Transcript+
All right everyone, welcome to the broadcast Part 25. This is where we catch up on news, tweets, videos, charts, trends, and any other Bitcoin related content that stood out to us in the past two weeks. Usually I'm here with Michael and Brian, but we have Matt O'dell as a special guest. Welcome, Matt. Thanks for having me. We had to bring in Matt because the vibes are really low right now. You know, if I knew we signed up for this pod to do it all 2026 and the price is going to be here, maybe would have rethought it. So we needed Odell to spice up whatever the Hell's happening. Yeah, and it's some fun and it's funny because I said, you know everything that stood out to us with Bitcoin and the first thing that Matt brought in was a a Poly market chart. So what's up with that? Over the weekend, we basically saw the first high volume legitimate assassination market that's ever existed in humanity. It's something that a lot of us have been theorizing for a while in terms of prediction markets. Prediction markets have had difficulty bootstrapping in practice until Polly Market came around. And specifically under this new administration, Polly Market was under basically under attack by Biden. The CEO and founder had his apartment rated, but as soon as Trump got in, it was like off to the races. And now they have tons of volume. And they had a market over the weekend. That was basically when will the Ayatollah be out of Iran? And as soon as war broke out, it actually turned into an assassination market while everyone was basically betting on whether or not he had been killed or not. And that market concluded because he got killed and people were paid out. It was over $100 million in volume on that market. And now, now they launched a new market who will be the next supreme leader of Iran? And it's basic, but they all keep getting killed by air strikes. So it's basically a another assassination market that they launched. And people are betting on who survives to take over. So theory has become reality. Obviously Polymarket is running, running on a shit coin network, but you can deposit Bitcoin. It is you know, I would I would still consider it a Bitcoin app, probably one of the most successful Bitcoin apps of all time. And just a quick high level of why I think prediction markets are interesting. You know, they get a lot of shit because insiders are trading them and and they definitely bet benefit insiders. If you're trading them, they benefit insiders, but if you're tracking them, they benefit outsiders because it basically provides an incentive for insiders to leak information to the broader public so that we have better quality information to work off of. So I think they're fascinating and I think particularly seeing a $10 billion plus valued company that has investment from New York Stock Exchange running assassination markets at high volume is absolutely wild and the single biggest story of the week. So I don't mean to put. You on the spot. But I have questions about prediction markets because you're the only individual that I interact with. That's like keeping me up to speed that these things exist. I mean, I know they're, they exist and they're, they're growing. But I'm curious based on like your knowledge and also thinking adversarially, like what's the angle why they're proliferating? Because I know like obviously new admin and they were allowed, but there feels like some other version of, I don't call it a psyop, but like, how do, how does the the machine benefit from like these markets? Because I feel like that's part of the story of why they're proliferating and where they'll continue to grow. Because theoretically these things could have existed five years ago, 10 years ago, even offshore, they could have gained this kind of steam. They they didn't. And there's a reason why now they're like NYSNYSSE, right? ICE owns a piece of of them. So like, what's your take if you have one on that? Yeah. I mean, look, I think there's a couple things. First of all, for these things to be accurate, you need to be able to bet in size anonymously. Why is that? Because they once again to for it to benefit external onlookers to watch, insiders have to be able to profit off of it. And an insider can't profit off of it if they're KYC, Ed and docs, right? Because then they'll lose their job or lose their government position or what not. So you need to be able to bet on it anonymously. I think also at size users need to have some assurances that it will be objective in how it concludes the market, right. If you if you bet $10 million that that there an airstrike happens and an airstrike happens, you don't get paid out, then all of a sudden that really hurts the credibility of the markets. So as a result, you needed to be at least relatively decentralized, right, to have the anonymity and to have the ability to to have good robust guarantees on payouts. So so that's why we haven't really seen them yet. And I mean, the founder does, I think deserves a lot of credit for how he designed Polymarket. Is it perfect? No. Is there still central centralized elements to it? Yes. We saw, bought the body administration nearly crushed the thing. And it's because there's people involved, right? And when there's people involved, you go after the people, you don't go after the actual protocol. But that's why it took so long for them to even have like the tech that like mostly worked to make it possible. And then in terms of like, if you want to like go a little bit deeper in terms of you said sigh up or conspiracy, like where does the deep state benefit from it? I mean, I think the deep state has a long history of incubating technology that provides them more data points and more information, whether that's something like Facebook, whether that's something like SpaceX with Starlink, whether that's something like the Tor Project Bitcoin, right? I, so I mean, I think they get a big advantage here, right? I mean, if we can go like the rabbit hole is so deep, which is why I think it's fascinating. But if, if, if the powers that be want to know what's happening on the front lines of Ukraine, there's an incentive for Russian soldiers that are poorly paid to open up their phones and bet on the markets actively. And they have active markets for the small skirmishes that are happening across the front lines. And people have made websites that basically chart the different projected probability outcomes of all those battles so you can get a better idea of it. And who even knows what Palantir has like Palantir is probably combing this data like crazy. So I, I think, I think the data is, is probably a, a super good reason why they would want that. And we saw with the elections, for instance, polls are often inaccurate. But when people have skin in the game and they actually need to put real money on the line, they tend to be more, much more accurate results. Are they perfect? No, but it's it's the most accurate signal we've ever had. Yeah, that makes sense. I, I agree with that. Like I, like I just told you before we recorded and I've shared this before about that. I think this is probably the best application of, of crypto that we've seen since 10 years, you know, over since, since since inception, like you said, Freedom of Information plus freedom of capital. But I think also what another thought I have is this does feel like we're in this Idiocracy type phase. You know, I, I don't know if you saw this, this video today that the White House tweeted that they, I don't know, they made it with VO3 or some sort of AI video creation tool, which was just I don't know. No, I had to think of Idiocracy. It's just so it's crazy that, you know, you call it an assassination. What did you say? Assassination market, right? But it's also just ridiculous entertainment in a sense, right? Like it really feels like Idiocracy. And I also think that this is even a new layer of entertainment in terms of, you know, war, violence and stuff like that. You had military movies and stuff before kind of to desensitize people towards war and stuff like that. But here, I mean, if you can make money, if your guy gets fucking bombed, that's next. That's next level entertainment in a different way. I would say so. So I also think it's kind of also kind of has something to do with that, that it's just everything becomes a game and nothing really seems super serious or deep anymore. But I think we'll we'll get to that. We have some stuff about Iran, but you know, it is actually pretty serious and you're not seeing everything on the news, right? Plus, you know, if you have this kind of entertainment around these types of events, then, you know, I, I wonder how many people actually pay serious attention to to stuff that's happening right now. Yeah, just the the thing to touch on, I don't have a lot there, but is that is like Primo slot from the government. Yesterday I saw one of the what was it? Twitter's like what the F exists? And I was like, I had to click it because the the tweet and it's just like quoting like Rocky and Maverick Top Gun or whatever. And they're just like bombing things from movies. It's pretty wild. It dude, it's super wild. I'm trying to ah here. I got it. I got it. Wait, look. Wake up. Daddy, Sean, welcome dog son, strengthen on us. Strengthen on. What will you do without freedom? Mavericks in doubt. You can't conceive of what I'm capable of finishing this fight. Yeah, I'm thinking on fact. Here to fight the truth. And justice the American way. I am the danger time. To find out maximum effort, sure, here it comes. Sorry about what? I'm a European dude. That's the. Official White House Twitter account too. You should honestly scare people because like the only take I have from that is revving up the like war engine to get a bunch of people. Of course you know. Which is like get get you excited with fucking memes, dude, That's crazy. That's crazy. OK, I think this is a fun bewilderment in a sense, right? Even if you think it's crazy, you know, imagine the reaction of the people on my side of the ocean. But yeah, All right, let's, let's move on to the next one. Maybe something lighter and maybe something darker. Actually, Mike, you, you had this one. Yeah, I mean, I thought this was fascinating because my dogs were working. I thought it was just fascinating because nobody, everyone is feeling like what's happening with AI and their jobs, but then they just like continue the CEO all the way down to put out research on