Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #656: Q2 2025 Monetary Base Update with Matthew Mežinskis
Transcript
- 0:00You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
- 0:10You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
- 0:13All the central banks going nuts.
- 0:16So it's all acting like safe haven.
- 0:18I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency,
- 0:24Bitcoin wins.
- 0:25In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- 0:28I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
- 0:31If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
- 0:36Summer's over. Back to work.
- 0:39Back in the lab.
- 0:43It's time to get back to basics.
- 0:45This is why we're starting a post-Labor Day run of podcast here at TFTC
- 0:50with one of our oldest and dearest friends at the show, Matthew Mazzinczos.
- 0:56Get back to basics.
- 0:56people are people are going crazy out there
- 0:59they are buddy september is on good to be here good to see you
- 1:05congrats on your expanding brood by the way thank you
- 1:08very exciting very exciting yeah it's uh it's pretty wild you know the uh i just saw the
- 1:16tweet from my friend who uh does a lot of the power curve stuff cena and he was
- 1:21just posting the monthly closes and august is the worst worst month for bitcoin uh not not only
- 1:29bitcoin it's obviously down month generally but um that is over and moving into an exciting fall
- 1:41i think which typically is exciting for bitcoin especially every four years and uh i've been
- 1:46talking about it a lot on my streams i mean if one is concerned with adoption and price and all the
- 1:52rest uh i've been talking about it a lot uh recently just looking at the the multiples and
- 2:00the percentiles and where we are and i'm sure you have a long view as i do so a lot of this
- 2:07chatter doesn't concern me too much and i would encourage listeners dear listeners to uh to feel
- 2:15the same. That was a newsletter I wrote last night referencing the chart. The chart. The old
- 2:22power curve. The old power curve. I messed up. I got to go edit it. We've talked about this for
- 2:30years. I dropped power. What did you mess up? I dropped power law trend in there.
- 2:38Yeah, power law triggers people. You and I have been talking about this, I don't know how many
- 2:44years. I first posted it in 2018. So seven years. Yeah, it's, it's funny how there's,
- 2:56when you talk about like a model or an idea, the word law can trigger, trigger people. But I've
- 3:02always, yeah, I've always used the word regression or curve because it's, there's exponential
- 3:07regressions, there's linear regressions, and there are power regressions. So.
- 3:12well let's dive into what your friends we can look at the chart you want to look at the chart
- 3:20let's look at the chart because you said that cena said that august was the worst month
- 3:23ever or just this year uh it's it's traditionally uh bitcoin's worst month as far as performance
- 3:29yeah but that's a different thing that's just simply get simple simple uh monthly changes right
- 3:35yeah okay then i'll set up this conversation i read a newsletter last night the trend is your
- 3:40friend i don't know if you've been observing this but i've seen a lot of people within the bitcoin
- 3:46twitter sphere which is consistently losing signal throughout the years but i feel like
- 3:52it should be addressed for those people who are freaking out they don't think bitcoin the bitcoin
- 3:58price is going up fast enough despite the fact that we hit a new all-time high fresh new all-time
- 4:04I had $124,019 days ago now at this point.
- 4:08And I was trying to be a good analyst, if you will,
- 4:13and being like, okay, let's look at the numbers.
- 4:15And I went to the chart.
- 4:17And August ended at, the price of Bitcoin ended at $108,316.45.
- 4:27cents the power regression model at the end of august is showing 112 262 so we're two and a half
- 4:35percent ended the month of august two and a half percent below trend then i just trying to compare
- 4:42it to something with the end of july bitcoin price ended 115 848 the trend was saying 108
- 4:49993 so we were 6.2 above trend in july and so i was looking at those two months those two data
- 4:57points and saying, hey, it doesn't seem like the price is abnormally suppressed if we're
- 5:04looking at this model.
- 5:06Yeah.
- 5:06There's a few different things going on there and we can go through all of them.
- 5:09But I think the overall power trend is something.
- 5:14So we should talk about that first.
- 5:16But then also we have this idea of paper Bitcoin that's leaking its way back into the space,
- 5:20I've noticed recently into the meme sphere.
- 5:25and we also have the idea of i mean it's tangential and related but you know institutions
- 5:33bitcoin treasury companies uh sort of manipulating the price with excess leverage uh sort of unbacked
- 5:41by real value and there may be truth to some of the some of that but um the overall picture as
- 5:47far as i can tell and i've been you know like i said i've streamed about this most days european
- 5:52morning time. Nothing has really changed underlying I haven't seen any of those signals.
- 6:00And I'm definitely a sort of a if it's not broke, don't fix it type of person. So so we can jump
- 6:05into it. Let me share here, Logan. There we go. So this is the old power trend. I can't remember
- 6:18I'm now putting it always on this 10, every 10 percentiles.
- 6:23So you can see sort of exactly where we are.
- 6:25Before I was doing kind of like sigmas, like one sigma, two sigma.
- 6:29There's less bands.
- 6:31But anyway, very quickly, so people understand why is it power?
- 6:36Why is Bitcoin power not exponential?
- 6:39is this is a log left scale, log linear.
- 6:48And you can see it has this nice sloping,
- 6:52nice downward, I'm going to zoom in here a little bit,
- 6:54this nice sort of a little bit fast at the beginning,
- 6:58but then a gradual descending, decelerating growth rate,
- 7:03which is how networks grow, cities grow.
- 7:06It's very sustainable.
- 7:07And it turns out that Bitcoin is growing like that.
- 7:09If Bitcoin was growing like the stock market or gold or the bond market or any other TradFi market, actually, then when you put this on log linear, log scale, you would get a straight line for the trend line.
- 7:24And we can show I can show you some of those as well.
- 7:28But it doesn't.
- 7:29It has this nice gradually sloping curve, which is the 96 percent R squared on the power trend.
- 7:37another thing i'll just show you very briefly top level if i show you log bottom here and i know that
- 7:44for the listeners it's a little bit better if you watch this one but so a power a power trend
- 7:51will turn into a straight line on log log so i do log bottom whoops i need to reset this
- 7:58sorry logan might need to cut that just did it once and now it's uh
- 8:07it's buggy on log bottom. Ignore the January's at the bottom. But anyway, you basically see it's a
- 8:15it becomes a straight line. Okay, we're not gonna look at this long this way. But
- 8:19power trends become a straight line on log, log scale. And the point is, what does that mean?
- 8:28It just means basically that as the thing grows, it grows proportional with itself.
- 8:34And that's different than, like I said, every other Tradify market, stocks, bonds, gold, because they grow constantly at an exponential rate, which more often than not, eventually will lead to some sort of a collapse or a crisis.
- 8:54I actually spent the Nordic circuit of Bitcoin conferences here this summer talking about this at Riga and Helsinki and Prague as well.
- 9:06It's not really Nordic, but.
- 9:09And.
- 9:11We talked about this last time.
- 9:14You remember that idea, this Jeffrey West book?
- 9:16Mm hmm.
- 9:17And so just to remind people.
- 9:22Well, let me hold off on the Jeffrey West, actually.
- 9:24because there's so many topics to introduce.
- 9:27Basically, Bitcoin is not growing.
- 9:29It's just not growing like other stuff.
- 9:32And before you get too disappointed,
- 9:34or you think that it's not exciting enough,
- 9:36or it's not growing fast enough,
- 9:37I can show you pictures of the growth rate,
- 9:40charts of the growth rate,
- 9:40and it's still pretty solid.
- 9:44All right, so if you look in here,
- 9:46we got every 10th percentile.
- 9:48The zeroth percentile would be 0.1x the trend.
- 9:52It's way down here.
- 9:53that's like extremely rare obviously and the hundredth percentile is 7.8x the trend
- 9:59that's way up here probably never going to happen again either of those never say never i know but
- 10:06probably never based on how uh the network has been growing that leave us that that leaves us
- 10:12the 10th to the 90th and if you just zoom in on the last two to three years here uh remember 2024
- 10:20before it was the start of the ETF approvals,
- 10:23we've been pretty much bouncing around the trend line,
- 10:26the black trend line.
- 10:28And the trend line itself sits at about the 65th percentile.
- 10:32So that means two thirds of the time,
- 10:34the price is below this black line.
- 10:35One third of the time it's above.
- 10:38It is true.
- 10:39We're recording this on the second.
- 10:41So it's 109K price when I pulled in the model.
- 10:46So my trend line,
- 10:47which is different than some other people's trend line,
- 10:49some people a little bit lower but my trend line is 112 000 so we're just below it um for a couple
- 10:56days but again to me as far as i'm concerned it's like nothing to worry about it's totally normal
- 11:02it's all totally normal behavior and um you know as a very very basic rule of thumb
- 11:09if you're below this black line you could kind of argue that this is an undervalued
- 11:16time in Bitcoin's life.
- 11:20And if you're above the black line,
- 11:21you could also argue on the flip side
- 11:24that it's slightly overvalued.
- 11:25But there's a lot of caveats there.
- 11:30We have the four-year cycle to contend with
- 11:32and a lot of other things.
- 11:34So, you know, a lot goes into that.
- 11:38I could stop there if you want to.
- 11:41I just want to comment on the psychology
- 11:42of the people who are stressed
- 11:44that Bitcoin isn't pumping.
- 11:46as hard as they expect it to.
- 11:48I mean, if you look at the chart,
- 11:49you can see early years,
- 11:51massive explosions in price corrections.
- 11:56And I think you mentioned it,
- 11:58like the introduction of the ETF.
- 12:00Since then, we've had sort of a more calculated
- 12:02and less volatile step up and to the right,
- 12:10which I prefer.
- 12:11But I do think many market participants,
- 12:15even if you came in earlier,
- 12:16You just heard the lore of the crazy four year cycles and you wait for, what is it, 18 months after the halving and that's when fireworks happen.
- 12:25And I think many people are anchoring to those expectations and becoming sorely disappointed that they're not materializing in the way that they would expect and underappreciating the fact that we have this somewhat very regimented and what's the word I'm looking for?
- 12:49Just stable.
- 12:51Structured, yeah.
- 12:52Yeah, structured.
- 12:53Up and to the right.
- 12:54It's boring.
- 12:55but it's still moving in the right direction.
- 12:59Yeah. And I would comment on that too, because I sort of am on record of saying,
- 13:04again, like I said, if it's not broke, don't fix it. I'm not discounting the four-year cycle idea.
- 13:10A lot of people are. A lot of people are saying now is going to be just sort of a more stable,
- 13:15less volatile Bitcoin. But my next question would be, at what trend? What is it going up? Because a
- 13:21lot of these people either don't understand the power curve or don't don't haven't read about it
- 13:26so from that side uh i would not be too worried like i think there's still plenty of time to
- 13:35overshoot um and have this euphoria which is you know again for if you do want to play the markets
- 13:42or you want to take some coins off the table for some lifestyle changes or whatever it might be
- 13:46totally fine uh on the flip side if you're a hodler if you're younger just getting started um
- 13:53or you're older and you have a stack and you're not thinking of like taking too much risk
- 14:01you know again it's caveat emptor i mean the hardest thing in the world to do speaking from
- 14:06someone i know you as well have been through these cycles the hardest thing to do really is to sell
- 14:10Bitcoin. It doesn't matter what price. No one knows the future. And if you sell it,
- 14:17and the price doesn't collapse as much as you think, and you can't buy as many Bitcoin as you
- 14:23would like from that exit that you made into fiat before, whatever, into gold, whatever,
- 14:29then that would be extremely disappointing. So that's why I totally respect the HODL meme. I
- 14:40About the four year cycle, I honestly I wouldn't count it out.
