BlackRock, Trump, and the Great Bitcoin Repricing

What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holy in the biggest bag of odorous extra ever assembled. In the history. Of. Darkness. 1974. 198792972000 and whatever we're going to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't. Help ourselves, I say, when we. Sell, I say, when we sell. All right, it's time for the last trade. We've got a, we got A55 heads on the last trade. That's Brian's favorite. So let me just shout it out real quick. We got Tim Konsman, also known as Rocket Man. He said we are going to the moon and we have Brian Cabelis who typically brings the house view. He will be able to share some insights from on ramps newsletter and research about why Bitcoin stone is priced currently. And then Michael Tanguma, he is the proverbial old man that yells at the cloud. So Michael probably be pretty angry about some things going on in the industry this week. And then our guest is Liam Nelson. Liam's joining from early Riders. Liam, good to see you. Thanks for joining us this week. Thanks for having me super excited. So the best place for us to start would be the just the weekly price. So we always start the episode with this. We're at 87 K. We've looked at the 80s for what feels like at least a month, probably 2 at this point. And then so you can see over the past seven days, we we're pretty much exactly in line with where we recorded last week. But I think there's some really incredibly bullish things to talk about and why Bitcoin is so massively mispriced. Let's talk about some of the catalyst behind that. And namely, we saw a report from BlackRock, Big Larry Fink had Larry, interesting insights to share about the US debt and its implications for the dollar. Brian, what is the house view over there? Yeah. I mean, house view on our side remains the same. I think, you know, we're recording on Wednesday, which is, you know, in a few hours there's going to be some announcements around the tariff deal. What that is actually going to look like, I think you're seeing markets kind of just act erratically in the lead up to that because there's so much built up uncertainty. And so I think post, post whatever happens this afternoon, unclear which way things go. I think you know, it depending on how other countries react to what is announced will drive largely, you know, more so like what equities react. I think what's happening with Bitcoin is a little bit different because this goes back to what I've talked about a bunch on this pod is like there's this slow transition that's occurring from people lumping Bitcoin in with risk assets to realizing what it actually is, which is this savings technology that's actually very risk off in nature. And what you alluded to around the the BlackRock shareholder letter that Uncle Larry penned earlier this week, that is what he is saying. He is saying that, you know, if the US doesn't get its house in order in terms of debt and deficits. And it's not even just US specific, it's really around the globe. There's obviously issues in this country, but they're arguably worse everywhere else. And So what he's calling out in that, in that letter was basically like, you know, if if we don't get our act together, like there is going to be competition for reserve currency status of the globe. And he mentions Bitcoin in that respect. And so that is very different than, you know, lumping Bitcoin in with tech stocks like that is fundamentally different from an investment perspective. If you're looking at Bitcoin akin to digital gold safe haven store of value, which is what the largest asset manager in the world is signaling to folks. So I think that was pretty incredible. I think part of it too. And like, you know, I think we'd like to think that that is like super bullish. I think to just take the other side of it. I, I still think there's this dynamic of if your entire portfolio is denominated in Fiat and you have 0 exposure to Bitcoin, you read that from Larry Fink and maybe people on the margin dig deeper on Bitcoin and try to understand it more. But other people are going to read that and think it's bullshit or, you know, just take the other side because they're so biased to the Fiat system and that's where their entire portfolio and wealth resides. And so I don't think it's just like this, you know, overnight, snap your fingers and OK, everyone's going to allocate to Bitcoin tomorrow. But it is an important signal from that type of institution, that type of firm that really just to drill this home. The most important part is that they're signaling it's not a risk on asset. It is something different. It is a store of value at savings technology. Yeah. And Brian, I agree with that. The other side of that, of your other side, I like, I like doing that now is there was also a note from BlackRock this week where they acknowledged that IBIT was the largest ETF launch in history And so I bet accumulates $50 billion of inflows in less than a year. And it was the third largest asset gathering for ETF products in the entire United States. And I guess the world as well outside of just the S&P 500, which is as we all know, the kind of de facto savings technology or index of the US at the moment. So for Bitcoin to be only third to the S&P 500 is an incredible signal. And my point is that it actually doesn't even matter if investors are viewing it as risk on or risk off just yet. And if they think of Bitcoin as another tech stock in their portfolio, so be it. And they want more dollars in the future and they think Bitcoin delivers more dollars in the future so be it. Does it impair any of our abilities to own Bitcoin directly and invest in Bitcoin businesses? And ultimately it all like my left side, left bell curve side take is always it's about incentives, right? So if Larry Fink and the BlackRock team are talking about how the Bitcoin ETF is the most successful ETF launch in history, they're going to continue to lean into that product. And so it's just a matter of time that other Wall Street firms, asset managers, we could talk about the brokerage as well. A lot of brokerages are still gatekeeping in terms of client exposure, But that was the big, I think signal to lean into from this week in terms of news that I saw. Yeah, there's a couple of key themes there working. So just trying to retrace going back to Brian and some of the stuff you share, Jackson, on the ultimately like what's going to happen with this, you know, Liberation Day. I don't like to make a lot of predictions and so I hope I'm probably going to be wrong here, but I think we end up in a dovish position. I think like the market signalling because gold, what's happening in the gold markets and then also Bitcoin, I think we're at like what 87.3? I think we end up and then we'll talk about later with the, the, the Doge revamp or, or getting rid of it. I think we naturally are going to see some either whether it's liquidity coming in interest rate, there's going to be something hinting at like we're going to go back risk on. But to Jackson's point, I don't think that risk on or risk off because you have the largest asset manager in the world not only talking about this asset, but it goes back to something we've been talking to a while is that they've recognized that as inflation runs persistent, we're going to naturally need individuals are going to need assets to hold. And so it came out this past week. I don't know if I can pull it up, but it's the Wall Street Journal. As Larry Fink says, regular Americans need access to private assets too. If you're going to inflate the currency and the debt away, individuals have to be able to protect their wealth. And I believe that's part of the ETF being announced. And then obviously, like between Ras and banks, everyone trying to figure out their strategy is the beauty of Bitcoin is it looks like a tech stock. It operates like real estate. It can operate like bonds from a wealth preservation perspective. And you can buy a sliver of it in your brokerage and you don't need to have a $250,000 down payment to go buy a house. And so I think that there's an underlying sentiment if we're going to figure out this whole debt issue, everyone's going to be able to hold an asset that can store their wealth. And that's been the long term play of these ETF's being approved since back in 2023 is the writings have been on the wall. If we inflate the debt, individuals from the most micro level all the way to institutions are going to have to like hold a harder asset than the nominal increase in money supply. Yeah, that's just the whole case for Bitcoin that we've been harping on for decades now, which is just essentially there is a completely finite asset. Bitcoin just mined the 94.5% of all total supply, I think earlier today. There's only 5 1/2 percent left that's going to come over the next 115 years. Meanwhile, deficits are accelerating across the world. It sounds like DOGE is planning to be wound down fairly soon or it's a little bit uncertain what exactly that's going to look like. But I read earlier this week that they've are, they claim to have saved $1.4 billion, which is great and definitely a step in the right direction. But with all the bureaucracy and red tape that's needed or up there that's stopping the actual cuts, whether it be trying to cut a certain department, specific funding, etcetera. It's just kind of a, it's going to be very difficult to reduce spending enough to offset the problem as we've been talking about for a while. It's always going to be you need to have the money supply inflate faster than than GDPI. Think the on the dose step just quickly, like, you know, I, I think it was always meant to be a temporary department or measure. I think it was like 130 days or something. So some of the reaction on X today around