Latest / What Bitcoin Did / Bringing Back The Bitcoin Bull Market | Cory Klippsten

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Bringing Back The Bitcoin Bull Market | Cory Klippsten · What Bitcoin Did

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  Inevitably, Bitcoin will go up again. Only broad participation against lots of people who truly
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  understand Bitcoin can keep it there. The people that just get easy access to Bitcoin through
• 0:12
  institutionalization and paper Bitcoin and price exposure, by definition, because it was easy to
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  buy, they have paper hands. The institutions and the retail that buy ETFs are easy to shake out of
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  their positions. All the treasury stock type people are easy to shake out of their positions.
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  people that truly understand real on-chain Bitcoin are much harder to shake out of their positions.
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  Nothing can beat Bitcoin at this point. The rest of this century is basically just a race between,
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  you know, dollar slash treasuries and gold and Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is the fastest horse in the
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  race. And it's the one that's technologically and just kind of logically superior to the other two.
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  And it's just a matter of getting people to wake up to that. It's okay to like pick up the baton
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  and try to achieve something, you know, like define your mission, plan your mission, get on the damn
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  mission, stay on the mission and be inspired.
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  Corey Clipson, good to see you, mate.
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  You're coming live from London.
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  I am.
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  I am in London for a little bit and bouncing around, planning to meet some Bitcoiners over
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  on this side of the drink, working on some early potential expansion plans into some
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  new markets and enjoying being able to do a lot of the morning shows that I really can't
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  do from the West Coast with call times at like 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. having young children. So,
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  yeah, really packing in the media appearances this summer and really trying to get the word out
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  and bring some real signal and some positivity. I don't want to say back to the space because I
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  don't think it ever really leaves. I just think in bear markets, it gets kind of drowned out by
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  a lot of FUD and a lot of negativity and a lot of infighting. And it just feels like the exact
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  right time to just be a lot louder coming through with Bitcoin education, really pushing
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  adoption, really trying to create the circumstances through which individual humans can understand
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  the power of real on-chain Bitcoin and self-custody after a lot of years of crypto madness and
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  Bitcoin stonks and ETFs and TradFi and just kind of abdicating responsibility for reasons to get into Bitcoin to signals from authority, which I think is kind of what's gotten people into Bitcoin for the last four or five years has mostly just been like on the recommendation of somebody else that's successful in TradFi.
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  and i'd like to fucking kill that completely and bring back people educating other people
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  and um and getting them into bitcoin so you know i think what you continue to do
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  is extremely important and uh you know i'm on the mission as always and uh have myself
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  a little extra time more than i have in recent years and so uh yeah back on the warpath man
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  let's go i want to get into all the efforts you guys are making at swan to sort of bring this back
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  but i have to ask you cory is the is the death of london exaggerated i mean look it's been through
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  tougher times they've had plague here uh you know i'm explaining to my wife the history of world war
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  ii and you know why blitz yeah the blitz and you know why are some buildings new and some not and
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  i'm like well that's pretty much a map of of strikes from the liftoff baby sorry uh you know
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  And like, why are there such well built out basements in so many of these places?
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  And I'm like, it's kind of some people actually did some reno when they were living down there
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  for a year or two.
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  You know, it's it's it is unbelievable.
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  I think the whole city in some ways, I haven't verbalized this before, but I was thinking
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  about it this morning.
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  It's a lot like kids that get to live at like their parents' villa or their grandparents'
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  villa or something like that.
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  There's so much capital that's accumulated here over the years.
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  like if you started out with the UK's economy today, you obviously couldn't get here. You know,
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  it probably wouldn't look as nice as Santa Monica, which isn't very nice,
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  you know, but because you have so many awesome buildings from so long ago,
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  like Istanbul, you know, there's so much amazing architecture there. And a lot of it frankly came
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  before the Ottomans even came to power, let alone all the cool shit they built, you know,
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  long before it became a secular republic.
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  And so you just get to walk around in certain cities around the world
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  and benefit from the many, many generations before you.
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  So I think that's pretty cool.
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  You know, I moved for now from the third largest metropolitan economy on the planet,
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  which is Los Angeles, to the fourth, which is London.
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  New York and Tokyo being one, two, and Paris being number five.
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  So, you know, you're just kind of moving from like capital to capital in some ways.
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  It's not that different as far as being an international city and 40% of the people living
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  here right now weren't born in the UK.
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  So it's got that cosmopolitan vibe and flavor.
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  And I mean it is weird I you know I not a fan of kind of walking around cities doxing myself but I obviously wore a Swan shirt to come do this show and I did Newt show earlier this morning
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  And, of course, you get stopped a couple of times.
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  It's like, are you Corey from Swan?
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  And it's like, oh, okay, yeah, that's right.
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  I mean, we may serve only the USA,
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  but obviously our education and our content is global,
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  and everybody gets Twitter.
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  So it does carry, which is kind of funny.
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  Yeah, as Fiat as London is,
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  there are still some Bitcoiners there. I love London still. It has its problems, absolutely.
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  But the architecture, the history is a beautiful city. I just hope it can get back to what it once
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  was. I guess we have the benefit that we used to be the world reserve currency, which is what
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  helped build it. But I still like London. It's fun. But we should get into Bitcoin. You guys
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  are bringing the vibes back, which I am loving seeing. So I think we had a few cool things
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  happen recently. X changing the algorithm, I think genuinely made a big difference. I've seen the
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  positivity grow from that. You're bringing back Cafe Bitcoin. I know you've got a big push for
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  the next 50 days. Tell people what you're doing. Yeah, so we call it 50 Days for Freedom. It kicked
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  off on the 21st, so we're on day four right now. We brought back Cafe Bitcoin. I've been hosting
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  every day this week, 10 a.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. UK time, 7 a.m. Pacific. It's been awesome. We go for
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  90 minutes, tons of guests, just really trying to bring educators and doers and people that are
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  actually building things up to talk about what they're doing. Obviously, a bit of news of the
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  day and topics that I think are important. It's curated heavily by me personally, for better or
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  worse. I think that's actually important that you have an editorial point of view and that you're
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  bringing people on stage that you have a sense of their quality and that you actually go out
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  actively and recruit people to come and join and have guests and things like that. So, I've always
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  been about journalistic objectivity, understand what you know and what you don't and what the line
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  is between them, try to present the facts, don't present opinions or forecasts as certain.
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  And I'm just kind of all about, you know, just signal through the noise. That's always,
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  you know, that's why it was called Swan Signal since inception, our weekly show that's been
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  going for seven years now. And, you know, I just think it was a really good time to bring that back.
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  I wrote a post that was kind of the third installment in the broad mission statement
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  of Swan and myself and what we and I try to do in this space.
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  It's called The Battle for Monetary Independence.
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  Just put that up on Tuesday.
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  It's much longer than most articles that I usually write.
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  I think, you know, it's probably like a 15 minute read versus the usual, you know, five
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  to seven minute read.
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  But it really is kind of the third installment after 10 million Bitcoiners from 2020.
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  And I think it was 2023, I put out the race to avoid the war.
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  And the way I really think about the battle for monetary independence is that it's kind
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  of like Russian nesting dolls, like a race to avoid the war is like a superset of the
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  themes and the mission required that was elucidated in 10 million Bitcoiners.
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  And then the battle for monetary independence is kind of a superset of the themes and the
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  actions required that I talked about in The Race to Avoid the War. So I think it is a good rallying
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  cry. It seems to be striking a nerve with a lot of people, which is great. We at Swan,
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  we like to coordinate things and we like to provide a platform, whether it's Bitcoin or
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  Jobs or Pacific Bitcoin or just producing shows or partnering with other companies.
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  I can't help. I'm a pass-first point guard by training in basketball. You try to make everybody
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  else score and then you win, right? So it's just kind of bringing that vibe back. I think there's
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  just been a kind of a lot of me, me, me, selfish, selfish, selfish, I, I, I in Bitcoin in recent
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  years. And I just wanted to do my best, as best as I know how, to the best of my capabilities
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  and our capabilities to kind of bring that vibe back. So we're doing it. We put our money where
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  our mouth is. We actually dropped our buy fee to 50 bps for the rest of the summer. So 0.5%
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  We remain the only company that has always since inception picked up the network fees for withdrawals.
