Transcript+
The whole game is not to mess us up in Bitcoin like it's the first time that you have this money like instrument that reduces all the counterparty risk and everything associated while everyone listening here and everyone appreciates it. And you also get the upside of take whatever instrument you want, private credit, venture, growth equity, everything, it's all wrapped up into it because we're in the monetization phase. We're never going to get this chance again. So if you leave the Bitcoin on the side because you wanted your 11% to keep pace with inflation, like more power to you. But we're just going to keep saying it because it's just true. And it's going to be on the right side of history. We explain the differences, we explain the trade-offs. And when everyone was running into this burning building, we're telling them, look, there's risk associated. And if it never happens, Bitcoin's still going to do its thing and it's going to outpace. What you're telling me is that music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous ever assembled in the history of darkness. 1974198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we. Sell. Hey, I say when we sell. We are back to last trade. We are back to all time highs. Everyone was worried the past month that the world is going to end and we're back to all time highs almost on the S&P and the NASDAQ. Bitcoin is 40% down from all time highs. But look, a lot of this does not matter. I'm going to continue to say that I think people are just going to generally benefit from having a long term bias, whether it's Bitcoin or otherwise and just their life. But enough about me, Michael and Brian. How are the two of you doing today? You know, you said we're back in everything's like normal or whatever. It made me think of what what happened to the straight in oil? Like, are we just good like we? Blockaded the blockade. We're good now. There's several. Blockades. So unless you guys can inform me, then we're not talking about the straight this week. We had a lot of straight talk class last week. So I think we're we're probably good there. Don't need to monitor that situation this week. Yeah, doing doing well, man. I saw a good tweet just around the price action that you were referencing. Good tweet. That was basically like, you know, when the last time Bitcoin was around this range, call it low 70s, it was early 2024 and then prior to that, you know, a little below that for the previous all time high. And it's just it reminded me that like markets play tricks on your brain in the sense that like when bitcoins at all time highs and it's around that level, people are saying, well, it's a bubble. It's you know, it's, it's way too hot right now, it's going to collapse. And now at the same price, it's like we're searching for a bottom. And so like that's the that's the longer term view that you have to take on on an asset like Bitcoin is that it's not just the number on the screen. It's like the context around what that number is and how holders are perceiving the number where sellers are whereby like where the marginal demand is. And SO74K today is like a totally different number than 74 K two years ago or, or four years ago. And that that kind of breaks some people's brain, particularly people on the outside of Bitcoin who just look at the numbers and like, oh, like, you know, Bitcoins flat over X time period. It's like, well, no, the context for that number is entirely different. So just some perspective on price. Well, I think we have to talk about the elephant in the room. I thought we were recording today with the one and only Big Mike, but there may actually be another Big Mike, Michael Saylor. And so Michael, you actually you had some takes last week. There was some controversy around the Stretch product. I think you came out with a pretty clear and definitive opinion and counter to a lot of the commentary and narrative around Stretch today or around stretch currently. And then actually this week that momentum is only continued to pick up more steam. And so as much as it may frustrate some of us to talk about what is happening here, I think it's incredibly important because Brian, what we were talking about before we hit record as well as this is really the, this is really the company or the person that is moving the market currently. I saw some numbers that I'll pull up now just about the estimated amount of Bitcoin being purchased by the Stretch products on a daily basis. So this is from Joe Consorti and this is based off these are getting estimates, but this was for yesterday. So Tuesday, April 14th, there is 1 1/2 billion dollars of volume of the Stretch product and could acquire roughly 16,000 Bitcoin. And so just to put that in perspective, I think this is a nice graphic here that is 35 times greater than the daily supply of new Bitcoin mine. And then the day before that or, or the past two days total is over 2.2 billion. And so I give this context because this is a pretty important development to watch. I think there's of course good and bad of this. And and Michael, we had some back and forth this morning as well that I think there's a lot of under appreciation in this industry in general about the potential centralization risks that this poses. Now. A lot of people don't seem to care about that because they want the Bitcoin price to go up and this is seemingly a vehicle to do that. But I think there are potentially downstream consequences that are not being currently addressed or or discussed very much. And I think it has a lot to do with people just having a line. People have an A financial incentive now to be talking about all the pros or all the great things that are happening as relates to micro strategy. But I don't think people necessarily want to talk about the the downsides or the consequences of this. So feel free to take that in any direction you want either of you. But I I think we need to be talking about it because it is really driving the markets at the current moment. Yeah, I mean, it's all over the timeline. And I do think given the past few days and even the end of last week, like it is you could you could argue that it is the they're sort of the marginal buy right now. And it's it's what's contributed to the Bitcoin price kind of inching up over the past few days from sort of 70 up to around 74. I guess at a high level, my take on all of it is like, I don't have a fundamental problem with these products existing. And I think when the conversation in the back and forth starts, it's like that's where that's where people want to take it. It's like, oh, you're a light I you don't understand this. You are anti anything that's like financial engineering and you just care about, you know, spot Bitcoin. Like that's genuinely not my take. Like I think it's kind of like, I do think it's kind of an interesting product. Generally speaking, what I take issue with and I think is genuinely a problem, and this is even outside of the centralization risk that you referenced, Jackson. It's just how it's it's marketed is what I take issue with. It's like it's disingenuous and it's misleading to call stretch a money market like instrument. It's not a credit instrument, it's preferred equity. There's no claim on the Bitcoin. People say it's Bitcoin back. That's actually not true. And Saylor himself tweets out things like money market like, and that's just genuinely misleading. And so put aside the risk that potentially like the SEC comes after him and the company for marketing it as such. It's the broader public and the, you know, the podcasters and the discourse and the people on Twitter that are talking about it as this like risk free digital credit instrument, which it's just not like there are material, material risks to this vehicle that go beyond just the centralization, beyond just the custody component that we talked about a lot. It's the fact that it's actually not backed legally by Bitcoin. They can suspend the dividend at any time. So it's not comparable. And, and Michael, this goes back to what you were initially tweeting about last week was like comparing it to Treasury yields is not fair or consistent in the sense that like the government's going to pay you that nominal yield. This product may not into the future in perpetuity. And so there's a reason why it's it can be higher than 4 or 5% because there's risk embedded in it. And so yeah, I have some other thoughts, but maybe I'll. Yeah, there there's so much here and this is kind of like, I'll try to be concise with it, but this is part of the maze that's created in a in a triad