like, oh, like, you know, Trump and Elon have had a falling out. Like that's completely misguided. This was always meant to be a temporary thing and Elon wasn't going to be in the government forever. So that's, that's point 1.2. I think the other component of, you know, what Lutnick had been signaling for months around like trying to cut one to two trillion of spending. That was always a pipe dream. That was never going to be a reality. But I think the the entire ordeal is sort of just an effort to step in the right direction, which I do think is valuable, even if you were never going to reach those, those, you know, goals of, of cutting that much, that much spending. But I do think that they have pivoted and made and made some effective measures that are again, a step in the right direction. But the reality is we we know where all of this goes, as Michael and and Liam were just alluding to, like they have to print their way out. They have to, you know, debase the currency more and ultimately lower rates. And that's that's what the admin wants as well. Yeah. I think the another big part of this as well, Brian, is to your point, sure, even if the US government was able to slash a trillion or two or cut the deficit by one to two trillion this year, it's just a drop in the bucket. And you can't reverse decades of irresponsible fiscal policy and deficit spending in one year. It's going to take far more intentionality behind spending, but then also generating revenue from taxes is typically how those are the revenues are generated, but through other methods as well, you know, the external Revenue Service or through sovereign wealth fund. All these other ideas that have been floated around. I do think just going back to the the debt discussion real quick and specifically with BlackRock, I want to pull this up just for anyone who hasn't seen it already, is that these are the types of charts that were published like 5 or 10 years ago by what were considered to be fringe gold bugs, right? And the Fed type of people. And so now you have in the BlackRock annual shareholder letter, these charts where it's the US federal debt held by the public as a percentage of GDP. And you can see it's specifically here called out. Of course, this highlight isn't from the original report, but it was from someone on Twitter. But the point being is the national debt has grown at three times the pace of GDP since the Times Square debt clock started ticking in 1989. So this is decades ago, right? And, and it was just a fraction of what it was today. And people are worried about it a bit at the time, but clearly not so much. And they had this debt clock. I, I've, you know, I've seen it before. I thought the debt clock was actually in Union Square, but maybe there's two. But anyways, this year, interest payments will surpass 952 billion, exceeding defense spending. And then by 20-30, mandatory government spending and debt service will consume all federal revenue, creating a permanent deficit. And so the call out here is, relates to Bitcoin is, is it if the US doesn't get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin. And again, the, the, the main thing to call out here is like, these are themes that have been talked about really since like GFC and the quantitative easing that followed the great financial crisis, But that was by like typically more fringe commentators or market participants. And now you have the world's largest asset manager specifically calling out these issues. And it goes back to incentives like they they have Bitcoin products now. It's also a real problem, of course, but now they can make money from the problem by having products that solve for it. Yeah. I mean, the thing that support all of that is ultimately you can make money from it, but you have to support the individual when it comes to inflating away that debt. So everyone knows it's the only way out. Somebody has to hold a harder asset to protect their wealth. And it came out today, I think like an hour before this about Fidelity letting investors hold Bitcoin and crypto through their, you know, new their IRA plans. It ties into this other piece that I was referencing I couldn't pull up earlier, which is Larry Fink says regular Americans need private assets too. And so it's just this natural notion that this fringe idea of sound money as a way out of this whole mess is becoming more and more mainstream. And now all the big financial players are integrating it into their flows and their financial structures, which is very bullish because nobody's really talking about this. They think people are just like adding it as a speculative ticker, which some firms may be doing it, but very sophisticated individuals know there this train only goes one way when it from a liquidity perspective. Yeah. What do you guys think? Should we talk a bit about the Bitcoin Policy Institute white paper that was published on Monday? So is the Bitcoin enhanced Treasury bonds an idea whose time has come? Just co-authored by Andrew Hans at Battery and New Market Capital and then Matthew Pines at Bitcoin Policy Institute. What are your thoughts there? I think it ties into the conversation we're having currently about the clear debt deficit problem that the United States government has. And now there's more widespread recognition in Bitcoins role to strengthen not only the US dollar, but just also the US government's fiscal position. Do you guys have a chance to check the report out? What are your general thoughts there? I, I went through it briefly. It looked like, you know, effectively a longer form version of the presentation that Andrew gave a few weeks ago in DC. And, you know, I think it's a, it's a cool, interesting idea. I think the palatability of something like that is is probably still years away. But what I did appreciate about it was the call out towards the end in terms of like execution and implementation of something like that. And they specifically call out custodial arrangements and like how are you going to secure the Bitcoin into the future? And they specifically call out multi institution, multi sig custody structures in there, which is, I think you know, slowly but surely becoming, you know, a standard for if you are a long term allocator or even just an individual saving for your retirement and wanting to pass on your Bitcoin wealth to, to future generations. You can't trust a single entity because there's, there's an option not to, there's an option to use multi sig and distribute counterparty risk. And so there's, there's no valid argument to say I'm going to trust single institution AB or C to secure these assets for the next 50 to 100 years. If you can distribute that counterparty risk, you should, it's your fiduciary obligation to do so. And so I really appreciate that call out in the report, because obviously, if, if the US government is, you know, securing Bitcoin, whether it's in these bond structures or just in the reserve, they're thinking about it very long term. And so they need to think about custody long term and, and ultimately distribute that counterparty risk. So that, that's, that's the main piece that I, I took from it. Interesting idea. I think it's probably not coming anytime soon, but I'm glad that sort of this, this long term orientation around implementation and execution is sort of manifesting in in the marketplace. Yeah, I think Bitcoin Policy Institute is a really interesting organization in the blending of remind me a little bit of ourselves in the honor side, but on the on the policy side that they blend in deep understanding of Bitcoin, but also in the regulatory policy space and are able to really affect change. And you've seen a lot of the stuff with Matt Pines and the groups there around just like the allocation and budget neutral and a lot of that language that's, you know, Senator Lummus has been involved and Connor Brown and a lot of those guys, I believe lean on BPI. And so it's ultra positive to see that they're recognizing ultimately what Brian just shared is that from a sovereign nation perspective, you can't get knocked out of the game because you messed up on who your underlying custodian is. It's it doesn't make any sense to throw it all at Coinbase in the same way. Doesn't make sense if you're not experts to figure out how to like spin up a self custody multi sig. So that was really exciting to see. And obviously we see the traction on our side and it's just becoming a notion that at the highest levels, whether it's the pensions we work with to the sovereign level and how you custody it all the way to the individual. Overtime, I think this meme of like gold and Bitcoin become more and more understood of like gold to bear ass in the same way bitcoins a bear asset. And while it's a little bit more burdensome to to secure you don't walk around the duffel bag full of all your dollars or gold in the same way that you're probably not going to want to walk around the duffel bag or with a backpack with a Ledger with $10 million in it, because it's just a recipe for a disaster. And so to see the that end up in there is exciting because it makes sense for everyone. That's the beauty of technology Democratizes from the individual all the way to the sovereign level can have access to the best in class custody. I agree. And one other thing that's worth mentioning too, especially as you brought up gold in there is just the ability to see segregated wallets with on train addresses too. So rather than going into Fort Knox and melting down all the gold and making sure it's actual gold and nothing else in there, it's going to be audited every 10 minutes. But what people can actually, you know, confirm that all the Bitcoin is there? Can can we double click? Like can we talk about that, Tim? Because I feel like you're closest to this in the sense we all