they were localized countries that went to fiat because they mismanaged themselves
• 1:10:45
  so bad and they debased themselves and became fiat and they blew up immediately. And what
• 1:10:51
  happened was we had the entire world, after World War II, we had all the worlds agree
• 1:11:01
  that the US was going to be good to use the US dollar.
• 1:11:08
  The New Deal was that.
• 1:11:10
  And then the US said, well, it's still gold backed,
• 1:11:12
  but all the gold is going to be in Fort Knox.
• 1:11:15
  And so that whole process when the redeemability got snipped
• 1:11:21
  meant that we managed to rug the entire world to fiat
• 1:11:26
  all at the same time.
• 1:11:27
  And that's what's holding it up because we're in the same boat.
• 1:11:31
  we're all debasing together.
• 1:11:33
  Whereas in the past,
• 1:11:35
  only one country would debase to oblivion.
• 1:11:39
  And so let's see how long it lasts for.
• 1:11:42
  But it's probably not going to be pretty.
• 1:11:44
  No, I think it's...
• 1:11:46
  I mean, who knows if even that gold
• 1:11:48
  is still in Fort Knox as well.
• 1:11:49
  Right? No audit.
• 1:11:51
  Yeah.
• 1:11:52
  We were promised a live stream audit by Elon Musk
• 1:11:54
  and I wonder why that never happened.
• 1:11:56
  Yeah, well, yeah, that would have been good.
• 1:11:58
  They've fallen out now, so...
• 1:12:00
  True.
• 1:12:00
  but thank you so much
• 1:12:01
  this Willie
• 1:12:02
  this has been good
• 1:12:02
  we better get to the conference
• 1:12:04
  oh yeah Danny
• 1:12:05
  let's go
• 1:12:05
  but thank you man
• 1:12:07
  that was great
• 1:12:07
  alright