- 14:42I mean, we haven't been through it, right?
- 14:44It is right now.
- 14:45This is the for sure with 2017 for sure with 2013.
- 14:50This occurred both times in November, December.
- 14:542021 was a little bit of a wild one.
- 14:57This time could also be a wild one.
- 15:00You know 2021 we had a double top But the first top was actually probably the real top If you look at other metrics which we can talk about like the price extending over say minor
- 15:12revenue or something, it was actually probably the first one. And then the second one was sort of,
- 15:18uh, I know people have called it the scam top or whatever, but it was, that was actually, um,
- 15:23kind of like a it was a huge debt cat bounce but it was not you know it was just not uh
- 15:29in relationship to other metrics when it usually extends and you know likewise in 2013 we had a
- 15:35double top although in that top it was the second top was five times higher so you never quite know
- 15:42um we could always be thrown for a loop with uh with bitcoin but you know there's
- 15:51enormous returns to be made here compared to any other traditional market. And if all you want to
- 15:58do is hodl, great. If you want to ape in and out with 10% of your stash, also great. So yeah, I don't
- 16:07think that there's any reason to discount actually the four-year cycle yet. And we can look at some
- 16:14charts if you want to look at that, talk about paper Bitcoin and all the rest.
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- 17:59I can show you actually, let's look at the, let's, let's look at one more here. So
- 18:03just so everybody knows, at least my opinion on where the price could go
- 18:07by the end of the year. So here's what I would say. If you look at this every 10th,
- 18:12right, we're zooming in to basically the trajectory here or the price history.
- 18:21Bitcoin is traditionally during the booms very easily gotten above the 80th percentile each time.
- 18:31it's in the earliest booms before that is 2021 it's gotten above the 90th percentile very easily
- 18:38each time 2021 again was a little bit of a little bit of a ringer the first top which is what i
- 18:45think was the real top this time which was early it was a very easily above the 90th for you know
- 18:51a month two three months three to four months is actually typically all the time that we get above
- 18:57the 90th percentile. And then it barely got above in November 2021, right where it should be. So
- 19:02again, just to remind you, these dotted lines are multiples above trend, and then how percentage
- 19:07wise how often that has occurred. So it's been pretty easily done for the prior three tops. But
- 19:17if this time we're different, and if it gets invalidated, or you know, this four year cycle,
- 19:22So for me, I think it would be somewhere around.
- 19:27For sure, it would be Bitcoin not getting above the 90th percentile, which it did do in 2021 and all prior cycles, and probably even I'd say the 80th.
- 19:36Like that would be the only reason that I would say.
- 19:40OK, Bitcoin really is on this totally different trajectory that doesn't have anything to do with the halvings or excitement after, you know, 18 months after the halving.
- 19:48just general hype cycles that markets have, I would say if it doesn't get above the
- 19:5680th percentile, which by the way, is 1.3x the trend. And if we look at the end of 2025,
- 20:01the trend is 125k. So 1.3x is 170k. So if we don't get above 170k by year end,
- 20:10or into like the first couple months of next year, then I would say,
- 20:15okay time to rethink the idea of the four-year cycles but not doing any technical analysis not
- 20:22looking at these impulses or elliott waves or whatever we're just looking at the power trend
- 20:26and where the price typically is over or under trend every four years it's actually pretty clear
- 20:33it's pretty clear what's been happening and there's nothing to me that would invalidate
- 20:39this idea until it's invalidated and it hasn't been invalidated yet.
- 20:45So that's actually a, I would say that's a bullish message.
- 20:49If you're listening.
- 20:51Hasn't been invalidated yet.
- 20:53Could potentially be.
- 20:55Could potentially be.
- 20:56May not be.
- 20:56Turn on the 90th percentile there.
- 20:58What will we have to do to.
- 21:00Yep.
- 21:01So the 90th is 2x.
- 21:03Pretty rare, right?
- 21:04So that means 90% of the observations would always be below this dotted line.
- 21:08So 2x is 250.
- 21:09Okay.
- 21:15And I can throw on, by the way, we can make this even more refined and go to the top 90th and above.
- 21:25And we can look at the 91st, 92nd, 93rd, 94th, 5th, all the way up to the 100th as well.
- 21:33But very simple rule of thumb.
- 21:35yeah i think 2x based on the prior trends could easily happen by the end of the year but if it
- 21:43doesn't say in the next six months then i would consider the four-year cycle being invalidated or
- 21:49different or something so here's now let me show you this is the top 10 starting from the 90th now
- 22:00This is very exciting, very exciting rainbow. Take off the hundredth. It's extremely rare.
- 22:07Now let's look at what happened. So the thesis, by the way, that people should understand is as
- 22:13Bitcoin gets more adopted, these peaks do come down, right? So notice, I now have the 99th
- 22:19painted on this chart. It has for a couple of weeks in 2013 and in 2017, gotten above the 99th
- 22:29percentile, which is 4.6x the trend. Okay, so 4.6x the power trend, which I told you is 125k at the
- 22:37end of the year. Bitcoin has achieved that every prior cycle, but it did not in 2021. Okay, so this
- 22:44is where we talked about softer tops, and I agree with that idea. So if we take off the 99th, 98th,
- 22:51even 97th, then we start to see what we hit in 2021. It was a 96 percentile of 2.8x,
- 22:56round it here, 3x. And this is where I would say, again, totally base case, totally possible
- 23:03would be 2 to 3x the trend. So if you just look at this now, go to the end of 2025, 125k,
- 23:122x happened every time pretty easily. That's 250k Bitcoin. 3x, roughly, that's 375k Bitcoin.
- 23:21although i will admit with lower highs on each one of these cycles i think this is indeed
- 23:29the max i would be very surprised that bitcoin went above 350 or 375k by the end of the year
- 23:35but i think it's possible
- 23:36bullish again i heard we're getting to 444 000 in november who who wrote that
- 23:46I don't even know if he's a microstrategy guy, but Josh, man.
- 23:54Well, 400,000 is the 97th.
- 23:57Let's go 98th.
- 24:00So yeah, on that 98th percentile, somewhere between the 97th and 98th percentile.
- 24:06It's pretty rare.
- 24:07It's pretty rare.
- 24:10You got to think about what that's saying.
- 24:12Three and a half times the trend line, basically.
- 24:1697 97 and a half percent of the time it doesn't happen uh so this is how i'm looking at it
- 24:24basically this doesn't tell you the time right it's kind of like a caveman analysis honestly
- 24:29because it's we're just assuming the four-year cycle four-year cycle doesn't happen or if
- 24:33extends or not i can't tell you that from this chart but what i can tell you is if the market
- 24:38gets heated if people get you know if grandma's getting excited this thanksgiving in the u.s and
- 24:43giving her grandchildren money to buy Bitcoin, then perhaps it could happen again.
- 24:51But yeah, absolutely possible that we have lower highs and even possible that we get out of the
- 24:57four-year cycle. But I'm still not seeing it based on the price action and based on where we are.
- 25:04I'm not seeing it. And we can look at some other charts as well to maybe further talk about that.
- 25:07But base case, what I'm thinking, two to three X, the trend by the end of the year or the first couple of months in the next year.
- 25:16That's 250K to 375K.
- 25:20That would be how I would look at it.
- 25:22I'll take that.
- 25:23The humble, humble 375, humble 250.
- 25:27Yeah.
- 25:29And you can imagine on the back end of this, by the way, because people, this is maybe people reset the narrative at this time.
- 25:37going to be like, oh, because remember this happened in 2021, by the way. People like to
- 25:41reset the narrative and say, oh, Bitcoin is now on this trend and is going here forever. Well,
- 25:46stick with this trend line, which I've come back to time and time again.
- 25:51This black line, Marty, has basically remained consistent since 2016. It's like the best trend
- 25:58line in all of finance, way better than anything else, and certainly better than the old stock to
- 26:05flow ratio. So, you know, take comfort in that. Doesn't mean it has to go there. But if people
- 26:14start to think, oh, we're now at a new plateau, you know, the old Irving Fisher sort of talk,
- 26:23and we're at 350k Bitcoin. And then all of a sudden, you have, you know, X number of Bitcoin
- 26:29treasury companies which have levered their balance sheet up, and their convertible debt
- 26:35facilities with less than three year duration to buy a lot of Bitcoin.
- 26:44And then the price starts to get soft. And then, you know, the short market participants get a
- 26:51little bit excited. You could see absolutely a cascading liquidations of these Bitcoin treasury
- 26:58companies. You could see, who knows, it might go as high as the White House. I'm not saying
- 27:01that it will. I'm not saying that it will. I'm just saying you can imagine plenty of scenarios
- 27:07where this whole thing rinses and repeats. Just on a completely different scale. Matt and I have
- 27:16been talking about this, Matt Adel and I, on Rabbit Hole Recap for the better part of
- 27:20a year and a half now. With this cycle, you have nation states and Wall Street getting into the
- 27:28degeneracy and we could see blow-ups unlike anything before it would make a FTX and the
- 27:35ICO bubble look funny in retrospect yeah precisely and I think for those blow-ups to happen you
- 27:42probably got to get a little bit extended on the high side first I think doesn't have to be the
- 27:47case but you know basic stuff at the end of the day uh you know I think a player like Saylor
- 27:54Obviously, you know, he's completely changed his, the makeup of their balance sheet, you know, with the new facilities and they've gotten away from the converts, you know, with pretty short duration at the beginning.
- 28:09Which, you know, in those days of 2022 was looking a little bit difficult for him, as you recall.
- 28:15but i i certainly think someone like him is uh and his uh his cohorts his colleagues around the uh
- 28:26around the micro strategy table are expecting stuff like this but the next
- 28:31500 bitcoin treasury companies i mean would you like to buy a convert from them i don't know
- 28:38i don't think too much about it i know there's a lot of people that strong feelings about bitcoin
- 28:42treasury codes but try bitcoin and be happy there is but let's let's dive into this of the paper
- 28:49bitcoin there's a ton of people out there who are looking at the price chart saying do something
- 28:54you're not high enough yet and pointing at bitcoin treasury companies etfs and saying
- 29:01hey they're creating paper bitcoin coin bases re-hypothecating giving
- 29:06allocations to the same Bitcoin to multiple players.
- 29:12And this is why the price is going down. Throw in CME Futures
- 29:16and the games that Wall Street have played
- 29:19with other assets like gold. And many are wholly convinced
- 29:24that the price is being suppressed by
- 29:27the combination of rehypothecation and
- 29:31financial engineering using derivatives.
- 29:35And here we can easily just look at a great chart from our friend Checkmate, great on-chain analyst.
- 29:44And this is the light pink.
- 29:48There are above one year.
- 29:51But as you can see, when the price is really skyrocketing, yeah, there's a lot of sub one-year hodlers that exit when we get over 100K, particularly this little spike at the start of this year.
- 30:02But as we gone on there have been more and more And you know that that ratio that mix above one year HODLers just one year one year and above becomes pretty large
- 30:14I mean, for a lot of the middle part of this year, it was 50% and above of the coins that were taking profit.
- 30:23Which cohort did they come from?