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  So it is and always has been free to withdraw your coins into self-custody.
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  Over 80% of the sats ever bought through SWAN are in self-custody as they should be.
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  We're not in the business of custody.
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  I don't want your damn coins.
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  Like I want you to learn self-custody.
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  We help you with CS to take custody completely yourself.
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  We also have guided self-custody through Swan Sovereign, where you actually get a rep who can help you and do key ceremonies and help you figure out your wallets and stuff.
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  And then, of course, we have Swan Vault for two of three multi-sig collaborative self-custody.
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  So we really are there to help you own real on-chain Bitcoin and get comfortable to the point where you are perfectly willing and able to take self-custody.
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  We can help you get there.
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  So I think that is enough on the shilling of swan things.
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  The one thing I will add just here at the outset is I done this a couple of times the last couple of weeks and I really enjoy it Email me Like if you interested in talking to me my Twitter DMs like rest in peace
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  My company just, you know, communicates through Slack and Zoom.
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  So actually email is like the place where things stand out.
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  And it's been really fun.
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  I've gotten dozens of messages from Bitcoiners the last couple of weeks since I've been saying Corey at Swan.com.
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  C-O-R-Y at Swan.com.
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  Email me if you have a question about Swan or Bitcoin or educational resources or whatever.
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  Tell me what you're up to.
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  I happen to have the bandwidth right now to be a bit of an information broker and a connector,
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  more like in the early days of Swan and eager to be of service.
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  You wouldn't reuse a Bitcoin address, so why does your phone broadcast the same identifier for life?
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  Every SIM has a static ID and carriers, ad networks and bad actors all use it to track you.
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  The big carriers have been caught selling that data over and over again.
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  CAPE is America's privacy first mobile carrier.
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  Their identifier rotation feature changes your ID every 24 hours
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  so you look like a different subscriber every single day.
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  And SIM swaps are off the table.
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  Your number can't move without a 24-word phrase that only you hold.
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  There's also no name at sign up, no social security number,
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  and there's no profile to build on you.
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  If you're a Bitcoiner in America,
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  I honestly don't know why you'd use any other network.
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  You can head over to cape.co forward slash WBD and use the code WBD for 33% off your first six months.
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  That's C-A-P-E dot co forward slash WBD.
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  If you own a Bitcoin ETF, especially if it's GBTC, you need to listen up.
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  Spot Bitcoin ETFs provide price exposure to Bitcoin, not direct ownership.
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  You can't withdraw it, you can't self-custody it, and they charge you a management fee every year to hold it.
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  Well, Swan recently announced Swan Real Bitcoin Exchange and it's ready to use right now.
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  RBX is a structured in-kind exchange that converts your spot Bitcoin ETF shares into real on-chain Bitcoin
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  It does that without selling on the open market and is designed to support a tax-efficient outcome
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  So for example, if you hold GBTC, you're paying 1.5% a year in management fees for Bitcoin price exposure
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  But by swapping GBTC for real Bitcoin with RBX, you can drop that figure as low as 0% by just holding it in self-custody
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  this is designed in a way that maintains your cost basis and in a manner that supports the
• 12:44
  deferral of capital gains tax so if you own a bitcoin etf especially if it's gbtc
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  you need to talk to swan private about rbx today head over to swan.com forward slash wbd and book
• 12:55
  in a call with one of their team that's swan.com forward slash wbd if you already self-custody
• 13:01
  bitcoin you know the deal with hardware wallets complex setups clumsy interfaces and a seed phrase
• 13:06
  that can be lost, stolen or forgotten.
• 13:09
  BitKey fixes that.
• 13:10
  BitKey is self-custody built for real life.
• 13:12
  It gives you an intuitive, easy to use wallet
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  with no seed phrase to sweat over.
• 13:16
  And it has a strong recovery system
• 13:18
  and built inheritance for long-term peace of mind.
• 13:21
  And BitKey's just had a massive upgrade.
• 13:22
  The new device now has a screen.
• 13:24
  So before you approve something,
• 13:25
  you can check it on the BitKey itself.
• 13:27
  The transaction, the address or any account changes.
• 13:30
  It's a big difference.
• 13:31
  You're not just trusting what's on your phone,
• 13:33
  you're seeing it for yourself on the device.
• 13:35
  it's simple secure self-custody without the stress go to bitkey.world today and use the
• 13:40
  code wbd to get 10 off the new bitkey that's bitkey.world and use the code wbd i love it i
• 13:48
  think that's awesome um can we get a bit more into your recent article because this was some
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  clipston family history um just tell everyone sort of the the basis of the piece yeah so look
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  you can you can access it really quickly we did a short link so it's just swan.com slash battle
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  and you can check it out and that'll just redirect right to it. But broadly, it compares
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  this moment in time and like the work of our generation right now to the work of the founding
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  fathers of the American Republic 250 years ago. So their great job, the job of their generation
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  was to achieve political independence. And I see it as being our job to achieve monetary independence.
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  and we're early in the install of Bitcoin as global money across all three functions of money,
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  store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account. We have a lot of bears to beat back.
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  So battle of the bears is like one of the sub themes of the campaign and all this like, you
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  know, kill the bears and battle the bears type art and memes and comic books and AI videos and
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  things like that, which is really fun. But bringing it back to the article, you know, the
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  The anchor or the through line is actually my grandfather's war journals from World War
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  II.
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  So, he was on the USS Yorktown.
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  Unsurprisingly, he was in comps, so like radar and getting messages to and from the Admiral
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  on the flight deck, whatever, and I guess like the observation deck and getting the word
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  out on what he wanted to do and grabbing information and bringing it to him, et cetera.
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  And he kept a journal every single day that he was on it from embarking in early 44 out
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  of Bremerton Washington and then all the way through to Tokyo and Victory and Kamikazes and the whole thing And it all in there every day What was going on That incredible And so yeah so there quotes from his journal throughout it which are just I think
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  spectacular and really inspiring.
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  And I just really feel like, you know, standing on the shoulders of giants when we think about,
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  you know, what that generation achieved, what the founding fathers generation achieved.
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  and it's okay to like pick up the baton and try to achieve something, you know, like define your
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  mission, plan your mission, get on the damn mission, stay on the mission and be inspired.
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  Like, don't just let things happen. Don't just wait for somebody to give you permission for
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  Bitcoin to be awesome. Like, I just feel like so many people were so passionate about this
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  more than I see today, where I think there's just a lot of abdication of responsibility.
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  And it's like, oh, we're so small in comparison to, you know, what's going on with like BlackRock or Sailor or Fidelity or the government or fucking Howard Lutnick or like whatever it is.
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  It's like, no, these guys don't even really care that much.
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  Most of those people I named, they don't give a shit at all.
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  It's just kind of more fiat for them.
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  And I think that we owe it to ourselves to really take up the battle cry and do it.
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  And, you know, if I can pull my favorite anecdote from my grandfather, Philip's war journal, German descent, that's why he got sent to the Pacific and wasn't allowed to go to Europe.
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  You know, so he has this story in there where, you know, kamikazes are inbound and Japanese planes are coming and like trying to fire on them.
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  I think they took out 13 planes that day from the carrier.
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  And it's all going on madness around him.
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  And people are like scurrying and heads down and everything.
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  And like he's scared too.
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  And he's kind of like ducking down and like doesn't know where to be.
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  And he looks over and like the Admiral is like dead center on the observing deck or whatever.
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  Just standing there upright, you know, heartbeat, probably 55 per minute, something like that.
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  And, you know, he looks at him and he was like, oh, I guess it's okay.
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  You know, like maybe low chance of a plane actually crashing into us here and it would crash into me if I were squatting too, right?
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  So he just goes over and stands next to him and starts doing the, you know, the comms thing and sending out the messages and gathering the messages and just, you know, being chill in the face of danger as well.
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  And so I just encourage people that have like any kind of inclination to action, to leadership, to whatever. You're going to be so much happier that you did it when times were tough and were, you know, in five digit Bitcoin and you help rally the troops and we all get to like win together and come back out of this.
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  You know, if, you know, some new institution or government or whatever the hell, you know, creates some narrative that Wall Street thinks it can sell and the media latches on, you know, and then they get the credit for the narrative, like inevitably Bitcoin will go up again.
