Latest / What Bitcoin Did / Is The Bitcoin Power Law Broken? | Matthew Mezinskis
Transcript
- 0:00The way that power growth manifests itself is, in the case of Bitcoin, is it has started
- 0:07out higher in the early years.
- 0:09It was, you know, a thousand percent a year, right, on a curve, on a trend.
- 0:12Now it's down to about 40 percent per year on a trend.
- 0:15I think that it's totally plausible that the trend could change.
- 0:19I also think it's plausible that Bitcoin could change other trends in the world.
- 0:23Common sense tells us constant growth is faster than proportional growth.
- 0:26It's going to be good.
- 0:27It's going to be good for Bitcoin holders.
- 0:28On the one hand, the number go up. But on the other hand, this is where you get into the idea of, you know, what does that actually mean? Is TradFi co-opting the system? Can anyone claim any Bitcoins on an ETF? Can you withdraw Bitcoins from exchanges after 10 years? There are a lot of things that could play into this. And by the way, if some of those play out, perhaps as some entrenched players in Bitcoin want, then I think, yeah, Bitcoin could go exponential. It could match. It could mirror the exponential growth rate of the rest of the financial system.
- 0:58Matthew, welcome to the show, man. One of my favorite quarterly interviews that I do.
- 1:08You know what? Last time we were on the show, we were talking about the power law,
- 1:11and we were pretty much at the bottom of the trend. And I think we were kind of calling it
- 1:16the bottom, if not close to the bottom. And then since then, Bitcoin price has gone below
- 1:21the power law trend. And I don't know, does that mean it's broken? Is the power law broken?
- 1:26Yeah, great question, Danny. You know, I come on your show every quarter or so and talk about this stuff a lot. And for old listeners, maybe it's a little bit repetitive, but just very, very briefly.
- 1:41when we're doing trends like this and i've been doing it for a long time you know a little bit
- 1:47less than than giovanni he's kind of got his name to the power law uh he first posted it on reddit
- 1:53in 2018 fall something like that on the price i did it in around december of that year but
- 2:00it's important to remember that we're not trying to model like channels or elliott wave stuff
- 2:07these lines on charts, ABC corrections. If this level of support breaks, then it's over for this
- 2:16amount of months. All of that stuff can be done. I mean, people can definitely do that and they do.
- 2:21And there's no shortage of articles of that on TradingView or YouTube thumbnails. But
- 2:24with the general idea of what I'm trying to do when I look at the price or the money supply
- 2:32is I'm just trying to gauge a relative level of change or the relative growth and see how the
- 2:41asset is sitting, you know, relative to the range of observations in the past. So just looking at
- 2:50the statistical probabilities, it can always be that it sort of goes lower. And we can look at
- 2:55some good charts today to talk about that. But it's not anything where you say, okay, if it goes
- 3:01past this level of support, it's definitely broken or it's over. So another way to look at that
- 3:08is you just have to see if Bitcoin is following this power law. And again, just quick, quick,
- 3:16quick refresher is a power law is not constant growth. Constant growth, like we talk about with
- 3:23our broker, or if you're looking at the stock market or the bond market, you're looking at bond
- 3:28yields, yield to maturity, IRRs, or just returns, right? Those are constant returns that you expect
- 3:33to get every year. So 10% a year, 12% a year. And it's actually getting a little bit faster,
- 3:38which we can talk about on the show as well. But in general, it's constant growth, right,
- 3:45is what we try to achieve in our stock portfolios. With Bitcoin, it's interesting.
- 3:49If you look at the price over a long time, you have a sort of very slightly decelerating rate
- 3:56of growth. So it's not constant. But there is still a relationship here and it's a power
- 4:01relationship. So it's actually the rate of growth is proportional to many things. It's actually
- 4:06proportional to addresses, to hash rate, and it's also proportional to time, to actual existence of
- 4:12time in the system. How long the system has been around. Bitcoin has a proportional relationship,
- 4:20say, till the next doubling, that in this particular case, that proportionality does
- 4:26stay constant. And the number is about 13% a year. So again, I just try to put that broad,
- 4:33broad overview and talk about like the power law breaking. I think it gets people that are even in
- 4:38the space like looking at this from an analytical view of the power law, that kind of wonder, okay,
- 4:43did the Bitcoin gold power law break because that thing looks really skewed? And still the answer is
- 4:47No, because relative to all the other trends that we can judge Bitcoin on, that's an exponential
- 4:55trend, logarithmic, linear. Bitcoin is totally, totally on par with a power curve or a power
- 5:04trend. I know a lot of people get triggered when you say power law, but that's the scientific name
- 5:08for it. But in any event, it's a sustainable growth rate and we can look at it. It's certainly
- 5:16relative to the probabilities, the range of observations in the past, the probability is
- 5:20very, very, it's showing not a lot of likelihood that it breaks too much lower. But again, it can
- 5:29always surprise us to the downside of the upside. So basically, that's my overall disclaimer. No,
- 5:35it's not at all broken. And I can try to show that with some just simple, simple charts here.
- 5:40Okay. But before we do get into the charts, one of the reasons that people have sort of PTSD
- 5:45around a lot of these things like the power law is because of what happened with stock to flow and
- 5:51how people became very dogmatic and never admitted that that whole model broke. What would have to
- 5:57happen for you to say the power law is broken? Is there something that can happen that breaks it,
- 6:01in your opinion? Yep. Good question. Great question. And again, even though I've been
- 6:05tracking this one for a long time, I've also been tracking Bitcoin as base money for a long time,
- 6:10looking at these major sort of macro trends, money supply versus Bitcoin UTXOs, the values of those
- 6:15things. There's going to have to be a lot that would happen to say that it's not a power law
- 6:22anymore. And again, it's totally possible. I'm not at all married to the idea that it needs to
- 6:26stay a power law or a power curve, power regression, however you want to say it.
- 6:32The challenge with throwing a lot of different models out here, and you'll see it, by the way,
- 6:38anytime you see like a straight line, people trying to take a straight line to Bitcoin's trend
- 6:42and the chart is only log linear, all right, that means log scale on the Y, linear, just normal time
- 6:48on the X axis, they're trying to shoehorn it into exponential growth. And it just doesn't do that.
- 6:54So again, I would say that. But if you would look at other types of models like stock to flow,
- 7:02they were also trying to shoehorn in some exponential growth factors into the price
- 7:10when Bitcoin doesn't do that.
- 7:13So it's a bit more confusing with stock-to-flow
- 7:17because in fact, it is a power law.
- 7:20He used the power equation to run through it,
- 7:22but he was running it over the stock-to-flow value over time,
- 7:28which in itself is about a 16% per year negative kegger.
- 7:33If you wanted to average it out,
- 7:36the supply of bitcoins decreases 16% per year.
- 7:41And it's not even average, right?
- 7:42It's not a constant 60%.
- 7:43We know that it halves every four years.
- 7:45So he's trying to shoehorn in a power law
- 7:49over some features of Bitcoin, which are exponential.
- 7:53And that's why it didn't work.
- 7:54Again, it might be a little bit technical there,
- 7:57but I've talked about it a lot as well.
- 7:59It's just, you know, he was trying to compare,
- 8:03say the Bitcoin, like back when he was doing these early models, 2019, 2020, he was trying to compare,
- 8:11say, the growth of gold or the growth of silver to the growth of Bitcoin.
- 8:16That is actually the units that came out of the ground in gold and silver's case or the UTXOs
- 8:21that would come onto the scene every 10 minutes. Everybody knows intuitively that Bitcoin's rate
- 8:27of growth declines, right? It declines there. It actually, again, that might even sound like
- 8:33power law when I said that, but it's an actual exponential rate of growth. The halving every
- 8:39four years, basically, it's a negative 16% per year on average. And he was trying to compare that
- 8:44to something like gold and silver, which when those ounces come out of the ground, 1.8% in
- 8:52gold's case, and actually 1.5% in silver's case, even less, those are exponential factors. They
- 8:58come out every year, about 1.5% for silver, 1.8% for gold. So they're just by nature simply
- 9:05incompatible with what Bitcoin does. And so there was a lot of confusion around that model. And it
- 9:13just, like I said before, you're trying to shoehorn in. He was actually using a power equation,
- 9:19But he was using it with this, a lot of features of Bitcoin that were exponential and it just wouldn't work. Whereas the power law, which we talk about with Bitcoin, we're just taking it purely on the signal that Bitcoin produces, whether it be addresses, whether it be hash rate, whether it be price.
- 9:36we're not even taking into account the having. We're just looking at the way that price grows
- 9:42over time or the way that addresses grow over time. It's like a pure signal, single variable,
- 9:48single unknown variable and running it. And the regression, the relationship is holding up very,
- 9:54very well. So this is kind of, these are some of the answers that I would get there
- 10:02to that question. I don't know if that fully answers it, if you have any more
- 10:06I'm happy to follow up on.
- 10:08If you hold Bitcoin long enough,
- 10:10there's going to come a time when you need some dollars.
- 10:12It might be a tax bill, a business expense,
- 10:14life getting in the way,
- 10:15but whatever it is, it might come at a time
- 10:16when you don't want to sell your Bitcoin.
- 10:18That's where Ledin comes in.
- 10:20Ledin lets you borrow against your Bitcoin instead
- 10:22with tiered rates that go as low as 9.25%.
- 10:24So you don't have to sell your stack if you don't want to.
- 10:28Ledin have operated through every market cycle since 2018
- 10:30and have originated over $11 billion in loans.
- 10:33But the important part for me
- 10:34is the way Ledin handles these loans.
- 10:36Your collateral is held in custody and never lent out to generate interest.
- 10:40And Ledin's more than just loans.
- 10:42Tether Gold is now live alongside your Bitcoin with instant trading across 10 pairs.
- 10:46And later this year, you'll be able to borrow against gold in the same way that you do with Bitcoin.
- 10:51Ledin really is an awesome company.
- 10:52I've used them multiple times.
- 10:54The applications have taken me less than 15 minutes and you have the dollars in your account within hours.
- 10:58If you want to check out Ledin, go to ledn.io and use the code WBD for 0.25% off your first loan.
- 11:05That's leden.io and use the code WBD
- 11:09You wouldn't reuse a Bitcoin address
- 11:10So why does your phone broadcast the same identifier for life?
- 11:14Every SIM has a static ID
- 11:16And carriers, ad networks and bad actors all use it to track you
- 11:19The big carriers have been caught selling that data over and over again
- 11:23CAPE is America's privacy first mobile carrier
- 11:26Their identifier rotation feature changes your ID every 24 hours
- 11:30So you look like a different subscriber every single day
- 11:32And SIM swaps are off the table
- 11:34Your number can't move without a 24-word phrase that only you hold.
- 11:38There's also no name at sign up, no social security number, and there's no profile to
- 11:42build on you.
- 11:43If you're a Bitcoiner in America, I honestly don't know why you'd use any other network.
- 11:47You can head over to cape.co forward slash WBD and use the code WBD for 33% off your
- 11:53first six months.
- 11:54That's C-A-P-E dot co forward slash WBD.
- 11:58If you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to listen up.
- 12:02spot bitcoin etfs provide price exposure to bitcoin not direct ownership you can't withdraw
- 12:08it you can't self-custody it and they charge you a management fee every year to hold it
- 12:12well swan recently announced swan real bitcoin exchange and it's ready to use right now rbx is a
- 12:18structured in-kind exchange that converts your spot bitcoin etf shares into real on-chain bitcoin
- 12:23it does that without selling on the open market and it's designed to support a tax efficient
- 12:27outcome. So for example, if you hold GBTC, you're paying 1.5% a year in management fees for Bitcoin
- 12:33price exposure. But by swapping GBTC for real Bitcoin with RBX, you can drop that figure as
- 12:38low as 0% by just holding it in self-custody. This is designed in a way that maintains your
- 12:44cost basis and in a manner that supports the deferral of capital gains tax. So if you own a
- 12:48Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to talk to Swan Private about RBX today. Head over
- 12:55to swan forward slash WBD and booking a call with one of their team That swan forward slash WBD So the question that I would have around that is I guess two things Let start on what would
- 13:08actually have to happen for you to say, yes, this is broken. Yeah. It's going to break or not be a
- 13:16model that is applicable if another traditional basic scientific regression fits the price
- 13:26the address growth the hash rate better um now there is a grand theory that i have around a lot
- 13:34of this stuff uh it primarily resolves around uh revolves around exponential growth and power
- 13:40growth mostly because those are the two types of growth that uh well really it's just exponential
- 13:46growth that is most prevalent in the financial world. And that's primarily driven by the interest
- 13:50rate. So your bank loan, your mortgage, whatever you are paying on capital that you borrow to
- 13:58acquire assets, whether it be a house, car, something for your business, that's exponential
- 14:02growth. So when you have bank loan, that's 5%, that's fixed constant growth that you got to pay
- 14:08per year. That's your cost. That's the bank's income. And of course, there are spreads on that.