like who's actually screwed and how quickly. But also the key take away from here that I was thinking about was that like this world we lived in. We know that because the money was broken, that we, the, the foundations like faulty, like what was or what what was isn't there. We live in this anomaly with Fiat and there's all these like constructs that came from it that are just going to get evaporated and we're always going to. But with like AI, they're just, it's probably going to happen a lot quicker because all these jobs shouldn't exist. You know, square blocks shouldn't have had 10,000 people. Google shouldn't have whatever number. But like, now this is just going to dissolve it faster, especially because the money's breaking and margins are compressing because of inflation. That it's just a crazy thing to be like, this is at the forefront. I know everyone here kind of works independently and is kind of in charge of their own destiny, especially because they've been holding a Bitcoin. But just like, put yourself in the shoes of working at McKenzie your whole life or being a corporate bank man. And you know, this stuff's coming in the same way. You know, like geopolitical uncertainty, US uncertainty is there and now your job's uncertain, but you have no angle on how to actually play it because most people don't have agency. It's just a crazy time. Any thoughts, Matt? It's definitely not priced in. I think we live in our own little bubble. I think also people is interesting, right? Anthropic is it it flips on on who is the most successful of these big AI companies at any given time, like who's the most effective? And I mean, Anthropic has been on a tear lately. Their models have been outperforming everyone else. So they very much have the spotlight and, and them specifically their CEO Dario is one of these effective altruists. He was like basically buddies with SPF of FTXI mean SPF invested in Anthropic, I think very early, maybe even the seed round for instance. And so he very much has like this woke protectionism regulation mindset, and he's definitely trying to build a regulatory mode around himself. So that's why he very much leans into the research of we're going to kill these jobs. We're going to have AGI. We think our AI models have consciousness. You know, some, some of them are like absolutely ludicrous. But the job loss thing is not. We're seeing a substantive change, a paradigm shift in how people will work and what jobs are valuable and what jobs are commoditized. And it really hasn't hit markets. But that was very long winded. And one of the reasons I went into that context is because a lot of the other AI guys are going the opposite route because they don't want discontent, they don't want riots, they don't want revolutions as they make their billions of dollars. And Elon, for instance, keeps telling people that they're going to have universal high income and everything's going to be great. Don't you worry about a thing. You don't have to take personal responsibility. You don't have to take agency. So you have a combination of, first of all, people not paying attention and second of all, listening to the wrong people and we're kind of sleepwalking into this thing. I think there's very few of us that are actually thinking about it. I think block firing 4000 people was the tip of the iceberg. I think that wasn't purely AI related, as you kind of alluded to. I think it's absolutely insane that he had 10,000 employees to begin with. What were they all fucking doing? But if you start multiplying that against the S&P 500, you're talking about billions of dollars of consumer spending that is not entering the economy. And those, a lot of those people are unhireable. Like I don't, I, I always go back to that COVID video that went viral of like the two women who are like product managers, like sitting in there sitting in a pool and like a Ibiza or whatever, talking about how they do no work all day. Like those people are never getting hired again. They have no, no useful skills. And you just extrapolate that across the entire economy, and we're in for a big world of hurt, I think. Yeah. Just real quick from two things on that. One, you wouldn't hire them to walk your dog and then 2 is in a vacuum. If it was just those layoffs, they might have been OK, especially in a pre kind of 5% or whatever interest rate world. But now how many of that 5000 gets hired less than probably 10% and then you multiply that times multiple companies and then the soft job market. The other thing that's worth noting, it is very interesting because I didn't think about it, but you you called it with like Dario sane versus Sam Altman because he right after I think it was the blocks layoff was like this is BS. They're using it as a scapegoat that it's AI that these companies just over hired. So there's that own like internal AI dynamic on like how much they want themselves to be the boogeyman or AII. Think that I think that's a great point. It's, it's funny, right? It's, it's I'm thinking about some similarity to to Bitcoin. I, I always think, you know, like, let's say a trust in the dollar or, you know, for example, in the euro falls further. I definitely see Christine Lagarde say at some point, you know, it's these people that are into crypto and into bitcoins that, you know, make other people lose trust in the currencies and, and they are, they are the bad person, right. But you know, fucking Christine Lagarde is following policy of debasing a currency into oblivion, right? But she's pointing outside and I'm, I'm, I'm thinking something similar here as to to what you said, Mike, I, you know, this technology is inevitable. The acceleration is inevitable. I think in a, in a, in a on, on a macro level. I last week I read an article about how the tension between US developed models and the US kind of like business approach with which is basically kind of like classic SAS type, right? You have a, you have a monthly payment or a yearly payment and you have like these tiers, etcetera. And you see people switch easily between models, right? So like today there's this new GPT model and people are like, well, you should switch over again. So a lot of people, I mean, I'm I'm paying Gemini open AI and and entropic, right, all three, But I also paid for for cursor. I skipped that. I paid for perplexity. Now I skipped that, but the Chinese strategy is, is very different. They just open source everything, which is fascinating by the way, from a for, for Chinese, they're open sourcing and they're just, you know, putting it, putting it out there. And you have this Quen model, which I think is at the level of Opus 4.6, right? So their, their whole strategy is to just acquire more, more people. So there's these different, there's like a, there's like a open source versus capitalist type of thing going on where again, like I said, the, the Chinese are, are going at the open source angle. So my point is this technology is inevitable. But like you said, Mike, I fully agree that they're going to externalize the logical result of of this, which is, you know, everything a person who's sitting behind a computer can do, an agent with a 200 IQ can do while living in the computer and making an infinite amount of offspring on the on the same device, right. So I mean, you're already seeing that and the writing is on the wall. But I think your point to to this, this kind of like outsourcing of the of the blame, It's probably, probably correct. Yeah, one thing. To call out like what Matt was saying about polymarket, there's something around selling like the seas of descent and allowing that to proliferate. I think if that is part of the strategy with China and the open source nature, because I don't think it's about acquiring more people. It's about when you have the whole US like whatever GDP is risen because of AI investment and if you get effectively like deflate that because everyone can have that locally run. I downloaded coin the other day. It's not 4.6, but it can run on a daily driver laptop. It's pretty insane without latency because the other stuff like Mama, the other, I forgot what the other one was. They were just like like he couldn't do it. It was unrelatable to like the frontier stuff. And so I think it's a similar angle there. There's just like second and third degree angles around what's happening that like we don't see. And then the other, the, the most fascinating thing I know, Matt, you thought about this is like AI and Bitcoin are so similarly disruptive, but also embraced by so few people. Like these numbers aren't exact, but directionally they're pretty close. Is basically .01% of the human population has any material exposure to Bitcoin where it would hurt if they lost it in the same way .01% of total humanities using any of these tools where it would really hurt if they got them shut down. Like I know you guys felt it when what other data centers were getting bombed and like Anthropic was down. You're like, holy shit, I couldn't. I was trying to work, but there's just so few people on either side of that that. There's like, it's almost like anxiety inducing because you're like, the rest of the world's going to catch up to this and how insane is the world going to look when everyone's doing this? Yeah, I mean, I was talking to a Bitcoiner that's much smarter than me, and the way he described it, I thought was fascinating and a good way to describe it. Basically, he's an investor much, you know, a sophisticated investor outside of Bitcoin, and he discovered Bitcoin very early and held a good bag. But the way he looks at it is he looks at it any given time, you kind of have a dot plot of potential future outcomes. So you can like imagine like a dot plot chart with time as the X axis and you have all these different scenarios that can happen and where we end up in three years, five years, 10 years, 20 years. And because of AI, that dot plot has never been larger than it is right now. Nobody has any idea where we're going to be in five years. And because of that, I think if anyone who's paying attention, it creates a level of insomnia, paranoia. You feel like you can't keep up. You're like trying to keep up. You're trying to be prepared, but it's impossible to be prepared because you have no idea what's coming next. And, but also at the same time that that level of chaos brings a lot of opportunity. So for, for a certain group of people that seize the moment, it can be absolutely life changing. But