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  Only broad participation against lots of people who truly understand Bitcoin can like keep it there.
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  The people that just get easy access to Bitcoin through institutionalization and paper Bitcoin and like price exposure, by definition, because it was easy to buy, they have lettuce hands.
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  Like they have paper hands, you know, the institutions and the retail that buy ETFs are easy to shake out of their positions.
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  All the treasury stock type people are easy to shake out of their positions.
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  People that truly understand real on-chain Bitcoin are much harder to shake out of their positions.
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  Like that's the holder base.
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  And so I really do think that continues to be, you know, where the floor is set. That is where we can get a ripping bull market that's actually truly exciting and isn't so kneecapped by, you know, shitcoin chicanery like 21 was with SBF and Drayson Horowitz and all that Solana scamming or 25, which was just driven by institutional adoption by lettuce hands.
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  right and we just got kneecapped and that should have been 180 or 200 not 126.
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  So I do really hope that we see a bull market that really feels you know more like the bull
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  market did when you know I first came into the space 2017 and how exciting that was.
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  I can't even imagine being in from 2011 to 2013 and seeing it go from like a you know
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  two bucks to 1100. Oh my God. Like that would be, we're not going to see that. I'm not promising
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  that, but like, it does feel like we could, you know, at, at some point, it's not just going to
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  go up four X, six X, eight X. Like I do think at some point there'll be kind of a super cycle or
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  like an accelerated blow off top type thing. And I just think, you know, if that's going to happen,
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  it's going to be because we get back to basics and actually share with people all of the
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  underpinnings from Austrian economic thought to the best writing about Bitcoin, the best speaking about Bitcoin from the early days and like all the way through and just kind of marshal a new wave of actual human adoption.
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  Yeah, this is why I love what you're doing, because I think we do need a really broad push to try and get the vibes back in Bitcoin.
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  I've said this before on the show, but it feels like sentiment.
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  is particularly bad in this bear market, even though we're only down 50%, which comparatively
• 20:54
  is not a lot, because there's kind of nothing to point to as the reason why we're going down.
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  Like it felt like in the last bear market, obviously there was FTX blowing up, Terra
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  Luna, all the block fires Celsius, all that craziness.
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  And it was very easy to point at that and be like, that's the reason.
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  Whereas this time, it doesn't really feel like we've had that, which I think has left
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  people feeling confused, which is, I think, why sentiment's so bad.
• 21:17
  I don't know if you agree with that.
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  But what we do need is sort of a rallying cry to get everyone back on side.
• 21:23
  No, I do totally agree.
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  I think that, you know, unfortunately, you know, we all probably rehash this in Q1.
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  But, you know, just briefly, I do think the one major theme that continues to resonate with me is that 100,000 kind of felt like an exit for a lot of early HODLers.
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  but that was just a number that they had in mind where they would peel it off and like have a good
• 21:47
  life and buy the boat and pay for the kids college and kind of, and, and just diversify basically,
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  you know, they carried for a long time in many cases from like single, double, triple digits,
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  and it gets to six digits and you're like, ah, shit, like anywhere from 50 to 150, I'm peeling
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  off. Right. And that's exactly what we saw. It was a lot of old coins that changed hands,
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  but they've changed hands. And now we're at all time highs for long-term Bitcoin not moving,
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  right? And just sticking there in addresses for over the six months, over 12 months,
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  these numbers are at all time highs on chain now. And it does feel like we're kind of putting in a
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  floor somewhere around here. Would I be surprised if we saw 49? No. Would I be surprised if we saw
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  53? No. Would I be surprised if we see two or three months of the 58K stablecoin come back
• 22:36
  one more time. No, but, uh, you know, do I see like a, a real flush? I don't, I don't think that
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  it's in the cards. I think this is a shallower bear, which makes sense. You know, we went down,
• 22:47
  you know, 85% and then 77%. And, you know, I think it's, I came into this cycle believing like
• 22:55
  if we actually had a proper bull market, I'd be fine with anything less than a 70% drawdown
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  because the bear was, I'm sorry, because the bull was so muted and didn't reach the heights that I
• 23:05
  expected it to. It wasn't that exciting to go to 126. I think this is good. I think having hit
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  57.5 or whatever, that's a perfectly reasonable floor for the spare market. And I am just
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  encouraging everybody to buy the dip. Any excess fiat I have is going straight to Swan. Yes,
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  I pay transaction fees at the damn company that I own. So I'm also excited at taking 0.5%
• 23:35
  and uh i just did uh you know just tested my whole setup again right before coming abroad and it's
• 23:42
  like i just can't believe how easy uh our product has gotten with uh with swan vault multi-sig like
• 23:48
  it's just so good so i highly recommend it like i stand behind it with two feet and i highly
• 23:54
  recommend you check it out that's awesome um so i i totally agree with what you're saying there
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  though and and checkmate has a thing he says that the the bull market author is the bear that follows
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  And I think that's what we've seen, like a 50% drop after the sort of muted last cycle
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  makes sense.
• 24:10
  And I'm not in the business of calling tops or bottoms.
• 24:12
  I'm just here talking about Bitcoin to people.
• 24:14
  But what does seem clear is there are things happening that make me think the bottom is
• 24:19
  probably close, if not already in.
• 24:21
  And I think even just in the last few days, BitMEX has closed down.
• 24:24
  We're seeing some of the treasury companies capitulate.
• 24:26
  These are the things that I think end up marking the bottom.
• 24:30
  Do you think we are probably quite close?
• 24:33
  Yeah.
• 24:34
  And just from every bear market has bottomed out exactly 12 months after the bull peak.
• 24:42
  So what is that?
• 24:43
  When was it?
• 24:44
  October 26th?
• 24:45
  October.
• 24:46
  Yeah.
• 24:46
  I think it was late October.
• 24:48
  So it's three months away.
• 24:49
  Can we trundle along here for three months?
• 24:51
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 24:53
  And if it bounces between 53 and 73, I don't think we're headed back to the bull until
• 24:58
  we punch through 73.
• 24:59
  that's just you know that was kind of the peak of the the etf pump in q124 and then in the in the
• 25:07
  bull there was one you know it went to like 108 but then it pulled all the way back down to 73 and
• 25:12
  that was support so it's been like the high and it's been the low now it has to be the one that
• 25:17
  you punch through to to head up to 200k i just think i think there's like very little but air
• 25:22
  above 73 so it'll be 73 a little bit of psychology around 100 again a little bit of psychology
• 25:28
  around 125 126 where the uh where the head where the basketball mark was but like i don't think
• 25:34
  that 100 and 125 are hard to punch through i think it really is like you know off and running once
• 25:40
  you punch through 73 let's go i i want to know why you think by the way i don't trade
• 25:44
  for me just you know thinking about my family's future and you know how to spend money at swan
• 25:51
  and make investments and think about campaigns and shit like that yeah exactly so i the same I obviously don trade The only trade I have in my future is selling some Bitcoin to buy a house at some point And I felt like I was close to that And now I probably a couple of years away again No you won have to buy a house
• 26:10
  My wife is going to make me buy a house.
• 26:13
  Yeah, I know. I'm married to a Turk. They don't believe in debt. So I get it.
• 26:19
  Yeah, exactly. I want to know why you think that the sort of the diminishing returns that we've seen in Bitcoin,
• 26:26
  the not so like I like you I came into Bitcoin 2016 2017 like that was my first bull market and
• 26:32
  being the first one and being the kind of market that we had it was pure euphoria craziness like
• 26:37
  those last few days of of 2017 were absolutely nuts and we've not really seen that again since
• 26:42
  why do you think they can come back and it's not just a forever diminishing returns type thing
• 26:47
  well I think it'll be vibe based so I'm not saying that I think we're gonna go from
• 26:54
  180 bucks to 19,700 that was like 110x from uh from property peak i don't see 110x cycle coming up
• 27:04
  uh and then also because it's just a law of large numbers and it's just like bigger it's just harder
• 27:10
  to move the thing so if you think about going from like 15 5 to 126 like that was 8x if we go from
• 27:19
  60 to 480 that's that's another 8x it could be muted like even if you went from like you know 60
• 27:25
  to you know 300 that would be a 5x which actually is diminishing returns in percentage terms
• 27:32
  but the vibes and the feel of that would still be just like rip roaring so i'm looking for like
• 27:37
  a vibe match not a percentage gains match that makes sense i i can't wait for those vibes to
• 27:44
  come back like they were then um do you think we've had a an adoption problem over the last
• 27:48
  few years? Because I mean, I obviously can track who's watching the podcast and it doesn't feel
• 27:54
  like we've had a huge influx of new people. I did a live show here in PubKey last night. And one of
• 27:59
  the questions I asked the audience was who had come to Bitcoin in the last couple of years.