know this. Maybe listeners would be good to share. But it's like this whole idea of proof of reserves is like, it's kind of like almost like it's almost like insurance on custodial relationships. Like it sounds good, but the reality is it doesn't. I mean, it's a little it's, it's nice, but it isn't a solution because you can do proof of reserves one day and then the next day get wiped out. And sure, you could prove. That you had them yesterday but not the next day. And there's a notion of what multi institution is, is embedded proof of reserves. It's on chain segregated like it's just implied in there. Maybe we need to do better at explaining like you don't need proof reserves because it is proof reserves. And Tim, I feel like you shared a little bit. I won't docs like the conversation exactly but just your understanding of the market sentiment around proof reserves versus just multi institution and the fact that each wallet is on chain verifiable with independent third parties not having full control but at least one piece of that is just something that doesn't get discussed. Most people are like proof reserve sell third party custody or self custody. It's still not in the zeitgeist of like what's actually happening here, which is very bullish. First started going, Michael, I thought you were implying that I was physically the closest to Fort Knox. So I don't know if that's true, but yeah, I don't I just don't think people have an appreciation for how all of this works and what it means in reality. Because I mean, I literally 2 days ago had Sam Abbasi in the studio and he does the has the company Hoseki that like Metaplanet and bitwise and So you know, some of these names like they use the service so people can see on chain. And I even, I mean, I'm not the brightest crayon, but I was asking them questions. I ask people questions all the time because I, I legitimately don't know what the answer is. And I'm like, well, can you, could you set it up where if it's no longer there, it sends you an e-mail? He's like, yeah, no, it's monitoring it 24 hours a day. It's actually literally how it works. So like, if I don't know, how would anyone else know if they're just trying to live their lives? I don't know if that's what you were really trying to hit on, but and then you just zoom out to even just the multi institutional part of it. I just think a lot of people are like, well, when the banks get involved and they're big banks and they're they have that name recognition that leads to this trust, whether it should be there or not. Like, that's what I'd rather have, but they're not really taking time to think through what multiple institutions taking that risk away really means. Yeah. There's a big concern when you go on Twitter or talk to these high net worths of like, is my money actually at COIN base or is it in the ETF? Just because, you know, a lot of this is settled off chain. And then just like at the end of the day, like they'll true up however much trading that we're supposed to do. And you, you know, you can't actually when you see have most custodians, you can't see your own on chain Bitcoin address. But the the cool thing that is underappreciated about on ramp is you actually know your Bitcoin is there because if you have however many Satoshi's down to the you know .000880 is a Bitcoin. If you have like one point, whatever you can see, OK, this is my Bitcoin address that on ramp shows, and this is the exact amount of Bitcoin. Unless there is somebody else out there who is also an on ramp client that has the same amount of Bitcoin, There is pretty much no way that you can fake that because you can go in any blockchain explorer and and verify that as well as anytime you either buy more, take some out of the wallet, etcetera. You can all verify that on chain, that on ramp is actually doing those transactions and that it's your Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, this is kind of bullish on how underexposed people are because there's a notion of, I ended up in a room talking to somebody very senior Coinbase and explaining what we do. And they're like, well, why can't and I do it or we do. It was like, well, explaining the scalability of like segregated wallets is 1 component. And then there's the aspect of the segregation of keys and really took time to walk through because he earnestly was interested. He's like, why is nobody talking about this? And I was explaining that even his clients, they're severely underexposed because even though they have all this capital, their clients are holding .01 to 1% of their total net worth. And when somebody's looking at this asset as a speculative asset, they don't care how it's custodied. But once that grows, anybody listening here on this pod realizes, wait, I want to know where it sits. I want to know that the other thing that's super fascinating that like there's some product or something to be developed here is I've shared with a few people on this call is we've never had verifiable addresses before until multi institution. We don't like talk about it, but it's interesting because think about it, when you're building a multi institutional wallet, you're getting on boarded with multiple institutions and they have you have title to the address, but then each of those institutions are developing that wallet so they can all objectively and from a legal perspective, tell you that that address is your wallet, umm, with redundancy. So that address is tied to you no matter what, Like that's yours. We've never had that because in exchange can say that's your wallet, but you can't actually verify with a third party. You can have your own multi sig set up and you can't even verify that because if you have two of those keys, you don't know where they're sitting or who has them. And so there's just unique ramifications of this moving forward. It kind of ties into very familiar with Hoseki and like you're still trusting a third party where at the end of the day, one party can lie, but the other two have audible records on you onboarded. That's your address, that's your Bitcoin sitting there. That's never been done before because every person that's built a wallet has always been a single custodian, which is just kind of interesting. Yeah. The key, the key with everything we're talking about is what I, and this is the part of of multi institution everything we're doing it on ramp that I think is becoming more well understood. But still there's a sort of a massive learning curve here in terms of understanding that the key to all of this is taking away the unilateral control from any custodian. So with this structure, each, each entity has one out of the three keys and a two of three quorum that that seeds control from any of those entities. They can't move your funds, they can't freeze your funds. They have to coordinate on your behalf at your direction in order to move funds. So what that in effect does is while the end user, the end client is not controlling key material themselves, are are protecting key material themselves. They are controlling it in the sense that none of their counterparties can control the asset. And that's like the big unlock that I think people are still trying to grasp is like, yes, this is a form of third party custody, but it's it's fundamentally different because none of these parties involved can control your assets. Yeah. I mean in Jackson maybe share like your thoughts on this because I know you're a very you're not excited about having, you know the market have to onboard to these little plastic devices, which by the way, I know this is going to sound like it's funny, but 70% of the assets roughly and Bitcoin set offline on these plastic devices and majority is with Ledger. So that's, you know, $1.4 trillion. You don't have to use honor if you don't have to care about it. But the reality is, and Jackson talks about this really nicely, is by being a proponent of only self custody works, you're ultimately telling the person either not to buy a bad coin or you have to go into an ETF. Because reality is most people don't want 12 words and a plastic device to secure all their wealth because this just makes 0. It makes less and less sense as the price goes up. Is it Jackson curious on any of that? Because we just had a really good call with somebody. And if any of between what I just asked and then that call comes to mind. Yeah. Well, I think there is a portion of the market that the proverbial plastic device makes a lot of sense for, but it's this very small portion of the market. And so there are people out there that may be the best solution for them is to self custody all their Bitcoin if they're extremely technically savvy and have great opsec it it's a fine solution for now. If you're geographically distributed, there's of course trade-offs with that in terms of access. And the big, the big gap would be if you're geographically distributed and have your seed phrase and cryptographic material in multiple different locations, then you have kind of eliminated some of the risk. But then you open up complexity in other areas, namely inheritance, because now your family, if anything were to happen to you, has to travel to multiple places and try to piece together something that they probably have never used or used very infrequently. So my point being is like there's a place for self custody. I think all five of us would agree with that. But a lot of people have been forced into solutions where they're not actually, it's, it's actually not best for them because they're not diligent, They're not actually performing key checks. They're not routinely using devices. And so when they go back every six months or year or two or three or five years to go check on these things, that's where mistakes happen. And So what a lot of people are speaking to us