- 30:25way more than or at least 50 50 but sometimes i think clearly 60 70 percent of the mix
- 30:33was above one year hodlers sometimes you know five so there's plenty of coins that are coming
- 30:42onto the market and as check says here uh you know nobody ever sells their bitcoin they said
- 30:48it was all paper bitcoins they said i think that summarizes it pretty clear uh to me but why would
- 30:54the OG sell? Do they know something? Do they know the top is in? Is that why they're unloading coins
- 31:02and converting the fee? I think not at all. I think OGs are not watching your podcast. I think OGs
- 31:08are not thinking about the power curve. I think OGs bought Bitcoin at sub $10 and they're enjoying
- 31:14$100,000 gains as they should. As they should. Agreed. The psychology of this is
- 31:22having been a part of it for 12 years now
- 31:25going on 13
- 31:26just observing it
- 31:29throughout the different cycles throughout the years
- 31:31it is one of the most interesting
- 31:33things to me is how the psychology
- 31:35evolves especially as you get
- 31:37new entrants coming in like the
- 31:39class of
- 31:4023, 24 even go back to
- 31:43like 2020
- 31:43seems like they're
- 31:46they're young fawns looking
- 31:49going to get their sea legs under them
- 31:50completely unaware of
- 31:54how this, not unaware, but
- 31:56I don't know, to me
- 31:58there's a ton of pattern recognition
- 32:00particularly on the sentiment side
- 32:01and the sentiment this summer
- 32:04and it's funny, like I said, August is historically
- 32:06the worst month, summer's historically
- 32:08slow, not only in Bitcoin, just
- 32:10traditional markets, you have the
- 32:12concept of the summer doldrums
- 32:14and it's funny when
- 32:16people are unable to recognize
- 32:18these seasonal
- 32:20and cyclical trends that have been pretty constant,
- 32:24not only through Bitcoin, but through financial markets more generally.
- 32:27And they succumb to the monotony of boring price movement.
- 32:35Yeah, and we should look at some other charts,
- 32:37but just to piggyback on what you said there,
- 32:40I think that's a crucial point.
- 32:42And I think, you know, five years ago,
- 32:44or certainly after even the activation of SegWit,
- 32:47even the 2017 top, every time that there are tops,
- 32:50the narrative actually changes to the complete opposite of what you said, right? We flip onto
- 32:57a new plateau, new money, this is going to be something that the world has never seen,
- 33:05all of which are points that I very much agree with. But the timescale is way different,
- 33:10I think, than people are expecting. And the idea that Bitcoin will sort of absorb the financial
- 33:24system next week, next month, or even next year, I got another few charts to show you on that one.
- 33:30It's just too ludicrous. All right. I mean, as another quick example, like Bitcoin Max,
- 33:37I think has done, well, actually I know Max, but the training 12 months, let's just say,
- 33:44has done something like $7 trillion worth of transactions on chain. All right, if you take
- 33:49everyday transactions, roll them at the price, about $7 trillion. Fedwire, which is the core
- 33:55of the financial system, one, only one of central bank, central banks around the world's real-time
- 34:04gross settlement systems. When I say real-time gross settlement, I mean, it works just like
- 34:07Bitcoin. It's literally banks transferring reserves like payments for stuff that they owe to other
- 34:14banks, like checks to clear and all the rest, right? That's called Fedwire. That does 1.1
- 34:22quadrillion dollars a year. So you're at $1,100 trillion that the Federal Reserve does versus
- 34:30seven that Bitcoin does. Bitcoin can absolutely get there. And the only thing that has to happen
- 34:34actually is the price to rise. But it's just not going to happen overnight. And so going back to
- 34:41the power curve, I think that the power curve actually should give a lot of people a lot of
- 34:46comfort and nobody still is paying attention to it. Again, I posted this stuff before the stock
- 34:50to flow ratio with still with a marketing budget of zero dollars. I know, but most people don't
- 34:55sort of understand it, think about it, whatever. But it's just the trend line
- 34:59that is showing how typically networks have grown. The internet actually followed a power curve.
- 35:06Crucially, not if you think about that S curve network adoptions,
- 35:10crucially, not like cell phones and other things like dishwashers or whatever.
- 35:15Usually, if there's a company that has a sort of a large share, technology products will not follow
- 35:24this. They follow more that S curve where that sort of explosion in the middle. Bitcoin, the
- 35:30internet, other networks, cities themselves, they don't have that. They have a decreasing rate of
- 35:36growth, which if you looked at it sort of as a supply, it looks exactly what we saw with the
- 35:39price on log scale, sort of faster at the beginning, slower over time. And so there's like huge comfort
- 35:46there. And I actually, you know, again, I keep saying I should reference charts and we just talk
- 35:52about it, but because I like to try to show people facts with what I actually say. I believe,
- 35:59Marty, that like 95% of what we see in the market today in Bitcoin is the power curve of network
- 36:04adoption itself. I don't think it has anything to do with the money supply, the Fed, interest rates,
- 36:08like literally 5%. That's sort of my latest thesis. And it's not really as of late. I've
- 36:15been saying it for a while now, but that's what I think. I think you first brought this up
- 36:20earlier this year and i completely agree and i think that again if you want to anchor in confidence
- 36:27and filter out all the noise i think anchoring to that and just taking price and exogenous factors
- 36:38like monetary policy and geopolitics and macroeconomics out of it and just view it as
- 36:43network adoption, uh, of which price is just, uh, a, an output of that adoption. I think it makes a
- 36:52lot of sense. More and more.
- 36:53Your representation of it.
- 36:54Yeah.
- 36:55Of this endogenous idea as you, to use your, uh, continue your analogy. It's, it's just within
- 37:00Bitcoin itself. That's what we see. We're looking at the adoption of Bitcoin, the system,
- 37:05when we look at the price curve.
- 37:06and i i do have to uh give you props too for that fed wire comparison i've actually used that
- 37:13a lot at 1031 talking to prospective lps when they really get in the weeds and they're trying to
- 37:20understand a good comp to bitcoin and many people naively will say visa mastercard
- 37:27venmo paypal it's like no it's the fed fed wire central bank settlement and that chart you have
- 37:33of the sort of multiple of Fedwire volumes and settlements compared to Bitcoin over time.
- 37:42This one is one of the highest signal charts out there.
- 37:46Agreed. Agreed. So there's your 1.1 trillion, 1,158. Sorry, there's your 1.1 quadrillion,
- 37:551,158 trillion. That's what Fedwire does over trailing 12 month basis.
- 38:00in transfer value, or some people even call that payment volume, whatever you want to call it.
- 38:06Bitcoin, seven. It's maxed out at, yeah, closer to 20 back in 2022 when trailing 12 months, but
- 38:15seven at the moment. And then this supremacy, as you see, we used to be very, this is log scale on
- 38:23the right, but this black line, we used to be millions of times smaller, or more properly stated
- 38:29Fedwire was millions of times bigger than Bitcoin. Now, it's only 157 times bigger.
- 38:36Still huge. So again, keep it in perspective. Don't get worried. We're going to wake up tomorrow
- 38:42and there's still going to be a Fedwire. I know people hate that. I'm not defending them. I'm not
- 38:47saying it's great that we have to rely on these Jackson Hole speeches and all the rest, but it's
- 38:51going to be there. It's going to be there. So keep that in mind. Use these things as a benchmark to
- 38:57stay grounded spend time with your family stack sats and if you want to like i said ape in and out
- 39:03on the extremes uh we have very good tools to do that
- 39:09yeah here's another one by the way while we're not going like to zero in fiat tomorrow even
- 39:18though fiat is a terrible storer of value so this is the through tune only the top five
- 39:26broad money supplies, meaning usually M3, it should be M3.
- 39:32So US M3, 36 trillion, Euro M3, 19. These are all dollar numbers.
- 39:39The yen, 11 trillions. China only publishes an M2, which I can explain the difference,
- 39:4545 trillion. And then the sterling, they publish an M4, which is even more liquid,
- 39:51is 4.3 trillion. But the broadest money supplies, if you add that all up is 116 trillion. And I think
- 40:00in value, and I think that you can add another 20% for the rest of the world. I need to get a
- 40:06full chart ready eventually for you when I come on, but I just don't have it yet. So you're getting
- 40:11somewhere close to 145, 150 trillion, probably in global money at this point. And then the question
- 40:19is, you know, people like to talk about 100 trillion. We're definitely getting there for
- 40:24sure. But it's not now. It's not tomorrow. It's not next month. It's not next year. It's going to
- 40:28be a while from now. And by the way, all the other stuff is going to keep going on with their madness
- 40:34as well.
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- 42:00I know we just
- 42:01gave the whole spiel of
- 42:03power trend network
- 42:05adoption
- 42:06endogenous factors versus
- 42:09exogenous factors and exogenous
- 42:11is probably not as
- 42:13impactful as the endogenous just
- 42:15pure peer-to-peer adoption of Bitcoin driving up the price.
- 42:20However, the exogenous factors are getting more interesting.
- 42:24We were talking about a few charts.
- 42:26If we think about podcast content,
- 42:28it could be 95% is indeed the exogenous factors.
- 42:33And I understand that very well.
- 42:34So we can talk about that as well.
- 42:37Before we get, I know you're not a fan of him at all,
- 42:42but did you catch the Richard Werner, Tucker Carlson interview?
- 42:46I did not.
- 42:48I mean, a few things about that.
- 42:51First of all, didn't that guy say that the CIA created Bitcoin?
- 42:55He did years ago.
- 42:56But I've heard from behind the scenes that he's become more open-minded toward Bitcoin.
- 43:02Yeah.
- 43:03Okay.
- 43:05Yeah.
- 43:06That's what Tucker said that too.
- 43:09Are you talking about Tucker or Richard?
- 43:10Richard.
- 43:11I think both of them said it, yeah.
- 43:14Well, Tucker doesn't know much,
- 43:16but if Warner himself said it,
- 43:20that he's backed off,
- 43:21then I guess that's a little bit better.
- 43:22But yeah, I mean, I didn't watch it in full.
- 43:26I saw some clips,
- 43:27and generally a lot of things I would probably agree with.
- 43:31Yeah, I think it was the most thorough
- 43:38and thorough and approachable understanding
- 43:44of money creation happens via credit creation.
- 43:47And then what really piqued my interest,
- 43:52I think his solutions, I think he's missing Bitcoin,
- 43:56they sort of hand-waved about gold.
- 43:58But I think when it comes to how money is actually created
- 44:01in the system via credit creation,
- 44:03it was really the clarifying in many regards like walking to the mechanics of of it particularly
- 44:12going back to japan in the yeah in the 90s so let me let me pivot off of that with another chart
- 44:22okay this one is what i was this is a part and parcel of presentations i was giving
- 44:27throughout europe this summer goes back to the idea i think we talked about it before about
- 44:32super exponential growth. And Werner talked about it as well. It's basically at the end of the day,
- 44:36most people understand that we can't go back to at least the system we're on right now.
- 44:41You can't peg anything. You can't fix it. You can't not grow with the amount of fiat and
- 44:49obligations that we have out there. You actually need to grow faster and faster. And some of that,
- 44:56I would actually argue, again, I'm not defending the system, but I'm just trying to look at what's
- 45:01actually happening, as I just showed you with the, you know,
- 45:05those broad money supplies keep growing and growing. And I think
- 45:08will continue to grow because that all that they know how to do at the base is continue to print But if you look at this Jeffrey West very interesting you know theoretical physicist who wrote this book Scale and I drew a lot upon his work in my presentations
- 45:20He makes the observation that it's not even only, you know, inflation. In fact, he doesn't really
- 45:26talk about inflation much at all. It's just the way that we grow, the way that we do things
- 45:30socioeconomically, we're moving faster and faster, you know, what would have taken thousands of years
- 45:35to evolve in the Stone Age or the Bronze Age can take 30 years now.
- 45:41And the idea is we're going faster and faster.
