Transcript+
Let's be clear, Bitcoin is an international asset. We are spending like drunken sailors. Bitcoin is the only economic entity. Where the? Supply is unaffected by the demand. If you want to preserve your wealth, you have to convert that currency into an asset that's scarce, desirable, portable, durable, and maintainable. This meeting is being recorded. Yes, both sides, I believe, Andy. So you're recording too. We got it. Technical difficulties dealt with. How you doing boys? Great to see you, Princey. I'm well. How are you? We're good. We are very good, mate. Thank you very much. Lawrence here, obviously. Jesse, what's up with you? How's it going guys? Jesse's, Jesse's had a haircut and Andy just keeps looking younger each time I see him. I wish. You're very kind, Princey. You're very kind. Kindest man I know. What's going on? Andy's been Andy's been hanging out at at Muscle Beach, I think. Right, I was going to say, what do you like employees of on ramp? Do you get a free gym membership or something? And like free Barber? What's what? What are the company perks? You know, it's all about employee benefits these days guys. So didn't you? Were you not aware? No perks that I'm aware of. They don't even hardly pay for editing for for our podcasts that we do. The main part is you get to talk about Bitcoin. Well, yeah, you get to hang with Jesse and and and talk about Bitcoin and discuss multi sig and multi institutional multi geographical Bitcoin custody. That's what Lauren's here for. Am I right? Definitely not just to say hi since I have no questions, but. I just said like 3 really weird things. Yeah, multi sig, did you hear that? Yeah. What do you think that is? Oh, that's what you want to get? Into yes, Laura, after 500 shows we're we're just about getting there as a as a partnership. Stronger than ever. Yeah, what is a multi sig? Sure. You want to take it, Jesse? You want me to? Go for it, Andy. Yeah, so as you know, Lauren, to move funds and access your money on the Bitcoin network, you need a key, right? And multi sig is a, it's a part of the Bitcoin protocol. It's native to the software that allows you to require more than one key to move funds, to move money. And so it makes it so that if you've got some arrangement where you don't want any single person to be able to move money, you can give multiple keys to multiple people and require them all to sign. Or if you don't want someone getting your keys or you don't want to have personal access easily to your keys, and therefore you want to require yourself to have to have multiple keys to get the money, you can do that too. So it allows for a lot of interesting ways to improve security of, of holding Bitcoin funds. That's what I would say about it. Yeah, agreed. Did that make sense at all, Lauren? I'm going to try and. So it's basically you keeping your keys to yourself or to other. People kind of thing. But this, Lauren, what if you had a box with 100,000 lbs in it, British pounds, and you had one key to the box and you were worried that someone would find that one key? You know, maybe you'd want to hide, maybe you'd want to require 2 keys, 2 locks to open that box so nobody would steal your money. And that's one thing that multi sig multiple signatures can require. Does that make more sense? That's the analogy, exact analogy I was going to go with. So let's pretend upstairs in your bedroom, you've got your Piggy Bank, right? Imagine that's a box. And on that box there's three padlocks, and each padlock has a unique key. You would have one key. I would have one key, and maybe your best friend might have one key, so the only way you'd ever be able to get to that money is all three of us turned up and opened at the same time. Might be especially useful if a if a burglar came into your house and you know, God forbid, held a gun on you or something, then you couldn't cough up the money. You'd say I only got one key and more than one key is required. OK. Yeah, yeah. So that's that's multi sig explained to a 13 year old. But we do that on Bitcoin network using Bitcoin software, the protocol and it's a little bit techie I was. Going to say, I think I'm going to be a bit complicated, not a bit more complicated than that. Yeah, and that's what on ramp Bitcoin are trying to solve for people. So they help their customers set up their multi sig volts. Yeah. Yeah, Lauren, that what So what we do, what Andy and I do with on ramp is we help people have multi sig wallets where they don't have to set up and manage and control their own keys. And instead they hire 3 separate institutions that do this for their business so that they have higher, they're hiring professional key holders to to hold a key on, on their behalf and in, you know, one of these three key setups. Yeah. And we should state, actually I don't know why we didn't start with this, but multi sig is is short for multiple signatures. Why didn't we think of that? Guy lesson, lesson learned. After years of explaining how things work on Bitcoin, we're still all terrible at it. Yeah. Yes, you're in the weeds. OK. So yeah, does that make it and when when you use your Bitcoin hardware wallet for example, that is also known, it's not a hardware wallet, it's a signing device. So that is making a signature for you. The only you would be able to use because it's your device and you have the password and the pass phrase to it. That device is signing the yes, you own this Bitcoin, and yes, where it's sending to or being sent to is a valid Bitcoin address. Yeah, yeah. I think that would have been a better start. All right, multiple signatures guys. All right, let's get it on the website like, you know, let's. Fair enough, well played, Lauren. Lauren, do you, do you ever use, do you ever do Minecraft? I used to but I don't have it anymore. She's moved past, moved on to better things, just like Satoshi or. Honestly, no. I would have had it if I could, but it was on a different device and that broke down like years ago. But what were you? She's very knowledgeable of Minecraft. I only ask because because my 12 year old's, my 12 year old's into it right now and I thought I might be able to talk about something cool, cool and Internet Y that she might be into. That's not Bitcoin. OK. Lauren, do you do you miss France or are you happy to be in in England? I literally film nothing. Yeah, all right. It's been a seamless transition other than like the, the, the mess of everything and, you know, moving the, the things. Yeah, it still feels as though we're on a home swap or something. Yeah. It's like kind of on holiday, but with all of our stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It's been good, been, yeah, it's been, it's been a good one. It's been fun. It probably doesn't hurt me as much because I know I'm going to go back to France. If we like lived in Asia and then moved to Europe, I know that's a harder place to go to. In just 20 days, we're going back to France and when we go for a walk along the the, the sea front here on a clear day, you can see France, it's just right there, right across the water. You're on the South, so you're in the OK, you're in the near the channel. Yep. Good for you. Oh yeah. Beautiful murky waters, big Stony beaches. How is it cold? Yeah, big white cliffs, that's. Right, they are very close, the White Cliffs of Dover. Yeah, you've been wanting to go swim in the sea. I know I just got to find the right time. I'm going to go do a cold plunge in the in the channel there. Swim the channel, aren't you? Aren't you a princey? I won't be doing that. Certainly not. I'll go for a dip, but no, no swimming. All right. Well, thanks for your questions. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Bye bye. See you soon. Bye bye. Yeah, guys. So I mean, we usually do the macro monthly that turn into the macro BI monthly that turn into like should we just do this every quarter because we can't organize ourselves? And so here we are back October time, that time of recording what has happened since we last chatted. And let's start with, let's start with on ramp because that's what you're building, that's what you're both involved in. What has what, what strides forward have you taken? What's changed within the company over the last, let's say 6? Months, yeah, six months. The number one thing is momentum. I mean, there's a, there's been a lot of new client signups. The product keeps getting better. It's really cool now. I think the format we've always known that we are, we have a great format for for to offer the market of here's a, here's a potential custody arrangement that depending on your circumstances, could fit into what you're doing already or could be right. For someone who's just coming into the market and isn't tech savvy and doesn't feel like you know, they're up to the task for self custody, but knows enough to know it's not wise to leave your funds on, on exchange anyway. We've always known we've had a, we had a good format and the product has gone from a year ago, I'd say it was pretty clunky to now it's like pretty slick. The user interface and all of the, the steps and processes and engineering behind the scenes is really quite, quite cool. And, and I think people have heard about us a lot more now versus 6 months ago. And so we're getting out, you know, a lot of a lot of sign ups. It's it's been pretty exciting to see. So that yeah, I guess that's the the big, the big, the big news on the on ramp front is, is that people are are really starting to take interest in adding this form of custody to their existing self custody. I think that's kind of the most common scenario. Our most common client is someone who feels a little uncomfortable with all the responsibility of a multi sig setup or even collaborative custody setup. Where at the end of the day you have all the majority of the technical and security burden on you and it leaves you worried at night a little bit. You know, just in case you have some vulnerability you're unaware of or if you screwed something up and you have all your eggs in one basket. So I'd say our most common client at this point is someone who's been in that circumstance and wants a little bit more Peace of Mind of having multiple baskets with different that are different custody arrangements. So, you know, keep your keep your collaborative custody, multi sig self custody set up and then add a multi institution custody vault. And then based on however it feels comfortable, split your assets between those two forms of custody and and know that you've kind of distributed your risk between two custody formats. So I think that's, that's kind of the, the, the most common pain point that that we're helping to solve at this point in time. Yeah. And, and that is, you know, probably the number one question we get of like, OK, so 33 separate institutions hold a key, but doesn't that mean that a person from two of the institutions, you know, they could collaborate, collude and you got one guy in one institution and one guy in the other institution and they, you know, sign a transaction to, to sweep out your account. But it, you know, it doesn't work that way at an institution. It's not like Bitco's hold is, has one guy with a, a hardware wallet in his desk drawer. And like that's, you know, that's how they're running their multi billion dollar business, their institutional grade key arrangements and then institutional grade processes, personnel access controls and physical access controls that make it so you'd have to, you'd have to have a half dozen plus people in any institution on board and then break all of the personnel and physical access control protocols in place that are, that are designed by each institution in order to be, you know, in impenetrable because, because their entire business relies on them not screwing up something like that. And you know, like in Bicco's case, because one of the key holders for us and they're, they are running the same processes to with that, with that particular key arrangement for an entire ETF. So you know, they're protecting an, an entire ETF with 1/3 of the security that we're that's involved in our custody arrangement because that's one of the keys for us and it's, you know, the entire ET FS protection for, for that ETF. And I, I've got a question about that because there's been a little bit of noise and I've not, I'm not completely up to, to speed on it, but we'll park it for now because I think the pledge listening, I'm probably thinking right now, huh, OK, so multi sig and inheritance because I was just playing around on a dashboard earlier and it's been a while since I logged in actually. And I do remember actually when I was when we were going to and from and I was testing it out when you said, oh, it used to be quite clunky. It is way slicker now when I, when I was on it and take a look at it. And I remember actually when I was doing the practice deposit and withdraw my I had multiple phone calls. I think from bit go you had to go through at least two people, if I'm not mistaken. So that, you know, to your point, the the the chances of there being some kind of collusion between like, you know, bad actors at these different places is, is almost what I just, yeah, I don't want to say never, but. Right, right. So and the last thing, you know, if if somebody if some bad actors at let's say bit go wanted to collude to steal funds, they wouldn't do it in a multi institution custody arrangement to sweep out oneplebs address. They would they would target the ETF that has, you know, the is solely protected by that that one key much more hanging. Fruit. Yeah, much more lucrative. Yeah, you also reminded me that the other big change over the last six months is we, we realized we, we can serve a larger portion of the market then because of our, our, our cost structures to serve an incremental client is it's, it's there's a lot of, there's a lot of fixed costs and then and then variable costs are not so, not so high. So we were able to extend our product offering to a bit further down market than than we previously thought. So our pricing now starts at $150.00 a month and so that's comes out to 1800 a year which is comparable or better than some of the other collaborative custody pricing structures out there. So you know if if people have heard of on rent before and thought well that's for you know for for bigger balances. That's kind of how we started and we have been able to expand our are offering to to folks who who you know may only have 