about is they're, they're coming up the curve on our value proposition and they want to start working with us. And then they're like, Oh, well, by the way, you know, my parents or my brother or my uncle, I'm, I'm like the, the Bitcoin guy, right? For, for all of my family members and my friends. And if anything were to happen to me, I may not only be putting my own family in a really tough position, but I may be putting like friends and other family members in the similar situation. So now there's all this complexity. And I think, Michael, what you're driving toward is that if you are someone who is only a proponent for self custody, what you're ultimately doing, if you have the blinders on and that's like the only way you think that people should own the asset, you're actually a ETF maxi. Because if you tell 99 or you tell 100 people to self custody their assets, 99 of them are going to buy the ETF and one of them will actually manage it themselves and take the time to figure it out, to do it the right way. And so I've actually spoken to people before and I've seen anecdotes online about people who have like pretty material positions in Bitcoin. Well, they'll actually consider selling or for future purchases. They don't actually buy more Bitcoin directly. They just start buying ETF shares because they're actually not comfortable with the amount of responsibility and the risk of more importantly, the risk of permanent loss of managing all their assets. So there needs to just be more solutions that sit in the middle between IOU to Uncle Larry at BlackRock and then I geographically distribute seed phrases all over the world, and that's the only way to do it. There just needs to be solutions that sit in between there. Yeah, and not to make this, you know, just about in my multi institution on ramp, but there I, I would make the the case what Jackson said is there's you can be the hardest core person, but even 5 to 10% should be in something like this. Because if if you're hardcore, that means there's complexity to your setup. And then that also means if you can mess it up or get hit by a bus, you want your family to get something. And the, the second part is, I'm only bringing this up because there's we'll transition maybe to the the Circle IPO news. But but this ties into it is the thing that I don't know if we've talked about on this podcast, but I've shared it privately and I didn't share it publicly because I didn't have like hard proof was that ultimately all this data is out there on what somebody's Bitcoin holdings are. I'm fairly confident you can back into 90 to 100% of the markets Bitcoin holdings, doesn't matter how secure you were, unless you're like GPU mining and never put them anywhere with an exchange via your IP, simply because everyone's CRM in this industry has been hacked. Or you can count on it being hacked because it's data. And then all these credentials are being sold to the dark web from third parties. And so you take that information coupled with chain analysis and you throw it into models, you can start to back into the amount of holdings everyone has. And so if you double the price of Bitcoin, you think about your holdings at 150 to $250,000. The digital bad actors are all day long trying to take it from you. What happens when the physical bad actors realize millions of dollars sent in people's houses? Nobody talks about this because nobody has a solution. Either people are selling plastic devices or they're selling third party custody. And to like reinforce this with like, you know, quote UN quote receipts. This is the note. I don't have a Coinbase account, so I think somebody posted this on Twitter, but I think it was down. So that's why I'm showing it in Slack by law, because this happened previously at my previous firm that there was ACRM infiltration or whatever. This happened with everyone back in the day. By the way, in 21, you can Google like HubSpot, everyone got their their database linked. And so part of that from a legal perspective is you have to notify the individuals that lost the data. And so this is the e-mail that came out yesterday from Coinbase. And the main clip that we're showing is we're writing to let you know that we detected activity suggesting a Coinbase employee may have reviewed a small number of Coinbase, small number of Coinbase customer accounts records, including yours in a way that did not align with our internal policies, right. So somebody's like pulling CSVS of customer data, sending that out, and it's just something that nobody talks about to the point of like, nobody wants to die for a trade. Nobody wants their family members kidnapped for their Bitcoin. And that's where this all goes because that's what happened with gold and that's why banks existed. But nobody seems to want to talk about that. There just needs to be better market structure because nobody kidnaps people's homes for their equity portfolio or selling their real estate because there's natural financial controls that exists in the financial markets. But with Bitcoin, you can do that and get access very quickly. And I Ledger Co founder and his fingers. And I'll also just add, totally agree with everything you just said. But one thing I like to drive home with folks is like Bitcoin custody is not, you know, one-size-fits-all. It's not all or nothing. You don't have to choose one strategy and be dogmatic about it. You can have different sort of piles of your stack across different custodial models. And we actually just put out a report this week on this. And it's something we internally for a while have called like the barbell approach where you you keep some amount in purely self sovereign self custody. And that's sort of like, you know, your proverbial go bag, your bar of gold under your mattress that only you control. And then also, you know, there's merit to that in just the sense of, you know, it's core to bitcoins value prop. The ability to do that is super important to the asset in the network. And so it's completely valid to want some portion of your stack in that type of setup. But the other side of that barbell is ultimately, you know in our view multi institution custody because it's better than trusting a single entity, but you're still outsourcing the actual key management to professional institutional grade enterprises, again none of which have unilateral control. So it's a basically a better form of third party custody that lives on the other side of that barbell. And you can, and basically the percentage split between those two strategies depends on your risk tolerance, depend on it depends on how you perceive potential threat vectors, whether that's the proverbial wrench attack or, you know, getting social engineered, or, you know, on the other side of that, you think, you know, the government is going to take your Bitcoin and they're going to call all these custodians and, and say, freeze all this Bitcoin and give it to us. Then maybe you have a less percentage in something like MIC and more in your, your purely self sovereign setup. So it depends again on, on individuals and how they perceive these different risk factors. But again, it's just, it's not all or nothing. You can do multiple different formats. And there's funny part is like there's precedent for this because we don't carry all of our money in a duffel bag or gold, but it's just accepted that we should do that with Bitcoin. And they're both, they're all the same thing. Like once digital, you can carry more of it without somebody knowing. But at this end of the day, if you get access to that and nobody manages their wealth. And so I think it's a good point, Brian. At On Ramp, we believe that Bitcoin is the most important asset of the 21st century. The hard part is securing it right There are shortcomings with keeping your coins on an exchange, but also with setting up your own self custody arrangement. On Ramp solves for these concerns. Our multi institution custody solution maximizes security and minimizes counterparty risk, ensuring that your Bitcoin remains securely in your possession and provides built in inheritance planning to ensure your family is protected as well. On Ramp provides Peace of Mind for your Bitcoin journey, whether for your whole stack or for part of it as a compliment to your existing self custody setup. For more information, check us out at on rampbitcoin.com. All right, Gold member, Should we talk about gold? You'll love those yellow rocks. I did want to talk about some things gold related, so I'm glad. I'm glad we're talking about it. I just was waiting for you to pull it up, never to bring it up. I actually have the gold member JPEG ready to go, so we could take a look at that as well. But yeah, I wanted to call a couple things out on the on the gold front. So anyone who's on video could see a picture of Michael here. He just loves his gold so much. But gold had its largest quarterly gain since 1986, nearly 20% return in Q1 of 2025. And a couple other things I thought were interesting and worth calling out because we know gold and Bitcoin are a similar thesis as part of an investment strategy. So something to call out is CME. There's a $14 billion buy of four and a half million ounces of gold for immediately immediate delivery. And So what are you guys thoughts on the gold market? And gold tends to lead Bitcoin in terms of price appreciation. So it's been the most bullish quarter for the Yellow Rock, Michael's favorite asset class in 30 years. So what is that telling us? Yeah, I think there's there's a few things. But what, what stands out to me is like, it's not just that gold's prices going up and people are viewing it as a trade or safe haven in times of uncertainty, as we were, you know, mentioning before. It's the, it's the outsized demand for physical delivery. That's interesting to