- 45:43And his question, which he leaves open,
- 45:46is this idea of a mathematical singularity
- 45:48where you increase the growth rate every time,
- 45:52but you get to a mathematical singularity.
- 45:53So if I show you the S&P here,
- 45:55which is a derived S&P back to the 1800s
- 45:58because the S&P started in 1955,
- 46:00But you can run a trend from 1800 to the start of the Federal Reserve.
- 46:07And the stock market grows like 2% a year.
- 46:10Okay.
- 46:10It's very rough.
- 46:11It's probably even lower than that because there's like survivorship bias.
- 46:14There's a ton of railroad companies that went bankrupt.
- 46:17I'm sure they're not included in this index.
- 46:19But anyway, from the start of the Federal Reserve until 1971,
- 46:26we went through a Great Depression in the US and we grew the markets faster at 4.8% per year
- 46:34CAGR. Okay. So the trend line is the slope of the value of the market. 1971 until 2008,
- 46:44we went even faster. Trend line growth of 9.6% per year. And then 2008 caught us right in the
- 46:51middle of the crisis, a new monetary epoch clearly. So that's where I delineated a new trend.
- 46:552008 trend actually was below like like like a truck sliding down a muddy hill right we were
- 47:02way below our base but we grew faster all right so if i put this trend line up now the red trend
- 47:08line you can see from the 9.6 percent kegger before 2008 for the markets we now grow at 11.5
- 47:15all of these are before dividends reinvesting reinvested it would be probably two percent more
- 47:20on your kegger if not so these are all targets to shoot for right for your returns
- 47:24the trend line for the stock market since uh since 2008 is nine point sorry 11.5 percent per year
- 47:33so you could see this idea of the faster and fastest faster and faster treadmills
- 47:38is is clearly happening and i think will continue to happen and probably at shorter time intervals
- 47:44uh still i mean if you just do the caveman eye test on this number one it looks like
- 47:51you have that sliding truck
- 47:53with every new trend line that you've
- 47:55put on this chart going back to
- 47:571914 it was below
- 47:59the 1800 trend
- 48:00go to 71 it was below the
- 48:031914 trend 2008
- 48:05and
- 48:05yeah this is pretty
- 48:09illuminating in that sense and you
- 48:11can feel it too not only
- 48:13it is weird
- 48:15I think we talked about this
- 48:17the last episode when you brought up
- 48:19scale and
- 48:20in these concepts, but you can definitely feel it socially in your life with inflation,
- 48:27with prices, um, certainly becoming more palpable, not palpable, but, um, very tangible.
- 48:36Right. He, uh, he focuses on like the growth though, as far as, um,
- 48:44you know, actually good things like inventions, patents, um, patents kind of weird, right?
- 48:49for us in the libertarian world to focus on patents, but inventions, discoveries, and,
- 48:55you know, increases in GDP, things like that, which again, we would say a lot of that gets
- 49:01papered over. But I think it's fair enough to say that there's some of both, right? There is,
- 49:08it is undeniable that, like, I'm very glad that we live in this time right now than in the Stone
- 49:14age or even 100 years ago. And I think there's a lot of hope there, actually, there's a lot of,
- 49:21you know, there's always the apocalyptic view, there's always the view that we're really on for,
- 49:27you know, in for a train wreck. But as long as we can jump to the first of all, this is back to the
- 49:32point of Warner, which I want to do addresses, if he's saying that they always paper over things,
- 49:37or they have to keep growing faster and faster. It's true. I agree with him. But there's actually
- 49:40a positive way to look at that. And that's we are increasingly getting better health care stuff
- 49:47in the US. It's always more expensive for lots of reasons. But in a lot of places, health care is
- 49:54improving, people are pulling themselves out of poverty. And there's actually a lot of good things
- 49:58to think about from these trends. Now, they are absolutely countered from the fiat madness of the
- 50:04money printing. We have to sort of parse through these things. But here's how it relates to Bitcoin.
- 50:10Okay, so this is kind of the one of the things that I was trying to show is notice, Marty, all of these trend lines, right?
- 50:19You see that they're straight lines, right?
- 50:20They're increasingly faster growing straight lines on log scale.
- 50:25So they are exponential.
- 50:26And they are, in fact, what he calls super exponential in his book.
- 50:29This is, I think, is a very good graphical representation of super exponential trends.
- 50:34But then if we look at Bitcoin, go to the price.
- 50:40let's go to trend. Here's our old power trend, our friend. We do not have a straight line. We just do
- 50:47not have a straight line on log scale. And if you actually showed the growth of that black line,
- 50:51it decreases. All right. So the interesting question will be, and this is again, also what
- 50:57I kind of left open in my presentation, my different presentations throughout the summer is
- 51:02what will happen when this super exponential growth of TradFi meets this decelerating growth
- 51:09of Bitcoin. Like, is that the singularity? Is that a new Bitcoin standard? I have no idea.
- 51:16You know, Jeffrey West, when he wrote his book, he was not thinking about Bitcoin at all.
- 51:20He wrote it in 2017, but it wasn't on his radar. You know, he left it open that hopefully it's a
- 51:25new invention. Hopefully we can figure it out. Maybe we're just moving to another
- 51:29faster singularity for, you know, the 15, 20 years. But Bitcoin was not on his radar.
- 51:36So the interesting thing is, if you look at, for example, the stock market's growing at 11.5%
- 51:42without dividends, if you reinvest it, it's probably closer to 13%, 14%. But that's constant,
- 51:48exponential, constant growth. Bitcoin, if you look at the returns from the beginning until today,
- 51:54we're right about 42% per year. All right. So on a curve, you'd actually get way more
- 52:00in the past, but on a curve, you'd be at thousands of... Sorry. On a curve, you're at a couple hundred
- 52:07percent if you hold till today. All right. If you have it today, 41%. And then as you move
- 52:14toward the future, we go down. And I could pull this all the way out to 2050. We still only get
- 52:20to 23.5%. This shows you, this is why, again, people need to back up and look at the power
- 52:25curve. These are monstrous returns, even with all the inflation and the craziness in the stock
- 52:31markets today. We're still at 41% CAGR, 42% CAGR for Bitcoin right now. I know you said you have
- 52:39no idea, but you have to have some thoughts on what happens when these two trends collide.
- 52:46And that's like... Well, I think it's a very, yeah, it's a very interesting graphical
- 52:49representation. Well, that's what I do. If you zoom all the way out on this, like even though
- 52:54the power trend still 23 and a half percent CAGR if you go back to the exponential log chart they
- 53:02just had a like the 2008 line is what 11 and a half percent CAGR so like even though this looks
- 53:07exponential the power trend is still producing a bigger CAGR and so like oh god I gotta turn these
- 53:14congratulations congratulations thank you but leave that on the final final cut
- 53:23like i guess maybe you have to extend the power trend out even further and is there like a point
- 53:30yeah so this hits this hits uh 10 in 2070 2070 okay and maybe like the singularity when
- 53:38the exponential kagger converges with the power trend
- 53:42bagger that's the idea i mean uh that's one of the ideas i should say no one
- 53:47i do not know to be honest there's so many things that could happen right uh
- 53:53obviously there's the world is sort of on fire the eastern authoritarian autocracies are trying
- 54:01to get more power away from the western democracies we got people in western democracies
- 54:06fighting amongst themselves we're in eastern europe here everybody should know my position now
- 54:10So there's a lot of stuff that could happen until then. Maybe we do peg into Bitcoin at one of these points and then things could change from there.
- 54:19there um i don't i wouldn't i wouldn't actually want to
- 54:28if you if you think about like all of the
- 54:37if you think about all the newsletters i've talked about this a lot right that gold bugs
- 54:44have written since like the year 1980, especially in the 70s when gold got depegged. This is only
- 54:5150 years ago, 55 years ago. You would have thought that you would have absolutely, you know, one,
- 54:56like civilization was moving back to gold. The fact that gold went from 35 bucks an ounce in 1971
- 55:02to 850 bucks for two seconds on the COMEX in January 1980, you would have thought that sound
- 55:10money was returning. The rest of the world was going to catch on. And then lo and behold,
- 55:16they went into a 20-year bear market. And in 1996, Alan Greenspan said the Federal Reserve
- 55:20stands ready to sell gold should the price rise. So I'm not saying that Bitcoin can be co-opted
- 55:26like that, although that is always some good doom porn on Twitter about any number of topics,
- 55:33as we know. I think it could be mixed, right? This is another idea that I've been throwing out there
- 55:42is it's totally possible, by the way, that Bitcoin, if we think about go to the math and back to the
- 55:49to the ideas of different curves, we have the power curve, which in my opinion, is a more
- 55:54sustainable growth rate. And we're looking at that now versus a traditional instrument like the dollar.
- 55:58but let's go the other way let's say that bitcoin turns into growth rates like this
- 56:06where now i'm not actually showing the growth rates but i'm showing the growth of the um of
- 56:12the supply right of the supply of the stock market value right it's still straight lines
- 56:18on log scale and it grows faster and faster and faster if bitcoin would move at some point right
- 56:24If the straight line sort of stops being the scale invariant,
- 56:29generally sloping curve, decreasing rate of growth, right?
- 56:33And somehow it just shoots up and turns into a straight line,
- 56:36like an Expo curve,
- 56:38and sort of just mirrors the rest of the financial system.
- 56:43That might be good for Bitcoin holders.
- 56:45That might be good for value,
- 56:46but that might not be good for the world.
- 56:48You know what I mean?
- 56:49Like that's just sort of Bitcoin,
- 56:51like Bitcoin kind of more matching into what it's trying to.
- 56:57It's kind of like gold 2.0.
- 56:58Like it's just, it's there, it's better, it's much better,
- 57:01but it's controlled for whatever reason.
- 57:02Like there's a lot of fiat units that are paying,
- 57:06you know, Bitcoin treasury companies,
- 57:08people lines of credit, all the rest.
- 57:10I mean, it's actually totally possible
- 57:12that Bitcoin could turn into an Expo curve, by the way.
- 57:14It's not now, but it could happen.
- 57:16On the flip side,
- 57:17what would happen if the rest of the world the trad fi world and again these are this is not next
- 57:26month next week next year this is this has to be decades from now but if everybody can start to see
- 57:32the beauty of bitcoin we really stay decentralized we don't have government fiat mandate mandating
- 57:38how everything is going if bitcoin keeps on this idea of this sort of nice beautiful sustainable
- 57:44growth rate in other fiat currency, how would you even charge interest if Bitcoin was rising
- 57:54in a power curve? That actually is one of the key questions. And I think that you can't.
- 58:02How do you keep... Why would you even accept a fiat loan, right? Like more and more fiat interest
- 58:11interest in this asset that you know is scarce you know there's only 2.1 quadrillion sats
- 58:16why would you even accept
- 58:19uh as a as a uh lender let's say to lend out your satoshis when you know that you're going to go at
- 58:29this very nice power growth and you know you're going to get paid back in some fiat interest
- 58:40on those Satoshis, you might not get your collateral back.
- 58:46That's what I see.
- 58:47Those are the warring sort of two sides.
- 58:50It's basically either Bitcoin goes exponential,
- 58:56kind of like the TradFi world, right?
- 58:59Or Bitcoin pulls the rest of the world
- 59:02into its sort of nice power growth.
- 59:05But if that happens,
- 59:06you can't really calculate interest on loans.