• 28:03
  And I think three people raised their hand, which honestly was three people more than I expected to
• 28:07
  see. I don't know. I don't exactly know why we've not had the adoption. But do you think there is a
• 28:14
  problem there? So what it is very clearly to me is that, you know, ETFs and institutional adoption
• 28:23
  and spread of price exposure came about four or five years earlier than I expected it. I thought
• 28:29
  we did ETFs in like 2028 to 2030. So just like circular economies and trying to jam medium of
• 28:39
  exchange down somebody's throat long before people even understand owning and holding Bitcoin and
• 28:44
  long before it's actually like a stable store of value is too early. And that's basically just
• 28:48
  marketing. Like that's, that's all the El Salvador thing ever was, was just marketing, which is why
• 28:52
  I didn't get involved in it other than kind of helping a little bit in the background.
• 28:57
  It's like that, like the, the flip side of that coin of making it easy to buy Bitcoin,
• 29:03
  as, as I was saying 10 minutes ago, is that a lot of people bought Bitcoin price exposure without
• 29:09
  understanding what they own, not actually getting it into the real thing, not understanding the power
• 29:15
  of not having to ask for permission to hold and own your own assets. And those are just lettuce
• 29:21
  handed institutions and lettuce handed retail. And they just, you know, it was the last thing in
• 29:26
  their portfolio. It's the thing they understand the least. And so we cheered making it easy to
• 29:31
  buy Bitcoin. And it also is super easy to sell Bitcoin, again, because they don't have conviction.
• 29:36
  so we need to disable the sell button on swan again um that that would be
• 29:42
  there's a very there's a very bad history with hodl mode if you remember the celsius days
• 29:50
  uh i'm not i'm not sure you want to bring that back in any way shape or form but yeah we did
• 29:54
  hold out for about four and a half five years with no sell button i love that still um do you
• 30:00
  think any of it comes down to sort of narrative issues because like if you look at the past cycles
• 30:06
  2017, I always feel like that was when Bitcoin became a household name.
• 30:09
  Like certainly everyone did not understand Bitcoin, but I think most people had heard
• 30:13
  of Bitcoin at that point.
• 30:15
  And then you had sort of the 2020 COVID crash and then crazy stimulus, which kind of shoved
• 30:20
  inflation down everyone's throat for the first time.
• 30:22
  Everyone kind of woke up to that.
• 30:23
  Again, we had an influx of new people.
• 30:26
  And even 24, I guess we had this sort of ETF narrative, very different, way less cool,
• 30:31
  way less like punk rock Bitcoin.
• 30:33
  and I feel like now we're hanging out for one.
• 30:37
  Look, I think it's kind of back to basics.
• 30:40
  I think this is kind of the,
• 30:41
  I think the freedom narrative
• 30:43
  and the bulwark against tyranny,
• 30:45
  that's what motivated me.
• 30:47
  That's why in May we started planning
• 30:49
  for 50 Days for Freedom
• 30:51
  and the battle for monetary independence
• 30:52
  and all of this kind of came around.
• 30:54
  It's because there has been this rush
• 30:57
  of anti-freedom actions
• 31:00
  taken by governments in different places,
• 31:02
  often in collusion with private companies.
• 31:04
  You know, it started with the social media ban
• 31:09
  for under 16s in the UK And then like the next day there was a VPN ban for Utah And then you know a couple of days after that was like an announcement of you know the accelerated schedule for the Euro CBDC And then a few days after that was having to prove your ID that you
• 31:29
  not a miner to use the LLMs in the US, the Anthropic and OpenAI. And then you've got chat
• 31:37
  control in the EU that they jammed through after losing five times in a row when there was a full
• 31:43
  vote, then they basically just did some tricks basically and reversed it and said on the last
• 31:50
  week before MPs go on vacation, it has to pass instead of fail by a majority of the people
• 31:56
  present. I'm sorry, a majority of the MPs, not the people present. So it actually like
• 32:01
  anti-chat control was the majority of people voting, but they set it up so that it had to be
• 32:07
  majority of the total and a bunch of people were already on the Riviera and don't give a shit
• 32:11
  because they just have a sanity here and they're bureaucrats that don't give a shit about the people
• 32:16
  and they pass chat control. So I just think that Bitcoin and just freedom tools, free open source
• 32:24
  software, cryptography generally are the last bastion of liberty. And this is really the time
• 32:34
  to take up that call. And that was the inspiration for writing the battle for monetary independence.
• 32:39
  It was the inspiration for this 50 day campaign of the battle for freedom through Bitcoin really
• 32:45
  is like Bitcoin as a freedom enabling tool. And I am just, I don't know. I don't know that I've
• 32:52
  been this excited and fired up in years. I mean, this, this feels like, this feels like when I got
• 33:00
  into Bitcoin, you know, building my conviction in 1819 and starting Swan and launching in 2020
• 33:06
  and just how much energy there was, you know, all the way through battling all the crypto scammers
• 33:12
  in 22 and all those collapses and how we were all cheering and having the blast even as Bitcoin was
• 33:18
  falling into the, you know, into the teens at Pacific Bitcoin in 22. Like it feels like that
• 33:23
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• 36:04
  I love the vibes coming back.
• 36:06
  And the funny thing about that
• 36:07
  Pacific Bitcoin conference in 2022,
• 36:09
  price was crashing, I was there,
• 36:11
  and vibes were still high then.
• 36:12
  Like amongst the hardcore Bitcoiners,
• 36:14
  the vibes don't really change.
• 36:15
  We just need to spread this to everyone else.
• 36:17
  The interesting thing on all the sort of crackdown
• 36:19
  on free and open use of the internet chat controls things like this is that there a proportion of people that say well move And I don really love that as an argument The amazing thing about Bitcoin and the freedom tech that being built is you can still live in those systems and just live in a totally
• 36:35
  parallel world. You don't have to necessarily follow these rules. Using Bitcoin, using VPNs,
• 36:41
  using open source AI, all these things are available to everyone and you could just live
• 36:45
  the life you want to live. That's right. Yeah. You can exit without physically exiting. And
• 36:51
  And we've talked about this time and time again as Bitcoiners.
• 36:54
  And I don't think people really understand that.
• 36:57
  And this kind of gets to, interestingly, I think it was the opening speech I gave at Pacific Bitcoin 2023.
• 37:05
  Do you remember that was like the first big backlash from the shit coins on Bitcoin people and all the ordinals people and like the Oodis, whatever of the world, like hating on Bitcoin educators and saying it was, you know, whatever.
• 37:17
  And it was my cousin, Cameron Clipston, the much more famous Clipston in Los Angeles who grew up there. He came up to me after a Swan Salon and it happened to be, that's one of our private client events.
• 37:32
  and I was like I was a little drained because I'd been on stage you know talking and I kind of just
• 37:37
  felt like and I was kind of you know burying my chest in a little bit and saying like you know
• 37:42
  it really felt like I am just kind of synthesizing things that I've read by other people and I just
• 37:48
  feel like I'm kind of repeating things a lot you know like the same old jokes for a comedian or
• 37:52
  something like how much is there really like new thought here it's all been said to some degree
• 37:57
  and I feel a lot more creative now,
• 38:00
  but at the time I was just feeling a little bit
• 38:02
  like at the end of my cycle there a little bit.
• 38:04
  And what he said is like,
• 38:08
  everything you said was awesome
• 38:09
  because I don't know much about Bitcoin
• 38:10
  and that was all new to me.
• 38:13
  And he reminded me of something that I should know
• 38:15
  because I ran a lot of YouTube sales strategy at Google.
• 38:19
  And like, I know that over 99% of views
• 38:21
  come on new content, not library content.