- 14:13And yes, the rates can go up and down. That's true. They do change with the market. But as time goes on, whether it's a little bit up, a little bit down, you're still paying this sort of constant fixed rate of capital. And so it is hard to imagine. And I don't want to go too far off on this tangent with the answer, but it is hard to imagine if Bitcoin's growth right now.
- 14:37So basically, the way that power growth manifests itself is, in the case of Bitcoin, is it has started out higher in the early years.
- 14:44It was, you know, 1,000% a year, right, on a curve, on a trend.
- 14:48Now it's down to about 40% per year on a trend.
- 14:53There will come a point, and this plays into something that, you know, Michael Saylor talks about, is we all know basically Saylor's cost of capital.
- 15:01We've seen that the market's trying to liquidate Saylor in the last couple weeks, right?
- 15:05With Stretch really being stretched as far as keeping the buck.
- 15:09And his cost of capital is 10%, 11%, whatever it is, right?
- 15:14But that's a fixed cost of capital.
- 15:15And as long as Bitcoin on a trend grows more than that,
- 15:20Saylor is fine.
- 15:21His shareholders are fine.
- 15:22Strategy is fine.
- 15:24But if Bitcoin ever started to grow less than 10%,
- 15:29Saylor's going to have to shrink the cost of his capital.
- 15:31or he would start to have to shed some coins and he would have some liquidity problems.
- 15:38He's a long way from that. And I cannot just, just to back of the envelope, even though Bitcoin
- 15:44on a trend is growing about 40% per year and declining, that means it's doubling every two
- 15:48years, 40% per year is doubling every two years. But that, that growth is declining in a, in a,
- 15:54in a compound fashion, like the rate is shrinking and the doubling time is increasing, right?
- 16:01But it takes a long time to get to that 10% as we're all modeling it in the power curve space at the moment.
- 16:08It's going to take to about 2070 to get there.
- 16:11The fireworks are going to happen much sooner.
- 16:13I think probably in the 2030s up to 2040 for a variety of reasons.
- 16:17We could talk about this.
- 16:19When you say fireworks, what do you mean?
- 16:22Yeah, so I'm already getting ahead of myself sort of in the grand theory.
- 16:24And, you know, we can look at some charts to illustrate this.
- 16:28Should we come back to that then?
- 16:29Because I have some other questions that are maybe a bit more of the groundwork before we get to that.
- 16:33Yeah, yeah, we can do that.
- 16:35But again, just to let me make sure I answer your question, though, because about breaking or not, whatever.
- 16:40If it stops being a power law visually on the chart, if the R squared starts to shrink,
- 16:47if something like an exponential trend looks better over the curve, over the price action of Bitcoin or the address growth or anything,
- 16:54then Bitcoin would stop to be a power law.
- 16:57But we're nowhere near that right now.
- 16:59nowhere near that right now. So the one thing that I want to try and get to the bottom of,
- 17:03because we've spoken about this before, but I don't know if I fully understand the reasoning,
- 17:07is you say that Bitcoin can't follow an exponential trend, whereas traditional financial
- 17:12assets do follow an exponential trend. Why is that? Yeah. Well, I haven't said it can't. I just
- 17:18said that it is not. And that's the interesting thing. So again, Giovanni's been following this
- 17:24since about fall of 2018, myself, at the end of the year, 2018.
- 17:31And at the time, that was the best looking trend that would fit.
- 17:36And it wasn't even hard to really find that.
- 17:37You just, you know, you can plot it on Excel and look at the trend automatically on the
- 17:42curve, right?
- 17:42Or Google Sheets.
- 17:46In the early days, like 2014, 2013 on Bitcoin Talk, there was this kind of relatively well-known
- 17:52account called Tro Lolo Lo. And he was doing the same thing. I was trying to sort of update the
- 17:58work that he was doing. But he was actually finding a logarithmic trend, which is actually
- 18:02more explosive at the beginning and usually gradual, more gradual growth at the later
- 18:10periods of the observations. It's a little bit different than power law. But brass taxes,
- 18:17Bitcoin at the early, early days kind of did look like that with the explosive growth.
- 18:22And then from about 2016, 2017, it started to settle into this trend, which is very sustainable,
- 18:29sort of gradually decelerating growth every year, but still very high growth for anybody.
- 18:35And by the way, if you catch the bottoms and then it gets back to trend, you can get well
- 18:38over that, which we can look at just for fun, some scenarios.
- 18:42that's an example already right there where Bitcoin seemed to be following one trend and
- 18:48it actually turned out it was following another which is power trend and I'm totally open by the
- 18:52way that it could follow an exponential trend in the future and by the way that is a very plausible
- 18:58scenario in my view considering the rest of the financial world follows exponential trends we have
- 19:03all of our interest rates on our credit which are exponential trends and it really it does come you
- 19:10You know, Saylor has this 10% cost of capital that everybody knows about.
- 19:14It does play into sort of my grand theory about how it could all work out, which, again, we can table towards the end of the episode once we look at some charts.
- 19:22I think that it's totally plausible that the trend could change.
- 19:27I also think it's plausible that Bitcoin could change other trends in the world, which would probably be the more cypherpunk interesting view.
- 19:34But bottom line of all this is I'm just trying to look at this through the lens of more statistics and math rather than kind of, you know, one off blog posts or whatever YouTube thumbnails, because I've been I've been charting this stuff for a long time.
- 19:47And trust me, I'll tell you if I notice that it's it's breaking.
- 19:52I like the idea of Bitcoin pulling the financial world like that.
- 19:56I guess that is Bitcoin eating the financial system is it pulling everything into its time time preference.
- 20:01Yeah.
- 20:01And I can explain that via the math.
- 20:05So I think that would be...
- 20:07Let's get into the chart.
- 20:07Can you pull up and we'll go through it?
- 20:09Yeah, absolutely.
- 20:10So here's a simple one.
- 20:11I've shown this in a variety of ways before.
- 20:17This is just even simpler
- 20:18because I've also shown this with stock to flow,
- 20:23but I'm sort of redoing my system
- 20:24so I don't have it at the moment.
- 20:25So here I'm showing you the price of Bitcoin
- 20:28up until today as we speak.
- 20:30Everybody knows this chart, log linear. This is log linear, right? And as you can see, it looks
- 20:35kind of like a rainbow, right? It doesn't look like a straight line, but I'm showing you, I'm
- 20:38shoehorning in an exponential trend. So the exponential trend, for those that remember,
- 20:44right? It's a straight line on log linear. So here's the exponential. When I put it on,
- 20:48straight line. But this curved line is the power curve. And yes, we are well below it. We are well
- 20:55below it, all right? In the past, we've also been well below it. We've also been well above it.
- 21:00But if you just look, just use your eyes, you don't even have to look at the map.
- 21:03You can see the nice rainbow power trend looks much better on Bitcoin's price.
- 21:09And when we say Bitcoin's price, it doesn't just mean price.
- 21:10It means supply, demand, the interaction of actors in the market.
- 21:15You know, it can be a proxy for adoption itself.
- 21:18So it's a lot.
- 21:18There's a lot going on when we look at price versus if I put on exponential and let's just
- 21:24even take the power curve off. Do you think that looks better or worse? Definitely worse.
- 21:32And you can see it. You really can't, like you can just use the eye test for a lot of this stuff.
- 21:37So we can shoehorn in exponential trends. The key is to not get too married, I would say,
- 21:44to any of them. But yeah, if we just look at the exponential trend here, Bitcoin hasn't hit it
- 21:50since 2022. I mean, it just clearly doesn't work. Yeah, exactly four years ago. And by the way,
- 21:55stock to flow gives a very similar effect, which again, I was trying to sort of verbosely go through
- 22:02that earlier. But there are aspects of Bitcoin's system that are exponential, which by the way,
- 22:09the 50 Bitcoins having every four years, that is, it's a negative 16% per year. That is what
- 22:14happens. It just happens in a weird way. Regardless, if you try to model that in and then stick a power
- 22:18law on it, which is what he did, it's shoehorning and it's not fully scale invariant. What a power
- 22:25law is, it's scale invariant. Anywhere on the curve that you pick it, the growth will be proportional
- 22:31relative to where it is at that point in time. So you can just see it doesn't work.
- 22:38And now let's look at the overall CAGR here. All right. I'm going to show you down here.
- 22:43It's a great CAGR if we were still on it. It's 108% per year. See it? 108% per year. Okay.
- 22:51And what this is saying is any point on the exponential curve that we would pick,
- 22:57it doesn't matter where, you would grow at 108%. If you do that present value,
- 23:02future value calculation that finance people know how to do, it will be 108. It just doesn't do that.
- 23:08So a much better model is a very simple power curve. All right. So if we take off exponential now, we can see it tracks it and we'll go into the details here. But if I go down to my very simple calculations here. Now, CAGR of power is actually higher, but that's irrelevant. It's just taking the first point on the power curve. And I go back to Bitcoin P today, May 2022 till today, which the power curve is about 140,000 at the moment, $140,000.
- 23:36So you can see how far under we are, right, at 62.
- 23:42It doesn't make sense, right?
- 23:44Because it's not a constant growth rate.
- 23:48What it is is scale invariant, which we just have to look at the trailing 12 month in the power.
- 23:53You see 40.2% right there, 40.2%.
- 23:56That's the power laws growth rate at the moment.
- 23:59But that declines every year.
- 24:01And just to see as well, what does power growth look like in log log?
- 24:05which means we took take all the dates which are numbers not dates you have to take the actual
- 24:10numbers and starts with genesis block of one back in january 2009 you see it starts to become
- 24:17almost self-evident that it's growing according to powell you see it fits very well yes we're under
- 24:24but we've also been under there in the past it fits really well but you would have to say probably
- 24:29the last 18 months two years is the least well it's fit in its history by the looks of it right
- 24:34because it has not exploded above.
- 24:37But this is where, again,
- 24:38you know,
- 24:40not to toot my own horn, Danny,
- 24:42but I mean, you just,
- 24:43people got to be,
- 24:44people got to be modest here.
- 24:47They got to, you know,
- 24:50I was,
- 24:51all right, let's just go in.
- 24:51Let's go into the,
- 24:52to the, to the detail.
- 24:55Here's, here's one
- 24:56I do all the time on my stream.
- 24:58This is quantile regression.
- 24:59Okay, so we're moving to just showing
- 25:00the one curve, the OLS,
- 25:02which is the main,
- 25:03think of it as the mean regression it's basically just yeah it's it's it's analogous to the mean
- 25:08now we're looking at something that uh is analogous actually to the median but it's trying to find
- 25:16all different levels of of uh a certain level of price like what would be a 10th percentile zero
- 25:23percentile 20th percentile uh and the 50th percentile is actually the median so that they
- 25:28are slightly different it's a slightly different analysis it's called quantile regression or a
- 25:32percentile quantile regression. There's two. Now I'm showing you the mean and the median.