me because it's, it's a signal of effectively people calling Bluffs on their counterparties. And so that that's what's actually interesting about this to me. It's not just the gold's price is going up and it's performing well. It's like, no, people want the gold, they want to see it, they want to feel it, they want the delivery of it. And so that's I think what's a little bit different about this, this moment in time as opposed to, you know, other gold rallies in the past. One, it's, you know, obviously it's magnitude as you just described Jackson, but it's, it's the physical delivery component that I think is worth highlighting. Yeah, that's a good point. It's the physical delivery is kind of akin to having Bitcoin on chain that you can audit 24/7. So that ties back into the conversation we just had. And then the other thing worth calling out just on the macro front is Joe Consortia in particular I think has done a great job. And now there's a few other people who track it as well, but just highlighting the 10 week correlation between Bitcoin and liquidity. So liquidity has been trending up over the past two months or so. And I think we're finally at a point now, we'll see what happens with the tariff announcements in a couple hours here. But I think we're at a point now where Bitcoin is ready to take off. Tim said before we recorded that he's on the rocket ship already. So I'm just excited about maybe next week we won't be tuning into 80 K Bitcoin anymore and perhaps we'll be starting to trend a bit higher. But yeah, what do you guys think about that? I mean, is, are we finally ready for lift off here? I think that the gold price is pretty indicative of gold price is the OG speculative attack before Bitcoin, which is, you know, selling your poor currency, which is dollars in order to acquire a harder currency of that's fairly limited in supply of gold. And, you know, central bankers have been doing this for centuries. And so seeing the price of gold really RIP is indicative of just the current demand. And, you know, the macro factors and consumer concerns behind the scenes of, you know, they're needing to be some sort of more liquidity here moving forward. And that's also going to be another reason to acquire Bitcoin in a time of where there's really limited, limited supply and just infinite dollars where the M2 money supply is continuing to go up. So I think we're in a fairly good position, but would love to hear your opinion, Tim and Mike. Yeah, I mean, that's where like I know Jackson little bit jokes and maybe even the audience, like we get excited about Bitcoin, but the reality is again, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes and gold is the closest proxy and it's much closer than people align to what Bitcoin is. And so to Liam's point, not only does it lead in periods of like distress or whatever is happening, but also it's something we've talked about. And Brian, you probably remember this better than anybody since we've been recording this pod. When we started this business was with the honor of Bitcoin Trust. It was created because Bitcoin has this accelerated business cycles and deleveraging events and people understand counterparty risk, which is not necessarily understood or appreciated in the traditional financial system. So people have mispriced risk in delivery. And so there's only like one or two ETFs like the Sprott that allowed for this delivery. But it's the understanding that not possessions 9/10 of the law and that when not only debt levels are unsustainable, but also insolvencies are on the horizon. You're just, it's a it's this onshoring of the COMEX that we pulled up. But also the goal is a notion of a like global monetary order being restructured and people recognizing that possession is 9/10 of the law. And so Bitcoin is the next order after people realize gold. It's like, well, shit, like I got to take delivery of this. I got to assay it. Like I can just buy the Bitcoin and then take it. And so that's the beauty of the leading indicator. It's showing the market starting to appreciate all the concepts we've been talking to for years. And individuals that have invested in Bitcoin for 15 years are all that. It's the Canary in the coal mine effect. Well said. Michael, do you want to talk about the Circle news? I know you'd mentioned it maybe 10 minutes ago or so. You want to just walk us through what was interesting to you there? Stables. Are you stables? Bull. Yeah, I guess it doesn't fire me up much, but we can talk about it. Yeah, I was joking. We did a segment on final settlement talking about stables. So just referencing, I mean, I'll let Liam maybe kick it off and then I can add some color because maybe that ties into the the fintech piece you put together. But yeah, maybe Liam, if you want to start on the circle news and just some of the, there's some interesting anecdotes I think we put in the chat if you want to pull any of those up or we can pull them up for you. Yeah, I thought the circle news is really interesting. I guess one thing that I wanted to to touch on was their balance sheet too, which I thought was, you know, before we we get to the actual like company itself, it's just really indicative of the three experiences that people have in digital assets. So when you look at their balance sheet, it's they have SUI which is some coin that I'd never heard of. They got a cost and I looked it up because I was interested in their balance sheet. Their cost basis is about 2.3 billion and Circle runs on SUI which is like some other token and they bought over 50% of the supply. And then there was an announcement that Circle was going to run on top of it. And that was their largest holding as of the end of 2024 when the financial were finalized for the IPO. But that's the last available financials at the moment. So they had over 50% of the supply and that was the single asset on the balance sheet that it actually outperformed Bitcoin. By now it's underperforming Bitcoin and they have over 50% of the supply. They're not going to be able to get out of that trade without, you know, moving the market super significantly. And then outside of that, their second biggest holding is Bitcoin making up, you know, about 1/5 of their overall balance sheet. And then a number of other coins that, you know, while they've gone up a little bit, they've all underperformed Bitcoin. It's just going back to the proverbial statement that we, you know, continue to kind of hammer home, which is Bitcoin is a hurdle rate. And if you allocate into to other cryptos, there's a way to outperform if you have inside knowledge that other people know about. But for the most part, you're just going to underperform Bitcoin and even would argue that you know, they're likely going to underperform had they not sold their suey and and you know, end up trying to get out of it now with over half of the market share. Yeah, maybe this ties into that exact notion. And going back to the stables is they're really impressive like obviously like Tether, Impalo and you go listen to a lot of their strategy and one of them ties back into what's backing it. So the interesting part about Coinbase and Circle is these people have not had like long term Bitcoin exposure and so the viability of their business, right? If you built on a casino, that casino people are going to be trading sui forever. But then there's the other part of that is the integrity going back to again, history and free banking. You can see these stables starting to be created and issued by different reputations in the traditional financial system. Well, they're going to start to compete in a free market. I as a Bitcoin investor was like never really interested in stables until really just thinking about, well, it's the number like Tether in the trading pair with Bitcoin. It's what's allowed for a lot of the liquidity to come in and then ultimately around creden redemptions and creations from a like Fidelity, which is rumored to be issuing one along with, you know, the Circle IPO, is that there's actually a lot of market share and entrenchment. If you can be the issuer to bring in the dollars in and then issue against them, maybe generate some capital or return it as it gets more competitive from a stable coin holder. But then you're just bringing that capital into your ecosystem to the regular, you know, your Sox, bonds, anything else from a capital movement. So it kind of makes sense, right? If a digital asset store value of Bitcoin and the closer you can get to the trading pair, which is dollars and moving around those funds along with banks. Banks are going to be custody in this asset and allow for trading. Well, they can't actually allow for custody and trading and have a competitive advantage if they're not able to swing around the dollars from a net settlement perspective unless they have a digital unit. And so that's where like this kind of interest has been like, OK, I can see where this goes. And Alex Storn had a really good tweet this past week and it was breaking down market structure bills versus the stable coin bills. And I think that's important because it talked about the market structure bill has been less has gotten less traction from a bipartisan perspective because of SEC and CFTC purview and who overseas this. But the one that has gotten a lot of traction because it's kind of thought as less of a big deal is around the stable coin legislation. But he makes the case and I would make the case as well. It has actually broader geopolitical ramifications because of all the things we know about dollar dominance. And I'll just pull up the one like key part that he referenced at the end is he basically says, put stablecoin legislation is likely to be much more impactful long term than market structure. AUSD stablecoin explosion could solidify growing