• 38:24
  And his point was,
• 38:25
  if somebody has chosen to listen to you, it actually is incumbent on you to, if you're the
• 38:32
  voice that they listen to and you're the educator they choose, it's incumbent upon you to tell them
• 38:37
  everything about Bitcoin. So like you with your audience, like you have to tell them everything
• 38:42
  they should have learned if they read Bitcoin is worse is better and showing out. And, you know,
• 38:49
  if they never saw the podcast with like, you know, Naval interview, or sorry, it was Tim Ferriss
• 38:54
  interviewing Nick Szabo and, you know, or they never listened to episode 71 of the Stefan
• 39:00
  Levera podcast, you know, intro to Bitcoin economic thought, you know, or Austrian economic
• 39:04
  thought, you know, so you kind of have to like resurface these things and repackage them and
• 39:09
  tell them in your own voice. And, you know, if people are learning Bitcoin because they're
• 39:14
  subscribed to your feed and they like your style and they like the cadence and you're a good
• 39:17
  interviewer and the production value is good, like it's kind of on you to find the guests and find
• 39:22
  the topics and ask the questions and figure out a way to get them up to speed on everything
• 39:27
  they've missed in the last 17 years.
• 39:30
  So I'm just kind of reminding myself of that responsibility and reminding our whole team
• 39:34
  and everybody around us and the podcasts we sponsor, et cetera, like we actually have
• 39:39
  a responsibility to bring the best of everything forward, you know, kind of year after year.
• 39:46
  and you know using the the stand-up comic you know frame of reference again or the analogy like
• 39:53
  some of the jokes may change and you're swapping it in and you're like hey there was this one piece
• 39:58
  about bitcoin and mises from 2014 actually the way they said it in 2019 was a little better so
• 40:02
  we swapped that out and like the jokes or the routine just keeps on getting better but uh yeah
• 40:08
  i just i just think you know always be curating abc always be curating i think that's i think
• 40:14
  that's actually a really good point um it's like you're the band you need to play the hits you don't
• 40:18
  want to be playing the obscure b-sides and i think when you've been doing this a long time
• 40:21
  and having these conversations a lot it's easy to feel slightly jaded by them but i think that
• 40:26
  is actually a very good reminder is that the thing as like bitcoin educators people who who
• 40:30
  do bitcoin content do you think that's the key thing we need to take forward or is there anything
• 40:34
  else we should be doing better i mean that i see as kind of the key thing uh i do continue
• 40:44
  I think there's something interesting going on right now with just how accessible AI makes knowledge and deep dives, not just coding, but also just being able to do research so easily and so quickly.
• 40:58
  I find it a lot easier to get to a point of technical understanding for a non-technical person than it's ever been before.
• 41:08
  because you got to spend a lot of time with these tools
• 41:14
  and you have to understand that Gemini is the best at research
• 41:17
  because it's Google and they have access to the internet
• 41:20
  and it's super fast and you can get all the information,
• 41:23
  but the logic engine is really stupid
• 41:26
  and it hallucinates constantly.
• 41:28
  And so you basically have to run it through ChatGBT,
• 41:33
  which is by far the smartest of the four,
• 41:35
  if you think of like Rock and Claude as being in there.
• 41:38
  And so you can kind of like
• 41:39
  like bat them off. And then if you want like a crazy autistic cousin, then you also run it
• 41:44
  through Grok sometimes. And then, you know, if you're doing coding or processes or whatever,
• 41:47
  like Claude is fine, but Claude is not a good researcher and it's not a good logician
• 41:51
  for words, strategy, research, things like that. Like it's just, it's great for code and it's great
• 41:57
  for process and that's fine. And sure, whatever, maybe Dario invents AGI, I don't know. But,
• 42:02
  you know, I just, I just find it's, it's rather easy now to get up to speed on technical topics
• 42:08
  for someone who's not that technical, you know? And I enjoyed jumping back into coding for the
• 42:15
  first time since the 90s. And I did a lot of it in like December, January, February. And we launched
• 42:21
  Speakeasy, which I prototyped. And we launched Vigil Protocol, which I prototyped, which is like
• 42:26
  family financial orchestration for Bitcoiners and non-Bitcoiners. Go to vigilprotocol.ai if you want
• 42:31
  want to check that out or email me. But yeah, I think then I just started realizing, you know,
• 42:39
  so much of this is just about having a tool for easy, faster understanding of complex topics
• 42:44
  and helping you kind of explain things to other people and arming yourself with good info. And I
• 42:52
  love that aspect of it. Obviously, it's great for strategy and great for marketing and writing and
• 42:57
  all kinds of different things, but I'm really enjoying being able to use it as a research tool
• 43:01
  as well yeah i'd be we should get individual later on because i am interested in that but um
• 43:07
  before we do that like you you have obviously been pushing bitcoin to sort of broader audiences
• 43:11
  trying to go through like the more cultural um avenues you had a lot of like basketball players
• 43:16
  people like that on the team do you still see that as a very important thing because i mean i had
• 43:20
  brandon quit on the show recently and we were talking about the uh archetypes of bitcoiners
• 43:24
  and how we're all just as a little bit weird and obviously we need to scale this to beyond the uh
• 43:29
  the autists of the world.
• 43:31
  Do you still see that as a very key avenue?
• 43:38
  I do think that when we were going a lot more after mass retail
• 43:45
  and probably just...
• 43:49
  I think the way that...
• 43:51
  You know what it is?
• 43:52
  It's probably...
• 43:52
  It was the ETFs launching in 24
• 43:54
  that basically pushed Bitcoin-only fintechs
• 43:59
  more mid funnel and ETFs became a much bigger part of the top of funnel.
• 44:03
  It made it a lot easier to do kind of private client businesses.
• 44:07
  It made it a lot easier to have subscription revenue from retirement accounts and different
• 44:15
  custody products and loans and things like that because you didn't have to fight against
• 44:20
  altcoins because altcoins are basically dead.
• 44:24
  So it's like a much better and cleaner top of funnel and especially because the ETFs
• 44:28
  sell a much inferior product to what you have. So it just kind of naturally sends people down
• 44:33
  funnel to Bitcoin financial services firms. But the broad retail is very handled by Robinhood,
• 44:43
  E-Trade, Fidelity, ETFs, et cetera, when they're not into it yet. So we used to have the first
• 44:52
  purchase from the majority of our new customers, it was the first place they ever bought Bitcoin.
• 44:56
  And it was like that for years. And now it's more like, you know, two thirds have an ETF already. And then they're going through that phase and starting to learn and care about Bitcoin after that and realizing it's better to have ownership than just exposure.
• 45:12
  So it really is just education, education, education at this point.
• 45:15
  It is because, yeah, because I could go and, you know, do a jersey patch on the Lakers or go and, you know, try to cut a deal with like Giannis or, you know, Roger Federer or something like that.
• 45:27
  And like, it just wouldn't fucking do anything.
• 45:30
  That's all that market is all gambling.
• 45:32
  It's all hot stocks and, you know, hot cryptos and leverage trading and sports betting and prediction markets.
• 45:38
  I mean, you just cannot outspend these guys because they're the house of a casino.
• 45:42
  and that's where the mass market is you know it makes sense for coinbase to put their name on the
• 45:50
  backboard during the playoffs and it makes sense for all the gambling sites to be on the epl jerseys
• 45:56
  you know it doesn't make sense for a bitcoin company to do that yeah no i totally agree with
• 46:02
  that um you you said that um you think altcoins are dead and i know we spoke about this a little
• 46:07
  bit on the last show but i think it's worth revisiting do you think that like obviously
• 46:11
  the vibes in bitcoin have been low the vibes in crypto it is over um i i am reluctant to say it's
• 46:18
  dead forever because like whenever i think that they come back with some new innovation but um
• 46:22
  well it's fake innovation it's dead for the fight that i care about which was okay what's what's
• 46:28
  that well there was there was this you know it was the it was the the altcoin battle or the battle
• 46:33
  of Bitcoin versus crypto and it was seven years. It was basically 2017 to 2023 inclusive
• 46:38
  of those seven years. And it was when a bunch of them were making claims to be better money.