- 25:36There's just two different ways to do it. They're both power. They're well statistically significant
- 25:41within each other. I mean, statistically, well, the relationship is actually statistically
- 25:51insignificant. They're so close together that you could say one or the other is the best way to do
- 25:56it Basically the same thing Yeah Right So can I ask you a question on this Because Like the reason I said the last 18 months two years or whatever looks the worst it looked is because if you go back to that 2017 one sure there loads of time that it well above that median line
- 26:10But there's also plenty of time that it's below. And it cuts through just by eyeballing it what you would imagine to be roughly the middle.
- 26:16Whereas this time, it's like at our highs, we just got above it. It looks like that line needs to be pulled down in the last two years.
- 26:23Right. So this is where, again, I would say people need to be sort of modest when you're talking about YouTube thumbnails or whoever's predicting a million dollar Bitcoin, which by the way, Plan B predicted in the fall of 2025.
- 26:36He predicted that the price would be that way in the fall of 2025. He did it like two years prior.
- 26:41people gotta sort of not think about the clicks and think about the statistics and sort of just
- 26:48at the time adaptively adjusting your view to what you see so this is what i was doing i was
- 26:56looking at exactly the analysis that you said look at let's look at the q80 q90 so this what
- 27:01these quantiles will do they kind of they try to find their own median kind of they they try to
- 27:05take a range which would give us to the point where the median is precisely 50 50 all right so
- 27:1050% observations will be below the line, 50% above.
- 27:13And what they're doing is trying to find their own,
- 27:15I'm using the word median,
- 27:16but it's basically their own baseline
- 27:17to the percentage you tell it.
- 27:20So I say to the software,
- 27:22again, I'm an applied statistics guy,
- 27:24so I don't try to,
- 27:25I used to do a lot of this stuff by hand,
- 27:27actually, the power law,
- 27:28but anyway, AI makes it too easy now.
- 27:30So I say, give me the Q80.
- 27:32Give me the quantile approximately
- 27:34where I can look at this, all right?
- 27:37And I'm just going to show you the Q80
- 27:38versus let's say the median, all right?
- 27:40So I only have the median, I only have the Q80.
- 27:42So that red line slices through the data according to a power law, and it is showing you that basically 20% of the observations are above the line, 80% below.
- 27:56That's Q80.
- 27:57The Q50, median, 50-50.
- 27:59And the OLS, by the way, you think of it more like the mean, it's slightly different.
- 28:02Like I said, it's statistically almost the same thing as the Q50 over the long term.
- 28:06But anyway, so here we go.
- 28:07this is what I mean by people need to have some modesty. I was fully expecting on my stream. I
- 28:13was talking to people. My streams are there for everybody to see. I was saying, all right,
- 28:18we know about the four-year cycle, which by the way, we haven't talked about. We can get into that
- 28:22because that's another triggering point for people. But we know about the four-year cycle.
- 28:25We know about the power law. We know about Bitcoin's adoption. I'm looking forward to on
- 28:31my stream counting the days. You can find all these episodes I did. Let's count the days
- 28:36that Bitcoin was above the Q80, right? Back in 2021, 2017, 2013. Let's imagine that there's a way
- 28:45to sort of, you know, get ahead of the market and do that because I fully expect it to be similar
- 28:50like that. Things like hyper-Bitcoinization, all that stuff, it's nice to talk about,
- 28:54but the data suggests differently. It suggests a more gradual approach.
- 28:59When that did not happen, when that did not happen in the fall, right? We barely got to Q80,
- 29:05you see here, and Q90, Q100 is like, just forget about. But when we were in October,
- 29:10so here's August, by the way, and here's October, when we started to not hit those levels,
- 29:17and really fall down. And then Giovanni had a very interesting cycle analysis, which he has
- 29:22pointed, and I can, we can talk about this as well briefly. But it's basically trying to look
- 29:26at, so the power law here, this is looking at the main wiggle, the main trend, right,
- 29:30putting it in these straight lines on log-log.
- 29:33Of course, we can also look at the cycles,
- 29:35the wiggle within the main wiggle.
- 29:38Giovanni, in the spring,
- 29:40he made me want to try to do this analysis myself.
- 29:44He did sort of a cycle analysis
- 29:46where you look at the returns in log space,
- 29:48which you can't see them unless you look at log space,
- 29:51and you try to extract some cycles.
- 29:53Still using a power law underlying math,
- 29:56he found that there was a cycle about 4.2 years apart.
- 30:00All right. And to me, that even further validated it. But again, he did that in like March or
- 30:05February of this year. Let's still put ourselves in the mind of fall of 2020. He still had that
- 30:11analysis. He was talking about it. He said there'd be a drop in November. He was right. I was
- 30:15listening to him. And so I was very cautious to people. First of all, because the power law
- 30:21is strong the way that it shows its bans about relative risk. Second of all, because the cycles
- 30:27are a strong signal as well.
- 30:29And people were very, very quick
- 30:30to dismiss both of those things.
- 30:32How many times did we hear
- 30:33the four-year cycle was over
- 30:34in the fall of 2025, right?
- 30:37I think I said that a thousand times.
- 30:39Right, because we had this stable,
- 30:41nice growth and everything.
- 30:42When really, I think in reality,
- 30:43what happened,
- 30:44if you just look at this is,
- 30:45notice how quickly we got back
- 30:47to the median here.
- 30:48This was already in 2024, all right?
- 30:53Early 2024.
- 30:55What I think was really happening was
- 30:57ETFs. ETFs were onto the scene, right? It came out in January, 2024. And I think Wall Street
- 31:04started to front run this idea. Of course, Wall Street knows about the parallel. They know about
- 31:08every other model that they do with their quants. So they started to think, all right, well,
- 31:13this has obviously been a powder keg of 10 years, you know, politically suppressed idea,
- 31:19Bitcoin ETFs. We got to front run it. You saw that there's a lot of growth and it cooled off.
- 31:23And then again, a lot of growth at the end of 2024.
- 31:27All right.
- 31:28Both of which, by the way, are above the median.
- 31:30Let's just take just only show the median, which was really elevated growth compared to, say, the last four year cycles.
- 31:36Just keeping it simple, keeping it simple.
- 31:37In 2017, right, we didn't get to the median until 2017.
- 31:42Right.
- 31:43In 2021, we didn't get to the median until December of 2020.
- 31:47As I remember those days, well, COVID, everybody's locked down and all of a sudden Bitcoin prices exploding and meme stocks and everything.
- 31:53But notice how the explosion comes very quickly above the median.
- 31:57All right.
- 31:57In 2013 as well as the year of 2013, we got back to the median.
- 32:02So usually, and particularly that crypto winter, as it's called, the, you know, from 2013 top
- 32:07to 2017 top, spent a long time under the median, under the power law.
- 32:12And here we went deep.
- 32:14And when I say here, for those that are, maybe it's harder to listen to this podcast unless
- 32:18you're not watching.
- 32:18But for those in that, remember the 2022, you know, SBF gift to us all of, you know, puking really, really bad in in November 2022.
- 32:31Peter Zion is saying, you know, it's seventeen thousand dollars overvalued on Joe Rogan with price of sixteen thousand.
- 32:36Very, very deep, deep deaths of depths of depression.
- 32:40And it only took, you know, a year, basically a year, basically 2023.
- 32:49And all of a sudden, 2024 is kicking off and we're back to the median.
- 32:53That was a different trend.
- 32:54That was a different sort of cycle within the cycle.
- 32:57So you need to adapt a little bit.
- 32:58And what I saw was, and Giovanni also solidified this further for me, was with it's still the overall scheme seems to be a four-year trend, which we can get to.
- 33:08but we were just we couldn't stay above that that very strong ols or the median however you want to
- 33:16look at it you know the ols was even breaking down further and so i was just cautious you can
- 33:21find it on my streams i was saying guys like look i was hoping by this time october and november we
- 33:26were going to be counting the days above these q90 bands and just you know just having fun with this
- 33:30seeing okay how repeatable is this trend how strong is this trend um you know is this something
- 33:37that we can sort of really, really find some signaling. And the point was, we didn't. And
- 33:44there was a lot of people that were super bullish October, November saying the four-year cycle was
- 33:48over. It's just completely ignoring reality. And then all of a sudden, you know, November,
- 33:53we broke down below the trend itself. And then the start of the year, you know, metals are on
- 33:59tear as well. We broke down very, very fast. So yeah, it's not, no four-year cycle is repeatable
- 34:07in Bitcoin, but there is a four-year cycle. And if the thing is not doing exactly as you think it
- 34:13will, just be cautious. That's all I could say is be cautious. So look, that's my view. And it turned
- 34:19out to be the right way to look at this in the fall. The thing that keeps me up at night with
- 34:24Bitcoin cold storage isn't Bitcoin failing, it's my setup failing. And this is where Anchor Watch
- 34:29comes in. With Anchor Watch, your Bitcoin's insured with your own A-plus rated Lloyds of
- 34:33London insurance policy and all Bitcoins held in their time-locked multi-sig vaults. So you have
- 34:38the peace of mind knowing your Bitcoin's insured while not giving up custody. So whether you're
- 34:42worried about inheritance planning, wrench attacks, natural disasters, or just your own silly mistakes,
- 34:47you're protected by AnchorWatch. Rates for fully insured custody start as low as 0.55%
- 34:51and are available for individual and commercial customers in the US. You can speak to AnchorWatch
- 34:56for a quote and for more details about your security options and coverage, visit anchorwatch.com
- 35:01today. That's anchorwatch.com. Do you want to pay less in taxes and stack more Bitcoin? Of course you
- 35:07do. Well, by mining Bitcoin with Blockway, you can. Under section 168k of the US tax code,
- 35:12Bitcoin mining servers qualify for 100% bonus depreciation. This means every dollar you spend
- 35:17on miners can directly offset your income in a single year. And it's true for both business
- 35:21owners and W2 earners. So if you have $100,000 in ordinary income, you can purchase $100,000
- 35:27in miners and potentially offset your tax liability entirely. Blockware's mining as a
- 35:32service does all the heavy lifting. They secure the rigs, they source the low cost power, and they
- 35:36handle all the day-to-day maintenance. So you get to stack Bitcoin every single day while drastically
- 35:41shrinking your tax bill. Get started today at blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD and use
- 35:46code WBD for $100 off your first miner. That's blockwaresolutions.com forward slash WBD.
- 35:53If you already self-custody Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets,
- 35:56complex setups clumsy interfaces and a seed phrase that can be lost stolen or forgotten
- 36:00bitkey fixes that bitkey self-custody built for real life it gives you an intuitive easy to use
- 36:06wallet with no seed phrase to sweat over and it has a strong recovery system and built inheritance
- 36:11for long-term peace of mind and bitkey's just had a massive upgrade the new device now has a screen
- 36:16so before you approve something you can check it on the bitkey itself the transaction the address
- 36:21or any account changes it's a big difference you're not just trusting what's on your phone
- 36:25you're seeing it for yourself on the device.
- 36:27It's simple, secure self-custody without the stress.
- 36:31Go to bitkey.world today and use the code WBD
- 36:33to get 10% off the new BitKey.
- 36:35That's bitkey.world and use the code WBD.
- 36:39The thing that I can't get my head around
- 36:42on the four-year cycle is why it would exist.
- 36:45Like, I mean, you can observe it and it clearly does.
- 36:48Like I thought it was going to be broken,
- 36:49but I just don't understand what's driving it
- 36:52because you can't really say
- 36:53that the cut-in subsidy is really a leading driver of the four-year cycle anymore. Like,
- 36:58I don't know what the sort of driver of that is anymore. I think you can. I think you can, Danny.
- 37:04Why? It's such like a small amount of supply coming onto the market.
- 37:08That's the reason that people give on the why not, right? I've interviewed these people,
- 37:14I know you have, and there's plenty of people that have talked about it. Again, it's not a big
- 37:17Everybody has their opinion on Bitcoin.
- 37:19But look, the gold market, let me put some of my applied statistics.
- 37:25And I'm interested in financial history and stuff as well.
- 37:28Mining in general is a huge game for the monetary system of any society.
- 37:36We have the famous case of Spaniards, Cortez and such, just stealing a lot of Aztec gold
- 37:44and other gold in the new world in like, you know, Bolivia, Peru.