Phi, in a debased world where the maze is meant to get you lost because there's multiple things conflated. And I I retweeted last week because it just came to mind if we forget a lot of the gradually and suddenly article series, specifically the great de financialization. Now I understand we live in a Fiat world and it'll take a while to get there, but this is the complete opposite of that today. And to your point, I do think all this stuff's interesting. Before getting to Bitcoin, I was always just very interested in the intellectual kind of maze of venture and technology and and just growth is fascinating. So in a vacuum, if these things were small, they would, they wouldn't necessarily need somebody to speak out or wouldn't feel necessary to talk about them. But I think that we've taken this approach of conservatism, especially seeing the 17 years in Bitcoin across the board, where if something looks obvious, it generally has this version of being obviously wrong or there's some Spidey senses that start tingling. Now, what does that mean? Or how do you like start to bake into it? I think it all just comes down to risk, right? Because I just personally don't think that these instruments pay you for the risk that you're taking. Now, if you're speculating and you're, and that's where the the crux of a lot of this gets trapped is when somebody invests in Bitcoin, they invest in gold, they're taking their investment that they already made and their time and efforts to get out of bed and produce value. And then they're parking it into an asset that allows them to save and increase their purchasing power. That's what money was meant to be. Everything is else is downstream of that. And you're assuming some level of risk because you have these liabilities. And so as you start to go further out that you're just not getting paid for the risk, especially when a, in nominal terms, inflation is just that par of what you're being delivered. If somebody told me an institutional allocator loves the pool of 11% and say, well, a, which one is that? Because Brian's worked for these folks and I can guarantee you they're not parking large amounts of money into something back by quote UN quote, back by Bitcoin with all the negative assurances. But on top of that, would you just price your risk and go into an 8% or wherever your private credit or facility that you would go and price that risk more effectively and size it So that that's one component on risk. The other thing that gets just completely lost in all this sauce that we're talking about with Bitcoin and dats and and MicroStrategy is a you take Bitcoin as is pristine asset and the thing that it does. And then you start to layer on more risk in effectually affinity, affinity like level attachment that you're assuming is going to give you professional slash confidence in the market. Meaning like MicroStrategy is its own beast in itself. It had this, well, it, what is it called Immaculate Conception, where it came about, people got in, there was a large base that got in early. They're sitting on gains. They're the some of the only debt investors that actually weren't insiders that were able to go back and look back at the appreciation. And they're, they're sitting in a capital gain, not loss. So you take that and it's an experiment. We don't know how it's going to work out. It's not guaranteed to work out. We don't have to even go into custody. In that 17 years, there hasn't been a custodian. There's an angle where I was thinking about it. It's actually riskier that he segregates the Bitcoin because if you think about it, it doesn't matter if it's Coinbase that goes down and he holds it all or if he has Coinbase, Fidelity and Anchorage, if anything happens at one of them, the whole stock is just done. It's toast, right? So you have that and then so that you can layer on the risk and we can talk about Stretch and how the the associated risk doesn't price it. And then you layer on the DAT trade, which you would think would be objectively doesn't make any sense like digital credit and all that, where the prices, the retrace, the volatility, the insiders that made their money. But for some reason it's just still held as at this thing is amplified Bitcoin, which is a funny term in itself. So there's just so much baked into there that individuals and then once somebody's pocketbook is invested, it gets really hard to back out of it. Like as an investor, it's the hardest thing if you play poker, the sun cost fallacy, throwing good money after bad. So if you're sitting on, you know, 80% drawdown and you were told that yes, of course it's going to go down greater, but it's also going to go up greater and that has to be perpetuated. Well then of course, you're like, well, why would I do this? And so you tie all that together, I think it all comes back to Bitcoin is just really hard. You have to manage it through volatility. You have to manage it to figure it out. Custody, it's a new form of money. There's new forms of custody for that new form of money. And it's a lot easier just to be told you can just make more money on just parking it in your brokerage account and being good with it. And that's how we're here in this state. And also a lot of people felt like they missed out on Bitcoin, so they're hoping to make up that retrace. So this is human psychology. This is where we're at. This is a tempered approach to it because I realize a lot of our clients and investors along these assets and again, everyone can do what they can do. And we have to recognize that us on this side of the table may be leaving upside, but we sleep at night knowing that we're saving, not investing. In the same way, you have to realize that if you're along these assets and continue to be long, then you may be leaving back when on the table and then everything just shakes out and everyone goes about their day. But I just think that there's not actually enough of the nuance that breaks this down. And then the last thing that I think is the most important, because you guys hear it enough, so I'm ending with this is if you don't have the custody right in all of us, you're just building a house on rocky or, or faulty foundation. Because you can say all these things about digital credit and everything above it, but if you discount the underlying and say that one bad thing, and this isn't like it's never happened for 17 years, all we've had is bad things happen to the underlying custody. So to assume that's never going to happen and bake everything your career and everything you're doing on that makes zero sense because it's saying that it's never going to happen again. And what would be the bowl case for no custody failure to ever happen again? It would be high. It would be incredibly high. Yeah. I was actually just having a call yesterday with SO someone looped me in with their advisor who manages their own team on Goldman Sachs private wealth. And we had this exact conversation where actually this advisor had previously allocated his own Personal Capital as well as I think a few clients into some actively managed crypto fund in the past. And the fund just totally closed down, never returned any capital because I'm assuming just everything went to zero. And so we had that conversation because he is now incredibly soured from that experience. And it was now trying to understand how our business is different. And of course, everything that we do is different because we're Bitcoin only, We're a passive business. We're not actively managing or recommending any clients to actively manage a crypto portfolio. But Michael, to your point, I mean, a lot of people are now on the sidelines because all they have either experienced directly or read about indirectly are failure after failure, scam after scam, fraud after fraud. And so it's just not an asset class that most people have been able to get comfortable with. And so I just share that anecdote because I know for every one person that I speak to that feels that way, there's hundreds if not thousands of others that are in the same exact situation and will not allocate to this asset class, even still with all these new products going live in the Wall Street complex. Yeah. And I think it's important to call out, you know, there is, there's two aspects of that. One of them is simply that these are theoretical, like we've never seen a Bitcoin, we've never seen an asset like it. 17 years in, it seems to be working. But anybody that's ever tried to build credit instruments on top has generally generally blown up. They've either lost all their funds. You can go back to