100,000 or 200,000 that that and it starts to make sense to to factor that in at that point. So. Yeah, exactly. And that of course that price point will put people off because they will think, well I can just buy a hardware wallet for like 100 bucks. Right. Yep. And if you're comfortable with that one, it's because you're technical enough and you've, you've gone down the, you know, the learning curve to master what's needed there and good for you. Like, like do that. If you can handle self custody and you can sleep well at night, great. Like that's, that's an outstanding outcome. If your balance has grown a little too large for you to sleep comfortably at night. And then maybe that's it's worth looking into. And also like if you're, if you're, if you're trying to get your dad into into Bitcoin and and you're trying to find the right place to, to get him to buy Bitcoin and have it be protected, We can do that. And that he can set up with on ramp, buy Bitcoin at at institutional rates, So like very low trading fees and then have it settle to multi institution custody. So it's vastly better outcome than you know, if he was to buy it on Coinbase or set up his own hardware wallet and screw it up and lose it. And and to him like to to, to carry on that thread with like onboarding your dad, for example, is login. Here's a slick looking website. It's very professional looking. Here's a little dashboard. This is exactly you know what you're holding. This is where you can just hit the buy button, which I think is an upgrade since we last spoke, I can't remember. I think you're just rolling that out so he can buy Bitcoin directly. He can deposit dollars into it. It's just like a a Charles Schwab trading account. You know, it's, it's what we're going for. It's nothing. There's nothing too complicated there. It's not this weird, strange world of Bitcoin. It's like, oh, this just looks normal. So I deposit dollars, I buy Bitcoin and they go straight into multi C You won't even know what those words mean. Multi C you won't need to because to him it'll just be my online. Vault. My online Bitcoin trading account, like if, if that's and the learning comes later. But yeah, to to onboard more people. I think is is critical and key and this is what we're trying to do every single day as plebs on the street. So to have this offering, I think makes a hell of a lot of sense. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. And it, it keeps getting, keeps getting better, which is it's, it's been very exciting. So anyway, I mean, we can talk about other things, but if anybody's interested in learning more about the product, just go to on rampbitcoin.com and click schedule consultation and, and we'll, we'll tell you all about what it is and, and, you know, ask about your, your circumstances and needs and, and maybe it's for you or maybe, you know, we'll point you towards what's right. Yeah, exactly. And if they use that code bits and they will save on the fees, 250 bucks. And last thing about the fees people, again, all right, if you've been investing in a classic pension scheme or index fund or mutual fund or whatever, take a look at those fees. You're used to paying fees, believe me. And they're probably a lot higher and the the asymmetrical gain of what you're holding in a multi sig Volt compared to your fees, it's just going to go up, up the value compared to the fee. You know, the fees are just going to stay, right. They're not going to go up a little bit, but nothing near as much as what you're holding. Yep. All right, Andy, let's bring it in. Well, let me, let me well, let me tell you what I've been having fun with it on Ramp, which is which is our podcast. And we came out of the gate strong. We we first few episodes were Preston Fish and Jeff Booth and Lynn Alden and we had Pierre and Morgan, Richard and Breedlove and Mark Moss and Gladstein and Samson Mao, Dan Tapiero, VJ Lavish, Natalie Brunel and Sam Callahan 2 Fer Then we had Scaramucci and we we we've been going through the the BPI crew, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Matt Pines and Troy Cross and David Zell, the founder and Ovic Roy who's an advisor. And then we just. Those guys are all so smart, by the way. It's incredible, yeah. So smart, I mean, but just yeah, in my opinion, well, they're my favorite Bitcoin organization, you know, non company organization. And then we had Tomer. Our episode of Tomer just came out and we recorded with the the great whale himself, Michael Saylor, and that'll be episode 21. Nice. Yes, Yeah, Well done. I've got lots to catch up on. I've listened to a few and I was listening to one earlier on actually. So the world of podcasting we've. Learned from you, learned from you, princey. Just been watching you work your magic over the years here and you know, for some reason decided it would be a good idea to to, to try it out and see what happens and, and it's been great. It's been a lot of fun. At Onramp, 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. Onramp 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. Onramp 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 onrampbitcoin.com. Francie, I have, I have a question from our our sailor episode. A major topic in that I want to get your thoughts on was Bitcoin yield, you know, and, and are there ways to do it in a, in a way where it is, it makes sense from a risk perspective or not? What do you think? I, I always default to Alan Farrington. Where does the yield come from and the yield of the friends you make along the way when it, when it comes to this particular. Yeah, how how can you set it up? I like, I I've yet to like. See a. So Taylor's argument, which I find very compelling, is that I think, I think there's an, an unstated assumption in here of like for the short to medium term, like, you know, decade, a decade or so, this is probably viable of if you can borrow from, from JP Morgan, is it borrow or lend to, I guess Andy I. Don't know you're the one explaining this. So you're already in a mess. So you you've have you got to. Give to. JP Morgan, like, is that what you have to do first? Because I'm out straight away. Yeah, I guess the the idea is that JP Morgan is as good as the US government like it, they're connected. And so if if you're if you're yield is coming from JP Morgan. Control the US government, I think is what you're trying to say. Yes, controlled and backstopped by the US government. So if they're saying, you know, we'll give you a 5% yield, you know, we like, let us, let us borrow your, your, your money and we will give you a 5% yield on it, then that's, that's bankable or, or at least, or at least that's, that's low enough risk that it actually makes sense to do that's I guess his argument. So. Which is of course problematic, you know, potentially problematic in that they can't print more Bitcoin. So, you know, if you had some event where Bitcoin just went bananas to the moon and you're or your assets, their liability denominated to you is denominated in Bitcoin. Like they owe you your coins back plus 5% plus the yeah, exactly. Plus the yield. Although they can I guess they can print that part maybe. But the and. I think that Sailor's argument is like, if they're good for the Bitcoin, they're