- 37:51Now today, there was this silver mountain that when that got back to Europe, that can
- 37:57cause great carnage, right?
- 37:59If you overmind, if you flood the supply.
- 38:02But generally speaking, if you are running a mine or close to the state, the polity,
- 38:08whoever is running the system, it's a pretty good business and it's pretty good for the
- 38:13state.
- 38:14Again, we don't have to judge on if the state is good or bad or what becomes good of the state.
- 38:18I'm just saying mining is a strong business in the history of monetary...
- 38:22The civilizations that arise around money usually have to be very close to a mine.
- 38:35Of course, they can overmine it.
- 38:36They can have problems.
- 38:37But this is the origins of the Cantillon effect, by the way, the Cantillon effect.
- 38:42or you want to say it, is that those that are closest to the mine, you know, have the most power.
- 38:48It's important. Now, gold. Before this huge surge in gold to $5,000 at the start of this year,
- 38:57plus right in February January February of this year and say two years ago the gold mining market in totality in the whole world was about billion
- 39:12And again, gold is different from Bitcoin.
- 39:14Sailors made this observation many people have.
- 39:16I have as well.
- 39:17Gold mining is not like it used to be.
- 39:20People don't try to save some of the gold.
- 39:21They just want to shed the gold.
- 39:24It's a revenue profit center, but it's also a cost.
- 39:27So they shed the gold.
- 39:28uh to cover their costs and that's it that's just how the gold market is bitcoin is totally
- 39:32different a lot of miners hodl bitcoin uh it's much easier to do it's it's uh not easier to do
- 39:39in the fact of mining but i mean it's easier to obviously to transfer around bitcoin is changing
- 39:43the economics of mining in general just because mining is a general concept so this is also
- 39:48interesting but still still to this day uh mining can always be disrupted by price and when the gold
- 39:57price and the silver price went up to four or $5,000 an ounce on a trailing 12 month basis,
- 40:02the gold mining industry went from being a hundred billion dollar industry to over the last couple
- 40:06of years being a $400 billion industry. And still at the moment, it's over, you know,
- 40:10on a trailing 12 month basis, if that $5,000 would hold, it'd get up to a $500 billion industry.
- 40:19Like the oil, just for people's, another way to understand the comparison, the oil markets are
- 40:25trillion dollar industry a year. Trillion dollars in revenue, sometimes it'd be a trillion five,
- 40:29super volatile, super political. These are huge industries, right? And all of a sudden,
- 40:34because of a 20-year spike in the gold price, gold is now a $400 billion industry, $500 billion
- 40:41industry. That's going to matter. It affects everybody politically, economically, geopolitically.
- 40:47Now, with all that little background, imagine applying that 20 years from now
- 40:53into the Bitcoin mining space.
- 40:55Imagine that we have, whatever,
- 40:59400, 500 billion dollars of Bitcoin mining revenue
- 41:02and then it gets halved in a day.
- 41:04It's going to matter.
- 41:06It's going to matter.
- 41:06It's not going to not matter.
- 41:08This is just a feature of the Bitcoin system
- 41:13that everybody, I think, kind of wants to forget.
- 41:17But Satoshi built it in and it's what we have.
- 41:20It won't necessarily halve, though.
- 41:21Like, if we're talking that far out,
- 41:23The percentage of the minor revenue coming from fees will be much higher than the percentage of revenue coming from fees today. Today, it's largely subsidy. At some point in the future, that fee percentage has to be much higher.
- 41:36The fee percentage can and will be higher for sure. But the inflation or whatever you want to call it, the issuance, the subsidy, the block reward, it's still going to be a meaningful. It's still going to be a meaningful number when we're talking about Bitcoin being, you know, 5 million, 10 million a coin.
- 42:01so i get all the arguments against it i get the fact that you know many more times uh a volume
- 42:11and dollar amount of bitcoins flow between minor wallets and uh or etf wallets or exchange wallets
- 42:20right i get the the whole premise of the idea the bottom line is mining is an important topic
- 42:27in the realm of monetary finance, monetary history.
- 42:31Satoshi specifically designed mining for that reason.
- 42:35And he decided to have it every four years.
- 42:38It's a shelling point.
- 42:39It's a shock.
- 42:40So I am, again, I'm just trying to be modest about this.
- 42:43I would not discount mining as quickly
- 42:46as many people are apt to do in the space
- 42:49just because nominally right now, right,
- 42:53it's much smaller than say 50 Bitcoins a block,
- 42:56which it used to be right it still can be a huge amount of money in the future and i expect it will
- 43:03be and i expect that it will also provide a lot of fireworks and shocks to uh the system but that's
- 43:09how it is that's how it's designed so if if we go back to the power law if you think the four-year
- 43:14cycle is still real um and we're are we about as low as we've ever been compared to the median on
- 43:20the power law. Like how far from a bottom do you think we are? Right. So I'll just show you very
- 43:26quickly the worst and the best. And then I'll also show you another way I'm looking at this now.
- 43:32So this is all time data, right? And the reason I'm getting these nice smooth lines is I'm
- 43:36extending, I'm taking the all time data, how I find the coefficients, don't worry about it,
- 43:39running the math, and then extending the line back and extending forward. All we can do in the future
- 43:45is extend it forward. But in the past, I'm sort of creating lines that actually didn't exist at
- 43:50the time. This is a small caveat here. So I'm, uh, there's another way to look at this, which I
- 43:55think will be more helpful. But basically, if you can imagine, if you look here, you see how we had
- 43:59this big drop here, uh, at the start of June. And now we're basically setting our own new bottom
- 44:06here. Okay. And we're off it, but I, this is way too early for me to predict, like, you know,
- 44:11we're going up from here. I'm sure a YouTube thumbnail will do that for you, but I would just
- 44:15be cautious about the levels that we're at. But as you notice, if we paint this line backward,
- 44:20we go back to the SPF levels, there's a huge amount of gap here. At the time, the zero was
- 44:26actually here. So another way I'm looking at this chart now is I'm showing the evolving trend.
- 44:32All right. I also have the shades of the bears here. If these charts are constantly evolving,
- 44:36does that actually mean that they're useful going forward? I'd be really interested to see what this
- 44:40chart looked like as the sort of statistics were back in, say, the SPF crash, like how this cycle
- 44:45would have looked since then. Right, right. So that's something I'm trying to show more on my
- 44:50streams now, because precisely to your question, you get the nice smooth lines when you just draw
- 44:56the math based on the all-time data, right? But the question would be, what did the data show,
- 45:00say, in 2013 or 2017 or 2021? So that's why I'm now, when we look forward, okay, we have the same
- 45:07projection of the lines, right? The percentile, quantile bands, basically. For simple language,
- 45:13I'm just calling them lines, but here's how it would actually look over time.
- 45:18And I think this is even more helpful to show people how, you know, trends can change, they
- 45:22can evolve, but still overall, we're still in a power function.
- 45:27So here's every band, but actually how it would look at the time.
- 45:32And every new day's worth of data, we change the band.
- 45:35So I'm not projecting backward, which I'm actually doing here to get the nice smooth
- 45:40lines.
- 45:40I'm just showing you how they would look at the time.
- 45:41So this goes back to what I was talking about with Trollolo.
- 45:45If you look at the early days here, this 2011 pop,
- 45:49and again, I start my pricing about Bitcoin P today.
- 45:53Sub penny.
- 45:55I think I used 35 pounds for those 10,000 Bitcoins.
- 46:00Because remember, it was a sterling to dollar transaction.
- 46:04But in any event, notice how these gaps are larger,
- 46:09kind of wild. The lines are trying to figure themselves out. And no one in the world was
- 46:15thinking that Bitcoin was running like a power trend at this time, right? Not even here.
- 46:20And you would see this thing, which is the Q100, which is like the realm of possibilities of
- 46:26Bitcoin's price. It's fantastic, right? Like, let's just look at what the number says. Q100,
- 46:30when we were at December 2013, that $1,000, $1,200 top, right? November, December.
- 46:39is saying $350,000 for Bitcoin at the time is theoretically possible.
- 46:44Obviously, we needed some more time to work out,
- 46:48and the price never got close to that.
- 46:49But because of the action that occurred in 2011,
- 46:52that's what the math said.
- 46:55So let's even take off Q100 just because, again,
- 46:57it sort of distracts, I'd say.
- 47:01But I'll come back to it because you can find some interesting things here.
- 47:04Anyway, particularly as we get into 2016, 2017,
- 47:09and this is where Giovanni and myself,
- 47:12we started into 2018 looking at how this was forming.
- 47:17Notice how the lines get A, closer together,
- 47:21and B, straighter on log log.
- 47:23They're not perfectly straight,
- 47:24but they get pretty good.
- 47:27You can clearly see from 2017 top,
- 47:30they get, you know, there's a pattern.
- 47:33And so this is another way to see the power log.
- 47:35Now, look, let's look at the worst examples,
- 47:38the worst offenders where we form new bottoms in this. We were at, say, a Q0 of $281 in
- 47:46December 2014. But as that crypto winter, as it's called, I'm not using that word to trigger anybody,
- 47:53went down to $200 at the lows in 2015, that Q0 turned into, well, this is log-log,
- 48:02so it actually kind of stayed the same. But at the worst case, it got to $190. And you can just
- 48:06see for those watching the video, you can see it's obviously dropping quite consistently.
- 48:142018, interestingly, that dropped to 3,000. Nominally, we know that 3,000 was well over
- 48:19the 1,200 top of the prior cycle. That's also an interesting thing to look at. We didn't really
- 48:23puncture there, right? That was kind of a nice support. And then 2020, we did. And notice here
- 48:31in 2020, the pandemic briefly.
- 48:33We punctured below.
- 48:35And then let's actually look at what happened.
- 48:36So the Q0 line is coming down
- 48:40and it's setting a new bottom of,
- 48:46you know, and if we look at the way
- 48:48that that came down,
- 48:50and by the way, this also shows you
- 48:52that this has nothing to do with
- 48:54are they parallel to each other?
- 48:55You see the Q0 is actually slightly above the Q10,
- 48:58which is interesting at the time in 2020.
- 49:02But it comes down to fully, you know, be in the current position that is today.
- 49:07And it took about from 2020 February to, you know, to 2020 late March, obviously during
- 49:17the just extreme craziness of the pandemic and scared a lot of people.
- 49:22And then so that's sort of the new bottom relative to this, like I said, for lack of
- 49:27a better word, like setting these.
- 49:28bands, these individual sort of thresholds of where the price can possibly be. And we just,
- 49:37we set a new low and that's it. And so you just have to imagine that that's going to be,
- 49:41not imagine, like just understand this is the probability of reaching this level is lower.
- 49:46And then look, we set a new low as well with a scam bank and frauds gift to us all after,
- 49:52of course, the just defy summer of madness in 2022, all that stuff, Terra, Celsius.
- 49:57And so it took us, again, a couple months. We set a new low. But as Peter Zion was, again, saying Bitcoin was $17,000 overvalued at $16,000, we were already sort of forming that bottom. And then it took until January of 2021 to get out.
- 50:14And once you see, just notice here, once you see the price start to rise off of the Q0 level, and when I say Q0, it's actually Q0.0001.
- 50:23It's finding the least probable event relative to the power law.
- 50:31And once it starts to move away from that, usually that bottom holds through the next cycle.
- 50:37It doesn't always go lower.
- 50:39Notice in 2018, it didn't go lower, but it did briefly in 2020.
- 50:42It did briefly in 2022.
- 50:44and now we're setting a new low.
- 50:46So from this June fall,
- 50:48we went to a low of Q0 of 67,000.
- 50:51Now our Q0 is 59,000.
- 50:54So here you can see it actually as it evolves.
- 50:59And brass tacks, bottom line,
- 51:02when you do this type of analysis,
- 51:03which is not lines on charts,
- 51:05I'm not just connecting dots.
- 51:06These are actual scientific functions here.