dollar dominance, create new demand for treasuries. This has massive implications for American power, global banking and geopolitics. And so again, it's something that seems innocent as a dollar kind of like, you know, claim really has a flow of funds implications that I think are going to be like really wide widely felt for the next 10 years. Yeah, I agree. I mean, like I said, I don't think it's incredibly interesting in terms of technology. But I think the interesting part is, Michael, what you kind of tied up there in the past minute or two because the US government has taken a keen interest in stable coins as part of the pro dollar agenda and U.S. dollar hegemony. So I think that'll be the more important thing to watch is just stable coin legislation and the role that they'll play as Tether was the 7th largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries in 2024. So this is, you know, just out of nowhere, right, seemingly. And then you have this company now that just operates well with like a dozen people or so and they're the 7th largest buyer of U.S. Treasuries in last year. Yeah. And that's where Tim, I think he goes back to the strategy whenever you and Sailor, you guys have been getting a little chummy on Twitter and you're doing an interview during the strategy conference. But it's the notion of Paulo references. They old 50 tons of gold and whatever they just bought does it. They just bought 8 billion in Bitcoin. But they bought, yeah, they bought 8 billion. It's crazy like so. 88,000. Yeah. So point being is like, well, it's the integrity of their balance sheet backing that coin. So he references if they're, if the dollar hyperinflates, they actually have the backing of these other assets on their balance sheet in the other in the other ways, if not like they have the treasuries and the dollars. But point being is I think that's where this all goes from a competitive landscape and strategy. Obviously, having so much Bitcoin, there's a lot of integrity if they launched a stable coin, because it's that underlying currency which goes back to like the bit bonds idea. It's a it's a matter of time before you have to insert a more credible monetary unit, gold and Bitcoin, if you're going to want somebody to buy that treasury, which is effectively a a dollar claim. Yeah, I mean, I think it all makes sense. I just, I could be totally wrong on this, but I think it's a little far fetched that you would have like Bitcoin Jesus launching a stable coin. Like I think it's more likely that someone like Cantor would launch something like that or just like someone else. It's like trad Fi, like boom, here you go. That's just my gut, gut reaction. What if I told you he's not Bitcoin Jesus? I mean, I guess I can't be on this call anymore. This is a bit of an aside, but I don't know if you guys like have read the stable coin bill. I haven't read the most recent version of it, but I know that there has been some not backlash is the wrong word, but people skeptical of what's in that piece of legislation in that it potentially picks winners and losers and could even say like we don't allow offshore issuers, IE Tether to operate. And so I think that was some initial sort of clamorings around one of the earlier drafts of the bill. I don't know if it's that part has been amended or anything, but that was some sort of concerns around it was like they're just going to crown circle and basically USCC becomes the CBDC of America. I think I like end up with the free market side of it. I think part of the notion of the tether and offshore was around the yield because when it comes to the treasury demands and where they're making their money and it's more into the financial system that I understand. But ultimately that they're not passing back our dollars when we're in a bank or if you hold Circle USDC where that would have a problem with the traditional plumbing where dollars would start to go offshore. So I think it's less around Crown and USCC. It's more of trying to have an insular stable coin set up. But then so that's others, right, Avanti or not Avanti, but it's a vet, but it was previously Avanti's custodias stable coin just launched. There's a consortium with Anchorage. There's a number of being spun up Fidelity as well. I think the free market will just decide right where the credibility of that stable coin and where they park their dollars and then they'll ultimately have to change that. And I think Tether probably like on shores as well at some some point. So I think it's just more of that aspect of less of like CBDC Orwellian. I mean, it is Orwellian, like we talked about it previously. Like it's still Orwellian that you can just shut it all down whenever you want. You get better insight from a centralized perspective of the flow of capital. But we're in a digital world, so it's like it has to exist. That's why Bitcoin exists as well. Yeah, on that censorship point, I saw the clip. Was it Eric Trump who was on Fox Business recently, this week, and they're he was talking about how the banks were shutting them down, the Trump family down. It was kind of like the choke point 2.0 where banks were being used, were being used by political motivations to tie or cut off access to capital. And so the Trump's were impacted by that. And he went on Fox Business to talk about American Bitcoin. I think you guys might have covered it, but like what? What's the high level thoughts? Just real quick, if we could touch on it for two to three minutes, Any thoughts on American Bitcoin that the Trump family? I just think it's the most bullish thing ever that all these politicians at the highest levels are like just getting equity exposure to everything in the ecosystem. Like it only signals one thing's about to happen in my mind. Yeah, I think you've got to be doing some serious mental gymnastics to think that any of that is bad, regardless of whether you like the Trump family or not. It's, you know, the family and power of the nation and they're interested in Bitcoin. They're seemingly passionate about it want to get more involved. Getting involved with mining, I think is a natural extension of of that interest. You go down the rabbit hole, you get interested in mining, you want some exposure there. As we know it's not the the best business to be in it's extremely cut thirds extremely competitive. So we'll see what this American Bitcoin, what's the full name of the company American Bitcoin something we'll see it we'll see how that ends up. But I think the, the stronger signal is this administration is, is a complete 180 from, from everything we've known about the US government's involvement and interest in, in Bitcoin. Yeah. Tim, what are your thoughts there? I'm this isn't my take, it's someone else's, but I agree that I'm surprised it took him this long to get into the infrastructure side. Yeah, I was just thinking about this. Why while you guys were talking about her saying that it was forecasted, I believe because Trump said he wanted all the Bitcoin to be made in the United States. So he they told us this six months ago that it was going to happen. And so I guess I'm not that surprised. The interesting anecdote, whether Eric Trump is truthful or not on Fox Business about why he got interested is the censorship resistant aspect of Bitcoin. So ultimately that ties into like stablecoin CBDC talk. And I just think it's interesting that people come to it in different ways. The Trump family was maybe less concerned about the debasement aspect of that draws people into Bitcoin, but it was a censorship resistance. And seeing how politically motivated actors were able to cut off ties to the financial system, and they're like, Oh yeah, well, of course Bitcoin makes sense to circumvent those restrictions. I think he likes harping on that because it's like, you know, it's kind of their their MO of being angry at the prior administration. And a lot of that stuff is true with choke point and whatnot. But I think the other interesting component about where they're coming from, and he said this as well, is like the real estate angle, like they've been in real estate their whole lives. They understand scarcity of real estate. And so I think when you, you know, compare owning real estate versus owning Bitcoin, you strip away a lot of the cost, the friction, the upkeep, the operational burden associated with managing real estate properties. And I think that's part of what clicked for the Trump family was like, oh shit, this is just a better form of property. The the beauty of all this stuff we're talking about is like this has been discussed for half a decade, if not longer in the sense that individuals hold Bitcoin and then they get to seats of power and they want their bags to be pumped. Like we've seen Senator Warren and other politicians do it in backdoor deals and you find out that they had equity. We've seen all the different, you know, what is it on Twitter, the different bots that capture the trades of like, who's the one? That's the Pelosi. And so it's just the idea of like, yeah, everyone's going to hold this. And the incentive is once you hold it, that you are going to become favorable to it and then everyone benefits from that versus like asymmetric information. And then the other part is I wouldn't discount too much of the debasement because we know Donnie loves his McDonald's and you know this stuff, this is what they took from us. We're pulling up a super size. It was $0.39 if you wanted a double quarter pounder. What you know Trump used to buy back in the day for 399 with. What is the drink? That's the meal. That's the meal deal, too. You know, two cheeseburgers meal 299. So I don't know the the basement might be an issue for for for Trump as well. That's fair. Yeah. If you're crushing like 10 Diet Cokes a day and a couple Big Macs, that