definitely good for the yield, and that there is that assumption that they're good for the Bitcoin and they won't fuck it up. But yeah. Yeah. Who knows? Did you see Mike talk about usury that I went around? I think we're, I think Daniel's setting up his his views here. Yeah. So where does that like? So, yeah, let's say let's walk through it. Well, it's like with any loan, you go, any Fiat loan, you go, you want a mortgage, you want a car, you want a holiday, you want a couch, need the washing machine, whatever it is. And you go in to the showroom and you speak to the salesman. It's like, oh, well, come from you. Oh, it doesn't matter. It's 0% finance and you're, you're good to go because they've got the financial arm of whatever bank backing them underwriting the, the, the salesperson, the showroom. So where does that come from? Well, that's just like credit. It's an expansion of credit. It's not like with they're not literally at that point printing money into the system, but they are expanding the credit in the system. So we've got the, the monetary base that just gets wider, right? So that means at one point the monetary base is going to have to come up to try and meet the the credit at one stage. And this is what Parker talks about in his chapter, Bitcoins not backed by anything. I think we went through it. So the expansion of credit therefore leaves to quantitative easing, let's call it that, printing a shit ton of money to try and bring that. And we'll never get it into balance, right. There's never $1.00 out there for the one credit it it's like 12:50 or whatever that the, the numbers are at the moment. Now that that money that gets printed or this credit that just gets like it. So a mortgage is a perfect example. You will, you want the, you want the $500,000 house. You have $100,000 to deposit that $100,000 that you've accrued over the last 10 years of very hard work using your skills and your time and your energy to get the job in the 1st place and work your way out the corporate ladder. That $100,000 represents everything that you've worked for until that point. Now the bank will take that $100,000. Thank you very much. That's just a deposit and we'll give you the other 400,000 in form of a loan. That loan that's not printed at that point, but that is credit that's created and then we're going to charge you interest on that. Now the definition of usury is a an exorbitant charge of interest on lent money. Now if that money is counterfeit, it doesn't matter if it's 0.025% or 15% that you're being charged on it, it's usury because it was non existent in the first place. So that my argument with the whole yield thing with Bitcoin is that if I place first of all, I, you've, I'm not comfortable sending Bitcoin to JP Morgan. And I don't think there's any amount of small print there that you could wade through to be completely, 100% certain that they're going to be good actors in three or four years time, however long the term is for. And they will return the Bitcoin and goodness knows what kind of financial wizardry they're going to get up with to with it whilst they're holding it in that time. But they can return you to fit. Of course they can because they just like they, they just extend the credit. And So what does that do? Well, that instead of, so I know I've heard Sailor talk about dying with your Bitcoin to leave a legacy because you increase the purchasing power of everybody else around you after you've gone. Whereas what's going on right now the, the, the hundreds of millions that are being borrowed and just like printed is devaluing the purchasing power of everybody's dollars whilst we're alive. So there's two sides to every story. And the, the whole yield on Bitcoin thing, I don't know. A friend of mine is in Australia. He's trying to think of a way to do this where you would have fixed term, a four year fixed term and you would draw monthly, you would be paid out monthly in Fiat, but it wouldn't be with banks, it'd be with private investment groups, like multiple institutions that come in to provide the Fiat. Then where are they getting it from? So, you know, it's it's a difficult one. One thing that's happening talk about this with Lavera, is you know I. Think, I think we. Lost your mic, Andy? We lost your mic. We've gone. We've gone back to amateur. Amateur hour here. Per hour mic, Hold on. Yeah. So, Prince, I agree with your, your summary. I think, I think where I come out is that if I was in Michael Saylor's shoes and JP Morgan is, you know, it's possible to have JP Morgan as the counterparty. And you know, I'm valuing I'm, I'm trying to assess the risk of, of default, right, of, of, of non repayment. I think I'm assessing that risk it at 1% or less. And I'm, and I'm happy to take a 5% yield for the right position size, right? Like whatever that means to you. Like I'm personally, I would love to be able to, to lend 10% of my meager stack to JP Morgan and get those terms and get a little like a 5% yield knowing that I'm risking only 10% in that, in that 1% scenario of, of default. You know, I think I feel like so, so I see that argument from Sailor and I feel like I, I guess I'm sort of on his page in terms of like, well, JP Morgan's taking the risk and at the end of the day, like they're going to be backstopped by the US government and I'm going to be made whole, most likely. But there's a 1% risk maybe that I'm not. Yeah. My mind goes to 61 O2, right? I mean, the actual 61O2 attack that occurred in 1933, they had to print in the newspapers. Hey, you guys, get to your nearest Federal Reserve Bank representative bank and turn in your gold now because we're taking that off you. You're not allowed to hold gold. Now, if the same thing was to happen to Bitcoin and it's already in the banks because you placed it there to to to try and score a little bit of yield off it. And let's not forget, like who are the biggest thieves on the street? You know, if we were worried about a $5 wrench attack, I mean, that can happen. Somebody can steal your wallet and steal the $20 out of your wallet anytime. But like. So you're saying is is? Don't trust that small print, really. No, no, because that small print can be usurped and over read. That small print is a wrench, a giant, giant ranch. Yeah. And we, we know, we all know how the the Federal Reserve Bank. If not, then go and read the secrets of the Federal Reserve and look at JP Morgan's involvement in that setup and who actually owns the stake in the the Federal Reserve. And they are, you know, that they're ultimately calling the shots, as we know. And if they put pressure because they want to roll their CBDC out, let's hypothetically they want to roll out Fed coin, whatever, the first thing they're going to do is cripple Bitcoin. And if there's a bunch of Bitcoiners with their Bitcoin sitting, JP Morgan's coffers, one of the closest, most exposed stakeholders to the other Federal Reserve and what they're going to do, they're just going to rub you and they'll probably pay you out and it's OK, but we'll give you the Fed coin equivalent and the, the kicker on top. So, yeah, I, I mean, I've not spoken personally to Sailor about it, but I, I saw the conversation with safe. I look forward to listening to your part about it