- 51:10And when you see there more white space
- 51:12between each band,
- 51:14it just means the range of probabilities is expanding. It means our range of uncertainties
- 51:19based on prior observations is unfortunately a little bit wider. Risk is possibly a little bit
- 51:24more. But if past is prologue, it doesn't last that long. And generally, these are screaming
- 51:34by opportunities. And frankly, statistically, relative to the power law or the power curve,
- 51:39this is as cheap as Bitcoin has ever been. In fact. Yeah. So who knows when the bottom will be,
- 51:43but statistically this is deep, deep value.
- 51:46As good value as you get.
- 51:47Yeah, deep value, as good as you can get
- 51:49for the brass tacks listener here.
- 51:51But also, like you said, you don't know the bottom.
- 51:53I'm not saying this is the bottom.
- 51:54There's nothing here that tells me, you know, in August,
- 51:59we're not gonna dip lower or whatever US legislation
- 52:04fails miserably, this Clarity Act, and then, you know, people try to, you know, Trump gets impeached
- 52:11or whatever. And his crypto businesses, he becomes the next SPF, which I've, by the way,
- 52:16said that could even happen like two years ago, just thinking about the four-year cycle. I'm not
- 52:21at all saying that. I have no idea what will happen. But, you know, these are interesting
- 52:28little nuggets that line up with the four-year cycle. And as far as I can tell here, the four-year
- 52:37cycle is perfectly intact. It's shallower than prior cycles. We've only been through nine months
- 52:42of this. It's 53% drop. All right. 2020, we got to a 77% drop. Sorry, 2022. 2018, we got to an 84%
- 52:53drop. 2014, we got to an 85% drop. So each drop is less than before, but I have no idea if it's
- 53:01going to be 53% this time, 60%. But what we do see so far is actually relative to the drops,
- 53:06relative to the trends, the cycle is, you know, the deviations from regression are shallower,
- 53:15the shallower this time. It's interesting that it's the smallest drop in any of these bear
- 53:21markets, but probably the worst sentiment we've had. You know, the next question I'm going to ask
- 53:25though. So let's just assume that the four-year cycle is real. What would the median line be
- 53:31for the top of the next cycle right now? So if we assume that the four-year cycle is real,
- 53:38that means it's going to be 2029, right? And let's just say somewhere 2029,
- 53:47uh november all right the ols there you can see 386 000 median 365 000 uh on a low case
- 54:00q0 184 000 and on a really fun case which is put that q100 back which is really looking uh
- 54:09like you know by the way those things are technically possible but
- 54:12we got a million dollar bitcoin million dollar bitcoin but let's look at the q90 there
- 54:17$500,000 Bitcoin. Another interesting thing is to look at the multiple over under the
- 54:23curve itself. That's what you see in the parentheses there in StoolTip. So
- 54:26a 3x multiple used to be more popular. It used to happen, let's say, it was more prevalent. Now,
- 54:33I think that's less rare, but getting to a 1.4x, 1.5x, totally possible. And by the way,
- 54:39notice how those deviations uh i'm talking about the multiples over under the trend so so my ols
- 54:49let me put this chart back in just so you can see it clear what i'm talking about the ols is
- 54:53is is one right q0 q100 here notice how back in the day right when we're when we're establishing
- 55:02this trend, trying to work out the math, the Q100 could be 20x, right? The trend, 10x, the trend.
- 55:12Q0 could be 0.16, 0.09, the trend, right? Q0, wherever it was painted. Today, Q100 is 3.3x,
- 55:26Q0 is 0.42. And as we go in the future, these actually converge. So you actually get less
- 55:31extremes to the upside, less extremes to the downside, which is in itself a very nice visual
- 55:40of that scale, scale invariant sort of power law nature where it's a sustainable growth with,
- 55:51yes, not as much upside, but also not as much downside. And in general,
- 55:56a more stable type of a growth is actually what power growth represents.
- 56:00yeah i'm here for that that sounds good um is there like uh if you're trying to take into account
- 56:06like efficient market hypothesis is there an argument that as this sort of model ingests more
- 56:11data it will stop breaking to the downside every couple years like it is doing now because it will
- 56:16have seen enough previous market moves that it can sort of price in the future or is that is that too
- 56:21far out there probably no i mean uh and again this gets back to the grand theory which we can talk
- 56:26about. I'm trying to think if we need more charts to show you in response to what you're talking
- 56:34about here. But I would say, you know, I said the power law is projected to slow to a 10% growth
- 56:42rate in 2070. That's still, that's nice to project out that far. And I do it for fun. And I show
- 56:48people what the price would be and, you know, what the growth rate is on my streams all the
- 56:53time with this, but I think that that's more just trying to give us a flavor of how the thing will
- 56:58grow. And I do think, I don't want to say there comes a time when, like, I'm using this term a lot
- 57:04like fireworks, right? Often in financial markets, we try to say there comes a point when this stuff
- 57:13breaks or whatever. That so far hasn't happened. I could be wrong though. Like we could be
- 57:20geopolitically worldwide, we don't have to get into it, right? We're in sort of a realignment now,
- 57:27whether it's NATO, whether it's China, whether it's Russia, whatever, we're in a realignment of
- 57:32sort of the world order. It's possible that the dollar loses status and Bitcoin ascends rapidly
- 57:38there. And that's why I use this term sort of fireworks. I do see something like that happening
- 57:43in the 2030s, simply because of the way a lot of numbers are lining up, right? So the parallel
- 57:48is going to be about, it's going to fall to 25%, 20% by 2040. That's going to happen to match,
- 57:57I think, what the stock market is probably doing around then. And also the market cap of Bitcoin,
- 58:05you will be around 5 million per coin at that time. So that's going to be about $100 trillion
- 58:09market cap. The monetary base is also going to be about $100 trillion. Again, I don't want to be
- 58:15drawn in by these round numbers. Because even when Bitcoin's $100 trillion in the monetary base is
- 58:21$100 trillion, that's still that 50-50 market share. And it probably will be the case that
- 58:25maybe some central banks are backing, major central banks are backing their balance sheets
- 58:28with Bitcoin at the time. So it's hard to predict, I would say, exactly how this plays out. But what
- 58:37I do think is a we're on a collision course is Bitcoin's value is going to grow to a number and
- 58:45also the growth rate of the asset itself is going to shrink to another that's comparable to the rest
- 58:50of sort of the world trad fi and then at that point and again that point could be many many
- 58:56years it could be a decade um the world's gonna have to see do they want to like lend out Bitcoin
- 59:05or let's say they lend out fiat units,
- 59:08maybe some of them are backed by Bitcoin
- 59:10to try to get a good return
- 59:12where we're still using like dollars, euros, yen
- 59:15as the base underlying currency.
- 59:17Or do we move to the sort of numeraire
- 59:19where it's Satoshis?
- 59:21And then in that case,
- 59:23do you want to lend out those precious Satoshis
- 59:27at a rate that is actually
- 59:29probably either too hard to pay back for the borrower
- 59:37because the Satoshis continue to get stronger,
- 59:40or do we go to something totally different,
- 59:46like an equity-based system
- 59:47or a system where there's just maybe some very short, short-term debt,
- 59:54but if a bitcoin world where people are investing in projects and trying to you know just develop the
- 1:00:02world maybe there's some sort of a different model obviously with technology and everything
- 1:00:06where it can be on more of like an equity-based system but that's that's part and parcel of the
- 1:00:11grand theory that i'm thinking about because i think in 10 years you're gonna a lot of these
- 1:00:16numbers are gonna collide the the financial system and the bitcoin system and i'm not exactly sure
- 1:00:20plays out. But I do, for anyone listening to this show or watching the show in the back of their
- 1:00:26mind wondering, okay, well, how does this work if Bitcoin's growth rate declines, but the stock
- 1:00:31market stays at like 15, 20% per year, what happens? I agree. There's going to have to be a
- 1:00:36decision that's made there by people of all kinds and all sorts of governments. Are you just going
- 1:00:43to have Bitcoin sort of locked in some component of the economy like gold? Withdrawals are almost
- 1:00:50impossible in the TradFi world and just exponentially more fiat units are lent out at interest,
- 1:00:55just like the system we have? Or do we move into this system where Bitcoin actually as a
- 1:01:01stable, scalable asset that grows at a power regression
- 1:01:07will actually pull the rest of the world into their system and then maybe the system will start
- 1:01:14growing power. But the key here is, if it's not clear, if you grow in power, an interest rate
- 1:01:20won't work there. A fixed interest rate won't work. At some point, Bitcoin's enviable UTXOs,
- 1:01:29they're going to accrete in value, but relative to, I don't know, the dollar or Apple stock,
- 1:01:36they actually might fall below that. So then what happens at that point?
- 1:01:42See, I think that's really interesting. It's one of the things that I've always really
- 1:01:46struggled with because clearly if we went to a bitcoin standard you're not going to get rid of
- 1:01:50credit like credit is always going to exist in some capacity and if if there's like a business
- 1:01:55opportunity or an investment that looks tempting enough people will part with satoshis to invest
- 1:01:59in that and and some people will be able to make enough money on those business decisions or
- 1:02:04whatever to pay back those loans but not everyone and i get that in this fiat world we have tons of
- 1:02:09malinvestment because it's very easy to get your hands on on credit but if you do you have the
- 1:02:16opposite where people are unwilling to lend unless you have an absolute killer idea and there's
- 1:02:21actually lack of investment yeah that's the that's the old like it's almost keynesian central banker
- 1:02:27like right i mean fear of the deflation and um look i i don't have a full answer i'm more thinking
- 1:02:34about it mathematically and um i would say it would depend on the system it would depend on the
- 1:02:42monopoly of the system who's in control of the system and if we're on a decentralized system
- 1:02:46where everybody's individual demand is stronger than the government's uh actions to compel them
- 1:02:52and they're just going to want satoshis they're going to want it in their wallet or they're going
- 1:02:57want to use lightning, then I think such a system could work just fine. But actually,
- 1:03:08due to the nature of Bitcoin's power growth in this case, and just the nature of, you know,
- 1:03:13we know that the supply is extremely limited here, unlike gold, unlike silver, where,
- 1:03:17again, it exponentially produces 1.8% a year more gold, 1.5% a year more silver.
- 1:03:23the system could change we could have like sort of the best way i could describe it is is uh
- 1:03:30you know either very short-term factoring type debt or people people are just going to have to
- 1:03:39take uh more equity contracts in their endeavors and everyone becomes a vc yeah yeah exactly and
- 1:03:48you might not be sure the exact, you'll have a range of your return. Maybe there's like some
- 1:03:53preferred return that you try to get, but if you don't get it and you split the profits or whatever,
- 1:03:57technically nothing is impossible to do here, but it's just, it's not exponential
- 1:04:02growth. So we're, we're already going into my sort of the grand theory and I have so many
- 1:04:08different charts but I don know where you might want to take this but I can show you I think the most interesting and most relevant right now is probably talking about the treasury companies because obviously sailors had a rough couple of weeks ever since they sold that first 32 bitcoin i don know what was that a
- 1:04:23month a month or so ago um they've kind of been in a mess it looks like they've recovered it now
- 1:04:29they've sold bitcoin to pay dividends which makes total sense to me i think that's what they should
- 1:04:32do i think that's good um but like you said earlier in the show their cost of capital right
- 1:04:38now is 12 13 whatever it is that's fine as long as the caga stays at around 40 but as you said
- 1:04:45that's not going to continue forever and just as like a complete vibe gut check it's clearly not
- 1:04:50going to exist forever like bitcoin is not going to go up at 40 forever yeah the question is when
- 1:04:55does that date come and what do they do in that situation because it's funny that they've gone
- 1:05:00from basically a zero percent cost of capital when they were doing converts at zero percent
- 1:05:04to now paying 13%.
- 1:05:06I don't know what the market is,
- 1:05:08like why the market's forced him to do that.
- 1:05:10But I mean, 13% is pretty high.
- 1:05:13The trade-off is probably the preferred aspect of it.
- 1:05:16So it's very, very difficult for him to get liquidated
- 1:05:18because it's a perpetual instrument,
- 1:05:21which is smart on his part.