FTX, Celsius block file, you can just go down a whole list. And so the notion of a treasury company, I I think we believe doesn't or does have any fundamental relevance. But also when you just look at it is it's truly a closed end fund, similar to an ETF, and those should trade as a trade at a discount to NAV because you ultimately have management resources and capitalization that's required to keep it afloat. So if anybody was doing diligence here and you can run it through perplexity, you can see what these teams are making. You can see their shareholders. So there's a whole level of just governance that nobody's really talking about when you look at some of these firms. And then also when you look at the amount of capital that's leaking and that's eating into your upside via the payment structures from these execs. I think a lot of firms are out there doing this because they don't necessarily want to get sued. They have to keep keep it going because of the retracement they've seen. So that's one. The other one is and this one's really like near and dear to our heart. And it it matters is the whole game is not to mess us up in Bitcoin. Like it's the first time that you have this money like instrument that reduces all the counterparty risk and everything associated. Why everyone listening here and everyone appreciates it. And you also get the upside of take whatever instrument you want, private credit, venture, growth equity, everything, it's all wrapped up into it because we're in the monetization phase. We're never going to get this chance again. So if you leave the, the, the Bitcoin on the side because you wanted your 11% to keep pace of inflation, like more power to you. But we're just going to keep saying it because it's just true. And it's going to be on the right side of history. And if people don't like it or it is what it is, but also if we're known for that and we're right, that's how you build a generational business because we explain the differences, we explain the trade-offs. And when everyone was running into this burning building, we're telling them, look, there's risk associated. And if it never happens, Bitcoin's still going to do its thing and it's going to outpace its kegger. Conservatively, depending on the time frame, anywhere between 30 to 80% annualized is definitely better than 11%. Keeping pace with inflation, which is if it works, is not going to stay at 11 percent. The only other thing I'll say, we don't have to spend too much more time on it, But I think the other thing I think worth calling out is like the proponents of all this stuff, whether it's the dats specifically or, you know, stretch, they kind of talk out, talk out of both sides of their mouth in the sense of like who who is being marketed towards? Who are the cohorts that should be buying this thing? Because I agree with the notion that like, you know, if you have the majority of your net worth and spot Bitcoin and you want to speculate with some percentage of that, like go right ahead, buy some dats, buy stretch for some some income potential. But I think the problem is that like these products are genuinely marketed to retail. I think like, you know, 80% of the holders of stretch are what you would consider retail. And so that's the reality. But then at the same time, they say, well, these products are necessary because institutions can't handle bitcoins volatility. So they need this tempered sort of capped upside instrument to benefit from Bitcoin Bitcoins appreciation in a more. Steady income oriented way and they're so they're saying two things at once that this is for institutions who can't allocate the spot Bitcoin for all these various reasons. But at the same time, the reality is like retail is being marketed these things. They're being fed the AI slot memes for Michael Saylor's Twitter feed to say this, This is Money market like this is risk free digital credit like that's geared at the unsophisticated retail participant who just wants the 11 1/2% and doesn't understand all the embedded risks that we're that we're discussing. So you can't really. You can't have it both ways and I. Think that's that's frustrating it's a great call out because it doesn't take it goes back to money doesn't grow on tree trees and if it's too good to be true it's too good to be true in the sense that, you know give a shout out. He had a lot of good bangers. But if you go to Odell's Noster, he had even Madoff didn't promise 11 1/2 percent that there is a reality that a lot of this stuff gets mixed in the maze of what you said. It's like, well, this is for different capital pools. And then it's like, OK, but everyone that works for these firms were Bitcoin podcasters to appeal to retail for it. So it's like, because if you think about it objectively, like those aren't credit experts. Those aren't those are Bitcoin pockets. Those are retail influencers. So why did you stick your neck at the board level across the deal with whatever firm for that individual if your target is institutional capital and then the other side of it. So then you have the AI slop and the memes and all that, but then the other side is you still forget. Like not we forget, but the market still thinks Bitcoin speculative because if they didn't, they would have gone and bought a bunch of it via the ETF. Even Harvard had like .03% allocation. So you don't just bypass the speculation by saying, oh, Bitcoin is speculative for you to hold in spot, but you can have this instrument that's built on top of it with no assurances and now it's all good. Like that's doesn't work. That's why I like a lot of these companies with the credit on real estate and all that. They were always like, didn't make sense. Because the way I liken it is if you went to an institutional allocator, it's like you took them the stake that was the return profile. And then the second you had to back into, because you're going to have to back into, how do you get the return? You just sprinkle this poison on top of it. And guys, I don't want to be poisoned. I love Bitcoin, but the reality is there's a stigma associated in these rooms with Bitcoin. So you're taking this beautiful stake and then you're effectively saying, oh, it's all built on this other thing that you don't believe in, you won't allocate to, but trust me, I'm going to make sure you deliver. It's it just doesn't make any sense. And the last thing I'll say is there will be credit products, there will be all these things built on top of Bitcoin, but we're still early in its monetization. So if you amplify it, you're going to amplify yourself to the downside, because that's what happens when you have, you know, very strong assets is if you amplify it too much, you basically bought yourself up. And that's why leverage gets blown up in this industry. Well said. Let's that. Was a good pod for the week. We'll see y'all next week and thank you for tuning in to the last trade. Thank you. Please like and subscribe and let's let's look past the stretch stuff. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys, but are your loved ones? Billions of Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan. With On Ramp, inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup. Your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control, insured through Lloyd's of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com On Ramp secured by three controlled by me. We don't necessarily need to talk about this. I just like the I like the headline here because the NASDAQ logs longest winning streak since 2021 as investors look beyond war, just like, Oh yeah, you know, we're looking beyond it. It's over. We're going to hit new all time highs across across different equity indices now. But Brian, I want to tie this into something that you and this we're going to talk about signal or noise, something that you brought to the table this week. Degen wars. Let's talk about this. Kevin Roche, who's the next the Fed chair coming in, owns 30 plus crypto projects. And you're bearish. And I just want to call out this. I'm going to say out front, Brian, I want to hear your take. But I think it's noise. If anything. I feel like this guy's portfolio of shit coins is probably close to 0 in these different funds that he's allocated to. So he may be a little bit salty at the industry when he steps into the Fed chair position, but he owns all sorts of stuff here, social, blockchain, NFT, developer tool, web 3, commerce infrastructure. It's just all garbage in his portfolio. But I want to hear if this is actually something that you think is bullish for the Bitcoin