• 46:44
  And it was you know it ended with the last gasp of the ETH heads and the bankless guys claiming that ETH was super sound or whatever And basically with the merge spurge plurge spooge doge whatever that was that Ethereum did
• 46:59
  and switching to proof of stake, that was the end of it. And I think the launch of the ETFs was
• 47:06
  kind of the nail in the coffin in January of 24. And it's just not a thing that gives me any
• 47:11
  thinking or pausing or anything at all. I mean, you can maybe have a short-term trade
• 47:18
  in a stock or a shitcoin that may outperform Bitcoin for a short period of time,
• 47:23
  but you can't do a one-way trade and hold for a few decades.
• 47:29
  Yeah.
• 47:30
  Because the founder could die or Vitalik could actually act on his fantasies of doing
• 47:36
  horrible things to young people or like whatever it is, you know, like I think I just, you know,
• 47:43
  you just, you can't trust these things that are just, that have leaders and that aren't
• 47:48
  Bitcoin in that way.
• 47:50
  And that's true of, you know, the, the leverage Bitcoin equity treasury stocks, which require
• 47:55
  all these levels of execution, have key man risk, et cetera.
• 47:58
  Like you just can't put much of your net worth into these things.
• 48:01
  um i think the only
• 48:04
  yeah but you are you are just um they're not even making the claim of any there's no altcoin that
• 48:15
  i've heard of in the last couple of years that's made any kind of claim of like being better than
• 48:20
  bitcoin at being money yeah that's the fight we've won we've won it's completely defeated and i don't
• 48:25
  really care about the other stuff because the bull case for crypto blockchain defy always which
• 48:31
  i became aware of by 2019 and have said ever since is the bull case is to merge with tradfi
• 48:37
  and provide incremental improvements to financial it which i have no fucking problem with i'd like
• 48:43
  go for it dude like you know improve settlement times a little bit you know put some tokenize
• 48:51
  some cows and take a loan against it. You know, like it's fine. I don't give a shit. Like it's
• 48:56
  just, it doesn't matter. Real world assets on chain is just like, you know, another flavor of
• 49:03
  digital recording of asset ownership. It's still adjudicated in meat space. I don't even, I don't
• 49:09
  give a shit if somebody comes and tells me about their Wharton blockchain certification. Like it
• 49:14
  doesn't mean what they thought it was going to mean back then that we'd have all these competing
• 49:19
  currencies. It was like, that was the one major thing that Andreas Antonopoulos got dreadfully
• 49:24
  wrong because he just never understood Austrian economics. Great at technical explanations of
• 49:29
  Bitcoin, but like all his economic stuff was just terrible because he would always talk about,
• 49:34
  you know, there's going to be some little girl in like Eastern Kenya that will start a currency
• 49:37
  in our village and it could be worth a lot. And it's like, no, they're going to get fucking wrecked
• 49:42
  like the dudes that were, you know, trading glass beads, you know, because their currency is shit
• 49:47
  and doesn't have a monetary network effect.
• 49:49
  So nothing can beat Bitcoin at this point.
• 49:52
  The rest of this century is basically just a race
• 49:54
  between, you know, dollars slash treasuries
• 49:57
  and gold and Bitcoin.
• 49:59
  And Bitcoin is the fastest horse in the race.
• 50:00
  And it's the one that's technologically
• 50:01
  and just kind of logically superior to the other two.
• 50:05
  And it's just a matter of getting people to wake up to that.
• 50:07
  Like the real lines that are going is like,
• 50:09
  it's 8 billion people versus 21 million coins.
• 50:12
  Like that's really the only two numbers
• 50:14
  that matter for this thing.
• 50:16
  Let's go.
• 50:17
  can I get your sort of broad take on everything that's happened with strategy and especially on
• 50:23
  their sort of marketing side over the last you know six eight months because one of the things
• 50:27
  that I had a really big problem with is calling saying that he was making bitcoin better money
• 50:32
  that that was like really the marketing push that I did not like that didn't sit well with me
• 50:36
  but like what's your overall take well that was the uh you know Fonzie jumping the shark moment
• 50:43
  And that was kind of when like even even the nicest Bitcoiners that like him personally and like the team and like the effort and love having them on the bid like that was a bridge too far.
• 50:54
  So I was I was OK with digital credit, even though Stretch and SATA are not digital credit.
• 51:01
  They're hybrid equities and it's you know, it is an equity and it's professional preferred.
• 51:05
  And, you know, using the language of better savings is pretty much what Mashensky and BlockFi used to say.
• 51:11
  and you know that that wasn't really okay but it did seem like they'd always caveat it on their
• 51:18
  appearances and they would actually always point to the fine print and they would always be like
• 51:22
  you know i know it's actually a hybrid equity it's just like it like the buyers are seeing it as
• 51:27
  credit and it does kind of have a yield because there's a payment every month or whatever so like
• 51:31
  i was okay with digital credit as a term of art and the way they were talking about it uh i didn't
• 51:37
  like any of the marketing to retail. From inception, when I saw these, I saw this as a
• 51:45
  Wall Street product. I saw these as leveraged Bitcoin equities. That's what they actually are.
• 51:50
  That's why I created the acronym in late 23 LBE, because it accurately describes what's going on.
• 51:56
  A Bitcoin treasury company masks what going on and confuses people because if you have Bitcoin in your treasury like MassMutual or Tesla you a Bitcoin treasury company and so is Swan and probably so are you right You a Bitcoin treasury company because you have Bitcoin in your treasury So it just confusing and doesn make
• 52:11
  any sense. A leveraged Bitcoin equity should provide levered exposure to Bitcoin price.
• 52:19
  And so it should be essentially a way to get 1.2X per year or 1.15X per year that compounds over
• 52:27
  time. It also will draw down more in a bear market when Bitcoin drops. It's hard to do. You can't
• 52:35
  create perpetual leverage that just sits there. You have to actively kind of trade and market
• 52:40
  and access capital markets and talk to shareholders and you face liquidity crunches
• 52:45
  and key man risk and regulatory risk and all these other things. There's all these extraneous factors.
• 52:50
  True of ETFs as well, by the way, which is why you can't just buy and hold a 2x long ETF. They always
• 52:57
  have an error tracking the index, which is why they're actually used as hedging tools by
• 53:02
  professional traders, not buy and holds for long-term investors. You can't use them that
• 53:09
  way. They erode and they don't actually track it and they have high expense ratios and you just get
• 53:13
  wrecked. And so I never thought they should have been marketed to retail. I thought the whole point
• 53:21
  was trying to get institutions into it.
• 53:24
  If you're obviously like watching the institutional marketing
• 53:29
  and seeing people going doing roadshows
• 53:31
  and getting institutions into the stock and their preferreds,
• 53:35
  like by all means, if that like I'm all about freedom
• 53:39
  and you should be like free to do what you want.
• 53:41
  But I don't like the messaging coming through
• 53:43
  with like superhero memes and like, you know,
• 53:46
  hot girl on the tide beach talking about retiring
• 53:48
  on a preferred equity or whatever.
• 53:50
  But even all of that didn't really raise my hackles until it was like a derivative of a derivative is digital money.
• 53:59
  You know, with the oil derrick meme or whatever.
• 54:02
  And like we refined Bitcoin into digital money.
• 54:04
  And I was like, bro, you're literally taking like a tranche of a preferred share that's traded on the DeFi rails of like former crypto scammers who you're now putting on stage at your conference and pumping them.
• 54:27
  And, you know, I just and calling it digital money.
• 54:30
  Anyway, so that I thought was a bridge too far.
• 54:33
  I hope they pull back from that.
• 54:34
  I think they'll revisit that term.
• 54:36
  I still very much like as people,
• 54:40
  let's say like Sailor and Sharish and CJ and the team at Strategy,
• 54:44
  I still like people Matt and Ben and Jeff over at Strive.
• 54:48
  Kudos to both of those teams for actually achieving live functioning LBEs,
• 54:54
  the only two in the US that actually achieved it.
• 54:57
  Everybody else either died or is still
• 55:00
  subscale and hasn't even been able to lever up in that way.