actually is a problem. And so Bitcoin does solve that problem. You get more McDonald's five years from now, 10 years from now, if you could live that long. I mean, Trump, yeah, he's he seems to be in credible shape for his age, despite his his nutritional choices. But yeah, Bitcoin buys you more McDonald's. What do you think? Fixes this. Bitcoin fixes this. There was also seed oil free back in the day before they took it from us. Well, one other thing that I, I am a little bit concerned from a narrative perspective because, you know, the Trump family will eventually be out of the office and, you know, if you think that they're not going to have their bank accounts, you know, censored, again, I would take the other side of that. And so I do get just I can understand how from a narrative perspective, you know, the Trump's getting very involved in, you know, Bitcoin and crypto at large, as well as like GameStop being the next Bitcoin treasury company. It seems like, you know, we're seeing something where if I was on the sidelines and didn't know anything about Bitcoin and crypto, I could say like, OK, it's controlled by these politicians. And Bitcoin on the balance sheet of companies is only for zombie companies that can do nothing else. It's not actually for productive companies. And I could see how that could make the average corporate treasurer or the average just individual who's not paying anything any attention to this a little bit turned off. But Tim, I would love to hear your thoughts on on the GameStop. And if you think that, you know, large cash flowing companies are going to take a an an actual interest in this anytime soon, as well as just the opinions on, you know, people getting turned off by the Trump's being overly involved if they don't know anything about it. Yeah. I mean, maybe the very best thing that could happen is if, you know, 4812, maybe 16 or 20 years from now when the Democrats get back in the White House that they're also pro Bitcoin. But in the meantime, to the extent that it's becomes political in anyone's eyes, it's not probably. It'll it'll further adoption, but it's maybe not where we want to be ideally at some point in the future. I. Think the counter to that would be that, you know, the the cohort of voters that arguably swung this past election that cared about Bitcoin or crypto weren't necessarily aligned with either party, but they had a single issue that they cared about. And so I think this is going to take time to sort of like metastasize in, in the political atmosphere. But like, I think there's going to be a recognition over the next four years that like Bitcoin is not like a Trump thing, It's not a Republican thing. It's an American people thing. And there's a, there's a growing cohort of Americans who care about it, want to want savings technology, want to preserve their bet, their, their value of their hard earned, you know, value in, in a, just a better savings vehicle. And so I think that's where you know, it, It would be actually surprising to me if in four years the Democratic Party took a, a similar negative stance on all this stuff as they had for the past four years, because I, I mean, you could say what you want about them, but I think they're smart enough to realize that, like the people that care the most about this stuff, like don't care what party you're in. They just want, you know, clear regulation and want to be able to operate, want to be able to innovate and want to be able to store their value in Bitcoin. And so I think that like, it's going to take time for, I mean, we're only a few months post this election, there's still like a ton of polarization, people upset, rationalizing things in their own brains. I think 4 years from now, even if Republicans lose the White House, I, I think there's going to be a recognition that this, this movement is, is bipartisan. And it doesn't really matter what side of the aisle you're on. You just want to store your value better. Yeah, It was just interesting to me that the Democrats didn't pivot like super swiftly. I mean, maybe they thought approving an ETF would get the job done. That's a joke. But yeah, I mean, they just didn't really move at all. And on the Republican side as not to beat a dead horse, but to the extent that it's optics, to the extent that it's a cult of personality, probably not ideal, but it is obviously from a regulatory and mainstream aspect. Moving it along, Liam, to your points and questions around GameStop. I mean, it's all good, right? We can talk about the convertible stuff that they just raised and how that gives puts them at a 31% leverage ratio. But like until they announce that they bought some Bitcoin, I think that's really the next step and. What do you, what do you think about the signaling? Because that that's one of the concerns I've heard from folks is like they, you know, put in their filings, they did this, this convertible note, but they haven't really articulated a strategy. Whereas like, if you look at Sailor and what he did for the past four years, like he was extremely overt and articulate about what he was doing, how he was thinking about it and how he's going to execute on it. And I think that just gives shareholders and perspective shareholders more importantly, confidence and conviction in what they're doing. And I, and I don't think we've seen that from Cohen or or anyone at GameStop. And so I think that's part of the trepidation in the market right now for them is like, well, how serious are you guys about this? Clearly doing this huge debt offering is a signal that they're serious about it. But like to your point, when you go to buy the Bitcoin and how do you think about it more importantly, like do you, do you view Bitcoin as a hurdle, right Or is the goal of this company going forward to accumulate as much Bitcoin as possible? Like that's the part that they haven't. Really spoken to, yeah. And I don't think I've missed it because you would think it'd be all over social media, but Ryan has not said anything publicly outside of filings that the company has done. So there's two things, 1 is when they announced their first purchase and 2 is, is he ever going to say anything? Is he going to become more public, which he would think would, if he can do it in the right way, would be very positive. Just in like through conversations, I've picked up one that I guess he doesn't do a lot of public speaking, not that he hasn't done any. But like I think whether it's him or they bring someone else in to kind of be the public face of that would be like the number one announce the purchase is number 2, whether it's Ryan or somebody else like get somebody in there that can communicate to. Or just like say why you're doing it like. Just say your. Thesis on Bitcoin like. That's the part. That I think is necessary for this. I mean, it's a big role for if someone's going to sign up to maybe they don't do 1000 podcasts like Sailor, but to be that public, I mean, it takes a lot of energy. And so I think them being thoughtful about whether that's Ryan or Ryan and somebody else, I think that would go a long way with the market. Find out next week on the last trade. We got like 10 more minutes or so. I do have a hard stop. I wanted to touch on two things. And then if there's anything else for the group, the first would be so there's news shared over the weekend that it's actually a Bitcoin holder since 2013, which their Bitcoin is a couple, their Bitcoin appreciated over that time from probably 2013, what is probably like a hundred 200 bucks at that time. And now Bitcoin is $85,000. And the amount of Bitcoin that they had was £3,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. And unfortunately, the news that broke over the weekend was that the, the wife is a married couple threw away the, the device, the hardware wallet. And so imagine how devastating that is to be in a position where you've actually kept your Bitcoin secure for over a decade. Not many people can say that. We speak to people that have been around since 2013. And in many cases, you know, they still have most of their allocation, but they may have been snipped on Mount G Ox or they may have misplaced a seed phrase here and there. And so perhaps this person did as well, but they still had about £3,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. And imagine just getting, you know, over the course of a decade, keeping it secure, just to know that, you know, there was an accident at home and you end up throwing away the cryptographic material. And so this is unfortunately I think a position that a lot of people are in, whether they realize it or not. I think that this device was just in a desk drawer with other probably wires, etcetera, and it was just inconspicuously inconspicuous looking and it was thrown out. And so this is ultimately why people, it goes back to the self custody discussion that we had. If you're going to do that, you just need to be very diligent about how you're managing your keys. And the reality is that most people don't actually have time to be thinking about this 24/7 because they have a family that run a business. They, you know, are taking their kids to sporting events, they're doing this and that. And so if you're going to do it, that's great. But the the challenge here is that most people don't have time to do it properly. So I wasn't sure if you guys had any thoughts on that. But ultimately it's a big thing we help our clients with is like taking away the burden of having to do the key management ongoing and still giving them a really secure, arguably more secure custody solution. But it doesn't require them or their wives or their children to be experts and have to, you know, think about where do the devices go? Where do the seed phrases go? Yeah, I think we touched on a lot of it soon