space because I'll tie it back to the last headline. Look, we're just watching everything else hit new all time highs and now Bitcoin price is down 40%. So I'm curious what we what the next narrative is or what what are we cooking up here behind the scenes? Before Brian goes I just want to say this reminds me of like SPFS deal. Remember when they would go through his bankruptcy stuff and it was just like all of the. SPFS anthropic holding would be worth like 64 billion or something crazy right now and they they fucking sold for 1.3 or something crazy. Yeah. I mean, I I kind of agree with you. I think it's mostly noise in the sense that, you know, the fact that he allocated to a bunch of crypto funds is not super helpful for like Bitcoin specifically. I would say the only signal you can garner from it is like he's open minded enough to have done that to make those investments, to be thinking about the, you know, theoretical future of what a a new financial system could look like, even if all those things are garbage. You know, Lightning, it says Lightning Network on there. I don't think you can invest in the lightning Network per SE, but maybe Lightning Labs he perhaps had an investment in through one of those funds. But so it's not, you know, it's not only crypto. There was some Bitcoin stuff mixed in there. I think the take away is that, you know, we and we kind of already knew this before getting this like disclosure of all these investments that I think he was on the board of some digital asset companies prior to this. And he's spoken somewhat intelligently and positively about both digital assets and Bitcoin in the past. And so I would say it's just positive from the sense of it's it, it's part of a larger mosaic of the broader U.S. government officials leadership positions be more open minded and less outright aggressive and anti towards the industry in these assets. Like on net to me that's a positive. So yeah, I think that element of it is, is some signal. But I think, yeah, like the disclosure of all these things is mostly noise. It's just like, you know, this is a guy who at least is forward thinking about some some elements of this. This reminds me of I hate to bring it back to what you're talking about, but like, is there one thing with this? Wasn't this wasn't on the list, but there was the Trump stuff that happened with the it's always hard to pronounce because there's like an L between Wi-Fi or I think it is on the list. But let's get to it. Well, the reason, the reason why I'm bringing it up is because I think the thing we really forget about and this was like part of the the founding of this business is we had in 22 all these companies blow up. And the companies that blew up were actually suits from Wall Street that came into the space. And so it was going to be inevitable that we were going to see more of that because nothing fundamentally had changed from a market structure perspective. And so it's coming to like fruition or starting to look like crypto was this test net for Tradfi. When you think about all the speculation, the Lunas, all the crazy stuff was really this just like game area where we know the tokens don't make sense. Increasingly, everyone's realizing that, but they're layering on those same constructs into a Tradfi world that already blows itself up. Everyone understands that that is like long Bitcoin of the existing world of financialization, the amount of fees, the amount of risk embedded. And the reason why this is coming to mind is AI was going to say it earlier, but also like maybe these guys aren't that confident when you look at this guy in his portfolio. Like nobody in their right mind that knows what they're doing would would be into these things similar with like Trump and what's going on there that there is just really this notion of you brought crypto into the Trifi space. Trifi is already highly speculative, highly fee oriented, less value, more extraction. Everyone knows that. So why would it be any different when you start to layer in digital credit products and all these things where all these individuals and empirically this is true. Like objectively a lot of the people participating from the manager, investor, early investment are up and then retail is just left underwater holding the bag, which was how crypto did it's thing. So anyway, it's just funny because like, why would we expect anything any different? Yeah, no, I don't disagree with any of that. I think also, you know, you had Trump reiterating like wars is going to cut rates. So like if you want to take any other signal from just the more like fed chair responsibility role, like he not only is open minded to this kind of stuff and wants to see the tokenization of the world like Jamie Dimon now does as as sort of had his come to Jesus moment around digital assets. It speaks to a broader tone of acceptance around these assets. But then also like we need to, we need to pump this thing, we need to lower rates, we need to inject liquidity. Like you, you can start to read between the lines of of what he's going to do once he's the chair. Yeah, that's what I've like respected. You know what we've seen Morgan Stanley and Fidelity specifically what their conservative approach because Fidelity saying or specifically Morgan Stanley saying we're taking a long term approach here. We want to lower the fee. We see value. Now, obviously they'll play in other things, but there's not a lot of money to be made there and there's a lot of value to be delivered. Similar with Fidelity sticking their neck out as one of the first firms in tragified building custody and being really serious and prudent about like what they offer. Now, obviously they offer other crypto currencies, but there's still a lot of legacy inertia. When you manage 6 to $10 trillion and you have shareholders, it's very hard to be myopic about an asset class, even though we understand where the signal is. So point being, is this not to lump every Tragfire firm into that. There's firms that are thinking in generations, and I think Fidelity is one of them being a family owned business. And that's really why counterparties matter. There's no shortage of very sophisticated folks that understand the importance of custody, but then they have to work with the custodian and they tell their friends and family to go to Fidelity because they manage it. It's vertically integrated. Like there's a lot of value there. So I just want to call it out. It's not like tragifying the whole thing, but you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. Yeah, Should we talk a little bit more about the world liberty financial news of the past week or so? I saw this article from the Wall Street Journal that I thought was funny and ties into a lot of what we've discussed today, because this is about Justin's son, crypto entrepreneur. The headline says he championed the Trump's crypto venture. Now he's attacking it and this just goes to show that people are shameless about their grifting. And then once it backfires against them, then it, you know, it's a pity party. So this guy, Justin's son, invested, I think it was north of 30 million, Thirty million. It may have ended up being like 50 million or so in the initial fundraise for World Liberty Financial where I think they raised close to $600 million total. And Brian, you could probably fill in some of the details as to the news the past week. You may have been closer to it than I have. But essentially Justin son is now coming out. He says see you in court, pal to the the Trump family because he was unable to get his liquidity out of the World Liberty Financial token. And meanwhile, you have like the Trump family, they're just using these tokens that they raised or created out nothing. They're mean coin. They're using it to borrow like north of $75 million in stable coins. And I think they had about a $5 billion paper gain for the Trump family through this project. So it's just an insane grift all around. And I just think it's kind of comical that you have people that will participate in it, but then as soon as it starts to backfire against them, they're like the first people to go to bed. And I wouldn't necessarily compare this to what Stretch is doing. It's kind of a totally different thing. But I would not be surprised to see if it, if that trade ends up going South at some point, you're probably going to see a lot of the people who are the biggest advocate advocates for today would come out and and end up attacking sailors. So just like there's a lot of this infighting, people are on the same side until until the