- 59:09you just uh all this stuff bitcoin treasury companies people taking converts and everything
- 59:15it won't actually work because loans literally literally interest will only work
- 59:21in exponential fashion compound growth is exponential so you can't do it you can't do it
- 59:29with this power growth so it's a very sort of uh deep philosophical way out in the future idea but
- 59:36Those are the two extremes as I see it.
- 59:38And I honestly don't know.
- 59:39I see so many different things that could happen on the spectrum where we go one way or the other.
- 59:44I would say probably the less optimistic side is if Bitcoin just kind of turns into gold 2.0.
- 59:49It's a great hedge, but the system is what it is.
- 59:54Bitcoin is exponential, just like gold and stocks and bonds and everything else.
- 59:57Well, on the latter of the two extremes, I know SAFE and many others have talked about a potential transition from debt financing to equity financing, where instead of giving a loan to somebody with an attached interest rate, a lot of financing will be equity driven, where...
- 1:00:17you give somebody money, you get a portion of the business and you read the benefits of
- 1:00:24the commensurate cash flows to come your way from that equity injection.
- 1:00:28Yeah. Equity, uh, equity does solve, uh, like just simply to say that you have equity
- 1:00:36would solve that idea. Uh, you don't have to worry about it like interest rates or anything.
- 1:00:42and maybe that could happen.
- 1:00:47But things would have to turn into very short-term.
- 1:00:53Like even if you're thinking about working capital or something,
- 1:00:55it would have to be very, very short-term fixed rates of interest
- 1:00:59and you just can't work very long.
- 1:01:02That's my thought about that idea.
- 1:01:05Is the world going to be ready for...
- 1:01:09That upends everything.
- 1:01:10And hey, we're ready, obviously, for Bitcoin to upend everything. But the credit markets are huge. The biggest markets in the world, I mean, bondholders all over the world, they get paid back first before stockholders.
- 1:01:25It just upends everything about the financial system.
- 1:01:30And so if we go to this sort of everybody's a stockholder, everybody has equity, there's no interest rates or interest rates are very, very short term.
- 1:01:38Yeah, it could happen.
- 1:01:40And I would say that's probably the better outcome.
- 1:01:43That's where Bitcoin stays on the power curve.
- 1:01:45It stays on a sustainable lower and lower rate of growth.
- 1:01:51But if you're on that curve, you literally, by definition, cannot calculate interest over the long term.
- 1:01:56You would explode the system with fiat interest.
- 1:01:59There just wouldn't be enough sats to go around.
- 1:02:02Yeah, it's fascinating.
- 1:02:05It is fascinating to think through these philosophical discussions of what we transition to.
- 1:02:11And I've always been partial.
- 1:02:12I think we've talked about this, but it's always good to touch on.
- 1:02:14Like, I think when you talk about transitioning and what it looks like, I think we're beginning to see that manifest in the form of Bitcoin becoming part of collateral packages.
- 1:02:30A lot of people look at micro strategy and the converts and all that.
- 1:02:33But I think in private markets, particularly what we're seeing with the emergence of products like Debitify, battery finance, the tools, the infrastructure is getting built out to begin seriously injecting Bitcoin into the credit stack as collateral.
- 1:02:51I think you can squint and look at that and see that as a first step towards equity financing, particularly if the lender and the borrower are sharing in the upside of the Bitcoin appreciation over the duration of the loan.
- 1:03:09Yeah, it depends on the nature of the contract. As a borrower, I think it's an absolutely great deal. Obviously, Saylor himself, you know, doing a lot with that idea, sort of borrowing with Bitcoin as collateral or borrowing to buy more Bitcoin and then have that as collateral.
- 1:03:34it still is though you know the the trad fi model right uh i mean have you seen
- 1:03:44these collateral deals where you know i've seen some i think in the u.s they've done it where
- 1:03:49a lender will have the developer of say real estate uh take a loan but also a portion of that
- 1:03:57loan should buy bitcoin i think that's very interesting uh so you have sort of a dual
- 1:04:03hedge, dual collateral hedge against the loan.
- 1:04:08All of that stuff, at least as far as I can see, is still modeled on the TradFi world.
- 1:04:13It's modeled with rates of interest.
- 1:04:16And since Bitcoin has such explosive growth, like as you see here, and your holding time,
- 1:04:23we're roughly on a curve.
- 1:04:24We're increasing the power trend at $100 a day.
- 1:04:27So as a CAGR, that translates into 42% per year.
- 1:04:33we're looking pretty solid, right? We're looking pretty, pretty, we have a lot of buffer,
- 1:04:39even enough to take care of the drawdowns or the bear markets, if they come again,
- 1:04:44which we talked about already at the top of the show, I think they probably will.
- 1:04:48There's still a lot of buffer before we get down to your, you know, your senior collateralized debt
- 1:04:55of like major companies, or major real estate companies where your people are trying to get,
- 1:04:595% or 7% now, maybe with a lot of crazy treasury markets. But obviously, treasuries themselves,
- 1:05:08I mean, you want to be even below 5% depending on your duration of the curve. But
- 1:05:13there's a lot of delta there. There's a lot of room to play around. When Bitcoin is doing 41%,
- 1:05:20TradFi roughly, let's just say it's 5%, maybe leaking a little bit higher.
- 1:05:24and as we talked about with the S&P 500,
- 1:05:27it's probably looking a lot higher
- 1:05:29as far as stock returns go.
- 1:05:32I think they're going to careen.
- 1:05:33I do think that they're going to hit each other.
- 1:05:35And before they hit each other,
- 1:05:40we're probably enough people
- 1:05:41will see the writing on the wall
- 1:05:42or understand Bitcoin
- 1:05:43that it's just, it's the place to be.
- 1:05:47But what I'm very curious,
- 1:05:49and I think what you'll start to,
- 1:05:50what will start to take shape,
- 1:05:51let me try to put some more substance
- 1:05:52on what I'm saying for the listener,
- 1:05:53is in the next 20 years, if we're pretty locked down in developed markets,
- 1:06:00if you can't withdraw Bitcoin, if there's just KYC up the wazoo,
- 1:06:05like you can't do anything in the real world,
- 1:06:10if nobody cares about key management or even node management,
- 1:06:17then that looks to me like a pretty traditional TradFi world.
- 1:06:23going back to exponential and that and in that world, interest rates work totally fine.
- 1:06:28They work totally fine. They're just you're going to get the boom bust cycle, you're going to get a
- 1:06:31lot of government intervention. And that's what it is. I think that's not that exciting. But in
- 1:06:36the other world, that's really hard for bondholders. I mean, it's just it doesn't,
- 1:06:43the math doesn't really check out. So yeah, again, a long winded answer to your question. But I,
- 1:06:49I think there's even those examples like you, I don't know, have you ever seen debt contracts or Bitcoin denominated contracts that are like fully equity?
- 1:06:58And that's kind of like a, is there a marketplace for that where it's like fully equity only Bitcoin?
- 1:07:03Probably not, I think.
- 1:07:05No.
- 1:07:06Pretty young, immature.
- 1:07:07I think the converts are like the closest thing because they convert to equity, right?
- 1:07:12Right.
- 1:07:12So we've seen.
- 1:07:13That's going to have a duration.
- 1:07:15Yeah.
- 1:07:15That's probably pretty short.
- 1:07:17Sailor rotated out of that market, right?
- 1:07:18and he got more into preferreds, which have no duration.
- 1:07:23So he's kicked the can down the road on that idea.
- 1:07:30Yeah, I'm looking at Cormant, the miner in West Texas.
- 1:07:35Shout out to Jamie McCavity.
- 1:07:37They did an interesting Series B equity funding, $29 million.
- 1:07:42I believe they did use both equity and debt financing,
- 1:07:46including unique Bitcoin-denominated loans.
- 1:07:48that was debt to fund its expansion, low-cost Bitcoin miner.
- 1:07:51From what I understand, those instruments perform very well.
- 1:07:58I think, yeah, I think all this is to say that we're still in the very early innings
- 1:08:03of people getting creative and really beginning to explore
- 1:08:09and innovate with Bitcoin-based financial contracts.
- 1:08:16Agreed, yeah.
- 1:08:17it totally i would say i would prefer the equity based but i think about it a lot i think about
- 1:08:23the different things that would have to happen for that to occur and a lot of that is self-sovereign
- 1:08:28stuff you know people standing up to you know some of the draconian uh financial regulation
- 1:08:38that we've seen grow and grow and grow since the 1970s so yeah i think it could go either way
- 1:08:44Honestly, I think it could go either way.
- 1:08:46And I think Bitcoin would do well in either scenario, but different people will be hurt in either scenario.
- 1:08:55Yeah.
- 1:08:56Well, let's let's paint the picture for people.
- 1:08:59What does an ideal landscape and capital stack and tech stack on a Bitcoin standard look like in your mind?
- 1:09:09I mean, you experienced it earlier this summer in Riga, particularly.
- 1:09:16What I think is very underappreciated and not really talked about enough
- 1:09:21is the maturation of the Lightning Network,
- 1:09:25particularly as this connective tissue between disparate second-layer technologies,
- 1:09:30whether that's liquid e-cash mints.
- 1:09:35in the case of Riga, they were using ARK in the background for all the merchants. And
- 1:09:43this is something that I'm very passionate about. And I can actually see it materializing
- 1:09:49in front of our eyes is this sort of emergence of a new tech stack for a banking system with all
- 1:09:58these different second layer technologies.
- 1:10:01And so I think if we want it to be true and if we want it to manifest and materialize,
- 1:10:08then the tools are there to make it happen, make this cypherpunk Bitcoin standard banking
- 1:10:14stack possible.
- 1:10:18I agree.
- 1:10:19And I think that we're going to go in that direction.
- 1:10:22I think that is very good.
- 1:10:23And I absolutely support everybody that's doing that.
- 1:10:30I think obviously the Noster ecosystem is helping a lot there.
- 1:10:36It's amazing.
- 1:10:37It really is amazing.
- 1:10:38I'm all for it.
- 1:10:41I'm all for it.
- 1:10:43Are you Larry White, Hal Finney?
- 1:10:51We're going to have a free banking system built on top of Bitcoin.
- 1:10:53I've been partial towards that.
- 1:10:56Yeah.
- 1:10:56Well, the risk of the free banking system is that it can be unfree, right?
- 1:11:02And that's the interesting thing that I think Bitcoin's trying to break.
- 1:11:08And so...
- 1:11:08What do you mean by unfree?
- 1:11:09Just over-regulated?
- 1:11:10Yeah, it becomes monopolized and captured and over-regulated.
- 1:11:14And then we don't have a free banking system anymore.
- 1:11:15We have a centrally planned central bank system, which central banks have no idea.
- 1:11:20Like in Washington, D.C., they have no idea what the bank reserve ratio should actually be in Wyoming or something.
- 1:11:26It's just it's completely gone.
- 1:11:28We had that in the 18th and 19th centuries in a few different markets, actually in a lot of markets, but big in northern Europe and in Canada as well.
- 1:11:39And then we lost it.
- 1:11:40So I think people got to look at all sides.
- 1:11:43I think anyway, the good thing I know we're going to be too heavy on this, like people are going to do Bitcoin.
- 1:11:50you're going to hold Bitcoin, you're going to do what you need to do on Noster or, you know,
- 1:11:54all the different relays and L2, L3 options that are coming, which are awesome. Absolutely amazing.
- 1:12:03I'm just wondering about, you brought up, you know, the free banking system. The problem is
- 1:12:08when you get to that sort of centralized, too big of a centralized hub, right? And we can already
- 1:12:14see I mean look it already happened Like let I know people don like this company but let say Binance This was totally you know shitcoin company They were an ICO company but it absolutely one of the most successful ICOs ever right
- 1:12:29And what happened?