- 1:05:22It's very smart to do it that way.
- 1:05:24But yeah, there is a higher hurdle rate there
- 1:05:27that he has to make.
- 1:05:30Let me show you this.
- 1:05:30This is the S&P.
- 1:05:33I don't know if I showed you this last time, but this is the S&P over a couple hundred years.
- 1:05:37I showed this actually at the cheat code conference, a variant of this chart.
- 1:05:43So exponential growth, again, I'm not going to go through all this, but this is S&P 500 back calculated.
- 1:05:50There's people that do this back to like the 1800s.
- 1:05:53Bottom line is it's very slow growth in the 1800s.
- 1:05:55The 1900s got a little bit faster.
- 1:05:57I do these little monetary epochs.
- 1:05:59So when the Federal Reserve was founded, then when we went off of gold, Bretton Woods ended and we went to 1971, ended the Bretton Woods standard. And then from 2008, when basically banks got bailed out all the time by central banks and we have this monetary easing sort of pattern, notice that the treadmills get faster and faster.
- 1:06:27and the treadmills are actually the growth rate.
- 1:06:30I'm going to take the growth rates off.
- 1:06:32But here's the, this is log linear, exponential growth.
- 1:06:36But what is actually here is Jeffrey West,
- 1:06:39the physicist, he's got a great book called Scale,
- 1:06:41talks about this as well.
- 1:06:42There's others that talk about this.
- 1:06:44He calls it super exponential.
- 1:06:46So it is constant growth,
- 1:06:48but it actually grows even faster over time, right?
- 1:06:52If you just take these sort of long enough horizons.
- 1:06:54and that's my question about actually how the Bitcoin system marries with this idea and I do
- 1:07:01think it's going to be a part of it so when Jeffrey Ress wrote his book and just to summarize
- 1:07:06try to summarize the physics book in you know 30 seconds here he was talking about this very
- 1:07:13interesting idea of the singularity but he wasn't using like the Ray Kurzweil he was just using a
- 1:07:18mathematical singularity. But if we can see that with our world, our fast growing world of technology,
- 1:07:25and we know that we grow faster and faster and faster over these epochs, but notice that the
- 1:07:30time periods are shorter and shorter and shorter. We still have some time. We have some time,
- 1:07:36but presumably there'll be another crash, probably a deep crash, more monetary inflation.
- 1:07:40But also, also there is technological development, which causes the stock market to grow faster. AI is
- 1:07:46a prime example right now. Okay. There will come a point where we reach what this mathematical
- 1:07:51singularity, which basically there's one point and, you know, we can't grow any faster. What
- 1:07:55happens there? That's the question he poses in his book. He leaves it open. And he wrote this book,
- 1:08:01I think the first draft was 2014 or maybe 2017. I'm not even sure. He was not mentioning Bitcoin.
- 1:08:07He did not think about Bitcoin here. So I've sort of overlaid Bitcoin as an idea of what could take
- 1:08:13over the mathematical singularity. It's just another data point. And I think by the mid-2030s,
- 1:08:20you'll see these fireworks. So again, exponential growth, let's take off these trends. Let's show
- 1:08:26you in percentage term what these mean. So now you have these, this is the treadmills, right?
- 1:08:32While you're pulling that up, can I ask you a quick question on this? Does it have to stay
- 1:08:35exponential? Yes. All financial markets have always been exponential, primarily in my opinion.
- 1:08:43I don't have like vast amounts of underlying research here, but it's as ancient as, you know, the oldest contracts that we have is basically the interest rate.
- 1:08:55It's an ancient thing and interest by definition, applying an interest rate to an asset, to a debt, to a mortgage, whatever, to a company, cost of capital.
- 1:09:04That's an exponential function.
- 1:09:05So it will always be exponential.
- 1:09:07and what's even let's say even scarier or wilder for our times is we have massive amounts of
- 1:09:13technology and faster and faster growth rates so this is the super exponential so again just
- 1:09:21i'm sorry i'm being an idiot but i want to know why why does putting an interest rate on
- 1:09:25on it make it exponential is it because of compounding yeah yeah yeah so that is uh compound
- 1:09:32Compound interest is the same thing as exponential growth.
- 1:09:36Geometric growth, continuous compounding, exponential growth, they're all essentially the same function.
- 1:09:43And that is, by the way, a straight line on log scale.
- 1:09:46So when you grow, you get a trend that looks, let's just say I'll grow from 2008.
- 1:09:52I split up the trends here, but from 2008, I have a line going through this.
- 1:09:56You can clearly see this is exponential.
- 1:09:59Log linear.
- 1:10:00and in my opinion, the reason for this is credit.
- 1:10:04It's credit.
- 1:10:05It's the interest rate.
- 1:10:07Yes, the money supply is a part of it and everything,
- 1:10:09but the stock market is way more valuable
- 1:10:11than the money supply.
- 1:10:12So it's credit actually that does it.
- 1:10:16And notice, by the way,
- 1:10:18this is another small tangent.
- 1:10:20The markets are negatively skewed.
- 1:10:22You see that how we have like huge dips to the downside
- 1:10:25and then we sort of slowly go up,
- 1:10:27but then we always have these stairs up, elevator down.
- 1:10:29Right, right.
- 1:10:30that is different than Bitcoin.
- 1:10:33If we go back to Bitcoin,
- 1:10:35this is sort of a different topic.
- 1:10:36Notice how the crazy spikes are the opposite.
- 1:10:39We surprise ourselves to the upside,
- 1:10:40which is why, by the way,
- 1:10:41I still think we can do that.
- 1:10:43You know, it might not be hyper-Bitcoinization
- 1:10:44all in one day,
- 1:10:46but I think we can easily go to,
- 1:10:48you know, 250 or 300,000, whatever.
- 1:10:51I saw one, you probably saw this as well.
- 1:10:52One of these ideas,
- 1:10:54maybe Trump buys strategy.
- 1:10:56We have a $250,000 god candle
- 1:11:00or something. All this stuff is possible. And Bitcoin actually surprises to the upside. So you
- 1:11:05never know. But that's sort of a small tangent. Back to the idea of the stair steps, which I got
- 1:11:10to find. There's too many charts for you here, Danny. Where did I put it? Here it is.
- 1:11:18The stock market over a long, long, long period. The other trend, which is wild, is it's actually
- 1:11:24faster exponential trends. That is also appears to happen in markets. And maybe it happened in
- 1:11:30old times as well. Like maybe that was why Rome collapsed. Maybe that was, you know, people blame
- 1:11:35it on money printing, they blame it on this, blame it on that. But it could have been a situation
- 1:11:41like this. Now, again, we always want to think this time is different. I hope that with technology
- 1:11:48and with Bitcoin and with everything else in our modern world, we're not going to go back to
- 1:11:54mesothamia or anything like a major crash and i also think that there are release valves primarily
- 1:11:58bitcoin that could get us out of such a crash yeah um but this is this is part of the the grand
- 1:12:04theory yeah so there's this uh physicist sornette uh there's uh jeffrey west they are posing these
- 1:12:09ideas that we get to this super exponential growth and it happens to be by the way late 2030s
- 1:12:15where they think that we could get at this faster and faster point where it's just like well what
- 1:12:20happens next i mean and that that does fit in with the whole ai narrative so well it does it does it
- 1:12:27does so mathematically what i'm trying to show you here is faster and faster growth and so now
- 1:12:31again i'll show you the growth rates this this is exponential growth this is what i was saying
- 1:12:36about the interest rate like you can think of this as the interest rate think of it as the growth
- 1:12:40rate of the stock market whatever it is the growth rate of the stock market but also think about
- 1:12:43interest rate two percent in the 1800s is how the stock market grew when the fed was founded until
- 1:12:481971, 4.73%. Straight line, compound growth. Take out the noise. Yes, we had the Great Depression,
- 1:12:54a lot of volatility, whatever. Brass tax, 5% in the early 1900s. Late 1900s, 9.5%. This is when I
- 1:13:01was studying finance. We would talk, you know, getting a 10% return was extreme in the stock
- 1:13:05market. Now, from 2009 till today, we're at a 12% per year compounded growth rate. So basically,
- 1:13:17so again, I know I'm going through a lot here, Danny, but the bottom line is I'm trying to
- 1:13:26visualize, and Jeffrey West actually uses this phrase in the book. He says faster and faster
- 1:13:31treadmills of growth. You can even see it in the stock market if you go far enough back and
- 1:13:36look, the dollar is, there are many currencies in the currency graveyard, right? Thousands of
- 1:13:45currencies. I'm not saying, I'm not predicting a collapse of the dollar or whatever imminent,
- 1:13:51I have no idea. But what we do see with the US stock market, with the dollar, with many currencies,
- 1:13:58is faster and faster growth rates of debt, faster and faster growth rates of the stock market.
- 1:14:04And then there's a question, how does that work with Bitcoin's interestingly novel model of being
- 1:14:10a new digital currency that's not controlled by anybody.
- 1:14:14But the market is showing a sort of actually declining growth rate, still growing quite
- 1:14:19fast, but it's scaling in a different way.
- 1:14:21It's a curious, I think it's a very curious overlay to this question of what could happen
- 1:14:26with the singularity.
- 1:14:28So if I put on Bitcoin now, back to our beautiful power curve, hopefully you start to see where
- 1:14:33I'm going.
- 1:14:34I don't even know how you meant to read this.
- 1:14:36Right.
- 1:14:36So it's the same power curve, but on the right axis, I'm showing trailing 12-month growth.
- 1:14:42Now, the noisy one is here, right?
- 1:14:45Trailing 12-month growth.
- 1:14:47Obviously, you can get thousands of percent, hundreds of percent, whatever.
- 1:14:53This is, you know, and then it can go negative.
- 1:14:56Let's just take that off, take the noise off.
- 1:14:58This is actually a curve trailing 12-month.
- 1:15:02It's just the trailing 12-month return on the OLS, right?
- 1:15:05on the average power curve.
- 1:15:07So now we can start to see the smooth curve of Bitcoin.
- 1:15:10And then here's, you see, we're at that 40% right there.
- 1:15:13As of today, July 2026, 40% return, $62,000 Bitcoin.
- 1:15:20If I back this out, I used to have this go out to like 2100.
- 1:15:25I told you that it's 2070 when it will hit 10%,
- 1:15:29but let's just look at when it will hit other levels.
- 1:15:32So it hits 30% on a curve, Bitcoin power curve in 2031.
- 1:15:38In 2041, it hits 20%.
- 1:15:42And in 2070, it hits 10%.
- 1:15:48So actually that gives you a scale that it's not linear.
- 1:15:51It's not constant, right?
- 1:15:53It slows.
- 1:15:55And even the rate of this slowing, right, can take longer, right?
- 1:16:02So 2031, 30%.
- 1:16:05Right now, 40% per year.
- 1:16:07By 2031, it's projected to slow to 30% a year.
- 1:16:10By 2041, it's projected to be 20% per year.
- 1:16:14If we match that up with this idea of faster and faster treadmills,
- 1:16:20and who to say what going to happen in the next 10 years of the stock market But we at 12 right now By the way that without dividends So if you reinvest dividends you got another 2 on there at least So you getting close to 15 as it is in the stock market
- 1:16:34But say we have another crisis, then we have another round of money printing.
- 1:16:39It does seem like the late 2030s, 2040s, we're going to have some fireworks because
- 1:16:46based on the models that we have with Bitcoin versus the numeraire of the dollar,
- 1:16:50this is the growth rate that it's tracking. And it's going to cross with a faster and faster
- 1:16:55stock market probably by late 2030s, maybe early 2040s. Yeah. The idea of being able to buy like
- 1:17:02an S&P index and get more returns than buying Bitcoin is weird. And I don't know what it means.