too. But for for the for the plebs, just just stack. Right, Yeah, for the none of us have access to the potential like negotiations that we, you know, that micro strategy could have with somebody like JP Morgan to say like, all right, here are our terms. Do you accept you're going to be paying us 5% yield under our terms? No pleb has access to that. So you would just get rugged by, you know, by tiptoeing into JP Morgan's world. Can you guys hear me again or is it still busted? Yeah. Come on, Andy, come on. I've been dying to get your take on this. All right, all right, all right. So a couple things. I was, I was talking about this on on Lavera last week, which is what's the other than Bitcoin? What's the big, what's the fastest growing asset class sort of new asset class in the world, anyone. It's this thing called private credit, and what it is, is it's so it's junk credit, OK, It's low quality or highly levered companies that have a lot of debt. This is the market that first sprang out of Michael Milken's head in the. 80s. Right back in the 80s, OK, Drexel made a killing on this, Milken went to prison. There's a great story there. People should definitely read it. Also, he's reinvented himself as a philanthropist. He runs one of the most exclusive and successful conferences globally. It happens every year here in LA, in Los Angeles. Anyway, that's a whole other can of worms. So the, the junk bond market grew rapidly in the 19, really the like the late 80s and and then into the 90s. Then there was a second low quality debt market that sprang out, which is called the leveraged loan market. And that was actually ongoing on the time, you know, when I was on Wall Street, maybe even when, when you were princey, although it might have been a little bit after your time. And it's basically a similar product. You know, you're lending to highly indebted companies, lower quality credits. There's a high risk of default, basically. OK. And what's happened, though, in the last decade or so is in a world after the financial crisis, the banks have actually been pulling back, reducing their lending to low quality or highly indebted companies. And who's stepped into the void, into the breach? It's the big private equity firms primarily. And they have launched these funds, which I think are a little bit similar to what you were describing, which is, you know, there's a bunch of investors, they have lock UPS on the on the funds. They raise funds for multiple years and then they go out and they underwrite loans to indebted, highly indebted companies. Some of them are just too small, frankly, to to issue bonds in the public markets. And so this is now more than a trillion dollar asset class. It's as big as the leveraged loan market. It's as big as the high yield bond market. But it is one step away from huge leverage embedded in the in in the lender itself, like a bank and moving more to toward a fund where you've got matched maturities, right? The capital is committed. You know, you underwrite loans, but the capital cannot be rugged or yanked. You know, it's not like a bank where people can pull their deposits. You can't have a situation like you had in the in the banking crisis 18 months ago. And so, yeah, frankly, it it results in less leverage in the lending system. And that I think is something more like what we'll see in the future with a Bitcoin based system is just overall less leverage in the system. But then, you know, the logical extreme, one of my favorite things about Bitcoiners is they go to logical extremes. And it's not hard to argue that, oh, maybe it won't be 100% this way, but maybe it'll just be 95% this way. And so my sense is that, yeah, they'll be much less debt in the system, much less credit in the system. But will some enterprising, will some enterprising entrepreneur figure out some wizzy new way to make it safe enough that some percentage of hodlers are willing to part with some portion of their stack, you know, to to get a little bit of yield? Yeah, I think that'll likely happen. It also could be much later. I mean it could be in a period when the annual price appreciation of Bitcoin in the annual it is much lower in the annual volatility, annualized volatility in terms of purchasing power is much lower. And that kind of a system fundamentally is less likely to go belly up and may be able to support some amount of credit. On top of Bitcoin, but that could be far away I mean that could be who knows that could be a decade or two away that. Could be 30 years. Yeah. I, I feel like the end state is there is some sort of Bitcoiners are able to achieve like to lend out their Bitcoin in, in a, in a future state where the price of Bitcoin doesn't rise a ton. And and you can lend out your Bitcoin and receive a, you know, with it with under contract of like a 1% yield in Bitcoin terms. And like that's about as extreme as you could ever hope for, you know, realistically. And, and how many people will be how much capital will be interested in that? A lot less than than in the Fiat system, where it makes a ton of sense to run it up, you know, in terms of how much leverage you take on because it's always easy to repay. And Lutnick announced this right from the, the Nashville conference that BGC, Cantor Fitzgerald, we're going to start a Bitcoin, a $2 billion financing Bitcoin product. I, I don't know it, I don't know the insides and outs of that. Did did you guys dig into what? Do you love announcements? Do you love announcements, Princy? Yeah. Announcements with no details? Yeah. How many? How many? How many announcements of new products, new features with no details have we seen over the years in in Bitcoin? It says here and I quote we are excited to help unlock bitcoins full potential and continue bridging the gap between traditional finance and digital assets. Bitcoin investors. Yeah, yeah. We will now build an incredible platform to support Bitcoin investors financing needs. Do you say incredible? Did he actually use the word? I would say it isn't incredible, as in not credible. Because there's. There's no detail like bridging fantastic. I mean, what are we? What are we talking about? I don't know we're. Talking about unlocking Bitcoin's full potential, which is the other phrase in there that is similarly nothingness. Yeah. But. What is that business are are, are they going to do something like you just described, like I send them Bitcoin and they send me cash at the end of the term or on a monthly basis? And am I paying them interest or are they paying me interest? You know what it makes me think of, it just makes me think of Tether. It makes me think of this, you know, giant whatever, $150 billion or something pile of assets. And we know that one of the things in that pile of assets is Bitcoin because they like to buy some Bitcoin, then hold it as part of the portfolio. And obviously I think we know that Cantor, you know, manages the the treasury with respect to Treasuries as in US T-bills that are part of the portfolio, the large part of the portfolio tether. So you know, by by some, by some magic, you know, could there be something going on there? Could you finance, could you know, could investors come partly finance Tethers balance sheet, you know, could you add some