for the overwhelming majority of people, I think the chaotic transition is going to be quite painful. And I do not think markets have realized that yet. I don't think most participants have realized that yet. And it's a very, it's a grim realization to come to right. So the mind doesn't want to conclude that that is what is actually playing out, but we're seeing it happen real time. Yeah, I always find it super interesting that like each technological progression basically puts more energy in a smaller package. And the people that's noticed that are always the ones that profit from it, despite the kind of like drawdowns or obvious obstacles that arise, right? So I'm thinking about like, let's say the first people that that had a, had a car, like in the early days of a car, there were like people walking in front of a car announcing that there was a car coming, right, to protect the people that were still walking on the street. And there were all, you know, there's always people that look at you, you know, in disgust or whatever, like, oh, you're using this for that or you're, you're making a, you know, sure that there's job loss or whatever, whatever the negative impact is of, of a new technology. But it's never been a bad idea to adopt A new technology where you can clearly see that it is a 1000 or I think in the, in the AI in, in, in the case of AI, it's like it's like 1000 X or maybe even a 10,000 X, right? Like when I do deep research with Claude, it researches 1000 sources in 14 minutes. Like dude, that's that's that's like 3 full time jobs or something for some for some for some. Yeah, and it would take them like a week. Well, not only to research, but to actually, you know, analyze and synthesize and yeah, yeah, like, like all that stuff, right. So. So how many people would you need to conduct the same research and get to the same insights from relevant sources? Yeah, I, I and. Also, it's the worst that it'll ever be today and I'm already mind blown right, so the. Thing that it makes. A deal with underestimation. The thing that makes it really messed up in, I'm sure you guys have thought about it, but I don't know if you like put it together like this is that we live obviously like it like the market, free market wins, but the free market and the like high agency people haven't necessarily had all these tools. And so it's similar like to Bitcoin and the term like gunpowder and it's asymmetry. You can't actually insulate yourself from it. So historically, people could be like, I don't really want to adopt the next thing. Can't opt out. Yeah, you can't opt out. Somebody's going to go adopt it and then they're going to steal your market share from all these different things, whether it's SEO optimization, like being able to undercut you on price, doing more with less. So you're basically like screwed either way. You just basically you're going to turn either Amish or you got to like figure out a participate and if you fit in the middle ground, you're basically screwed because that's just there's not going to be room for average effectively. By the way, you just accidentally said something that just shows how you know, big of a change is coming that we don't even really. That's just hard to comprehend. And that's the words SEO optimization. First of all, humans will not be doing it. But the next question I have is what does quote UN quote search engine optimization look like? What does search engines look like in a future where it's mostly agents doing everything? It doesn't look like it does today. It might have a completely different term in the 1st place. It might have completely different objectives by whoever's running it. I mean, I think directionally a decent analogy is what China did and outsourcing did to blue collar jobs. This is going to do to white collar jobs. I don't think it captures the pure craziness of what's about to happen, but it's a, it's a directionally correct analogy. And even even if it's just that level, which is quite simple, that's like a quite simple level. The jobs are being outsourced to computers. That's devastating. And it doesn't have to be everyone unemployed. Unemployment jumps up 6%, seven percent, 8%, and you have really significant effects happening to the global economy. And you can say rightfully so as well, because that's the one thing I didn't mention on that chart. It was like the notion of there's been inversion, right? The crazy people, the Luddites, the gold bugs weren't wrong. There was just a time scale. And again, being too early is the same as being wrong. But in this new world, the welder, the plumber, the people that you can't kind of like strip out because of AI are the people that are going to be able to make the money. And this also ties to the global perspective because like energies neither created nor destroyed. So if we destroy a bunch of white collar jobs that have been here, it's actually going to move to a bunch of other places that have Internet connections via Starlink or whatever and have access to AI frontier models. Somebody's going to benefit from this. And so a lot of times we look at it from a Western view, when in reality this is a global phenomenon and a lot of people are actually going to get a fighting chance at survival as well. The only thing is, like when Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of the Internet, he brought along for the ride, you know, 100,000 people or whatever. I don't know what their employee base is. I know Google right now has 190,000 employees, right? So when Sergey and Larry took advantage of a fundamental technology shift and became absolutely filthy rich, they brought along a whole subclass of people that also did quite well for themselves. But in this situation, you could have, you know, one to 10 people, 100 people that do really, really fucking well, and they bring nobody up with them. It's fucking crazy to think about. Well, I have, I have a poll, I have an item later about AI and, and, and Bitcoin and I agree, I agree with you. But it also, I don't know if these are the right words, but it's also kind of like healthy cleansing in, in, you know, in, in like a Fiat driven economy. Like you said, this video of these two women in the pool, right? Like I'm a product manager, you know, it's it's it's also kind of the decadence that comes in a Fiat driven money system where yeah, there's just money, you know, in in nominal terms. The question I think is, is there is there value, right? And if there is a new way of being more productive I see a link or is this? The link play the video. Yeah, I'll play it. I don't. Want to get in trouble in saying what they should be doing, but like, that's the point of what Brahm's saying and the cleansing is like. Maybe they should have been doing something else and other people should do other things. Yeah. This was the top. This is like Marty. This is the top. That is job marketing world. Yeah. Job. So anyways, this is our current workstation. Callie and I are what you call product managers. Callie, what is your team over? My team is over reporting and personal tools and I am over what we call card experience. So we work on like anything from activating your credit card to freezing, reissue shipping, all the good stuff. What's APM? We help prioritize and help the engineers see on track. And help them know what to build. I don't think the engineers like working with her. I can promise like that. She didn't sound too confident in her project management skills. Yeah, well, you know what? I love it. It is. It is literally like I, I don't think I, I don't know if I mentioned this to you, Mike, but I have this friend and we're always tinkering here in this office with AI and stuff like that. And we have, you know, in an evening, we're just fucking around and we saw this video of Eric Schmidt and he said, yeah, that's so crazy. Like, nowadays you can just tell an agent to read all of chemistry and then you can do stuff. And we just looked at each other and they were like, read all of chemistry. What does that mean? Right. Like what what does that imply? What what can you do when you can have an agent that just reads all of chemistry or reads all of physics? And then we were kind of debating whether, you know, a super curious, playful, open minded entrepreneur type person with five agents that read all of chemistry could actually go further than, you know, 5 pH DS who all read different types of information and synthesized it in a different way and just have a human experience with ego and, you know, all all these things, you know, could you go further than those five, you know, pH DS for for example? And our, our, you know, our conclusion was totally, you know, and they said. No, it's not. It's not the. You don't think so? I know no. It's not because AI is just a frag, it's just a mirror into if somebody's the highest level, they will come up with other things for the AI to do to like tie. It's the same idea of like you. Know without AI meaning without the without the AI like just the the the information pros just to gather information to synthesis the processing. What I'm saying now, person's context that already had the professional domain will always be able to do more with that information than the person that's starting off of scratch. So like it just allows you to become average. It's the same thing with me trying to do designs or video. I can get to average but I can never get to the highest level because if the person at the highest level is using the same tools, they're already have the domain discipline. This is why engineers will be like million X engineers, but I'll never be able to get to like that level. That's the same concept with with chemistry. I'm more sharing like I don't fully agree. I think there's also a certain pride in having a certain knowledge, having a certain degree or whatever. Like this is kind of the tension where we're at. That's more my point. Like I do think that there will be people that have an open creative, entrepreneurial mind that will probably use AI to find either solutions to like breakthrough problems or create like breakthrough innovative concepts just because they have a perhaps amateuristic interest. But they now have this tool that's kind of democratizes this whole synthesis, synthesis of information and processing it, etcetera. And I like we're looking at the PM, the PMS here, you know, if you're a deaf and you know what to build the PM skill is literally 1 download and Claude