- 1:12:30They didn't stay free.
- 1:12:32They didn't stay, you know, the mission,
- 1:12:35obviously no Bitcoin is really going to sort of like agree generally what
- 1:12:40they're doing, but they're, they were a untethered,
- 1:12:44unregulated zero fiat company.
- 1:12:47same with BitMEX, same with BitMEX. These guys were free banking, untethered, using Bitcoin
- 1:12:52primarily, but also in Chitcoins, I guess more in Binance case. They were a decentralized free
- 1:13:00system and they both got captured. So that to me is the interesting question really about what will
- 1:13:11or could happen with a Bitcoin, like a true Bitcoin free system, because those those examples,
- 1:13:19I agree, they're more sort of free banking like they're more, you know, but any system,
- 1:13:26if you're going to get big enough, you're going to have enough money.
- 1:13:28People are your footprint is starting to get around.
- 1:13:31They're going to want to get you and they're going to want to tax you.
- 1:13:35Yeah, well, and I think this is where implementation details really come into play.
- 1:13:40and obviously BitMEX, Binance.
- 1:13:44BitMEX, I think, most beautifully,
- 1:13:47and I don't think they get enough credit
- 1:13:49for really building a primitive Bitcoin bank
- 1:13:55with the way they implemented multisig
- 1:13:57and did all their payouts
- 1:13:59and geographically distributed.
- 1:14:03But in the case of BitMEX and Binance,
- 1:14:06like you needed...
- 1:14:08I'm just trying to figure out how I want to describe it.
- 1:14:10You need those core teams who really understood the space
- 1:14:13and were able to spin up a business,
- 1:14:16like a legal business entity with processes and all this.
- 1:14:21And they had their siloed sort of way of operating
- 1:14:25and building their businesses,
- 1:14:27where I think I've been really on this tip
- 1:14:32that I think the reemergence of eCacheMint,
- 1:14:34really the two protocols, Fetty Mint and Cashew,
- 1:14:38the fact that you have these protocols
- 1:14:40that are open source, permissionless,
- 1:14:43and you sort of had these out-of-the-box,
- 1:14:45this out-of-the-box banking infrastructure
- 1:14:48that doesn't necessarily,
- 1:14:50you have a team of open source developers
- 1:14:52building out these protocols,
- 1:14:53and anybody can leverage the product of the work
- 1:14:56of that open source team,
- 1:14:58whereas in the case of BitMEX and Binance,
- 1:14:59you're really dependent on those closed source teams
- 1:15:02to build out that infrastructure.
- 1:15:03And I think you can squint and see an implementation of a rapidly growing competitive and hydro-like free banking system with these cash humans.
- 1:15:16And if you go back to CHOM in the 80s and what the holdup was there is that it failed in the 80s because you need permission from the banks to actually do anything.
- 1:15:25Whereas with these e-cash protocols, you don't need any permission.
- 1:15:29You just get a GitHub and figure out how to peg in and peg out Bitcoin and issue e-cash tokens.
- 1:15:38And boom, you have a bank.
- 1:15:40That is my dream.
- 1:15:40Maybe it's naive.
- 1:15:41Maybe it's too optimistic.
- 1:15:43But I think implementation...
- 1:15:44No, 100% me as well.
- 1:15:46To use the old parallel word, right?
- 1:15:49It's fiduciary media.
- 1:15:50it's a it's a you're setting up something that's related but different to the underlying base which
- 1:15:57in the old days was of course gold or silver at times uh there are so many better things about the
- 1:16:04both the systems that you just mentioned fetty and cashew than any other prior system but even there
- 1:16:10right the um the different coordinators or i can't even forget the language of fetty uh but you know
- 1:16:18say you're a farmer, like say you have a big farming operation in Africa.
- 1:16:22Yeah, the guardians, right?
- 1:16:23My understanding is there still is a possibility that guardians could
- 1:16:27in some way, shape or form.
- 1:16:32Rug you.
- 1:16:33You're right.
- 1:16:34I mean, for lack of a better word.
- 1:16:36And that's totally fine, but I'm not totally fine,
- 1:16:39but that's natural the way that the system needs to scale.
- 1:16:41I'm absolutely not poo-pooing any of this.
- 1:16:45This is like, this is like, like you said, this is basically my, you know, one of my dreams as well.
- 1:16:50That's why I like reading about free banking history because it's something that existed.
- 1:16:53It worked.
- 1:16:54It was there.
- 1:16:55Then it failed.
- 1:16:56So we have to do better than that.
- 1:16:58And I think we're on the way.
- 1:16:59I think it's amazing what those guys are doing.
- 1:17:04And I think it's totally possible.
- 1:17:06I do.
- 1:17:08The rub will be, though, probably two main things, right?
- 1:17:14it to be, of course, the co-opting it at some point, like you said, if, you know, however that
- 1:17:19form might occur, it could be different in different places and different geographical
- 1:17:23factors and socioeconomic factors. It might be, you know, some, some guardians turn out to be
- 1:17:29mafia-like. Some guardians might turn out to be co-opted by the state. I have no idea. I'm just
- 1:17:33saying, I know these guys think about that stuff too, all the time. We got plenty of time. So
- 1:17:38that's, that's probably the main risk that people think about. But then the other risk, which goes
- 1:17:42back to the power law stuff and the, um, you know, the exponential stuff is you can start to make
- 1:17:51money off of these systems. If you can be like, well, you know, let's just, let's keep the Bitcoin
- 1:17:57here. You're just going to start using our, uh, fiduciary media, our sort of certificates. Yeah.
- 1:18:03This, this, uh, this, uh, this Chami and Mint is backed one-to-one, but this one isn't because
- 1:18:11the state is involved and then this other state is involved here here here and you can just imagine
- 1:18:15that there is if the economic growth is big enough anywhere it doesn't really matter what we're
- 1:18:22talking about if the economic big growth is big enough there will there will be that
- 1:18:27sort of perennial tendency of the of wherever you are operating to come after you and you know fill
- 1:18:35their coffers with tax revenue. So it's just going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting
- 1:18:45to see how that works. I mean, on the one hand, we could maybe set up the true dream of the old,
- 1:18:51the anarcho-capitalist paradise where everything starts to have a fee and a price and a service
- 1:18:57can be delivered from infrastructure, water, Bitcoin mining, right, can give heating. There's
- 1:19:05all sorts of amazing things that can happen. I'm sure you've done some shows with some of those
- 1:19:09miners, um, talking about that, like grid list was doing that and stuff, but the, uh,
- 1:19:16the question will be, is if we can overcome the state, the state, uh, monopoly there when they
- 1:19:26want to come in and start doing it their way, very mafia, like as Rothbard said, there's only the
- 1:19:33the mafia and the state are the two groups that can just sort of come and
- 1:19:37demand demand revenue from you without necessarily providing a service.
- 1:19:42It's fun to dive into these like deep philosophical where we'll go.
- 1:19:47And I think it's not only fun, but it's important, I think,
- 1:19:50to anchor, to put something down,
- 1:19:52like here's a vision to strive for to at least test out.
- 1:19:57And I think it's also important to recognize where we are still in the very
- 1:20:02nation stages of Bitcoin overall, and even more so these second layer technologies and
- 1:20:10these financial contracts and his way of doing things. But I think it's also important to
- 1:20:16recognize that the stuff is getting built out, like really tying this back to the overall tenor
- 1:20:23of the beginning of the episode, which was people are somewhat disappointed with where Bitcoin is
- 1:20:28from a price perspective.
- 1:20:31There's another contingent of people who are disappointed
- 1:20:34because Bitcoin doesn't seem to be maturing at all
- 1:20:36at different levels, different parts of the stack.
- 1:20:40But I think that's inarguably untrue.
- 1:20:43We are actually paying attention.
- 1:20:45All this stuff is getting built and getting more mature
- 1:20:48and getting used more every day.
- 1:20:51Yesterday, we have somebody helping us out
- 1:20:54with the YouTube thumbnails, the clickbait
- 1:20:56to make sure that we're getting as many views as possible.
- 1:20:59And he sent me an invoice via BlinkWallet,
- 1:21:03which I was not expecting at all.
- 1:21:04This is some dude I think we found on YouTube.
- 1:21:07And he asked to get paid in Bitcoin using BlinkWallet,
- 1:21:11using the Lightning Network.
- 1:21:12And that was a shocking signal to me,
- 1:21:19like, oh, people are waking up.
- 1:21:20This network adoption is happening.
- 1:21:23Yep.
- 1:21:24There you go, man.
- 1:21:25It's a great thing.
- 1:21:27I'm super bullish.
- 1:21:28I mean, we talk about all these.
- 1:21:30Don't get me wrong if listeners are doubting.
- 1:21:33I'm absolutely very, very confident that at least one of these paths to sort of stay free in Bitcoin will work.
- 1:21:45And obviously, it's not limited to just one.
- 1:21:47I mean, there are just so many different ways to do it.
- 1:21:49I think it's
- 1:21:54for sure green pastures
- 1:21:56but yeah it is the
- 1:21:58sort of the
- 1:21:59current
- 1:22:02fiat world that we're in
- 1:22:03can be quite unforgiving
- 1:22:06unforgiving
- 1:22:07very depressed
- 1:22:09yeah
- 1:22:11I think people are waking up though
- 1:22:13I think
- 1:22:14people are getting fed up
- 1:22:18You got to have that optimism.
- 1:22:20We're going to break free.
- 1:22:22Absolutely.
- 1:22:23It's inevitable that they will get fed up and look for other options.
- 1:22:27And you know, Bitcoin is going to be there.
- 1:22:29Gold failed there, right?
- 1:22:31Like I said, you were the gold bug.
- 1:22:33If you were the gold bug in our, we were at some gold conference in 1981.
- 1:22:37You're like, this is it.
- 1:22:39This is on game on.
- 1:22:40And then 20 year bear and Alan Greenspan in the nineties is telling you that he's
- 1:22:45got the gold market captured.
- 1:22:48Bitcoin is not doing that.
- 1:22:50I mean, it could happen, but actually capturing it,
- 1:22:58actually stopping every single person from running a node
- 1:23:01and being able to censor every transaction
- 1:23:04and being able to control the market price,
- 1:23:07we're a long, long way from that.
- 1:23:09So I have no doubt that we're going to give it a good run here with Bitcoin.
- 1:23:17It's the best chance we have.
- 1:23:19It really is.
- 1:23:20But speaking of gold bugs and gold,
- 1:23:22gold's having a moment right now.
- 1:23:24It's having a moment.
- 1:23:25It is.
- 1:23:26It is.
- 1:23:27I saw your tweet.
- 1:23:28I saw your tweet about the gold,
- 1:23:31you know, getting to the highest reserves ever
- 1:23:33and more than treasuries.
- 1:23:38I'm pulling it up right now.
- 1:23:40We are still up at 35 or at 35.
- 1:23:436-3.
- 1:23:45Corn's even pumping a little bit, up 100.
- 1:23:4711k. The model that I just pulled in
- 1:23:50earlier at the start of this episode, I think was 109.
- 1:23:54So
- 1:23:54we just pumped like
- 1:23:582k during the course of this episode.
- 1:24:00Of course, this chat 2.5k
- 1:24:02hasn't even been posted yet and the universe
- 1:24:06can feel
- 1:24:07a signal coming from it. Smash buying
- 1:24:10Bitcoin. What a letdown if
- 1:24:12it's 105 when this thing is released.