grifting doesn't go as planned. Yeah, I mean, this is it's sort of like typical defy shit coin or a shenanigans applied at like a massive scale where the the president of the United States and his family is involved like that. That's kind of the the broad strokes of what went on here. Like they, you know, created these these tokens out of thin air, as you mentioned, and then borrowed, borrowed a bunch of stable coins against it in the Super illiquid pools. And I think some of the allegations that Justin Sun is making goes even further than that. Like there was a backdoor element to the protocol, which I don't fully understand the mechanics of, of what he's accusing there or alleging. But the the end of the day, it's like it's we've we've seen this story before, Like you spin up these tokens that are worthless, you play these defy shenanigans around them to borrow against these pools which you just created. And then they rugged the thing, right? Like the the price of the token went down materially and they were able to siphon value out of it as insiders. And then that's just the same playbook we've seen for several years now in the crypto space. And so I mean, at a higher level, the the take away to me is like, we shouldn't be too surprised that there's still a stigma around crypto, digital assets and even Bitcoin because people can't disentangle why Bitcoin may be different from all this stuff. So they see these headlines, they see the Trump family involvement and say, you know, he's also championed Bitcoin. So it's all the same thing. So I'm going to be very anti this whole industry and believe it's all Ponzi, it's all a scam. It had it, you know, it all ultimately succumbs to these insider dynamics that are being sort of exposed here. And so I think, I think that's a real thing that's still sort of an uphill battle for even people that are principled in the Bitcoin space that we're up against is like these things are are difficult to shake in terms of the broader perception of of the industry. Yeah, All I can think about is going back to how elegant staying humble and stacking sats really is as a as a meme. It goes back generations or or you know, thousands of years in the sense of like you don't have to participate in any of this. You can just hold Bitcoin and outside of this recent downtrend from last year, you would be up in the green. And everything else is theoretical and like what the return profile will be, if ever this whole just angle of like what's going on, it's going to continue and persist it like the, I think the, I don't know, like the caricature of the industry and like Justin's son is like that. It's like that's also just this other component of Sailor and how it, we're good with it on the run out and we like that it pumps the bags. But the reality is you can see it's like drinking. You can see the hangover come in on the other side of it because whether it's institutional capital, the amount of concentration there, the amount of like governance and concentration and the reality of we saw this again, we called it and then saw it where these firms are puking out the coin on the, on the, the retrace. So the whole thesis goes out. I don't even know where they're trading at, what they're, what the plan is. If you puked out all the Bitcoin, if you're like sitting on a 50% loss after that, what what do you do? But the point being is that you just end up with a stigma as an industry that continues to persist even though it feels good in the short run. It's just not rooted in like fundamental soundness of, oh, I need this thing. It preserves it does this. It's just like this crazy kind of like orchestration. And that's why you see the memefication of it. Like it just feels icky when you go on Twitter and you get this like cult like falling and then it kind of just continues to persist. And then you're kind of crazy if you speak up about it. But again, objectively, empirically, there's one trade here that has put people in the green the whole time, minus whenever the little retrace is, which we've been in for like 6 months or whatever and it's holding spot Bitcoin and then just going back to your life. Yeah, I know we we've talked a lot about strategy today, but Michael, I I even forget that a lot of these companies have just ended up selling all their Bitcoin from last year pivot. And they don't say anything. They don't say anything. Like the thing, the thing I randomly stumbled on was there was like a pub Co that it wasn't even their Bitcoin that went public. And I really knew they didn't have it. There's all these companies out there that say have Bitcoin, blah, blah, They're like share was down and I randomly like just went into perplexity to get like what's going on? And like perplexity will just give you exactly equity research analysts tell you exactly. And they like puked out half their Bitcoin and nobody knows like they just thought they're holding all this Bitcoin. And that's just the stuff that you quickly search. A lot of this stuff's public, whether it's Mara Embry who we wanted to have or, you know, talk to and then like they don't hold any more Bitcoin anymore. It's it's crazy like. It wasn't Embry, but in this case I'm about to pull up at or talk about. It wasn't Emprey, it was another company. But I remember talking to the CFO and the CFO just learned about Bitcoin, maybe exaggerate a little bit, but like he'd just learned about Bitcoin like weeks ago and it was just brought in as the CFO for a treasury company because he had like treasury management, the background in in the traditional financial system. And I'm pretty sure that company has sold all their Bitcoin as well. So yeah, it's crazy man, just because I think a lot of people will will always anchor to the the strategy outlier here. They're just in a totally different league as it relates to all this. But if you look at virtually any other company, people are wrecked 99% and a lot of the companies they invested in don't even own Bitcoin anymore. So just a travesty all around. And this is just as we transition. This is why I went back to the whole like nuance of it gets conflated that Brian reference it speaking out of different sides of the mouth that the Bitcoin per share or whatever you have 5 to 10 different metrics that continue to change the nomenclature changes. I didn't even know about them until you see them about digital credit or amplified Bitcoin. But then you ultimately have MicroStrategy that's still sitting out there with some like semblance of like success, whatever you would call that. And then everyone's like, oh, this is the future because we sit with that. So you like have MSTR on Bitcoin kind of affinity doing their thing. And then if everyone else affinity on MicroStrategy and that's how you like make it impossible to get to the root of like how we got here. What's going on? And yeah, I mean, and the beauty is like, we could be completely wrong and we still have a wonderful business because the reality is there's embedded risk in this no matter what. And there will always be people with real money. And it's generally those people that control significant account capitals and pools and money that don't want any of that. They just want their make their state, they want it cold storage, they want to go back about their life. That's who we appeal to. That's our business. Like that's, that's what we do. It's always what we're going to do. And in a world that's short, that we're either very right or very wrong, and we'll live by it. But it's going to be a fun ride. This one this is this next one has to be my favorite one of the week When I saw this this morning I I had nothing to say just besides what the hell man like this is this is crazy I. Don't even know what you're going to pull up. I haven't. I haven't seen the list. Yeah, I just love this one so much. Struggling shoe retailer All Birds makes bizarre pivot from shoes to AI stock explodes more than 700%. I don't know if you guys saw this news today. I got a couple other ones here as well. You have the Bloomberg from Tracy Holloway at Bloomberg Companies pivoting the business to AI compute. They're a shoe company and they're becoming an AI company. I just love this one so much. And then this is from the Kobe SE letter. All Bird stock. All Bird stock was down 99% from its record high as of yesterday as the shoe company was collapsing. Today, All Bird stock is up as much as 875% after entirely rebranding as an AI company. Just like what the hell? This includes selling all the brands and footwear assets and rebranding to New Bird AI. What do they do? Acquire GPU. Yeah. So the the company will use 50 million of convertible financing facility to acquire high performance. Just stay humble and stack GPU. Holy shit, man, This is this is crazy. This is reminds me of I think it was in 2021 of all these companies just announcing that there are blockchain companies now and they just are doing that. They're doing the same thing, but. Yeah, Long Island Ice T blockchain company. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. But this also ties into how we got here because it's nearly impossible. It's like changing the atmosphere. Individuals whole portfolios and construct of financial literacy is around a 6040. They still hold the equity market as a credible source for pricing signals in a free market. And then you see things like that, that in a showcases that they're just the volatility Trump treats. Once you have 20% trillions of dollars sold off, you treat something else. It goes back. All these metrics, they're just like funny money, funny, funny tokens. And so you see what happens here. And that's how we end up here. It's like somebody has a 6040, they made all their money. They they're sitting on that. They've seen the gains. So it's really hard to disconnect another reality because you feel really smart. It's like everyone that's listening that's talked to a real estate investor, it's really hard to tell them about Bitcoin because they're like, I can touch it. I made my money, it compounded. They can't ever go back to zerk and recognize that maybe it was a low interest rate phenomenon. Why they're real estate compounded over inflation. It's almost impossible to convince that person. It's few and far between. It's the same thing here with the equity market that you show that it's actually there's no time to fundamentals and then everything else built on it isn't tied to fundamentals, but I can still make money. You end up in just having a back in and unscrew all the the maze that's been created there. Yeah. It's all narrative. I mean, this was a funny headline just in the sense that it kind of broke containment. Like I got multiple texts in normie group chats about the all birds stock spiking. But yeah, it's like if if something's down 99% plus people know the shoe business is worthless, then yeah, it would be logical that if they say something about stacking GPU's like it's going to spike like. You know, you think of GameStop, remember when they got bullied into putting all that Bitcoin in the balance sheet and then they sold it or they did, they did something crazy like do an option trades Coinbase. Option derivative trades on it. Michael, you got to somehow build a script in perplexity so you can find so you can have your equity research analyst find shoe companies that are pivoting to AI before it happens. Probably been better suited just buying bitcoins. I don't know man, you would have been up 800% today with your your new new bird AI. Well, there had to be manipulation, right? There had to be some crazy like small flow. New and went gig along. Yeah. Yeah, it's just crazy, man. I just thought that was that was a comical one. If the Bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London Insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. We get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three, controlled by me. Let's go back. Let's go back to something that happened in the traditional finance world. If we if we can. Brian, I think this is something that you flagged this morning or or perhaps yesterday. Eric Balchunas. Eric, I know you love the show. Appreciate you listening, man. Well, Eric broke some news about Goldman jumping into the Bitcoin ETF game. So there's a new filing for a Bitcoin premium income ETF. Now I don't know, is this signal, is this noise? I'm hoping one of you guys can tell me. I feel like we can make the case either way, but what are the thoughts here about Goldman's new product that they're filing for? Frank, can you bring down the construct first? Because my understanding is that like they're putting all the ETFs in it, right? So if it's that or if it's just like an option strategy like covered calls, like an income generation vehicle, OK, walk through. BlackRock has also announced something similar. Walk through this one. I think I saw something else by Goldman that's doing it like ETF of ETFs. There might be multiple, but I guess my take on it is it's signal in the sense that if you put it in the context of what we've seen over the past several weeks in terms of Morgan Stanley coming out with their spot Bitcoin ETF, it going live last week, doing pretty well in the first few days of trading. And then having another sort of Wall Street giant come into the fray to launch their own product with their name on it. And Goldman's been one that's, you know, similar to many of the others historically been on the sidelines sort of anti the industry, digital assets and Bitcoin. And so I think it's it's signal in the sense that again, they're seeing the writing on the wall of this thing's not going away. There's ways to make money from it. We should have our own products, we should own the distribution, we should be able to generate fees on it that we capture ourselves and instead of just letting our clients allocate to other firms products. So in that sense, I think it's it's signal in the sense of it's this continuing snowball of bending of the knee from these massive incumbent tried 5 firms and and banks that know they have to do something and and want to be involved. Yeah, I think it's this same product we're talking about it. I I think of it as signal and bullish because there was something we shared on final settlement Jackson from Arthur Hayes who recently said he took this approach of I don't care about clarity or genius or administration coming in pro or a negative. He was probably being hyperbolic was saying, I wish they stayed out in the sense that this was always going to go in One Direction because it's a retail driven phenomenon and that people want exposure. And I think that's what you're effectively seeing here with Goldman step in is that they have clients that want exposure. They probably need to justify doing something a little bit different to charge whatever fee they're doing. So you layer on this strategy, you're able to maybe double up on the percentage. But I thought that was really bullish from a market structure perspective because retail, we've always said this retail is the most sophisticated just by proctive being in the industry the longest. You've had to learn about it, how to learn a custody, etcetera, etcetera. And so as they demand better products, the market will have to naturally adapt to it or they'll just lose the flow. And so you obviously know where I'm going with that in the multi institution custody aspect is that it's just a matter of time when one of these larger firms figure out that strategy because they will just lose assets to another firm. And at first it'll just start because of credibility because the firm has a bigger balance sheet or longer standing. But then ultimately, when everyone's competing in that same field, then you start to look at counterparty risk. And so I think it's just really positive that retails driving the adoption and engagement from the Morgan Stanley's, Fidelity's, Goldman's of the world and Black Rock just with the ETF product. Yeah, I'm just curious, are they going to match stretches 11 1/2% yield? If they can't do that, then who's buying that product? No one wants the premium income ETF. But all seriousness, I think a lot of the education will just need to, it's happening so slowly. I thought it would be quicker, but I did that, that Goldman advisor I spoke to yesterday, I did send Chris Kiper's research from what was it last week or the week before from Fidelity about revisiting the, the case for Bitcoin in a portfolio. And I think that type of research just needs to be more broadly disseminated because advisors, if they actually are acting as fiduciaries in the best interest of their clients, they should at least be considering and reading some well thought out research about the merits of Bitcoin within a portfolio. And there's so much information out there, you don't even need to read a 30 page research report. You'd probably be better off because you'd learn a lot from it. But you could ask perplexity and to to run the numbers and, you know, build a couple portfolios for you to have a 1, three, 5% allocation of Bitcoin and see how that changes things. But I don't know, man, yeah, it's taking a little bit to to get these firms up and