now right like that's. More of my. Point. So you can be a 10 year PM, but if you just have a computer that just listens to the thing you want to build, that helps you organize and plan and whatever, then yeah, it's fun that you have 10 years of PM experience and read all the PM books and whatnot. But there there's not really a difference. Just one thing to say on the like positive thing that most people don't is that like Fortune 500, it's roughly 5% of their CapEx is spent in like information technology. It's not even just technology, just anything related to security, 5% Fortune 500. So think about, I don't know if this is true, but the amount of engineers like applications, let's say it's flat to a little bit up. The reality is there's just been not enough engineers. Like when you think about if that's only for portrait 500, think about all the mom and pop shops and everything you go into in your regular world that could be optimized by software. So there will be that also on the other side. And it is just a lot of people that need work that have these tools will be able to like further efficiencies in the world. So it's not all, you know, kind of like bearish on humanity. It's just it's what Matt said. I like that angle of you're always looking at it from an investor in from an investor perspective. You're always just trying to layer on the least amount of assumptions, right? And like if you're looking at a dot plot, there's just every there's no, your assumptions are basically all thrown out the window. You don't have a lot of framework to work from outside of like that kind of we money and very few people are even there. Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. And and eventually my point is I also just think this is a good thing, right? I do think it's it's a good thing. It just forces you to think about, OK, how can I add add value? And maybe, you know, for the women in this in this video, it might be a totally different thing that they would actually enjoy and. What do you think they should be doing? I don't know, you wanted to make a joke. But no, I'm not going to make a joke, OK? Let's move on to a Bitcoin item that I brought. You probably saw, we saw, we saw Ray Dalio this week talking about flaws in Bitcoin. There was Chamath who got roasted with people that said, you know, you better talk about all the specs you did where people lost 99.8% of all the funds and he crashed out and and whatnot. But my point is more about let me see if this is yeah. Chamath is getting crushed so hard. He bought, he paid for somebody's kids college. Did you see that? Yeah, he said. Like show me our losses and I'll reimburse you or something, right? Yeah, he invested in their college funds and then the guy tweeted out he was like, Shamath is such a class act. What a great dude. Weird. OK, wild times. What I want to talk about with with you guys is, you know, what Dalio and Chamath are missing and I liked what Jeff Parts Park said here. You know, they fail to understand why central banks are broken and why they need Bitcoin, right? They're talking about, you know, central banks will never buy Bitcoin, etcetera, etcetera. I talked to Dave Weisberger this week and he said, you know, he's correct. You know, the ECB, the, the, maybe the US Treasury will buy it, but the Fed will never buy it, etcetera. So in big countries, no, obviously they're not going to buy it. But small, smaller countries, which in general already have less power with regard to their their currency, yeah, they, they might adopt Bitcoin, right? But it's more about the, like Jeff says, the growing distrust in centralized organizations that don't really have the receipts to show that decentralization of everything basically was a good thing. So I just wanted to highlight this and also, yeah, I wanted to get your guys takes on on, you know, Dalio Chumath and whatever else you've seen that's perhaps related to this. Well, they specifically were saying that the reason governments reason central banks and governments won't buy Bitcoin is because of lack of strong privacy guarantees, which I think is just a a false premise to begin with. I mean, I've been very focused during my time in Bitcoin on trying to make Bitcoin easier to use privately. And I think there's still a lot of work to be done. But it is very much possible to use Bitcoin in a private way regardless of how the protocol is set up. And the protocol is set up specifically so we have transparency first, right? And provable supply so that you're able to realize that there's no debasement going on, no inflation going on. It is interesting because Chamath is historically a massive shit corner and so I'm expecting that he's going to try and pump Z cash as his plan here which is ridiculous. It's not a competitor to Bitcoin and governments will never adopt it for sure because it's controlled by a small group of people. US based company and you have no assurances on whether or not there's silent inflation going on, which is fundamentally a key value prop. I think of good money. Now he's in that in that clip, he's actually comparing it to gold, which is interesting. And he says gold has privacy and I guess gold kind of does have privacy because it's analog. It has a lot of other disadvantages to Bitcoin. I can't be moved around very easily. It can't be secured very easily. I can be counterfeited much easier than Bitcoin. It's almost impossible to counterfeit Bitcoin. All you have to do is run a Bitcoin node to verify that you're getting real Bitcoin. And gold is an interesting example, right? Because Elon said when he was working for the government said that they were going to audit Fort Knox and walk around with a live stream camera and show us all the gold bars in Fort Knox. And then he got a black eye and got kicked out of the government. And we haven't heard a word since about what's in Fort Knox or not. And you have a perfect example there that if they had Bitcoin, they could eat very easily without putting the security of the Bitcoin at risk. Verifiably prove that they own Bitcoin and how much Bitcoin they own. And I think he's missing that key piece, which particularly should incentivize smaller governments. All of those features of Bitcoin should incentivize smaller governments to be the first movers here. We always see the challengers be the first movers regardless of what what niche it is. I mean, another example on that front is we have Cash App moved first because they were second behind Venmo. Venmo came second, right? MicroStrategy was like a no name tech company. Sailor was a no name billionaire. He was the first mover into Bitcoin because he had something to prove and needed an edge, right? And so we'll see that. I think we see the challenge of governments move first and then you see the big dogs move later when they basically have no option but to adopt. Yeah, I, I also think these, the, the comments are kind of unfair because like you said, you can, you can build any technology on top of Bitcoin, but it's more about Bitcoin being this fundamental base layer. And if there is, I always say like a forced transparency there, like you said, you know, like if if I say I have X amount of Bitcoin and you, you, you say to me, well, prove it by, you know, signing this challenge and I say no, then you know, you cannot trust me because you can force me to be transparent, right? And to establish a trust, a relationship. So I always think that that is more a you could, you could have a philosophical conversation about that or you could just say, you know, like, it's just not there is no privacy. So it's bad. But that's also kind of deceptive because you, like I said, you can build any technology on top of it. And the fun thing is it's I got 1,000,000 views on this, on this video. I had a video of how the Dutch government moved 15 billion in gold. I mean, this is not really obscure guys. Like this is not really, you know, this is how you move 15 billion in in gold. And The funny thing is that there was a news item that accompanied this, this video. And the person who was like in charge of of this transport was asked like, how how do you keep this secrets? You know, this is for the national news guys. How do you keep this secret? And his deep answer was, yeah, you just shut your mouth. Was literally the quote. It's like the an article. Those those trucks are not like I don't know if you guys saw yesterday like Elon Decoy where he was going in and like it's a great video. I like, I like that. I like that. That's. Good. He showed up to the courthouse and he ran. That's what reminds me like there's no gold in those trucks. Going back real quick to to math's point, yeah, it came out today. Kazakhstan is putting like $350 million in in crypto. I would imagine it's Bitcoin on their balance sheet. But I think like we give too much credit. I can't I I think it would like fed speak in what Dalio and Chamath say in the sense of like their portfolios probably looked very different than what they're talking about. And I went, I was it was just this morning. I had it not to listen to full thing, but I saw in the time stamp or Dalia was all in pot or whatever he was on was talking about gold and Bitcoin. I wanted to hear what he said and obviously he talked about privacy, but then he also talked about quantum and like one other thing. And it just reminds me of like how inorganic all the flood feels right now because these are similar concepts that are coming out around privacy. Z cash quantum. And it was just 6 to 12 months ago that Dolly was putting on a 5 to 15% position that he was talking about in his portfolio that everyone was happy about. And like we know Chamath has been in Bitcoin or at least had exposure a very early on that he like rolled in the GBTC. So I just don't carry like a lot of weight when these guys say things because they part of the machine, specifically the Dalio part of the machine, they go with wherever the winds going and they need to and then they switch when it's the right time. So, like, I don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's the same thing with like, Musk has no idea how Bitcoin works and he pushes Doge back in 21. It's like, so the smartest plan on the person, the smartest man on the planet Earth doesn't understand Bitcoin, but we do. Like I don't accept that. That's part. There's probably some truth to that. I mean, I also think they're just flat out wrong, right? Like you can, you can use Bitcoin