- 1:24:14But
- 1:24:14no, I love it, dude.
- 1:24:19I mean, yeah, gold is pumping.
- 1:24:21I think it makes sense geopolitically that states are doing that It funny though You know the trend I do like trends on this stuff as well also to look at you know comparisons with Bitcoin
- 1:24:35The trend is still generally flat to even slightly down since the 60s
- 1:24:42of central banks holding gold.
- 1:24:44But since 2008, they've been consistently buying.
- 1:24:46And like you said, we're getting now to the point where,
- 1:24:49in dollar terms, gold is, you know, your gold reserves are more than your treasury reserves.
- 1:24:56That's, uh, that's, that's big news. Yeah. And I'm just going to pull this up here. I'll
- 1:25:02share a screen for the first time ever during one of these episodes, but just to
- 1:25:07put a visual on this for, um,
- 1:25:12everybody watching on YouTube or wherever, here's the chart we're talking about. Foreign central
- 1:25:19banks hold more gold in treasuries for the first time since the early 90s yeah that's a good chart
- 1:25:28i gotta get that i gotta get that data online yeah i mean and even though exogenous factors
- 1:25:36only factor for five percent of of bitcoin price movement right in your opinion it is
- 1:25:42fascinating to observe
- 1:25:45what is going on.
- 1:25:48If only because
- 1:25:48just take Bitcoin out of the question,
- 1:25:51it is very obvious that we are
- 1:25:53in some sort of phase change
- 1:25:56in terms of
- 1:25:57the global monetary system
- 1:25:59as is evidenced by
- 1:26:01people falling back to gold
- 1:26:03in favor
- 1:26:05or in disfavor of treasuries.
- 1:26:09Yep.
- 1:26:09you see there it's 75 that's an 850 gold price for like i said two seconds on the comex in 1980
- 1:26:18uh that's a huge valuation there of gold and um you know can we go back to that
- 1:26:27i don't know but i absolutely think the bitcoin will be a part of that now moving forward um
- 1:26:34but also i'm not you know i think there's a lot of conflicting messages
- 1:26:39between bitcoiners as well you know you have a lot of bitcoiners that
- 1:26:42are even uh i don't know
- 1:26:46you have a lot of bitcoiners who are saying that it's a good thing that big you know governments
- 1:26:54are starting to reserve bitcoin you have a lot of bitcoiners that think that that's a bad thing
- 1:26:59right the government's reserve bitcoin what's your what's your take on that if bitcoin starts
- 1:27:05to become starts to become a mix in that basket i have a very uh mvk view on this which is bitcoin
- 1:27:16is money for enemies and there's nothing you can do um you just have to if you're worried about the
- 1:27:23government potentially co-opting or wall street co-opting blackrock co-opting whoever the only
- 1:27:29way to prevent that is to
- 1:27:30hold your own private keys, run your own node
- 1:27:33and make sure that
- 1:27:34hash rate's sufficiently distributed.
- 1:27:39What if
- 1:27:39they say no withdrawals from Americans?
- 1:27:42Like no Americans can
- 1:27:43hold gold.
- 1:27:44That's when you take to the streets
- 1:27:47and you say no.
- 1:27:49That's why
- 1:27:49don't wait for it.
- 1:27:52It is certainly a possibility as you just mentioned
- 1:27:55it has happened before in US history
- 1:27:57with Executive Order 6102
- 1:27:59and to best prepare for that is to make sure that you get your Bitcoin off the exchanges
- 1:28:05and into your own wallets that you secure.
- 1:28:11And I think luckily we're still in this period where a majority of Bitcoin is held in individual wallets
- 1:28:18with private keys secured by individuals.
- 1:28:21The trend is going in the wrong direction, but that is a product of the institutions coming in and buying via the ETF.
- 1:28:29and paper Bitcoin summer with the treasury companies.
- 1:28:34I do think everybody should be proactive.
- 1:28:39And if you want to protect yourself
- 1:28:43from the withdrawal button being turned off
- 1:28:48by the US government at exchanges,
- 1:28:50just don't wait for that to happen.
- 1:28:52Be active, get it into your own wallet,
- 1:28:57secure your own private keys.
- 1:28:59Yeah.
- 1:28:59And if the government does do that, like I think, I think it would be hard for me to believe that people, Bitcoiners specifically, particularly the early adopters would just roll over and allow that to happen without some pushback.
- 1:29:21Right.
- 1:29:22I was on a panel with Pitch Todd in Helsinki and he said similar things.
- 1:29:28I mean, on some level, it is going to get political.
- 1:29:31You know, you will have to push back.
- 1:29:37He gave the example of the, you know, if code is for speech, right?
- 1:29:43The cypherpunks had to do the government in the 90s and actually won.
- 1:29:51Although that analogy is still very hinged on a U.S. centric world, which we're moving away from now.
- 1:29:58frankly. So in any event, I think it's still better. Bitcoin is, I still think,
- 1:30:03going to do well in this world, right? In a more multipolar world, even though these,
- 1:30:09you know, Russia, of course, has no gold because they're stupid and they lost it all. But China does
- 1:30:13have a lot and they continue to buy. And so gold will be a part of it. And if you think Bitcoin
- 1:30:21will be a part of it.
- 1:30:23But, you know, yeah, I hope it like the other side of whatever comes here.
- 1:30:29I hope it's not, you know, too bloody, too violent.
- 1:30:34But like you said, I think people are going to have to push back.
- 1:30:38If your basic rights and private property rights,
- 1:30:44free speech rights start to get taken away, you will have to push back.
- 1:30:47Yeah.
- 1:30:47and I can think of a number of founders that run exchanges in my mind that if
- 1:30:53the government were to signal like, Hey,
- 1:30:55we're going to turn off the withdrawal button.
- 1:30:58Like I like to think the romantic in me likes to think that there are
- 1:31:02principal Bitcoiners and positions and many exchanges that would sort of force
- 1:31:10their users to withdraw saying like, Hey,
- 1:31:12you need to figure out how to download blue wallet.
- 1:31:15we're going to send her your Bitcoin because we don't want to
- 1:31:17we don't want to be holding this.
- 1:31:23Do you think that there are principled
- 1:31:25owners of Bitcoin treasury companies?
- 1:31:30God.
- 1:31:32I think a lot of...
- 1:31:34Sorry, I just had to lob that one out there for you.
- 1:31:38Well, you want to hear my theory.
- 1:31:41What are your thoughts on the U.S. government
- 1:31:43taking a 10% stake in Intel?
- 1:31:45hold on i want to hear your theory first well this is the setup for the theory what are your
- 1:31:50thoughts on the u.s government taking 10 staking intel i'm not gonna i'm not gonna throw too much
- 1:31:57judgment out there first of all uh you don't get too much back into the geopolitics of this episode
- 1:32:03but um yeah if you want to envision yourself as a citizen fully sovereign
- 1:32:14way in the future, or your grandchildren or your heirs way in the future. I think that's sort of
- 1:32:22easier to envision. But if we talk about even just 100 years ago, the consolidation of power
- 1:32:29between monarchies and a few governments around Europe, we're completely consolidated and completely
- 1:32:36hopeless as far as the proletariat. I think we're somewhere in the middle of that today.
- 1:32:41OK, so what I'm saying to answer your question is I don't think I think it's a gray issue.
- 1:32:46I don't think it's black and white.
- 1:32:47If someone wants to, you know, if we talk about pure capitalism in a free market, I think that's one thing.
- 1:32:56But if you're talking about an entity like the government buying 10 percent of Intel.
- 1:33:02OK, but what about if the Chinese government came in and tried to buy 10 percent of Intel or the Indian government tried to come in and buy 10 percent of Intel?
- 1:33:09You don't think the U.S. government would stop that?
- 1:33:11So there are pros and cons there. I understand the idea of the US government trying to do this for a defensive as a defensive play. And those those though that position is not without merit.
- 1:33:30on the other side as a free market person obviously yes i'm not a fan of seeing the
- 1:33:36government come in and you know take bigger and bigger stakes and companies so it's mixed
- 1:33:43i can see they're being married to it but also like intel why are you buying intel
- 1:33:48it has been good since andy grove died and you're basically buying a loser in hopes that
- 1:33:57injection of
- 1:33:58or it's not even
- 1:34:00they didn't even check there
- 1:34:01it's the CHIPS Act
- 1:34:02they're basically converting
- 1:34:03subsidies from that act
- 1:34:06into equity
- 1:34:07it's like they're getting
- 1:34:10the money anyway
- 1:34:10the US is getting
- 1:34:13the US government
- 1:34:15is getting
- 1:34:15and taxpayers by extension
- 1:34:16theoretically are getting
- 1:34:18a return
- 1:34:19based off of that equity injection
- 1:34:21but
- 1:34:21no no the point I bring up
- 1:34:23is
- 1:34:23if you didn't want a 6102
- 1:34:26So if you were the U.S. government, if you understood the game theory of Bitcoin adoption and particularly tipping your cards to your adversaries in terms of what you're doing on the Bitcoin adoption side.
- 1:34:44And one great way to build a Bitcoin stack is to have somebody in the private sector acquire 3% of all Bitcoin and then come in one day and just print money, acquire that company and their balance sheet and make their shareholders whole via printed money.
- 1:35:07That's a great way to build a Bitcoin reserve.
- 1:35:12Sure.
- 1:35:13Sure.
- 1:35:14and uh are you referring to anybody in particular by chance yeah microstrategy you know large
- 1:35:20bitcoin holder yeah perhaps yeah 600 000 plus coins yeah no man i mean the theories are out
- 1:35:28there for sure i mean the headquarters is a tyson corner i believe it's right next to every defense
- 1:35:33contractor in the united states no i mean um look you and i are pretty skeptical on a lot of that
- 1:35:41stuff so i'm with you there uh no no actually like honestly like it's just a theory it's fun to
- 1:35:47to talk about and to surmise but honestly if you're thinking like the most
- 1:35:53um sort of painless way to do a 6d 102 like event just like you have like a strategy acquire
- 1:36:03all the bitcoin once it gets to a certain level the government's like okay this is a good
- 1:36:08strategic reserve for us.
- 1:36:11You print the money,
- 1:36:12you make shareholders hold,
- 1:36:14maybe even at a premium.
- 1:36:15Everybody gets paid back.
- 1:36:16The government gets their Bitcoin.
- 1:36:18And I'm not saying this is happening,
- 1:36:20but it is funny.
- 1:36:22Yeah, so I share your skepticism.
- 1:36:25Most of our listeners
- 1:36:26who listened to me and you chat for all these years hopefully know that I share your skepticism But i also have this other layer of skepticism towards other governments and the united states actually i don think it the worst i still think it the best looking horse in the glue factor as i usually
- 1:36:41say the dollar and even the government in some cases not in not in others but um you know a very
- 1:36:48simple example all the uh nice hard right uh anti-woke podcasters or some of them let's say
- 1:36:56were contracted by Russia earlier this year via a company called Tenant Media,
- 1:37:04and were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars an episode to create content.
- 1:37:09You know, the likes of Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, these guys.
- 1:37:15It's not only walled to like, the U.S. government is not playing just with itself.
- 1:37:23There are a lot of other players happening.
- 1:37:25So that's what I meant with my intel answer of trying to say it a little bit of both ways.
- 1:37:29It's a defensive move.
- 1:37:30It might be a dumb move.
- 1:37:32Like you said, it could be a totally dumb move.
- 1:37:34But I don't actually know.