running, but it is client driven. And then the other thing too is since it is client driven and there's a massive transfer of wealth happening right now and just will be happening for the next 20 years or so. The younger generations that are inheriting, whether it's on the older side, Gen. X, but mostly millennials, Gen. Z, etcetera. They have an, an affinity for Bitcoin digital assets for DraftKings and prediction markets and all all this other shit as well. But I think they're more of, as we know, the younger generations are more just naturally inclined to allocate to Bitcoin, saving Bitcoin than their parents or grandparents would be. So it's a slow game, but we're we're going to get there. And I think we'll probably see announcements like this almost every single week for the rest of the year. There'll be some sort of new product being teased out or filed or something happening in in Wall Street. So we'll continue to monitor the situation there. The next thing I'll pull up is this one. So sad. This is the sad corner for the last trade now. Boy, I feel like a subconscious, I was going to share it, but you know, we saw your grandmas about it. What you're really saying is I thought I was going to be quicker. Like I thought I was going to get out of my grandparents attic or wherever you're at quicker and it's just not playing out that way. That is true or wherever you're recording from the the undisclosed location. Americans have never been this pessimistic about their financial situation. A record 54% of consumers say their financial situation is worse compared to a year ago due to higher prices. This has rigid risen 900% since 2021. So this index, which is measuring the sentiment here, currently more Americans believe higher prices worsened their financial situation than at the height of the 2008 financial crisis. Percentage is even higher than that of the 1970s and 1980s when the official CPI inflation rate exceeded 10%. Furthermore, US consumers are now expecting inflation to rise to rise 4.8% over the next year, the highest rating since June of 2025. Well, I think inflation is just really tells the entire story because when you think about something like the 2008 financial crisis, a lot of people we're in a bad situation because of what happened there. But I think what we fail to appreciate is, is that typically makes more of a splash. Those types of events make more of a splash. They draw in more attention. But I think inflation really is the silent killer and it, it just effects a way, way larger group of people. Like, I, I would need to really think about how many people I know personally, whether it's like, you know, family, friends or friends of family, etcetera, that were really materially impacted in the 2008 financial crisis. I'm sure there are a few that, you know, lost jobs, maybe even foreclosed on homes, etcetera. But when you think about inflation, it is way more systemic and it affects every single person, not just people who are losing their jobs or are having troubles paying the mortgage. It's affecting everyone. And so this is a yeah, this is a tough, tough thing to look at just because we, I know everyone feels this somewhere than others, just depending on how much cushion you actually have. I think we're all in a pretty good spot here, generally speaking. But yeah, when when you look at stuff like this relative to even the 70s and 80's. The other thing to call out too is the official CPI inflation rate exceeded 10% during those decades. But then the CPI of today is not the same as before. So I know all sorts of things have happened to those government metrics. They're all they're, they are just incredibly disingenuous. They're change in terms of the inputs all the time. And so I would have to look back and see if we were actually using the same type of measurement, I'd imagine that CPI would be way higher than what is reported today. So we always go back to Michael, your case for ground beef or just beef prices in general as a, as a good inflation indicator. And yeah, I mean, it's, it's tough out there, I think for a lot of people. And that probably partially explains stuff that you see like Ryan, some of your friends are texting you about all birds because people are just want, they just want to buy something and they want to make money, right. And it explains all the the momentum behind prediction markets and sports gambling on these financial platforms. Just yeah, just general general sentiment is not great out there. Yeah, 100%. I mean, just looking at that scare where it's at 4.8%, if they're expecting that, it's really probably closer to 15%, you know, and that's probably base case post, you know, whatever is going to happen with the blockade and oil and, and commodities and, and food in general. This is kind of personally really where I take offense to the whole amplified and digital credit stuff is because all this all this stuff's hard enough to like it. Just obviously it's the reality of what has always been sound of staying humble and second sets, IE money doesn't grow on trees and you just have to save more than you earn. Let it compound and there's no real like lottery ticket. And that's what all the these things are. We talked to clients and they're probably listening that talk about their their kids and that they make really well, you know, great incomes, but they're constantly at the bars and on Polymarket and they're just like looking at make it because they can't afford a home because that's in baked into a lot of this. And the inflation is just the cost of being able to afford a home has not kept up. Wages have not kept up with that. So that base level necessity has these like downstream socioeconomic factors when it comes to number of people having children, everything associated, just security. And that's like how societies crumble and that's how we see all this. That's why I like everything we've had to talk about. If you went back 100 years or if they could look at this and look why did they have to explain all of that? It's because that's how insane the world is that you are like in the minority to describe why you would take a conservative approach to building your wealth. And the the best example or what it's described, it's just dark matter. It just exists everywhere around us. And nobody can actually explain it, touch on it or talk about it because it is pervasive. It is embedded in every action and everything people do until they step outside of that hamster wheel. And that's effectively why we spent 45 minutes talking about all the stuff there is because that dark matter exists and it's hard for people to pin down. So yeah, it's, it's really sad. Yeah. Only thing I'll add is like Jackson, how you were initially describing like the sort of the events themselves, whether it's O 8 or other financial crises, COVID, you want to look at. It's like the the thing to keep in mind, it's like it's not the event itself that is the Super pervasive negative impact. It's that the quote UN quote cure or the reaction to said events is worse than the quote UN quote disease. And what I mean by that is like because of the way the Fiat system works, it's like when you do have those credit contractions or unwinds, the solution has been and always will be to print more money, continue to debase the currency. And that sort of spreads it out in a sense where like the individual in real time doesn't notice it as much, but it compounds over time in terms of inflation and debasement and, and that stuff only accelerating going forward. And we're just going to have more and more of those as we look forward. Like there's going to be more and more excuses to print a ton of money when things do start to break, whether it's private credit or global conflicts, generally, there's always going to be a reason to print more money. And that's just the way the world has worked really since the Federal Reserve was created. And then, you know, even more perniciously, once we left the gold standard and to be able to step outside of that, you know, it comes back to the notion of like financial literacy and actually understanding how the money works and what sound money is. And the principles of Austrian economics, which just like, you know, it's not taught in schools. And it's it's it's information that you have to go gather yourself and you have to have agency to be able to want to understand these things. And so the alternative to actually taking that initiative is you, you sort of slide into this nihilistic approach to the world where you, you inherently know the dollar is working against you. You