- 1:17:08right likewise uh what it would mean is if if what it would mean is is that bitcoin has been
- 1:17:18co-opted into an exponential asset sailor has this other sort of way too cheeky way that he
- 1:17:23describes what he thinks is going to happen have you heard him say basically uh that bitcoin's
- 1:17:29going to settle into a 21 return i don't know if you've heard him say this what does what does he
- 1:17:35mean well it's it's not what he means that it's going to go exponential and by the way he's never
- 1:17:40uh give you a little inside baseball on this i know that he's talked to giovanni a little bit
- 1:17:45he said you know hey congrats on the power law uh giovanni met him at some event and then
- 1:17:49at these things you can't really talk uh quickly right and you know sailor's obviously an in-demand
- 1:17:55fella at these conferences and and he tried to get into it a little bit but sailor basically said
- 1:18:00you know i think it's at the end of the day bitcoin's an exponential asset it's going to
- 1:18:04grow exponentially. To be clear, none of us that have been studying this for a long time see it
- 1:18:09right now going exponentially. It could in the future. But what does that mean if it goes
- 1:18:14exponential? First of all, this growth rate turns into a straight line. So by the way,
- 1:18:19if you hold Bitcoin, I'm not saying this will be like a bad thing number go up wise, right?
- 1:18:24It actually would portend, if we go back to this chart, right? The original chart I showed you,
- 1:18:30exponential versus power, take off log, log, just look at log linear. If we get back on exponential
- 1:18:37growth, which is the straight line, common sense tells us constant growth is faster than proportional
- 1:18:42growth. It's going to be good, right? It's going to be good for Bitcoin holders. On the one hand,
- 1:18:47the number go up. But on the other hand, this is where you get into the idea of,
- 1:18:52you know, what does that actually mean? Is TradFi co-opting the system? Can anyone
- 1:18:57claim any Bitcoins on an ETF? Can you withdraw Bitcoins from exchanges after 10 years?
- 1:19:04There are a lot of things that could play into this. And by the way, if some of those play out,
- 1:19:10perhaps as some entrenched players in Bitcoin want, then I think, yeah, Bitcoin could go
- 1:19:14exponential. It could match, it could mirror the exponential growth rate of the rest of the
- 1:19:19financial system. One of my favorite quotes was from Thomas Pacquiao from PubKey. He said on a
- 1:19:25show we did years ago. We're all going to be rich and depressed because the project failed. And that
- 1:19:30seems like the example where we're all rich and depressed. I actually remember that show. Thomas
- 1:19:35is a great dude. And what he is saying is 100% what I am saying here. I'm just trying to show
- 1:19:40you the math of it. I'm trying to show you the math of it. So this is my grand theory is basically
- 1:19:46a lot of people that are in the system have a lot of fiat interest that they need to pay back.
- 1:19:54In order to pay that back, they have to stay above the level of interest.
- 1:19:57To do that, you have to be exponential.
- 1:19:59To be exponential, it could require some sacrifices.
- 1:20:02It could require a lot of fiat interest.
- 1:20:03It could require you not holding your keys.
- 1:20:05It could require an overbearing state on here.
- 1:20:10There's a lot of things that could go into that factor.
- 1:20:12It also might be a totally different scenario, which is Bitcoin turning the system power.
- 1:20:19But again, that's a different scenario.
- 1:20:21Yeah, but I want to know what that scenario is, because if Bitcoin going exponential is essentially, if we simplify it to that being Bitcoin being co-opted by the financial system as we know it today, what's the inverse of that? What is Bitcoin co-opting the financial system into power? What does that mean?
- 1:20:39I think it means we started to get into a little bit, but I think it means we're free.
- 1:20:45There might be some sort of money monopoly.
- 1:20:47You know, I always say the dollar is the best looking horse in the glue factory, right?
- 1:20:50It's around for now.
- 1:20:51It's been around for a long time.
- 1:20:52There's still thousands and thousands of currencies in the graveyard.
- 1:20:55I'm not saying the dollar definitely avoids it or definitely doesn't.
- 1:21:01But if Bitcoin persists globally, and by the way, if mining is free globally, where people can mine, people can trade, people can send, you can withdraw your keys.
- 1:21:17You know, you've got things like Fetty Mints, super popular, or Chalmian Mints, or whatever, whether that's a layered system, which it's going to have to be, obviously. But the layered system is also very, very easy to sort of get back in the castle and get back to on-chain Bitcoins.
- 1:21:32If all of those things persist, then I think there's a real possibility that we stay in that free cypherpunk Bitcoin world where Bitcoin keeps growing as it is. And then once we do have that crossing point, which I also think about a lot, people will start to say, look, I don't want to do it. I don't want to put my capital at risk, hope that I get 20% in the S&P or whatever. I'd just rather hold Bitcoin.
- 1:21:58I'll invest in some projects.
- 1:21:59I'll pay for employees or whatever.
- 1:22:03But the model might look a little bit different.
- 1:22:05The model might be more equity.
- 1:22:07It might be very, very short-term debt, factoring, invoicing type debt.
- 1:22:13Short-term is the best way I can say it.
- 1:22:15Because imagine putting these together now.
- 1:22:18Sorry, not this one, but the stair stepper, right?
- 1:22:21Where we 12%, 50%, and then the declining interest rate.
- 1:22:25the only way that this system holds, which is the power, this mathematical relationship holds,
- 1:22:31is if people sort of say, okay, I don't feel like I need to chase Apple at 20%
- 1:22:39CAGR. I'd rather hold Bitcoin. I'd rather do it a different way. And by the way,
- 1:22:45I'm not sold on either. To me, it's 50-50. It's just 50-50. I see this is why I'm not married,
- 1:22:53that Bitcoin stays power.
- 1:22:54I think Bitcoin could lose its power function,
- 1:22:58turn into an exponential like Saylor wants.
- 1:23:00And so back to what he said,
- 1:23:02he has said this sort of cheeky number,
- 1:23:03like, oh, it just settles into 21% per year.
- 1:23:06That's a total number pulled out of thin air.
- 1:23:09It just obviously has the number 21
- 1:23:11and it happens to be 11 percentage points
- 1:23:13higher than his cost of capital.
- 1:23:14So it sounds good.
- 1:23:16There's no evidence in the Bitcoin power curve
- 1:23:18that it's going to stop at 21% per year.
- 1:23:20By the way, 20% is right out here, 2041.
- 1:23:23wait where is it there it is 2040 get 2040 2041 so this is why this is this is part of my grand
- 1:23:36theories basically this is why i think late 2030s early 2040s we're lining up with the
- 1:23:44jeffrey west sornette singularity idea ray kurzwell by the way says the same thing uh late 2030s
- 1:23:50We're lining up with probably $100 trillion valuation in Bitcoin, $100 trillion valuation in base money, and anything goes.
- 1:24:01By the way, to throw one more chart at you, here's the monetary base.
- 1:24:03We talk about this a lot, right?
- 1:24:05I haven't updated this for the third quarter.
- 1:24:07Sorry, for the first quarter yet, even.
- 1:24:09I have broad money and base money as of 2020.
- 1:24:12These things move slower.
- 1:24:13We can look at Fed balance sheets if you want after this.
- 1:24:15We can leave much more updated.
- 1:24:17uh here's the monetary base over 50 years i don't want to change too many topics but basically this
- 1:24:23is the money supply that's comparable with bitcoin it's world central bank money all right it's about
- 1:24:2726.4 trillion dollars as of 2025 year end 26.4 if you run these same regressions notice how we're
- 1:24:34you're an expert now danny on exponential versus power you see straight lines on log linear
- 1:24:38base money is an x it's an exponential function notice where are we in the realm of probabilities
- 1:24:43way low, way low, right?
- 1:24:47We need more liquidity.
- 1:24:48Right. We're at the bottom end.
- 1:24:50And again, I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow.
- 1:24:53Fed is being a little bit cagey with their minutes.
- 1:24:55Warsh is, you know, the sort of hawk dove,
- 1:24:57Griffin sort of, you know, amalgamation.
- 1:25:03We're not quite sure where he's going to be.
- 1:25:04But basically, as John Tamney,
- 1:25:07who has a great book on money long ago,
- 1:25:10said presidents usually get the Federal Reserve chairman they want.
- 1:25:12and we know what Trump wants.
- 1:25:15So lower interest rates, more money printing.
- 1:25:17But anyway, we are at the lower end of the curve globally.
- 1:25:19We were at the higher end of the curve at 30 trillion in 2021.
- 1:25:24So here's the point.
- 1:25:27This is another wrench in the scenario.
- 1:25:29Sorry, that's further back data, which is not really comparable.
- 1:25:32At 50-year data, you look at this CAGR.
- 1:25:36This is the CAGR of the exponential OLS right there.
- 1:25:39CAGR, 10.2% per year.
- 1:25:4110.2% per year.
- 1:25:41It's interesting there that so when you pulled up the other chart of the S&P, it was 2% way back.
- 1:25:49It's essentially still 2% at 12% today.
- 1:25:55No, no.
- 1:25:57No, you mean it's essentially growing the way that it was in the 1800s?
- 1:26:02Yeah.
- 1:26:03No, it's not.
- 1:26:04Here's the interesting kick.
- 1:26:05It's another wrench in the formula.
- 1:26:07Money supply is actually growing slower since 2008.
- 1:26:10So is U.S. debt.
- 1:26:11So here, you might think that it's growing faster.
- 1:26:15We had all this money printing in 2008.
- 1:26:17And yes, it does kind of depend on where your starting date
- 1:26:19when you do these regressions.
- 1:26:20But I started year-end 2008, by the way,
- 1:26:23same time that Bitcoin started.
- 1:26:24So this is 1971 trend.
- 1:26:28So you see the trend here, 10.2% CAGR.
- 1:26:31Here's another chart where I started in 2008.
- 1:26:34Notice, first chart, second chart.
- 1:26:37First chart, second chart.
- 1:26:39When you start the regression later,
- 1:26:41it's actually shallower growth.
- 1:26:44And I'll show you the CAGR, 7.7.
- 1:26:47So in the last 15, 20 years,
- 1:26:51I believe that the powers that be,
- 1:26:54the whatever, the central banks,
- 1:26:56they realize how bad they screwed the pooch
- 1:26:58in 2006, 7 and 8 with low interest rates
- 1:27:01and everything else and the bailouts now.
- 1:27:04So they're very cautious actually about extending-
- 1:27:07How is that possible?
- 1:27:08How is it lower?
- 1:27:09Yeah.
- 1:27:11When we know they're printing trillions and trillions of dollars
- 1:27:13over the last, especially over the last, like, six years,
- 1:27:162020, 2021.
- 1:27:18Right.
- 1:27:18The bottom line is they don't always print money.
- 1:27:22They print more, they print less.
- 1:27:24You know, the Federal Reserve wasn't printing money
- 1:27:26from 2014 until 2020.
- 1:27:29Yeah.
- 1:27:29A lot of people don't sort of know that.
- 1:27:31Now, other currencies were.
- 1:27:33You see, it was generally going up.
- 1:27:35And there's a huge spike in 2020, 2021.
- 1:27:39But since, you know...
- 1:27:41This is a long five years now where we've taken the money supply back from 30 trillion down to 26.
- 1:27:46And if you just run the math from 2008, when Bitcoin started until today, this is the actual CAGR.
- 1:27:53It's only like 8%.
- 1:27:54So let's just round it.
- 1:27:568%, 7.7%, 8% versus 10% over the 50 years, all in dollar terms.
- 1:28:04By the way, not to throw another wrench in it, but it's actually probably, both are probably faster than that.
- 1:28:09because if you measure, if you do these regressions all in their native currency and then take the
- 1:28:14average, it looks different than if you do it in dollar terms. It's showing dollar supremacy
- 1:28:18because they get weaker against the dollar. I don't want to throw too much wrench in that,
- 1:28:22but they are printing a little bit faster than this in their native term. It's true,
- 1:28:25weighted globally Let forget that for now 10 versus 8 10 50 trend 8 2008 trend in the money supply that another wrench in the curve or another wrench in the calculation where I think they are well aware of the damage that they have
- 1:28:44done in intervening in the market so much. They think that they have all these tools like paying
- 1:28:52interest on reserves and they're just more cautious, so on and so forth. And actually,
- 1:28:58the data shows it. Like U.S. federal debt has the same trend. Until 2008, U.S. federal debt was
- 1:29:06growing faster than it has been since 2008. It still grows. It's still huge, right? I mean,
- 1:29:13this is the nature of compounding. But that exponential trend over the epoch is slightly
- 1:29:18slower. So again, it's a little bit of a wrench in the thesis of this one, where the stock market
- 1:29:23for sure is growing faster.