- 1:37:36Again, in the world where our grandchildren and their grandchildren are living in a purely anarchic capitalist paradise,
- 1:37:42running a node and maybe mining a little bit of Bitcoin on nuclear fusion or something versus the world of 100 years ago,
- 1:37:50we are, unfortunately, I think, and I would use this word, unfortunately,
- 1:37:54we're still in a world where there are big big powers that play with a lot of money and a lot of
- 1:37:59guns and there are wars going on right now so it's very difficult you got to watch out for that
- 1:38:02and i also think and this is where i kind of land more on the side of like i think the way that
- 1:38:10peter todd looks at some of this geopolitical stuff he's a big ukraine supporter by the way
- 1:38:14um is there they're just our adversaries they're their government government adversaries there are
- 1:38:21government intelligence agency adversaries. There are good companies and bad companies in
- 1:38:27different jurisdictions. It's just not the US government alone by itself.
- 1:38:33Anybody can argue about the strategy the US government takes on a lot of things,
- 1:38:37I would certainly argue in many ways. But that little example of the right wing podcasters being
- 1:38:44paid by the Kremlin, which I have been, again, yelling for years as RT was ascending in the 2010s
- 1:38:51on youtube that's just that's one example to think about you know we just thought there's a summit in
- 1:38:57china right right now where all the all the dictators are meeting including modi even though
- 1:39:04people like to say that modi's a like india's still a democracy because trump had put all the
- 1:39:09tariffs on them right and now he's meeting with xi and putin and kim jong-un is even coming in
- 1:39:13is he by train yeah he's coming in by train and they cancel all the trains uh in china like
- 1:39:20lovely communist move right there.
- 1:39:23Like, I don't know how many hundreds of millions of Chinese
- 1:39:26just got shut off of a train when he's coming in.
- 1:39:28But I mean, he's coming in by train.
- 1:39:31And this is a very rare event, by the way.
- 1:39:33You know, Kim Jong-un would come,
- 1:39:35like he might meet with Trump in Singapore,
- 1:39:36or he might meet one-on-one with Xi.
- 1:39:39But this is a major dictator event that's occurring right now.
- 1:39:43You know, Erdogan's there from Turkey and then Modi.
- 1:39:47I mean, we'd say India's democracy,
- 1:39:49but they're a fledgling democracy at the moment.
- 1:39:51Modi himself has got plenty of autocratic history, let's say.
- 1:39:57I feel like he's been in for quite a while.
- 1:40:00He has indeed.
- 1:40:01That's really all you need to do is look at the track record,
- 1:40:03like Putin for 25 years.
- 1:40:05Lukashenko was there, of course, from Belarus,
- 1:40:08very close to the Baltics here.
- 1:40:09He's been in for 31 years.
- 1:40:13I mean, it's a wild world, man.
- 1:40:16It's a wild world.
- 1:40:17So anyway, there's that stuff as well going on.
- 1:40:19That's my long winded answer to your point there about the government getting involved in U.S. businesses.
- 1:40:26Yeah.
- 1:40:27Why can't we all just get along, man?
- 1:40:31Vipers everywhere, man.
- 1:40:33Vipers everywhere.
- 1:40:34I'm just trying to run around the block with my son and not have to worry about that.
- 1:40:38And do that.
- 1:40:38Hey, let's go back to the top of the show message.
- 1:40:40We're getting close to the end, right?
- 1:40:44Enjoy the power curve.
- 1:40:45it's 95% of what Bitcoin is doing
- 1:40:48the adoption you can see it
- 1:40:50you can visualize it
- 1:40:51let me finish off with one more
- 1:40:54chart here just so people
- 1:40:55those brave souls that have stuck through our
- 1:40:58you have one of the highest
- 1:41:00retention particularly
- 1:41:02my rants because I know a lot of people
- 1:41:04don't like my Ukraine stance but
- 1:41:06let me show you
- 1:41:07let me show you
- 1:41:09the
- 1:41:11Bitcoin
- 1:41:14as we close it out here.
- 1:41:18I think this is my new headline chart
- 1:41:19as far as showing the whole thing.
- 1:41:21It got the power curve.
- 1:41:23We got the power curve.
- 1:41:23We got exponential curve.
- 1:41:24We got money.
- 1:41:25We got Bitcoin.
- 1:41:25So this is now what I'm calling
- 1:41:27TradFi based money.
- 1:41:29It is available gold and silver.
- 1:41:31So it doesn't include industrial.
- 1:41:33And then since gold and silver
- 1:41:36is actually a little bit
- 1:41:37a part of the monetary base,
- 1:41:38there's like $4 trillion now
- 1:41:39because it's a huge value
- 1:41:40in backing the fiat based money,
- 1:41:43which is liability.
- 1:41:43You take that off.
- 1:41:45So you just look at unbacked fiat money.
- 1:41:49That's what this is.
- 1:41:50Okay.
- 1:41:50At the moment, that total right now is $38 trillion.
- 1:41:56All right.
- 1:41:57$38 trillion.
- 1:41:59And the Bitcoin network, all right, is right there.
- 1:42:10Okay.
- 1:42:13Bitcoin dominance, 5.6%. All right. 2.1 trillion. This moves from actual values right into the
- 1:42:23trend lines, right? So you can see them. But this is actually graphically what I mean when I say
- 1:42:2895% of Bitcoin's action right now is just the power curve itself. Like we literally,
- 1:42:33this is kind of the real Bitcoin dominance. If fiat-based money altogether is 40 trillion,
- 1:42:39gold, silver, fiat-based money, central bank money, Bitcoin's $2 trillion. We're at 5%.
- 1:42:44All right. Question would be, when do we cross? That would be here. Go out to 2041 or so.
- 1:42:55Actually, it's changed a little bit here, but
- 1:42:572041, roughly 120 trillion.
- 1:43:07And there's an idea for you.
- 1:43:1015 years from now,
- 1:43:12something to shoot for.
- 1:43:18It's around this mythical 100 trillion.
- 1:43:20All right.
- 1:43:21And I think that we're going to get close there,
- 1:43:23probably sooner.
- 1:43:25and again when we do meet it's still 50 50 so that's money that's valued in something like a
- 1:43:31dollar that has nothing to do with bitcoin okay because it's unbacked fiat based money would be
- 1:43:36something like 100 trillion 120 trillion uh bitcoin itself if it got to 120 trillion there
- 1:43:45would still be 50 50 so that's what i keep saying these money supplies keep growing skate to where
- 1:43:50the puck is going uh yeah i think 15 17 years is probably where we will match and this is this is
- 1:43:57how you can see basically um you know trad fi which runs in a exponential straight line on log scale
- 1:44:06right versus bitcoin which runs in a power trend on log scale which is a this sort of nice gently
- 1:44:15sustainable curve.
- 1:44:19So that's what I think.
- 1:44:21I'll keep tracking this.
- 1:44:23Keep tweaking it.
- 1:44:25But that's what I think is going to happen.
- 1:44:27You know what I think is going to happen?
- 1:44:28Tell me.
- 1:44:29Bring it to year 2041.
- 1:44:32And people are going to be digging through the archives of the episodes that we've been
- 1:44:35producing for seven years.
- 1:44:36This guy was a genius.
- 1:44:38He told us how exactly how it was going to happen.
- 1:44:42Yes.
- 1:44:42Looking forward to that.
- 1:44:43no uh it's tweaked around a lot like these numbers are super sensitive and um the trend
- 1:44:49line is sensitive like you know i could tweak a couple things and this could go up to like 140
- 1:44:54trillion so i just want to make that caveat this can be i'm tweaking this all the time based on
- 1:44:59the changes in the numbers and the uh the updates of the trend line itself when i do these quarterly
- 1:45:05reports. So it's, you know, big, big, big ticket numbers, a long time period out might be like May,
- 1:45:16something like that. That was it was showing that before when I before I did this quarterly update,
- 1:45:19it was already up to like 140 145 trillion. Now it's down to 120. We'll see. We'll see based on
- 1:45:25all the price action and everything that happens. But who knows, it might be that mythical 100
- 1:45:30trillion is exactly where Bitcoin passes the fiat world.
- 1:45:34But this is how I see it, sort of a headline idea.
- 1:45:38Yeah.
- 1:45:41I like it.
- 1:45:41Very exciting.
- 1:45:42Very exciting.
- 1:45:43So all reasons to be bullish, all reasons to hodl.
- 1:45:47Never financial advice, but if you want to play around with the extremes of those percentiles
- 1:45:52and ape in and out, check my streams mostly every day.
- 1:45:55Check the streams, check out porkopolis.io.
- 1:46:00There's a porkopolis economics, let me see.
- 1:46:02Yep, yep, yep.
- 1:46:03Porkopolis.io.
- 1:46:04We'll link to all this.
- 1:46:05BaseMoney.World.
- 1:46:06You can get a lot of different places.
- 1:46:09It was funny because I was setting up to write the newsletter last night.
- 1:46:13I wrote the newsletter that I wrote last night because I was beginning to question myself.
- 1:46:16I guess Bitcoin, is it not doing what it should be doing?
- 1:46:19Are we having a depressed cycle?
- 1:46:22And then I just went back to basics.
- 1:46:24I went to look at the chart.
- 1:46:25I said, no.
- 1:46:25It's right on trend.
- 1:46:27We're,
- 1:46:28we're fine.
- 1:46:29People are the noise for anybody listening.
- 1:46:31I think the lesson to take from this conversation,
- 1:46:35really every conversation that Matthew and I have every quarter is this is the
- 1:46:42best way to filter out the noise.
- 1:46:44This is the signal.
- 1:46:45If you're ever feel your emotions being manipulated by people on Twitter or
- 1:46:51gold bugs or whoever it may be,
- 1:46:53just fall back to basics.
- 1:46:54Look at,
- 1:46:55look at the data. This is where the signal is.
- 1:46:57There's a lot of noise out there. It's only going to get louder
- 1:46:59and there's going to be
- 1:47:01more of it.
- 1:47:03Twitter is not real life.
- 1:47:05It really isn't.
- 1:47:07Running around the block with your kids
- 1:47:09is real life. I love it, man.
- 1:47:11I'm very happy for you. Good luck with the
- 1:47:13newest
- 1:47:15getting some sleep and
- 1:47:17all the rest, but
- 1:47:19I'm very happy for you, buddy.
- 1:47:21Thank you, sir. Go run around the block.
- 1:47:23Actually, you said tonight, so you got a while.
- 1:47:26Yeah, we got a while.
- 1:47:26I could run around the block with my little one.
- 1:47:28Maybe we'll do that.
- 1:47:28Yeah.
- 1:47:32We're going to be doing this until 2041, so.
- 1:47:35I think we will, dude.
- 1:47:36I think we will.
- 1:47:39I just hope Central and Eastern Europe are preserved and safe until then.
- 1:47:46That's what we're working for.
- 1:47:48Yeah.
- 1:47:49I think we're going to be good.
- 1:47:50I think we're going to be good.
- 1:47:51Let's see.
- 1:47:52Let's see.
- 1:47:52And when in doubt, run your own note.
- 1:47:56Yeah.
- 1:47:56Enjoy yourself.
- 1:47:58Marty.
- 1:47:59Always a pleasure, my friend.
- 1:48:01Matty.
- 1:48:01The pleasure is always mine.
- 1:48:03Peace.
- 1:48:03Love freaks.
- 1:48:04If you've made it this far, I want to thank you for listening and ask you for a couple of things.
- 1:48:09Can you subscribe on the platform that you're listening to?
- 1:48:12Maybe give us a rating and a review that helps the show quite a bit.
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