leverage on there, you know, backed by some claim against the Treasury? I don't know who knows? I mean, there's a million things you could financially engineer, but until we'll, we'll just have to wait and see. Yeah. I mean in, in theory couldn't you, couldn't you hedge your position and then take the dollars and put that into T-bills and just get that, you know that nominal yield while you're, you're Bitcoin neutral because you've hedged at the outset and you guys know more about this stuff than I do so. It's getting too complicated though, right? Just stay humble stack sets like. That's that's the, yeah, that's. True, if if you want like and this is the thing, right, people are how do I get more Bitcoin? Well, you provide more value in the marketplace. So if that means working overtime, getting a second job, getting a side hustle, do that. If that means, you know, that starting a podcast, writing a book for for Bitcoin as a product, do that that that's the way like that's the traditional way of being able to afford more things is by providing value, not not like OK, how do I financially engineer some yield wizard technique? Yeah, I don't like the that's my kind of PSA pleb service announcement. It's like just keep it simple, follow him at Odell and stay humble. Stack the sets, don't chase the yield because it might just turn around and bite you in the ass. Yeah, any of this stuff is. Really an advice, excellent, advisable. To to, you know, to a company with a billion dollars plus a Bitcoin. Like outside of that, you've got no business wading into this world. Exactly. So staying with institutions and ETFs and Coinbase, did you guys see that? Was this on your radar? Like is something happened with the ETFs now insisting that Coinbase have full proof of reserves of the coins that they are supposedly buying on behalf of the God knows how many customers did the inflows into these these ETFs are huge and they have been since January and that they've shown no sign of slowing down. What what was the what's going on? Like what what Sonia Ray does? And it's amazing that the the the Ethereum ETFs have had a net outflow during their their entire lifespan of a few months, yet now net outflows from from the Ethereum ETF. They're using that as exit liquidity. Large Ethereum holders are using the ETF to get out, which is hilarious. So the place in the ETF and then just taking the haircut that that they're sending Bitcoin to the ET, what, what are they doing? How? How are they working this out? For the Ethereum, yeah, I mean, I guess the mechanics would be that that they are Ethereum holders are probably subscribing in kind to the ETF and then selling to get it like as a net outflow from from the product rather than more dollars coming in than Ethereum coming in to be sold if, if that makes sense. Don't do earth, kids. That's that's that's the underlying message. But. But on, on the, on the Bitcoin ETF side and, and like the Coinbase, but like the tightening up of how Coinbase is has to settle the ETF activity. I think, Annie, I'm sure we'll have a more detailed and informed view of this. But I, I think it's probably, it's a great sign that, that the ETFs are, I think probably honest actors, at least in this regard. And they, so they've got nothing to hide. They've got nothing that they're like been trying to, you know, been trying to do at the margins to, to like squeeze some yield out of nothingness. And so this bad press sort of starts this circle of like, oh, you guys are allowing for, for like slightly opaque settlement. And they were like, oh, well, actually, let's just make it clearer then and, and we'll tighten that that up because we're not doing anything there anyway. So I so I guess it's a good sign ultimately. Yeah, I think it's fair to say that every bridge quote UN quote Speaking of building bridges between the like trad fi system, legacy finance and Bitcoin, there's always a little slippage or a little friction or ways things can go wrong. And if you're talking about, you know, creation and destruction of ETF shares, I mean, this is not my area of expertise should should call Belkunis or safer to the OR the ETF experts. But at it at any rate, if there's any slippage and if there's any errors and if there's any differences between the accounting of someone who owns an ETF share or some custodian who aggregates a bunch of ETF shares in the street name, you know, and, and what they think their their clients own in terms of actual coins, like actual unspent transaction outputs. You know, there can be problems if price moves dramatically and there's, and there's, you know, errors in execution on the, on the dollar to BTC or BTC to dollar flow. And so the tighter you know, the less lag you have. They're both with respect to execution of the trades and also with respect to public reporting of who owns what, you know, including which, which UTXOS are are you know, controlled by Coinbase, which is the custodian of the assets. You know, the, the tighter you make that stuff, probably the better and probably the less likely that there's, yeah, that there's differences between the, the accounting differences between the books on the Fiat side versus on the Bitcoin side. And now we have this extra layer options being approved. Yeah, this has generated some controversy. I mean, there's one guy I think I had a Bitwise, can't remember his name, who suggested that this could increase the volatility of Bitcoin, the dollar price volatility. I and then there are others who think it won't. I don't have AI, don't have an opinion. I think it matters a lot how big these markets get. It's definitely what you know, it's always been one of my concerns. Everybody's concerned right You you've spoken about it before Princey, about the the gold market and manipulation and the multiples of paper claims that sit pyramided on top of the actual underlying. And of course, that was one of the issues with FTX was, you know, a bunch of people quote UN quote, bought Bitcoin on FTX, but either they didn't actually buy the Bitcoin or they sold the Bitcoin later and people had claims, but actually the Bitcoin weren't there. And that does affect price. You know, if if you put in a buy order on whatever exchange and you think he got Bitcoin, but they don't actually buy the Bitcoin, then, you know, prices effectively suppressed. So I watched the futures markets on Bitcoin. I'm kind of worried about, you know, if those get really big, especially compared to the size of the underlying market, you know, could that be a price suppression tool? I suppose you could say the same of options. And then the flip side of it is, well, this is just normal with the normalization of of an asset class. Like you got a trillion dollar asset, you better believe there's going to be an options market on it. You better believe there's going to be a futures market. You better believe that all the tried and true ways of pyramiding and creating derivatives on top of some underlying asset of any size, which is what Wall Street's actually, I guess actually good at. You know, it's going to basically it's going to happen. So it's it's it's adoption, it's normalization. Yeah, it's nothing new under the sun. And so we just have to keep an eye on