• 55:04
  I do think one of the most interesting things that came out from the strategy team where they
• 55:09
  said that 80% of the people that bought it were retail investors. And like you said earlier,
• 55:13
  this was kind of touted as being an institutional vehicle. And clearly, we didn't get there to a
• 55:20
  great degree. And I do wonder if that means the institutional money that everyone expected to
• 55:24
  flow into Bitcoin last cycle is still on the sidelines. And that's sort of a big pool of
• 55:28
  capital that we'll tap into in the next few years? Yeah. So look, I know what I wanted to say in the
• 55:35
  last section, which is that even in the height of the hysteria of strategy in, you know, 24, 25,
• 55:42
  you know, we had a hard line that I personally had to come up with and kind of put through our
• 55:45
  whole sales and marketing team, which is like, yes, we understand some of our clients are also
• 55:50
  allocating to this, but like hold the line and be very firm that you actually believe, you know,
• 55:55
  80% of their Bitcoin price exposure minimum should be real on-chain Bitcoin.
• 56:00
  So if you want a trading stack, understand that that's a trade.
• 56:03
  Understand it's not the real thing.
• 56:05
  Understand there's a lot of risks on top of Bitcoin that you're accepting by buying these, you know, securities.
• 56:11
  And just make sure.
• 56:12
  I would say having watched the last year of, you know, NACA, Sequans, which we, you know, advised to some degree.
• 56:18
  and Empree and Pops thing
• 56:21
  and, you know, all the hundreds of failed attempts
• 56:25
  that Debra even got off the ground
• 56:26
  and then watching what happened to strategy
• 56:28
  and their price.
• 56:30
  Like, at this point, I'm like,
• 56:32
  like, minimum 90% of your Bitcoin price exposure
• 56:35
  should be real on-chain Bitcoin.
• 56:37
  And if you want to gamble a little bit
• 56:39
  and, like, think you have an N or something like that,
• 56:41
  like, sure, go there.
• 56:42
  But I think you'll be very happy
• 56:44
  buying and holding Decoin for the long term.
• 56:48
  Yeah, that's all I do. I do think that going forward, maybe these will perform kind of like
• 56:54
  altcoins did in the past, where maybe during a bull market, they'll outperform Bitcoin,
• 56:59
  but I don't think over any long arc of time they will.
• 57:02
  Then you shouldn't hold them at all, because that's really the promise of a leveraged Bitcoin
• 57:05
  equity. So if you think they're going to weed out so much that over the long haul,
• 57:09
  they don't outperform Bitcoin, then you should never buy it.
• 57:14
  And I mean I no markets guy That just my gut check on it at the moment Have you seen that Strategy Galaxy BlackRock a few other companies have just come out with this Bitcoin
• 57:24
  security consortium? I have. Yeah.
• 57:27
  What's... So the idea of this is... Sorry, just for the audience, the idea of this is that they're
• 57:31
  going to try and do some novel quantum proof cryptography, sort of build on that. Does it
• 57:36
  worry you in any way, like the group of people that are working on it?
• 57:38
  So that's one of the things they say they're going to work on. I think Galaxy announced first, and I think of it, it's not using the word of a pledge, but I think that is the way to understand it. So they basically pledged $5 million, and then the rest of the firms kicked in, and I think it's like $15 million total.
• 57:55
  it's not going to any central entity and each of the companies gets to spend the money however they
• 58:03
  want and so in that respect it doesn't worry me as being like particularly centralizing
• 58:10
  uh you know i just see it as you know why not having have some people spending some money on
• 58:18
  bitcoin and looking at things and they're probably gonna hire people that really give a shit and
• 58:22
  And we'll look at these things.
• 58:23
  And this is why, again, you can't always look at something that appears stupid and negative and self-serving.
• 58:31
  And like there may be a silver lining to the cloud.
• 58:35
  So, you know, there was a lot of penny stock pump and dumping in early 25 around quantum themes.
• 58:41
  And a bunch of people ripped people's faces off and did a lot of scamming and got away with it as usual.
• 58:45
  and basically by the fall,
• 58:47
  there were a bunch of crypto,
• 58:48
  blockchain VCs and companies
• 58:50
  pumping crypto, you know, quantum FUD
• 58:53
  and, you know, basically
• 58:54
  the way they marketed their funds
• 58:55
  and marketed their companies
• 58:56
  was saying that Bitcoin was, you know,
• 58:58
  in dire need of saving like right now.
• 59:00
  So fund my deal.
• 59:02
  And that sucked.
• 59:03
  And I do think it was part of the muting
• 59:05
  of the bull market last fall
• 59:07
  was quantum FUD kind of selfishly.
• 59:10
  But, you know, there is a silver lining.
• 59:12
  Not everything is in the con column.
• 59:14
  and why not have some shit on the shelf
• 59:17
  kind of ready to go, well-researched,
• 59:19
  in case something ever happens.
• 59:21
  Do I think it's urgent? No.
• 59:22
  Do I think it was genuine and honest
• 59:25
  the way that a bunch of these scammer types
• 59:28
  went after Quantum FUD last fall?
• 59:30
  No, I don't think that was genuine and honest
• 59:32
  and I don't believe them.
• 59:34
  But I really don't fucking mind where it ended up
• 59:38
  and I just don't really care.
• 59:40
  I don't think that they can exert
• 59:42
  undue influence on this. I don't think the loose coordination by, you know, Mike Schmidt organizing
• 59:49
  a Zoom call twice a week or probably like fucking twice a year, not twice a week, probably like
• 59:54
  twice a year between, you know, some lower level research guy that works for Alex Thorne at Galaxy
• 1:00:00
  and Alex is a hardcore Bitcoiner. You know, even some of the guys at Fidelity that would take this
• 1:00:06
  work on are Bitcoiners. And, you know, same thing at BlackRock. There's a couple of real Bitcoiners
• 1:00:10
  that run their internal blockchain group. And do I think they're going to be nefarious?
• 1:00:16
  I don't think it'll matter. Like 15 million isn't that much money. Like what are they
• 1:00:20
  going to do? Like force us all to like steal Satoshi's coins and pass James' dumb ass BIP?
• 1:00:25
  No, it's not going to happen. Yeah, no, I think this is a good thing as well.
• 1:00:31
  And there's no reason that any of the research that they fund will, it doesn't mean it has
• 1:00:35
  to end up in Bitcoin. And if strategy and Galaxy are going to foot the bill to do some
• 1:00:39
  novel cryptography research. I think it's a really good thing. I also think there's been a lot of
• 1:00:43
  people that were critical of Sailor for never funding developers who are now being critical
• 1:00:46
  of Sailor because he's teamed up with BlackRock to fund developers. I just don't think you can
• 1:00:50
  have it both ways. I think it's probably a good thing. I'm neutral. I don't trust anybody.
• 1:00:57
  I just don't really care. And I think there's plenty of people willing to do the research,
• 1:01:04
  especially with, again, like AI tools and being able to access cryptography papers and like
• 1:01:10
  figure things out. It's not out of reach for people without funding to do that sort of thing
• 1:01:15
  either. And as we've seen with some of the atrocious funding that's gone on for Bitcoin devs
• 1:01:20
  and protocol devs and some of the poor choices made for like who gets those grants, you know,
• 1:01:26
  just having the money available doesn't mean that that person or people are going to outperform
• 1:01:30
  people doing it for the love of the game.
• 1:01:33
  Yeah.
• 1:01:34
  Before we close out, Corey, I want to talk a little bit about Vigil.
• 1:01:37
  I was speaking to Brady and P a couple of weeks ago, and they were telling me about
• 1:01:40
  it.
• 1:01:41
  It sounds very cool, but you should let everyone know what it is.
• 1:01:43
  Yeah, it really is.
• 1:01:44
  So Vigil Protocol basically came out of the problems that we individual humans at Swan
• 1:01:52
  and all our clients kept on pointing to, which is that once you get over a certain level
• 1:01:57
  assets that's not really that high, your life financially gets pretty complicated. This is like
• 1:02:03
  the more money, more problems issue that you run into. Like over like 30 to 50 million bucks,
• 1:02:10
  you can pay for your own family office or you qualify for like ultra high net worth tier at
• 1:02:15
  Goldman or Morgan. And you kind of have a whole team handling all your shit and, you know, doing
• 1:02:18
  all the legal tax evasion and asset optimization and tax-free gifts to your kids and all that kind
• 1:02:24
  You got enough money to handle it,
• 1:02:26
  and it's worth paying like the 250 grand a year
• 1:02:28
  or whatever to get that done for you.