privately, particularly if you're sophisticated like a government. I mean, you mentioned Kazakhstan. It goes hand in hand with the idea of challengers. But also on the privacy side, Kingdom of Bhutan was one of the first movers on Bitcoin. Obviously, El Salvador was too. Nobody knew they were stacking sets. Nobody knew they had a bag of Bitcoin. The only reason we found out that the Kingdom of Bhutan had Bitcoin was because they got doxed in the Celsius bankruptcy, which is just a complete Fiat phenomenon, completely unrelated to Bitcoin. If they, if they had gold with some company and the company went bankrupt and they were in the bankruptcy proceeding, we would know they had gold in the, in the, in the bankruptcy estate. And that's how we found out that they had Bitcoin in the 1st place. Venezuela, We, we, the US government went in and, and, and abducted Maduro. And there's speculation that the Venezuelan government has a shit ton of Bitcoin. They definitely have a shit ton of Bitcoin. Well, show me where their wallets are. No one knows how much Bitcoin they have. How much Bitcoin is North Korea? North Korea? How much Bitcoin is North Korea? Show me the addresses, right? You can figure out some of the addresses, right? Some of them have been docked, some of them have been figured out, but a lot of them haven't been. And even if you could figure it out, you can't seize it. So the last point I would make here, by the way, is if your most of your exposure to crypto, quote UN quote, crypto is shit coin land, it's really bad out there. Like if you use Solana, Chamath is a huge salonable Etherium. You have one address that is literally your entire financial transaction history and they have horrible privacy. So if you're used to stable coins, you know, using USD tokens on Solana or Tron or something, you're used to having very, very little privacy when you interact with crypto. And if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt, some of that belief could be coming from those interactions that they've had. All right, let's move to this one, Mike. Yeah, I thought this was interesting because I I've taken the other side of, you know, why bit or gold's made its run the liquidity, the the 5000 year track record. But the reality is counterparty risk still matters. Where you live still matters and you know, there's was reported earlier today that there's a discount over spot on spot because in Dubai people are trying to get out. There was reported I think a couple days ago, there was caravans and it was for the ultra wealthy. We're having to travel through the desert 10 hours to get to Riyadh to just fly out and to think about having your gold in a bank in your mansion and then figured out how to get out of the country with that, you're sitting on 10s of millions of dollars. I think that this is one of the just fundamental mispricings. I think it's on one of your links. So I don't want to steal the Thunder, but related to these air pockets that exist in the global economy because there's too much debt, not enough dollars that most people don't even price Bitcoin for the lack of for the, yeah, lack of counterparty risk you have to deal with depending on who, how who and how you custody it. Where in every other aspect of that you have some centralized party that can just tell you one day it's not yours. And once the world wakes up to that, that's when you really start to gain an appreciation for it's this old like like mental exercise. Would you rather have 500,000 in BTC or would you rather have $1,000,000 in Silicon Valley Bay, right? Because you could take that 500,000 Bitcoin, you could sleep well at night with it. But the $1,000,000, even if it's there theoretically tomorrow it's gone. And do you really want to live in that world? It's part of the way I rationalize Matt. We've been pinging about like, man, what do we sign up for in this, like this? Just this whole thing's crazy for to be involved this long. But there is, you know, the draw downs being all in Bitcoin. But there's still a level of Zen will at least like I'll die by my sword, not by somebody else's. And that's all you can really ask for in this life is like, if I'm going to mess it up, it'll be on me, not because some counterparty decided that my goal is not lying anymore. Yeah, Matt, before you reply, let I'll just also show my link. You know, these, these credits, these withdrawals that BlackRock blocked, I have similar thoughts here, right? Like The funny thing as Michael's pointing out the use case for Bitcoin. You know, you can hold it in self custody. You can move it. Yeah, if you want to. You can move it anywhere if you want to, right? You could spend it on something if if you wanted to. So just these three things plus these two, you know, these three characteristics plus these two examples, I fully agree with Mike that it's going to become more and more clear that you need to own your wealth yourself. And you can and I also fully agree with Mike. You know, if, if this is not it, then at least we tried because keeping on outsourcing everything finance related to either the geographical restrictions or these, you know, these types of, of, of companies. We're seeing that it works less and less. And, and like something like this with, with BlackRock, I think it's extremely serious. You know, only 9.3% of the money was redeemed and it's kept at 5, right? So, you know, is, is that a Ponzi or what? You know, how, how, how does that even work? I I think a lot of people that actually own this don't even know how it works. But yeah, I just wonder how long it takes before more, more people wake up to, you know, all this security and abstraction that just exists while at the same time Bitcoin also exists. Yeah. I mean, anyone who's dealt with investments is aware that there's always a disconnect between assets under management and liquidity. And usually the market doesn't realize the disconnect until there's crises and people are trying to withdraw their money. So there's really no surprise here to me that this is happening. I would say that it should be concerning to people because it seems like they couldn't cover, they couldn't even come close to covering it. It says here, at least if I, if I'm going to quote this tweet, I don't know how accurate this tweet is, but they had $1.2 billion in withdrawals and they only paid out $620 million. And supposedly the entire fund is $26 billion. So if they only had $620 million of liquidity for a $26 billion fund, then maybe all the numbers are all bullshit, right? And I think that's what a lot of the math a lot of people are doing on the Bitcoin side. Look, Bitcoin, real Bitcoin held in self custody is the ultimate safe haven asset. There is no second best. There is nothing better than it. And anyone who's ever experienced Bitcoin in self custody intrinsically understands this and realizes that they know it. But we're in crisis mode right now. The world is in chaos and people are flocking to safe havens. And I think the one of the main reasons that Bitcoin is trading like a risk asset and it's trading like, frankly, like dog shit amid this chaos is because all the new people that have been onboarded, most of the new people that have been onboarded have been onboarded into custodial suit products, whether that's Blackrock's own ETF, whether that's things like MicroStrategy. And if that's how you interact with Bitcoin, it is not a safe haven at all. All the properties that make Bitcoin a safe haven evaporate when you're trusting A custodian, a third party to hold it for you and manage it for you. And so it makes sense that those market participants wouldn't be thinking of Bitcoin as a safe haven. And what do you look, if you look at the market price of Bitcoin, we've almost, we've almost nearly round tripped to when the ETFs were launched, when the ETFs, when BlackRock ETF was launched, it was January 2024 is a little over two years ago, Bitcoin price was $47,000. We're slightly up from that point. And why is that? It's because the world is in chaos and people aren't treating it like a safe haven access asset. Because they're not holding self custody. They're not holding real Bitcoin. 22 quick things. Also, Blackstone reportedly had to pay 400 million out of their own pocketbooks for redemptions. I will, I will push back and you can, you can, you know, come back if you want, we can have a discussion. I'll say that like self custody, there's an angle on the other side of it. If you're in Dubai with self custody and you're out at the restaurant, you're probably not carrying your private keys and your house gets bombed and like now you're kind of screwed or you're traveling because you lived in Dubai, you came to the States. Well, probably it doesn't make sense to do that. Most people aren't sophisticated to have geographical multi sig self custody. So like what I've always stance is barbell approach. It's how people manage their capital, whether it's their dollars or gold, they like have some in self custody. They can always owe shit. Maybe your seat is in your wallet with a passphrase. And then there's stuff like we do or others I do. But I do think that there's a reality of like where I came to this conclusion because I was all in self custody, multi say collaborative custody. Then I'd go overseas and travel to Dubai and I'm like, holy shit, my wife got somebody to do the cabinets. It's like who's in my house? And what if you put the whole thing together? So I think like that's the angle of you get to a point, you start having kids, you start having a plan around it, and then diversification to a Fiat extent starts to become just like Fiat. But there is a reality. You don't want to get knocked out of the game because somebody bombs you, you're travelling and then you're self custody is all like screwed. To be clear here on ramp is a a microcosm in the in the suite of products in Bitcoin land. Yeah, and I wouldn't group in with MSTR and I bet. Because yeah, you're just saying. Over the asset you can withdraw actual Bitcoin if you want to actually withdraw Bitcoin. So it's I would say it's much even though it's not self custody, it's collaborative multi institutional custody. It's much closer to self custody than I bet for instance. Yeah, I was just referring. To. Self custody by the gold. Standard. It's gold Standard. It's like it, it is, but it is in in the sense if you're all your money's in Bitcoin and somebody bombs you and you don't have your access, you never can get it