can't save. And so you have to move out the risk curve, invest in the equity market, become a real estate broker, gamble, hit the prediction markets. And so that's kind of just where we're at. And it is, it's only going to get worse. And you know, if if expectations are 5%, like you said, Michael, not only are they probably higher than that, in reality, expectations sort of there's a self fulfilling nature to inflation expectations where if people expect prices to go up, then they go up even more. So yeah, not in a great place. Yeah, it's it's a true truest sense saying like the road just surfed and like post 2020. I think that's the thing that we really discount this really feeling is we passed the event horizon for this only accelerating because to your point, when the market tries to delever, you just have to print more back more Bitcoin, you have to print more dollars. And so inflation can continues that capital doesn't go to the places it should. So that has to cause a deleveraging. You get more dollars. And I don't really understand how people are going to get out of it outside of holding. I mean, you might hit a lottery ticket, but there's few and far between. You have to figure out gold or Bitcoin, What's your percentage? Because outside of that, like everything else in a nominal term is not or in a real term is not keeping pace with everything that you feel around it, whether it's home insurance, the home traveling. I mean, look at the flights with what's going on with the gas prices and oil prices going into like thousands of dollars, so. Yeah, stop complaining though man. The S&P 500 just hit a new all time high, has a recording 7000 on the index. Thanks for playing. One of the last things I know we got to wrap up here soon, but we got to call it out. People be careful out there. This is the Bitcoin. This is the honor of Bitcoin IRA sector point single point of failure of of the week. Jackson it's the honor Bitcoin IRA single point of failure of the week. We'll work on landing that a little bit better for next week. Michael, that was. A bit of a bit of a mouthful for a segment. Honestly, we had that. This is, yeah. But this is something that people should pay attention to and just be vigilant out there. So if you're not watching on video, fake Ledger live app on Apple's App Store reportedly drained for 9.5 million from 50 plus victims in just one week. And then I think I had a second one here as well. I don't know if this is true or not Scott Milker, but he says a friend was just hacked, got a new computer and downloaded the the Ledger wallet app and entered his keys. Well, you know, there's a number of things that you should try to avoid here, but generally speaking. Be incredibly careful anytime you're doing anything related to seed phrases, hardware wallets, you should be double, triple checking stuff because unfortunately there's a lot of sophistication out there and there's a lot of people who want to take your Bitcoin. And you know, when we're talking about $75,000 per Bitcoin, the stakes are pretty high. And that's why we talked about it so much, because unfortunately, these attacks will just become more sophisticated over time, whether it's from a software attack, a hard hardware attack, physical attacks, but just be mindful of that and, and make sure if you are in a position as well where you're guiding or shepherding, helping friends and family, they're asking you questions about Bitcoin. Just make sure that they, that they know to be reach out to you and you should be kind of working as their advocate as well. I remember getting, I think it was last summer, I, I received some emails from, I guess the swan data leak before. And one of my, some of my friends were on there too, from years ago. And one of my buddies like, thankfully he checked with me first because he was getting emails that were impersonating swan about all this stuff. But he was very close to getting his account his his fun strain too. So I just call this out because it seems like something like this is being discussed every single week on Do we have time for a last take? Michael, are you are you checked out after we made fun of your your Bitcoin, your on ramp Bitcoin IRA spiel? No, we can't do elastic. I saw the the gold on that list. What was the gold ETF flows? And then and the reason why you're pulling it up, the reason why I'm bringing it up is because I saw something from Lou Grohman that was saying it was really reported under the radar. But like I'm reading this, yeah, it's something different. But it was effectively like net exporting gold was like the largest, the most gold is left the US in the past, like I want to say 3060 days. And the the point was that China for rare earths is not accepting anything except for gold from the US. So they're not taking dollars, not parking and treasuries. And I went to look it up like it's true. You can Google it. But I thought it was fascinating because that's not really being discussed. And they're not even necessarily shipping it to China. I think the way that he was able to back into it is because they're going through like Swiss base brokers that have to maintain whatever Ledger and management. And and that was like what came about. And I thought it was just fascinating because if you really start to see commodities trade breakdown from dollars, the ramifications for that when it comes to gold, but then also, you know, just dollars and bonds. Just something to pay attention to. Yeah, that can be your last take. That's a good one. Brian. What do you got here? There was a good tweet I'm trying to find from Safedeen, which kind of relates to what we've talked about here today, but he was basically breaking down why like value itself doesn't necessarily need to be tangible. And I think that's a something that a lot of people struggle with when they're looking at Bitcoin here I got. But he breaks down basically that, you know, if you look at the equity market, the vast majority of the value of these companies, whether it's a mag 7 or otherwise, are tied to, you know, intangible assets. These these things aren't you can't touch the mass the majority of the value here. So about 6% of these valuations are actually tied to physical assets. 94% of the value is non physical. If digital things have no value, then you should have no problem giving me your computer to erase all the data from it. I'll return your computer to in the same exact physical form. Technology, data, business knowledge, consumer base, brands and so much more are non physical assets whose value likely exceeds that of all the planet's physical objects and land. Most people think about their money is physical, but in reality most Fiat currencies today are 90% plus digital and usually less than 10% of the supplies physical paper money. Bitcoin is entirely digital money, but it is given value for far more intelligent and peaceful reasons than Fiat money. And so he's just talking about sort of a historical common objection to Bitcoin's value for someone who's just beginning to sort of look at it seriously, is that, well, it's, it's digital, it's not tangible. How do I touch it? How do I feel it? And that's often the the analogy or the comparison people make when they think about it as like relative to something like gold, which you can't obviously, you know, hold in your hand. But he's making the point here that like everything is sort of faith or belief driven at the end of the day and and value is derived from those beliefs. So, you know, if people stop believing in the value of Bitcoin, it can lose its value. But that's true of everything, whether it's gold, certain equities, real estate. And so I thought this was just a good, a good tweet, sort of just in the vein of the type of education that we need out there and need to to permeate. Because, you know, the equities that you think are your savings tool are just as fallible, if not more so than, you know, a, a real store value, a type of money like gold or Bitcoin, in the sense that, you know, not only are these companies here mostly intangible value, but the thing that makes them different from, you know, actually just holding real money is that there's competitive forces at play here. So like, you know, there's all embedded risk in terms of management execution and then just competitive forces in the market that you have to consider that makes makes these things not money empirically, even though they're they are used and perceived as sort of store value assets. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client Advisors.
Transcript source: fountain