- 1:29:26But does it matter if they're aware of the issues with that trend?
- 1:29:29Because when push comes to shove, if they need to,
- 1:29:32they're still going to print money.
- 1:29:33Sure, they will.
- 1:29:35We can be sure that that's the main thing that they know how to do,
- 1:29:38and that's how they deal with crises,
- 1:29:40is to add liquidity or basically add zeros to banks' accounts
- 1:29:45with them at their master account.
- 1:29:48So it's a digital money print that they do,
- 1:29:51as opposed to a physical.
- 1:29:52They also do physical money print.
- 1:29:54And they have started that too, right?
- 1:29:56The Fed balance sheet is growing again after a few years of doing nothing but drop, essentially.
- 1:30:01Right.
- 1:30:01Here's the Fed balance sheet.
- 1:30:03You see, it has been growing since November of last year, ever so slightly, and maybe even
- 1:30:11cresting a little bit.
- 1:30:12And then we have, you know, sort of hawkish dovish mixed signals from the new Fed group.
- 1:30:17They're not really, they're very, they just released their minutes this week and they're
- 1:30:21very cagey.
- 1:30:21but some people think they might even hike in September. We'll see. But I think I have one of
- 1:30:29the ECB as well. No, this is the ECB balance sheet. Okay. So it's about 6.12 trillion euros.
- 1:30:35Again, when I say balance sheet for people that are new to this, it's the monetary base. This is
- 1:30:40the asset side. The liability side is mostly the monetary base. There's a little bit of other
- 1:30:44things sometimes, but just keep it simple. ECB, since it's been founded in 1999, has grown its
- 1:30:50balance sheet at a KG of 10.6%. So notice that's actually similar to the 50-year curve,
- 1:30:58but they as well are at the bottom end, the bottom end of the analysis.
- 1:31:07Time to short fiat and buy Bitcoin.
- 1:31:11Yeah. Yeah. So it all looks good, I would say, if we assume that money printing is good for
- 1:31:16Bitcoin, if we assume there might be some more instability in a very unstable, exponentially
- 1:31:22growing system, and we assume that Bitcoin is a sort of more stable power asset that is still
- 1:31:28growing tremendously at 40% per year and, by the way, discounted to its lowest percentile quantiles,
- 1:31:35all that looks good. But the grand theory, as we've sort of been touching on and off in this
- 1:31:41episode is. I think it's, you know, late 2030s, maybe even a little bit later, as I said,
- 1:31:50they can push if they really want to, they can take off the gas. And they did that last five
- 1:31:54years. So it's just the nature. All I do is measure this stuff, Danny. I try to give people
- 1:32:01the best way to look at this stuff just by measuring rather than talking. But I'm giving
- 1:32:06you hard facts, hard data. Stock markets growing faster, exponentially growing, sort of stair-stepper,
- 1:32:14super exponential growth. Base money is actually, it's growing fast, but it's over the last 15,
- 1:32:2120 years, it's actually growing at a slower rate of return. US debt as well. So there's a mix there.
- 1:32:28But if we want to come back and just think about Bitcoin as this asset, we try to grow it,
- 1:32:32measure it, how it's growing and everything. It's looking pretty good. Never financial advice
- 1:32:38always. And one more thing just to show you here. If we take the lows, let's say you bought in the
- 1:32:44low here. Let's actually even show you the evolving exponential trend, which is here,
- 1:32:51right? Which we talked about this one. Let's say in 2022, when Peter Zion was saying it was
- 1:32:58overvalued, you held it just until here, we got back to trend. Okay. This window is 2022.
- 1:33:02uh,
- 1:33:03December until we got here.
- 1:33:05I,
- 1:33:05the window is a lot of bit,
- 1:33:06a little bit wider,
- 1:33:07but what you see,
- 1:33:08I'll just show you the dates.
- 1:33:09It's 2020.
- 1:33:10I,
- 1:33:10the,
- 1:33:10what I just zoomed in was 2022,
- 1:33:12December 7th until holding until 2024,
- 1:33:15March.
- 1:33:16That's actually when the price got from it's low to trend.
- 1:33:20Let's look at the actual Kager that you could have earned right there.
- 1:33:25176%,
- 1:33:26176%.
- 1:33:27When the trend itself,
- 1:33:29um,
- 1:33:31um,
- 1:33:32Well, this is a little bit different because it's evolving. Let me go back to this one just to show you the trend at the time. Here we go. Roughly here to there. It could have even gotten 197%, right? If you bought whatever, it's going to be slightly off. 180, 190% CAGR. The trend itself at the time was 48%. 48% was the power curve trend. Now we're down to 40.
- 1:33:58So you can still, in Bitcoin, make many multiples over the trend.
- 1:34:03Even though I tell you again and again and again, I tell people it's doubling every two years,
- 1:34:06but that doubling time will increase.
- 1:34:08The rate of growth will decrease.
- 1:34:10You can still, if you pick the right moments, and by the way, now seems to be a right moment,
- 1:34:14and six months from now could still be the right moment.
- 1:34:17I'm not saying we're out of this bearish period.
- 1:34:20But if you have the whole encompassing view, you understand statistics,
- 1:34:24you understand how this stuff is working. Statistically, we're in a very good place for
- 1:34:29a bullish Bitcoin hodler. Yeah, who knows if it's the bottom, but it's not an area you're
- 1:34:36probably going to regret buying. The interesting thing to me is this, whatever happens mid to late
- 1:34:412030s, it's like perfectly in the first turning, two worlds, Bitcoin and the financial system
- 1:34:47collide. Who knows what happens, but that's exciting. I can't wait to see it. Yeah, it really
- 1:34:53is. We'll be here for it, right? Danny, I think it's, if you look for it, you will find all sorts
- 1:35:01of crazy numbers, conspiracies, thoughts about, you know, if gold's coming back or whatever. But,
- 1:35:07you know, if we can measure the Bitcoin system, measure the TradFi system,
- 1:35:11there's a lot of interesting things happening in late 2030. So I think that's pretty cool.
- 1:35:16Another thing, just one more here, or we can go longer if you want, but there's
- 1:35:20another chart. There's UTXOs. I like to show against... So let's say Bitcoin's the benchmark
- 1:35:28now. How strong are different currencies within that? And actually, Bitcoin is going to become
- 1:35:34that true measuring stick. So here now, this is the same power curve, but I'm using it.
- 1:35:41I'm starting everything at one on Bitcoin Pizza Day, May 22nd, 2010.
- 1:35:46So it's the same exact curve, but the numbers aren't really going to make sense. It's just,
- 1:35:51you can see the power curve. Bitcoin itself is up 15 million times. So good on the person that
- 1:35:57bought them from Lazlo, right? Since Bitcoin pizza day, 15.5 million times. And the power
- 1:36:02curve is up 34 million times. So you see the discount on the power curve there. We're at 45%
- 1:36:06under the curve. So this is the dollar. Is there a currency that I found that is actually stronger,
- 1:36:10stronger would be lower than the dollar? There is. It happens to be the Swiss franc.
- 1:36:14just slightly
- 1:36:15just slightly
- 1:36:16alright so the Swiss franc
- 1:36:18is
- 1:36:18is
- 1:36:20only up 10 million
- 1:36:23only
- 1:36:24you're only up
- 1:36:2510.6 million
- 1:36:26in Swiss franc terms
- 1:36:28since Bitcoin pizza day
- 1:36:29alright
- 1:36:30but it's very similar
- 1:36:31right
- 1:36:31it's almost identical
- 1:36:32but it's just
- 1:36:32we can say that
- 1:36:33relative to bitcoin
- 1:36:35the Swiss franc
- 1:36:36is the strongest
- 1:36:36dollars next
- 1:36:38but then here's
- 1:36:39here's something cool
- 1:36:40let's look at weaker
- 1:36:40currencies like way weaker
- 1:36:42let's look at turkey
- 1:36:43Turkish Lira. They had the right idea of actually lowering interest rates during massive inflation.
- 1:36:49That was their sort of policy a few years ago. So here you see Bitcoin is doing very well against
- 1:36:57the Turkish Lira. If you are denominated in Lira, you need to save your purchasing power. You'd have
- 1:37:02459 million more times Turkish Lira if you had bought those Bitcoins in 2010. Again, the number
- 1:37:09is not important. It's the level of these colors, basically, or the currencies. And now look at this.
- 1:37:16Let's do the power curve on that. Talk about the power curve breaking, Danny. The Turkish lira
- 1:37:22hasn't even broken. It's above its power curve, its power regression, which I think is pretty
- 1:37:30interesting. Now, it's probably going to go under it, and if it passes, prologue it.
- 1:37:34But notice how in the last cycle, it was under its power curve much shorter than the more dominant global currencies of the dollar and the franc.
- 1:37:45So that's interesting.
- 1:37:46Now let's look at the Argentine peso.
- 1:37:48Just one more.
- 1:37:52Let me find it for you.
- 1:37:54BTCRs.
- 1:37:55There we go.
- 1:37:57And this, by the way, is the official bank rate.
- 1:37:58It's even worse in reality.
- 1:37:59This is not the black market rate, but just to show you.
- 1:38:02So there you'd have 5.8 billion times more Argentine pesos if you bought the Bitcoin with those pesos back in the day in 2010.
- 1:38:13And then let's look at the power curve on that.
- 1:38:17It's not even close to the curve.
- 1:38:19It's never coming back.
- 1:38:21So that shows you, by the way, this idea of breaking.
- 1:38:25Is the power curve breaking?
- 1:38:26Actually, in all currencies, it's a power curve.
- 1:38:29There's a little bit different slopes.
- 1:38:30there's different levels uh none of them have broken and in fact in two of these currencies
- 1:38:37out of four that i'm showing you in this chart the price of those currencies relative to the curve
- 1:38:42that they manifest themselves uh in the bitcoin market it's actually above it's above trend
- 1:38:49probably going to go below soon in the case of turkey if we have a couple more months of
- 1:38:52bearishness but that's how it looks man matt this has been awesome i love that we've done like an
- 1:38:59hour and a half on the power curve i i initially thought this would be like 15 minutes of the
- 1:39:03conversation but it's been awesome um but we'll just have to do it again at some point
- 1:39:08thank you uh thank you for sticking with us i know you've got a sick kid over there
- 1:39:13but um appreciate you guys for dealing again at some point with the takes and uh appreciate it
- 1:39:19tell everyone where you can go check out your youtube channel
- 1:39:22pop up list everything you do yeah you can find me at uh all the platforms at one base money so
- 1:39:28the number one base of money.
- 1:39:32Podcasts, streams, whatever.
- 1:39:33You just go there on Twitter or YouTube
- 1:39:35and you'll find my account.
- 1:39:37And yeah, this is a lot of what I'm doing now every day
- 1:39:40is just trying to dig into the numbers
- 1:39:41of how these trends work in the Bitcoin world
- 1:39:45and in the TradFi world,
- 1:39:46trying to reconcile them.
- 1:39:48And like you said,
- 1:39:49it's going to be an interesting next few years.
- 1:39:53I'm glad to be sharing it with you
- 1:39:55and others in the space, man.
- 1:39:56So happy to do it anytime.
- 1:39:58when can when are you going to open this up so i can use these charts soon hopefully by the fall
- 1:40:03hopefully by the fall you'll be ready to time man ready to go i know i know it's it's it's an effort
- 1:40:09it's a like i said i'm more applied statistics guy so i don't want to just go only this i want
- 1:40:15to get you some economic data some money supply data some other things trying to get it all
- 1:40:19together here shortly i will be a subscriber when you do it um appreciate you man thank you
- 1:40:24no problem danny
- 1:40:28Thank you.