back. That's like the just the angle. Yeah, I mean you can kind of protect yourself from it, but first of all not living in the Middle East and second of all using distributed multi sig. What do you mean in Minneapolis? But here, here's a question for you, Tanguma. Do you think the majority of your clients at Onramp think of Bitcoin as a safe haven asset or as a risk asset? Well see that's the interesting part. It's more safe haven what most. Of our that's what I'm saying, because it's not because it's closer to self custody than something like I bet. And then they basically hold a lot in self custody and then with us because in the world where they were traveling and they could never get back, they didn't lose their whole stat. But someone who's holding MSTR is not thinking of Bitcoin as a safe haven. Oh yeah, they're thinking of a speculative tech stock. They're thinking of it as a high risk asset. Yeah. That's what I mean. But yeah, but but this is just the this is the entire thing that we're in, I would say, right? Like we we although he he called the top sort of, you know, Mike and I laughed about Luke Roman saying, you know, I get the whole macro thesis. You know, I understand people should move to hard assets, but I'm going to sell Bitcoin because it trades like a tech stock, right? And I just think it's funny because it's stupid when people approach approach it like a tech stock and like an investment. I wish it's called Luke, for whatever it's worth. Yeah, I would just say that at the time I made fun of Luke. And sure, whatever he. He nailed that. He nailed that call. The hard part is buying back in SO. But this is what I'm saying. Right. I've done half of it so far, yeah. So my comes. Back in. So my point is twofold. Yes, I agree. But if you have a long term outlook and you think it's a safe haven asset and you've tried to sell and buy back lower and you failed or not, I mean I failed in the past miserably. You know, I'm just, I'm just huddling and that's for me with a longer term outlook is just easier than trying to search for this next trade or whatever. So it was more of my opinion, like if you understand the bigger picture and that Bitcoin is actually a safe haven asset on many different levels. Yeah, just huddle and chill basically, right. And don't try to overanalyze. Like why are some people looking at it as this risk, risk on thing and trading like a nest? You know, when I see the sentence Bitcoin is trading like a NASDAQ stock, I'm like, no, there's people that are trading Bitcoin that are viewing it as an investment instead of a safe haven as it asset that is vastly superior to any other option that they have. You know, and that's fine, but that is kind of what what we're what we're in. To be clear, I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with you and I think a perfect example is what we saw over the weekend, right? If you are a high net worth Dubai resident and you followed Luke's advice and you went full hog into gold from Bitcoin, and then crisis hits and you want to get back into Bitcoin, it is very difficult. When you need Bitcoin the most, it can be very difficult to obtain it and secure it, as opposed to just, you know, being safe and having your safe haven and just hobbling. That's the thing I think we like, I know we appreciate, but it always dawns on me when you see those pictures on Twitter where all the money's getting caught in the duffel bag and there's dollars and there's all this stuff and people talk about putting a Rolex on and trying to get $50,000 and we're looking at air pockets. It's just the notion that you can maintain all your life savings in this asset, move it borderlessly, not have any intermediary. It's just an insane proposition in a world that's used to just having to ask for permission. Mind blowing from your accountant. Yeah, it's mind blowing. Yeah, sorry, I didn't want to interrupt, but this is no, no. I just don't think we fully logical. It's so it's like in your face. There's literally nothing like it. I had to send someone a Zelle payment earlier today. They have a $2000 daily limit. How does anyone take that seriously? I wish I'd had that. I only get 1000. I only get 1000 daily limit on. Ridiculous. Yeah. So it's all permissioned, right? But my blockchain is fat, no. OK Anyway, I just wanted to make a chat. OK, I'm happy Matt is here because I want to get your take on this. I've said previously on the different episodes after I talked to American huddle, who said to me, you know, Bitcoiners are like 8 year ahead of eight years ahead of people. I'm I'm I'm seeing these fractals of like trad 5 people just in their 2017 crypto 20/17/2018 crypto type stage, right? And so I saw Bank of Japan to test blockchain settlement for bank reserves, right? And then some governor said XYZ and I said, I think it's fascinating that Tratfi is in this 2017 crypto moment, right? So we eventually realize that Bitcoin is the way like if you just hold Bitcoin Azure Foundational Bank Reserve, you can conduct instant final settlement of any size every 10 minutes on the most secure blockchain ever, right? So I just want to get your take on this, how you view this lag that I think exists and perhaps also, yeah, maybe your future outlook how that will how that will play out. Yeah, I don't know. It's frustrating to live through. It's definitely true. We live in the future. The few people paying attention live in the future. I mean, I think it's probably similar on the AI side to our earlier conversation. But I mean, ultimately I think all these people will start to realize that trusted third parties are the security hole if they are the problem. And if you don't have a native bearer asset like Bitcoin, all this blockchain mumbo jumbos just is exactly that. It's just all bullshit. You don't actually have any final settlement. You don't actually have settlement at all. You're trusting a third party to do that settlement. I mean we're seeing it with all types of real world asset stuff. Where it requires A trusted issuer in order to access the asset, whether that's fractionized real estate or gold or whatever. And I think it just takes longer for people to realize. And also it requires pain. You know, we can wax on and wax off about how USD tokens like Tether have trusted third party risk, right? But Tethers also operated for I think over a decade now and it's still working, you know, And so people don't get rugged, then your theoretical concerns are never actually become realistic concerns. And once they become realistic concerns, that's when people actually start to to learn through pain. Yeah, I mean, that's 100% it. It's the pain. And that's where I go back to the anxiety inducing because you remember and you were, you were talking about this early with the, the Shane, was it no Hong Kong riots. And it wasn't till Hong Kong riots happened that people recognize, oh, signal went through the roof. And then we've seen this in other markets with bit chat. But then I remember viscerally back in 2275% of the BTC. It was like roughly in this little public knowledge, like $13 billion to wherever Unchained holds at the time, 75% of it came in three exact instances. It was blocked by Celsius, FTX or Celsius blocked by FTX. And so it goes to that point, like we live in these small fractals of every cycle. There's just such a small, that's why the shit corners and the, the, the charlatans can get away with this because there's such a small percentage of people that are paying attention or allocated. So they get rugged and they go on to the bigger mark because the, the Tam grows, but it's still so small in relative terms. And it's not until the pain happens like what I experienced this all day long. It punched the face. Talk to the largest institutions who are explaining why we do it the way we do it. And you're just going to have to wait till the market gets rubbed via Coinbase or whoever else till the market realizes, oh, crap like or the Iran stuff or happens here. And so we just have to literally wait. It's the same thing as the AI. It's not until people are getting laid off in droves and they have nothing to do with sit around and try to figure this stuff out that they're going to be willing to do it. And we just have to sit here and talk about it until that all happens and hope we're on the other side of it. I mean, I remember in 21 people were in my comments on on Twitter saying that not your keys, not your coins was FUD and that Mountain Cox was 10 years ago and the industry has matured and it's never going to happen again. And then like less than a year later, as you said, three massive quote UN quote institutions in the space FTX sponsored the fucking Super Bowl, all went under. And then people realized, right? But then they're going to forget again, no realize this is going to give. Yeah, because right now it's like, well, it's BlackRock, Fidelity and State Street. They'll never lose the the Bitcoin. That's like, they literally just like tie it to whatever social proof they need. And yeah, it's, it's the same side of the crypto stuff. It's the same story every couple of years. There's some reason why that centralized counterparty will never lose the Bitcoin, and there's lots of easy anecdotes. 1 is it's just data. Data is private keys. Private keys will, like all data gets leaked on a long enough time horizon or the other angles. If there's a single point of failure, there will always be a single point of failure. Like it's just on what time horizon will that happen? Yeah, I don't really have that much to add, but I I do agree. I always think it's funny that sometimes, you know, people that are our critics kind of act from this point of view that everything should already be crystallized, right? Like when when bitcoiners talk about the future or like, you know, this should be the proper function of Bitcoin, This is why you should hold it or a central bank or whatever. Yeah, Like I said, I just think the critics, they, they operate from this, this, this, this, I don't know, standpoint of everything being crystallized, which is just not the case, right. We are envisioning a certain future and talking about how Bitcoin fits in somewhere. But this is an yeah, this is a, a, a developing thing every day, every year, whatever. Mike, what do you want to? Say, well, does this say to be fair, like it's the same thing as AI and that like, it is a pretty wild construct in that like most people don't want it to exist. And rightfully so. Because if you said, well, it should have all the money, but it's like all the money's going to change and you're going to have to relearn and understand all these things. It's the same thing as AI. It's like, I'd rather just not to be a real thing. And then you come up with every reason why it can't work in quantum's the most recent thing versus just figure it out. It's the same thing AI. You have to relearn everything you thought you knew and for whatever reason we decided to, but that's the status of how people want to operate. Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is always how it goes just to resistance to all the change. All right, I'm looking at the time. Let's do two more items. Matthew, you brought this. I have a question, but I'll let you go first. Yeah. I mean this one just, it was a deal that I personally got done. So that's why I put the link in there. But bitwise when the ETFs were launching, January 2024 really started. I started scrambling in November 2023. It looked like the ETFs were definitely going to get approved. It was just a question of timing. I'm one of the Co founders of Opensats. We're focused, we're A501-C3 charity focused on supporting the open source contributors that make this movement possible, that are working on things that cannot be monetized. But they're foundational infrastructure for everything else that is being built out there. And they just didn't have ethical paths for funding. So we launched Opensats. We take no cut of donations, 100% pass through. We hold everything in Bitcoin. We're sending out $1,000,000 in Bitcoin every month. Right now we have about 200 outstanding grantees in total since we've started, we've funded over 370 people totalling over $30 million all in Bitcoin. We just, we hold Bitcoin in multi sig. We send out Bitcoin payments once a month, but we're constantly, we're a charity. We're constantly looking for more funding options. And I was hoping that these ETFs, 1 silver lining of of paper Bitcoin was going to be that they would help position some of their massive revenues into open source development. I had conversations with multiple ETFs. You know, there's about seven of them, but there's like 4 that really matter. And Bitwise is the only one who came through and they're continuing to come through with their commitment. I think their commitment specifically as a volunteer is particularly awesome because it's tied to their profits. So it's reoccurring, 10% of their profits on their ETF. They donate to open source contributors through three organizations, US Brink and HRF. And it's particularly designed that way to try and reduce centralized points of failure. Instead of it all going to one organization, let's evenly split it. So yeah, I mean, I think this is going to continue to grow organically as they find more success with their product. And I would love to see more companies in the space do similar commitments. It would. It would definitely make my job a lot easier. And I think it also accelerates everything and provides indirect benefits and direct benefits to the companies that operate in the space. So shout out it was. Yeah. Well, I think you answered my question because I wanted to ask you what do you think about yeah, paper Bitcoin versus, you know, donating to this, which is obviously very important. I do remember that at the beginning when they all launched this announcement by Bitwise saying that they would send part of their profits to open source development, I think got got a lot of support and it's it's it's probably, yeah. Like you said, I think silver lining is probably the the the best term to to to describe it. Yeah. So I, I don't really have anything else to add. I just thought it was cool to see. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, we're going to we're going to probably talk paper Bitcoin because I think that was my last topic. But before that, kudos to Matt for working on this and and also bitwise for following through. And then the reality of it's just to to add to Matt's point is you need objective people working on this protocol. And more so now than ever given without going on that rabbit hole, the notion of quantum and what are the economic actors or economic notes that are holding this Bitcoin want to think about forking And what does it look like? Like the reality is you don't want these large centralized entities being able to economically enforce or incentivize certain actors to start working on this protocol. You need objective people. You need organizations that are nonprofits to be doing that. So throwing that out and then, Matt, because it's right before tax season, people can get an offset in taxes, right, if they donate. Correct. I mean, yeah, for next year though, because it's already the 2026 tax year. But yeah, yeah, we're at 5O1C3. You can donate Bitcoin or or dollars. If you donate dollars, we automatically convert into Bitcoin. So you're like stacking for a good 'cause it, it, it benefits Bitcoin number go up in that way. And if you if you donate, if you donate with Bitcoin, you also have the choice of donating anonymously, which I think is pretty cool. Obviously you don't get a tax credit in that regard because we can't give you a tax receipt if you don't know who you are. But just to show the power of Bitcoin, it's pretty wild that someone can donate $500,000 anonymously through ABTC pay invoice. That's never been possible in the world of charities before. Part of the reason we're able to run so lean and efficient and have real, real, I think value add to the community is because we're built on a Bitcoin standard from the ground up. And to your point on you need objective people working on this stuff in Quantum, you know, I got a lot of shit during this period because while I was having these conversations with the different ETFs, Michael Saylor was going into private meetings and telling them not to donate to open source contributors. He's completely in his right not to donate himself. I'm never going to tell someone they have to donate to these things. It definitely rubbed me the wrong way that he was going out and telling other people not to donate when I was volunteering my time trying to convince them of the opposite. Which was already a huge hurdle to be honest, right? Why is he doing that? And what his argument was, if you have a bunch of developers working on things, they're going to mess things up and that they already have enough support. But anyway, I tried privately to resolve that. Couldn't get him on the phone, couldn't make it anything. So I just made it public that it was happening. I mostly reserved judgment at the time of how I felt about it, even though it could be insinuated. But I just wanted to be public. I wanted to be out there at the like the closed doors stuff was just felt wrong. Anyway, in his most recent investor meeting, quarterly meeting, he said we need a quantum task force, we need people working on these things, blah, blah, blah. It's like, Michael, this was two years ago. Maybe if we had more open source contributors working on these things and focus on these things, you wouldn't have to have a centralized task force to run out of your company. Yeah, they just want they want their quantum task force on this is is exactly that people discount or don't under fully understand. I don't think we have a lot of time left, but I would love to dive into this more because I think this is quite strange. And I agree with Matt that it's it's kind of. One thing. I understand. Sorry. I just want to say one thing like I like what Sailor says about, you know, Bitcoin is a rocket ship and but it is a it is a no, but it's like a precarious one, right? Like you don't, you don't just add a fucking fin on it or whatever. And I mean, I, I love that analogy and I fully agree with it. And I also think that he's also relating to, you know, people that want to make programmable money and, you know, blah, you know, this is a whole different conversation. But, you know, I, I think Bitcoin should stay boring and simple in a way that you can build on top of that. So that's how I follow that analogy, right? Like, like what he says with, you know, enthusiastic developers that want to do cool shit, like, you know, don't do it in Bitcoin, do it on top, do it on top of Bitcoin, right? But I I think not not funding this open source part is kind of strange. And then we got a transition because you guys see that Peter Jernis tweet. I don't know who it is, but it's like I'm the CEO of Palantir Technologies and just it's like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like someone, anyone that hasn't seen it, you should look it up because that's what reminds me of when Sailor or anybody speaks in that way. It's like, what are they saying versus what do they mean? And that's just the thing that we just don't get as humans, that people will say things but they're not there's, there's subtext to it. But to be clear here, I agree with that general premise. I'm very conservative when it comes to Bitcoin development. I think if Bitcoin should be boring, right, it should just be the best money. It's fundamental value properties. It's incredibly hard to change by default, which I think a lot of people miss. And it causes a lot of people to be unhappy when they want to see changes. But I will also say actions speak louder than words. I've never proposed a Bitcoin protocol change. I've never advocated for one. I've we've never directed funding towards one. But meanwhile, Sailor two years later has effectively proposed that we freeze a bunch of old Bitcoin without their consent because of quote UN quote quantum risk. And that's a huge move. That is that is you want to talk about people adding adding extraneous things to Bitcoin? Well, how about the first protocol level seizure at scale on a what's supposed to be a censorship resistant distributed network that nobody controls. So I mean, it should be interesting to watch that plays out. Maybe he pulls back from it, maybe he doesn't. And I would just say the last pieces, you know, I've been accused many times of like, oh, Matt called out Sailor just for his own career benefit. It's just it's logically does not flow. If you were operating investor circles over the last three years, being critical Sailor in any, any way whatsoever was a straight net negative for you. And people that won't accept that they're either lying to themselves or they're lying to everybody else because it's it's very obvious to anyone who's paying attention. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the this reminds me very much of the Fiat brain of who will build the roads like in the sense of people always this is how you really know kind of our brains because I talked to a lot of like really well-intentioned people. We're meeting older boomers in laws or whatever. And it's like, well, we need the government, we need people because how who will build the roads? And it's like, well, if we all sit and we all live in the town, people listening and then our kids need to get to school, we'll build the roads because they need to get to school. And so it's the same idea here. It's like if Bitcoin needs to be fixed or worked on, we will figure it out because we will come together and aggregate and they'll be enough incentive to do that. But in the same like analogy, anybody, whether it's Sailor, he's the easy one to pick on because of his economic force in this industry. It's like you don't need that person to do anything. We will figure it out. But they pulled that, that credence with somebody like that. It's just so many individuals have to take a step back and realize that's what's happening or can happen because people just hold somebody because of their name, their stature in that place. And similar to Matt's point, it's like, you know, we deal with this all the time because our clients hold Bitcoin with MSTR and these other deaths and this is tie into the next thing. And it just been very out front because it's a public exciting trade. But the reality is if you want to be around long in this asset class, you have to protect the underlying asset, but you also have to protect your reputation because the only thing that lasts longer than the underlying is how long you're there. And if you put people in bad positions, they will remember. I mean, honestly, they actually don't remember it. But like our principles and, and we, we have to like look our kids in the eyes and be like, look, I didn't actually like lose a bunch of people's money. But most people don't think like that. And it's actually against general consensus because if you're you can maybe leave some money on the table basically, but long term it'll play out in the right way. All right, let's move on to the last item. Oh, this is this is basically tying into it. So what goes up comes down. We didn't label the episode of the show, but it it's just an interesting dynamic that's playing out right. We've seen the dats puking BTC but similar now Mara, they're kind of walking this back. I don't know who else recently this past week came out on the large mining side, but it just goes back to the lack of fundamentals in 25 where a bunch of people were putting back on the balance sheet because the perceived market appreciation from it, they didn't fully understand appreciate and we're holding this as a long term store value. And so ultimately as that goes up, they're going to puke it on the way down for a number of reasons. And so everyone that was super excited about it lacked that understanding that it eventually was going to get puked out whenever the market got volatile went against them. And so this is just the latest version of that. Do they say how much they're selling? No later day. Later Day put out a statement saying that it's just a change in policy, that they could possibly be selling it. A joke because they're getting they're getting incentive, they're getting incentivized, right, to move the AI and rightfully so from a capital market perspective and you know, leverage and interest rates, but they're also getting penalized because like how capital efficient does that look if you're holding this volatile asset that just, you know, you have $500 million in, you know, notional losses. So that that's the idea behind a lot of this. It's an interesting perspective wise, right? Because obviously sailor has said many times never sell your Bitcoin and hasn't sold any Bitcoin. And I bring him up because he's obviously the elephant in the room by far. I mean, I think there there are over 750,000 Bitcoin now in holdings, but he sold billions of dollars of his own stock to buy cash with, which is effectively the same thing. It's like you basically sold Bitcoin in that situation, but the market appreciates it in a completely different, takes it in a completely different way than if you outwardly sold Bitcoin, which is something that no one really talks about, but it's just interesting how the market perceives one versus the other. Well, yeah, I think I have a different take on that because what I that's why I'm also interested to hear more about your story, why he's so anti open source. Like when I of of all the stuff that I've heard Sailor, well, of all the things that I listened to when I heard Sailor talk about Bitcoin, I think a lot of his understanding is quite, I don't know if the word is profound, but he does see the bigger, the bigger picture, right? Like I re, I re I really like his really far like future outlook, which I think he really, he really sees it and he's acting on it, right? Like he is extremely early and yeah. Is it good or bad that he has 750,000 Bitcoin? I personally don't think it's necessarily good, but. He's the only one that's actually acting upon a certain future outlook, right? Like if there were more, more people that would be bold enough to take that step because they come to the same conclusion, there would actually be some competition, right? So anyone can adopt Bitcoin even if you don't like it, you know? Yeah, all the all that stuff, but I also think it's it is super early, right? And the whole idea, I mean, you know you, we've all been into startups and investing and stuff like that. The whole idea when you have an idea and you are early is to survive until more people realize that it's a good idea, right? So even along the way, if Sailor would sell Bitcoin to survive, I honestly wouldn't think it would be a bad thing because I just have a certain idea about what I think is his thesis for a longer term. So for me, it's all about how do you survive until Bitcoin becomes a thing, if it becomes a thing. But that's the whole underlying thesis is that he thinks it becomes a thing. I want to say something. I want to hear about response to all of it. None of that tracks like because it tracks, you know, it, it, it tracks from, yes, like he's expounding these things. But what's the old adage? It's don't show me or don't tell me what your, your portfolio is. Show me or like, show me what your portfolio is. Don't tell me like what you're doing, wherever your money talks. And so you can say all these things and they can resonate, but at the end of the day, if you're saying you have to stay alive, it's incongruent to park all your Bitcoin at Coinbase if that's your whole deal or Fidelity or wherever it's at. I mean, I don't. Disagree with that. Nobody talks enough about like whether like. The simplest, easiest angle to Matt's point is if you're issuing all this debt for dollars, it is not expensive to build what we built or other institutions built to go build it. That is a rational thought. If you were a rational actor, for whatever reason, to go and set this up and manage your keys and hire a bunch of engineers, hire a bunch of operations and just manage it all. If you were what people think you are, and if you don't do that, then that's what tells you that it's something else is going on. Like that's the angle of where that doesn't lie. Yeah, it is wild that, and to be clear, he doesn't keep it all like Coinbase. It's like split up between multiple districts using the Titanic approach. Yeah, yeah, the you know, if if one compartment breaks, he still has the other compartments is what I'm referring to as the Titanic approach. But yeah, it is. I don't disagree, Mike. I don't disagree. But it's why it's also over if one of those gets lost, because then all credibility goes out and then that. Just I agree. Yeah, it's it's wild that you just even overpay, like spend $100 million and set up your own custodial operation. And then you could also custody all of your little child treasury companies, right? Like he could custody semblers and they can make a business out of it if he wants to. He's already running all the conferences and stuff for all the different Dats already. It would make complete sense for him to build out his own custody and then sell it as a product to the other custody companies. It would line up perfectly and it's wild to me that he hasn't done it. The other piece is to Bram's point. Look, I mean, he has, he's been selling preferred equity, which has dividend commitments, long term dividend commitments. And as the market was going down, a lot of critics were saying he wasn't going to be able to pay those claims in the future. Even though if you do the math, you know, he was, he was in a pretty a very solvent position. Like if you did the math, he was in a very solvent position. So I actually do not blame him. It actually makes logical sense to me to like say OK, I'm going to build up a 2 1/2 billion dollar cash position to show the market that no matter what, I can fund these things 100%. But it was the same as selling Bitcoin because the the Bitcoin per share went down accordingly. He diluted his shareholders. He sold stock that is valued based on the amount of Bitcoin that he holds to buy cash. It is the same exact thing as if he sold Bitcoin in practice but in perception it was. He didn't sell Bitcoin, he sold stock to load up on cash. And that's the only point I was just trying to make there. Is this interesting how the market perceives it differently than him selling Bitcoin. If he sold Bitcoin people probably would have freaked out and said he was going to sell the whole 750K back. But this holding the stock is not a claim on the Bitcoin. Yeah. So, OK, that's a different conversation. But the market treats it as one. Yeah, the market is treating it as I'm kidding. I'm kidding. All. Right, it's a good point. It's not really a joke. All right, Yeah, that's why I don't think it's a good thing to say at the end of a 90 minute live stream. But yeah. All right, guys. Well, let's wrap it up. I want to thank Matt for joining. You should do it again sometime. And thanks for being there, Mike. Thanks and thanks everyone for watching. Hope you find it valuable. Please follow along on YouTube and X and Spotify and we'll see you next time. All right. Cheers. Bye bye.
Transcript source: fountain