enough to hash out to in depth or like on ramp shill. But the reality is this happens way more than people. This is just somebody public. It's the same thing with the the bad actors. Like it's only the one out of 10 or to 100, if not greater end up coming forward for your stories about U-Haul transfers and somebody putting all their information right. Because you have like if you're a collaborative custody user, you have all those convey the seeds and the devices. You throw them in your U-Haul and it gets disconnected or lost or stolen, losing their funds to palisade fires and that seed being in the safety deposit box and the control being lost to safes being broken into and rings and the person missing. The sea phrase taped to the top of the safe to what Jackson described is you're kind of like in a bad position because if you tell somebody about where this is secure, then you kind of expose yourself. If you tell nobody, then a family member is just cleaning up a desk drawer or cleaning out a safe. So it's just again, I think the the big component is going and taking a look. If anybody just wants to learn more about how we think about it via the barbell approach to custody. Because I think obviously self custody is insanely important. It's what makes the system work. It's just the reality of do you want all your assets to be thrown away or that capabilities? And when the price 10X is that just that person probably didn't care about it at 20/12/2013, you know, let's just say it was $3000 at a time. It's like it's not a big deal. But that 3000 turns into 300,000 and then 3 million. And so that's the whole notion of like protecting this asset like it's 10X the price it it will be. And that's the crazy part about all this is nobody when it was 3000, I could say, you know, maybe certain amount of people weren't ready for 10X because that's 30,000 and then 30,000, you could say 300K. I'm fairly confident 99% of Bitcoin holders are not ready for 10X because that's effectively $1,000,000 Bitcoin. And you probably want some portion of that not in your setup because if you get knocked out of the game, you want your family to get it. And so, yeah, it's just, it's something that we'll we'll keep talking about. Yeah, we'll put a link to to this barbell report in the show notes. And you said it very well, Michael. Like we're not personally dogmatic about this. Self custody is great. There's a place for it, but there's also a place for something like multi institution where you can reduce the burden on yourself, reduce the burden on your family and just make sure that like you're able to pass on all of this wealth that you've accumulated in Bitcoin and not going to get knocked out of the game. And so that's ultimately what we're trying to strive towards at at on ramp is, is providing options and, and the beauty of of multi institution is you, you always have that optionality, like you can always withdraw it to yourself custody. And so you know, again, that that transparency, that clarity of on chain segregated addresses where you know, you can very easily withdraw that to your own custody is unique to our model. Can't do that with the ETFs. And there's just a lot more trust if you're again giving unilateral control to a single entity. It's worth calling out just like because I do think it adds to the air of the credibility of that. We're not just saying this to say it like there's very few people because we're so early that I've onboarded thousands of dollars, thousands of people and billions of dollars to self custody. I came over from Unchained Cam Kim has come over. There's been others like we've gone through the wringer and how to do this and realize there was a ceiling when it comes to this ability for individuals, but then ultimately enterprises and institutions that cannot manage cryptographic material, including the US government. And so the, if we want this system to be successful, you naturally have to decentralize the risk with institutional grade experts that manage that. So it comes from a place of like going through the hard work and realizing over half a decade that there just needs to be more robust, resilient architecture for the system. And that's where we're excited about being able to democratize access while also not having people left alone with Coinbase and them selling your data, but also, you know, your wife or, you know, loved one throwing away your your wealth that you've been storing since 2013. We almost forgot that may arguably the most critical aspect of the show. Tim, you got to do your tie reveal. You have AC phrase stitch on the back of that tie. Tim can't take a picture of it. It's right. It's right here. OK, yeah, that looks like that looks right. But Tim, it's a nice, yeah, it's a nice looking tie. It's. Pretty long. It's pretty damn long. Barely fits in the frame. I think we'll be in the 90 thousands next week. Yeah, let's let's wrap up here real quick. Let's do a quick round of some bullish and bearish takes. Any anyone got some exciting takes for the audience who decided to stick around this long? Global liquidity is going back up, guys. Gold is is the Canary in the coal mine. It's ripping. It'll hand the baton to Bitcoin at some point. Don't overthink the timing of it. It's going to happen. Yeah, I've been surprised that gold has really ripped ahead of Bitcoin right now. I just haven't seen that or in my recent memory. My memory is not always that great. But the other thing that we're probably going to see in 35 minutes in the Rose Garden is, and you guys were my inspiration for this tweet about an hour ago. If we can't cut enough of the irresponsible government spending, then the only other move is to be irresponsibly long Bitcoin. I mean, you know, hopefully it's catchy. But I think that's where this is going is they're like, hey, we're cutting what we can. We're tariffing what we can, but we just, there's only one thing left to send this thing on the rocket ship and which like as a country we need to do. And then you're just going to see things that you. I don't think bit bonds are years away. That's my bullish prediction. I think they're happening this year. I got a bearish take for everyone, while Michael's thinking of his bearish take is. Michael told me in secret that he actually sold all of his Bitcoin for gold, and that's why he's been so excited about gold on the show the past several weeks. He likes his rocks. It was it was just a, it was just a trade. Now we can go cycle back into the the Bitcoin. Well, Tim, I'm I I like that take you just had. I think that's a good place to wrap bit bonds this year. That would be quite bullish. So Tim Kotzman, he he's a man of few words sometimes on this show, but he actually delivers the most alpha. He also. He also hosts 17 podcasts, so. Yeah, how to juice Might sell dollars, buy Bitcoin. He hosts a number of podcasts, but this is the real hurdle rate podcast. He can't take that from us. Leo, before we have what you have to have, you got to show something bullish or bearish, but ideally it's bullish. Yeah. I'm never bearish. Yeah. I mean, the strategy of, you know, selling dollars to acquire hard assets is one that's going to continue to work well, whether it's gold or Bitcoin. I'm sticking with Bitcoin, not just trade for me, but I'm going to continue to do that. And I think there's could be a lot of other people that are doing it too. I mean, we're seeing the speculative attack ramp up with the strategy or meta planet or or whoever else. But I mean, everybody realizes that they want the, you know, finite asset with only 5.5% supply left coming over the next 115 years, while I think the dollar supply, the deficit last year was like 2 trillion. It's going to continue to ramp up. And that's just the US. Many other countries are, are way worse. So everybody's going to find Bitcoin, whether it's individuals, governments and corporations. And I'm sticking with Bitcoin. Yeah, Just to be clear, nobody's trading Bitcoin around here, at least on this side of the. So don't have any gold. I have a little gold, but not like really from an investment perspective. And also I was so short needing more Bitcoin, we had to start businesses to start accumulating Bitcoin. So I like I'm as all in as you can get, contrary to what Jackson may believe. Hey man, you can be truthful with the audience we all know you have. You got a lot of gold. And I do have a big, I have one big question before we wrap is what do, what do you need from the audience to show up next week? Because you know, it was a few weeks ago, you really got them out in the comments and liking and subscribing and we appreciated it and you showed up. But curious if there's anything that's going to help you come back next week because we, we like having you around. Well, thanks. You know, I, I wasn't sure if you actually did, so I appreciate that. No, I think anyone who's made it this far, anyone who's made it this far on the show, hopefully you've. Already liked and subscribed but send this send this to a friend, a Co worker, someone who you've you know, been trying to teach about Bitcoin but they won't listen to you because they know you and they're sick of hearing from you or. They're going to buy GME and not Bitcoin. You should send them here because they're going to hear the the thing that they won't hear from Tim. Just share it with friends, tell them to like and subscribe, assuming you've already liked and subscribed. Tim, Yeah, Tim's going to take her family's Bitcoin subscribe. From that one as well. Wow. How does it go the lower? How does it go, Tim? The lower it dips? The higher it rips. Let's go. Yeah, that's what it is. That's what it is. If you don't like the podcast and rate it five stars, Tim is going to steal your family's Bitcoin. 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