• 1:02:29
  anywhere between that, like one to 30 mil,
• 1:02:33
  it's just like you're on your own
• 1:02:35
  and you have this patchwork, you know,
• 1:02:37
  and basically every American suburb and city
• 1:02:39
  is just full of people with like, you know,
• 1:02:41
  their tax guy, their fucking estate lawyer,
• 1:02:44
  their insurance guy, their real estate guy,
• 1:02:47
  their FA, you know, maybe like a pocket
• 1:02:51
  for venture capital, private equity type stuff,
• 1:02:53
  investing in your friends, this, that, the other,
• 1:02:55
  like it's just, it's spread out all over the place
• 1:02:57
  plus you own all these assets and everything.
• 1:02:59
  And so having a coordination software that basically replicates what you get if you have your own family office or have your own team, but it's actually that you have the assets and that you actually have a plan of how to make sure that your family knows about them, keeps them.
• 1:03:20
  It's basically the sleep well at night.
• 1:03:23
  Go ahead and take that business trip.
• 1:03:25
  Your wife is going to be handled.
• 1:03:27
  Your kids are going to be fine.
• 1:03:28
  Take that vacation.
• 1:03:29
  Like we know, and you've actually proven to yourself because you've actually tested it and made sure that all the messages go to the right places.
• 1:03:37
  And it's family financial orchestration for people with complicated financial lives.
• 1:03:44
  I think it's targeted at kind of like the 80th to the 99th percentile, basically.
• 1:03:48
  And it's U.S. only for now.
• 1:03:50
  So it is, I think it's the number two source of anxiety for families outside of where to store your wealth, which I think a lot of us handle with Bitcoin.
• 1:04:02
  We figured that one out.
• 1:04:03
  That's Bitcoin.
• 1:04:04
  And then how do you make sure that your family is going to be taken care of and you have it all coordinated?
• 1:04:09
  And none of these point solution providers that serve these families is willing to kind of take on all of that across the others They all kind of peers and they hang out at the Chamber of Commerce and you know coach Little League or whatever And they spend 60 of their time on BD
• 1:04:25
  So they're not really like super up to speed on the new laws,
• 1:04:28
  new regulations, like the best things.
• 1:04:30
  Even really good accountants like fuck up my taxes.
• 1:04:33
  Even like big name firms in Century City with skyscrapers
• 1:04:35
  have fucked up my taxes like bad,
• 1:04:37
  especially when you're dealing with like Bitcoin and, you know,
• 1:04:39
  venture and stuff like that.
• 1:04:40
  So I think actually, I'd say the biggest thing,
• 1:04:44
  So portfolio management software like Mint, personal capital, stuff like that basically pulls in your balances from all these different accounts.
• 1:04:51
  It's not that.
• 1:04:52
  This is you actually upload like the 200 page will and like the full insurance contract and the full deed and like literally all of the actual paperwork.
• 1:05:02
  and it actually audits that and pulls out the real fields
• 1:05:05
  and tells you what's what and what's missing
• 1:05:08
  and what is done better in other similar documents
• 1:05:11
  out there and helps you get the whole thing in order.
• 1:05:15
  So you go through that process,
• 1:05:16
  you know, you or you with your spouse,
• 1:05:18
  and you actually know for the first time
• 1:05:20
  that you actually have it handled
• 1:05:22
  and you can prove it to yourself
• 1:05:23
  and you can remove that second biggest source
• 1:05:27
  of financial anxiety.
• 1:05:30
  It's weird because now I'm like thinking,
• 1:05:32
  And, you know, so much of what we do is just kind of removing stress from our own lives.
• 1:05:41
  And that's what Bitcoin has done for me.
• 1:05:43
  And now the other thing that I really needed in my life was Vigil.
• 1:05:46
  So, you know, broadly, I think the mission of the company is to like reduce divorce rates and SSRI prescriptions.
• 1:05:55
  Let's go.
• 1:05:57
  We need to open this up outside of America.
• 1:05:59
  I need access to this.
• 1:06:00
  The big question that I'm sure everyone would have on this is with AI, obviously,
• 1:06:05
  you don want to be uploading a ton of financial documents if you don know where they going Is this presumably completely secure and private It in like you know super super locked locker within AWS and Azure with multiple levels of
• 1:06:16
  controls. I mean, it's, we're a company that's secured PII and the only kind of value, more
• 1:06:22
  valuable information than financial information is a digital asset itself. And obviously we've
• 1:06:27
  secured that very well. So yeah, you don't want to via code this thing. This is not the kind of
• 1:06:31
  thing that like two dudes in Germany can copy and like come out with because they'll get you
• 1:06:36
  wrecked if they don't have a real security infrastructure and team. Half our freaking
• 1:06:40
  eng team is basically security. Yeah, that's awesome. I think that's a really cool product
• 1:06:47
  and something that's definitely needed. I think maybe particularly needed for Bitcoiners because
• 1:06:51
  I don't know, a lot of people that came in here don't have experience with this. Like I didn't,
• 1:06:56
  I certainly didn't. And this would be a very useful tool. Corey, before we close out, can you
• 1:07:01
  give everyone a closing rallying cry get the vibes going let's get let's kill this bear look
• 1:07:06
  what i'll say is i think that there is a there's a common theme usually here in the media i get
• 1:07:14
  asked all the time from the the you know msm sources and then you also always hear it from
• 1:07:19
  the bankers uh and they're always looking for a narrative they're saying like what narrative is
• 1:07:24
  going to spur the next bull market and i've posted about this they have it asked backwards
• 1:07:30
  actually price drives the narrative.
• 1:07:32
  And as soon as price starts going up,
• 1:07:34
  which is just a matter of having more buyers than sellers,
• 1:07:36
  and it's basically just putting in a floor
• 1:07:38
  and recruiting more people into Bitcoin,
• 1:07:41
  and we'll turn this thing around,
• 1:07:43
  there's plenty of bullish narratives.
• 1:07:45
  We've had 100 bullish narratives
• 1:07:46
  from the last nine months since the ATH,
• 1:07:50
  and they're all worthy of spurring a bull market.
• 1:07:54
  There plenty of bullish things out there from institutional adoption to great things that have happened here there or the other Legislation you know more adoption more products more loans lower rates on and on and on
• 1:08:06
  Like there's plenty of good things out there.
• 1:08:08
  So I just don't, I don't think we need a new narrative.
• 1:08:13
  I think we just need to, you know, buy the bear,
• 1:08:17
  buy it up, turn it around, smash it,
• 1:08:20
  take advantage of those 50-bit buys.
• 1:08:23
  and you know if you're if you have any inclination to be one of those people that you know wants to
• 1:08:31
  be the admiral or just go stand next to the admiral and and be a leader through osmosis and
• 1:08:37
  and do it like you know plan the mission get on the mission stay on the mission and and win
• 1:08:45
  you know and and whatever you can do i just think this is a really fun moment in time like it's it's
• 1:08:50
  not cool to wear a Bitcoin shirt and hat when you're at an all time high because there's
• 1:08:55
  a bunch of douchebags doing the same thing and they just got it right.
• 1:08:57
  Like it's fucking cool to rock Bitcoin gear in the bear.
• 1:09:01
  And it's cool to be pumping Bitcoin and telling people to buy it now.
• 1:09:05
  Like this is actually the most fun time to buy because then you get to win with your friends.
• 1:09:11
  Let's go.
• 1:09:12
  I love it, Corey.
• 1:09:13
  I'm glad you're bringing the vibes back.
• 1:09:15
  I'm glad Cafe Bitcoin's back.
• 1:09:16
  This show is going to go out on Monday.
• 1:09:18
  Tuesday is my chance.
• 1:09:21
  Let me come on Cafe Bitcoin.
• 1:09:23
  It's going to be my last day in the US
• 1:09:24
  and it's the last time I'm on the time zone.
• 1:09:25
  So yeah, let's do it.
• 1:09:27
  But I appreciate you, man.
• 1:09:28
  This has been awesome.
• 1:09:29
  Thank you for everything you're doing.
• 1:09:31
  Since people are listening to this on Monday,
• 1:09:32
  I'll see you tomorrow.
• 1:09:48
  Thank you.