it. I don't know what the outcome will be other than this is just more normalization and integration of Bitcoin into the financial system. Yeah, the financialization side of Bitcoin, which we've talked about before and we always knew it was going to happen. We knew these markets would spring up out of nowhere because they already exist across the board on everything else. And it is a rent seekers paradise. So they've got it. They've got what they wanted. And Wall Street now are fully, firmly both feet planted in the Bitcoin world. And what worries me to, to echo the point of who whoever it said, well, it's going to bring more volatility. I think it does too. And I think it brings a, a whole new tool and mechanism for price manipulation. Because if, if you think about, let's say you've got proprietary trading funds out there, hedge funds, whatever, taking a punt on specific Bitcoin strike prices and dates like, you know, February 100, like, you know, 100,000 strike price and you're getting towards that expiry date and it's not going your way. Well, what can you do? You can just dip straight into the spot market and start manipulating the price for spot where you need it to go up or down, depending on, you know, what, what side of that trade you are. And I think it's going to create a lot of mess. And I think again, web service announcement sit back and just watch people get burnt because Bitcoin humbles everybody and Wall Street is no that they're going to count. There's going to be such a huge humbling. So let me so let me put forth a scenario because I'm just thinking about it real time and it does worry me too. So every option, let's just take a, you know, a hall option contract, right? You've got the buyer and the seller and so the buyer has unlimited upside on the price of Bitcoin, right. If Bitcoin goes up, the call option owner makes money. And by the way, they make more money, at least in dollar terms, well also in Bitcoin terms than than they would have if they just bought spot Bitcoin. Well, they have to pay the they have to pay the premium to the the yeah, yeah, the options, right, OK. And then if that, if that, if they buy that call option and it goes up through that strike price, come the point of maturity, they have the right to buy Bitcoin. Let's say it's 100,000 strike price. The price of Bitcoin is now 120,000. They have the right to buy Bitcoin at 100,000 from that person that wrote, right. So this is just to get people up to speed. So yeah, carry on. Yeah, yeah. And So what? So why is that useful, let's say for a hedge fund? Well, a hedge fund has only so much capital and they can effectively this creates leverage in terms of rate of return for them, right? Buying a call, this is the whole reason that you had Wall Street bets and you know, all these retail guys buying short dated call options, these lottery tickets is because if they hit, they make tons of money. OK, so that's appealing for a hedge fund. Well, where does that call option arise? It has to be created. So somebody has to be on the other side of that, of that trade, which means they are going to have potentially unlimited downside if Bitcoin price goes to the moon, right? They lose. The seller of that call loses, loses their ass essentially, if if it's exercised. So what? How do they protect themselves from that? Well, they have to probably collateralize it with Bitcoin because they can, the seller can protect themselves from the asset getting called away from them by having the asset right part there. Well, but that means one more Bitcoin in the financial system, right, 'cause it's gonna have to be literally, you know, custodied in the same system, the same account effectively as the call options so that that settlement can happen seamlessly. So it looks like on net that could just suck more coins right into the custodied system and out of, let's call it self custody. So don't feed the beast, keep your coins to yourself and in the multi sig. So Andy, do you think that that's one? What are they settling in? Are they settling just in dollars? So this is just I mean, do they even or are they settling in Bitcoin? I've not read the. I'm guessing they're settling in dollars. I actually don't. I actually don't know. So if they're just settling in dollars, then they're just going to get bailed out like they always do. And yeah, yeah. I mean. That's why I think the volatility, the volatility I think is going to spike in the near term as the financial derivative products hit the market and at the same time that we all know X amount of months after the halving and we're drawing closer every single day. The bulls are going to start running and there's no following rhyme, no reason where that is going to go, and there's no amount of price manipulation techniques or suppression techniques that Wall Street are going to be able to do without getting humbled. You get back to sailor too, right? What happens if you're right, Princey and the and the price volatility goes up? That feeds the micro strategy beast because the higher the volatility, the cheaper he can raise capital because the, you know, basically the cheaper he can underwrite new capital and go buy more Bitcoin. Value of the value of his of the embedded option in his convertible debt that he issues goes up and maybe that'll be a feedback loop. I guess we'll find out. I think that's, that's his thesis and I have so much FOMO about that one. It's the, it's the one, you know, I don't have any Bitcoin in the, in the tax advantage account. So if I was to sell any Bitcoin, it would be a taxable event. And so if I was wanting to get in on micro strategy, I would have a tax event upfront just trying to partake. And that has prevented me so far and still does prevent me from from partaking in that. But he's managed to deliver a 17% Bitcoin yield quote UN quote by by doing this, you know, per share, the amount of Bitcoin that each share represents has gone up 17% this year. That's awesome. I wish I could, you know, be a part of be on that train, but unfortunately. And when does this new accounting protocol, it's first quarter of next year, is that right? Yeah, yeah, it's, it goes, it goes into I think it's January 1, 2025. I the option has been in place since January 1, 2024 to electively switch to that form of accounting and then it becomes mandatory. It's either Q1 or I think it's just January 1, 2025. And so micro strategy has not yet elected to do that. Of course, you know Wall Street is valuing their their holdings accurately, but from a a Fazbee Gap perspective, their quarterly reports continue to suck because they have to recognize any. Intra period decline in the value of their Bitcoin as a realized loss and they're not allowed to record a realized gain from any or or an unrealized gain from any appreciation in the value of their holdings intra quarter. So anyway that'll that'll start happening. Q 1/20/25 when they are when they have to switch to that. I don't know if there any stipulation I like they might be able to stage out how they transition to that rather than switching 100% Q 1 and having like a massive one time quarterly gain from from the unrealized. Quarter big, big quarter micro strategy. I know I was thinking like a. $10 billion quarter. You guys on the earnings call, you know, that's, that would be I I want yeah. I wonder how he's thinking about managing that and the team over there, but also think about like, where's where's the price of Bitcoin going to be like on that first earnings call? Yeah, you know, like. Right. Maybe it's 80, maybe it's 100 by then, maybe it's 60. We'll see. I think the, I think the really cool thing about what that'll start doing is, well, microstructure. Degree like $100,000 is this key psychological, psychological barrier and as soon as it goes to 100 and 100,000 and change. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in a whole new, a whole new. Era, I agree you got no reason to sell at 1:30 if you know like if if you're like, if you're going to sell, you're going to sell, you know, 90 to 110 something. You know, that's probably what you've got circled on the chart. But anyway, so I think cell cell pressure probably lightens up quite a bit once you get in 130 and then you could you could gap up to 200 pretty quick. Well, we'll see, but. Heard that if you sell any coins below 100K, you're not invited to the 100K party. That's funny because I told. You guys, I. Told you guys I caught up with Valles last night. Shout out JV, we all miss your voice. Come back to us. He sneakily just removed himself from the podcast scene. He didn't give any big farewells like, you know, it's John, John, come back to us, brother. But I said to him, well, you might be getting that call in about a few months time to start sending out the invites. So what are you going to do? Just hide in Thailand? And are you just like wherever the hell you are or are you going to come and join us? Like what's going on? You're you're supposed to be organizing this thing. And he's like, do you think, wasn't that just a meme? I'm like, yeah, but one of the most important. And there are there are a lot of people that remember it so. Yeah, that's that's definitely real. You know, he can't buy Bow out of out of that duty Bow. You got to come back. Well, well, Valles was only ever going to be like the deal was made that if it hits 100K, sailor throws the party. But but John handles the invite up to like 2000 people. Yeah, I don't I don't envy that job. But yeah, well, one, we got to get there and you know, 2 Mike's got to actually have the gas to host a party for a bunch of plebs to, you know, there's, there's a lot of variables. That's it. Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure both those guys will will honor their commitments. Through Bitcoiners. That's right. We're going to, we're going to hold them. We're going to hold them to it. So whilst we're on the this this chat of price, which we tend to steer clear of on, on the once bits and pot generally, but when you guys are on it's, it's always fun to go down these thought processes. You're your slideshow. Jesse has been doing the rounds of, of conferences. Thanks again to to to Michael, who's who's been using some of the slides from there to to show, you know, accurately what's been going on and where this could go. So do you want to lay out your thesis a little bit for those people that haven't heard where this might be going in in 10 years and and sailor's thoughts after using your using your article on your slideshow? Yeah, yeah. So, so I wrote Bitcoin's full potential valuation a year and a half ago and and Sailor read it at the time and liked it and retweeted it and send me a nice note. And then shortly after that, he started using the, the kind of framing slide that I used to tee up the, the whole article in his presentations. And that that slide is just what is the global asset landscape. It, it, it's an attempt to show all of the major buckets of value in the world and total them all up. You know, what, what, what are the subtotals and what does it all amount to? And $900 trillion was my, my research into trying to get triangulating the right size of these buckets and that those buckets are like debt and real estate and global equities and gold and money itself and, and Bitcoin and Bitcoin obviously is $1 trillion asset in this $900 trillion C, So that's 0.1. Percent just just just stop there. Just. Hit one one thousandth of the Yep. One trillion in a 900 trillion marketplace. Yep, that's right. And, and I think that's why he's, he, it's why I wanted to get to that slide and it's why he started using that slide because it doesn't, it does a good job of like letting laying out how objectively early it is for Bitcoin, one, one thousandth of the world's assets. It's, and, and so the, the argument in that article goes that, and I later found out that Andy had written, written something similar in, in his book, similar kind of analysis of, of OK, so you have all these buckets. And, and if we're, if we're saying that Bitcoin is objectively a better store of value asset, has more attractive properties as a store of value asset than any of these other buckets. And in my opinion, that's because of increasing scarcity of supply issuance and the fact that there will only ever be 21 million of Bitcoin. That's not true of any other asset class, even real estate. They're always making more land or building skyscrapers. So there's always supply inflation growth with with any other store value asset anyway. Bitcoins, a better store value asset, how much of the world's value might be interested in flowing from the buckets that they're sitting in into this new bucket that's tiny now, but is a better store value asset has has better prospects of growing than anything else out there. And you know that you can stop at that point and say, well, obviously a lot. There's some amount, a lot. Or you can try to triangulate a reasonable estimate and say, well, you know, it seems like maybe you could get this amount from bonds, this amount from real estate, yada, yada. So I did that exercise and I came up with, well, I think the full potential evaluation for Bitcoin in in today's dollars is 200 trillion out of the 900 trillion. So you know, 20% of the world's assets could be Bitcoin eventually, which would mean $10 million per Bitcoin in today's dollars. And that was that was my analysis. And Michael Saylor has started, started using those slides and then ended up building his own model of taking the same approach on the same methodology from, from that article and entering his assumptions, which is what I, I encouraged in the article is everybody should do this for themselves. What, what, what do you think? And so he did it and he built his own, he built his model with his team and they just open sourced it. So it's available on GitHub for you to download as an Excel model. And you could, it's a very well made model and you can tinker with the inputs and the assumptions of, of what happens. His, his version of it differs a little bit from mine, namely in that he, I, I kept all of my numbers in today's dollars because I, I feel like it, it's hard to make sense. As soon as you're factoring in potential inflation, everything gets confusing. So I kept it the future state in today's dollars, but he included 7% annualized inflation projection for the next 21 years. And that basically 4X is all assets, the global asset landscape, which really means that the dollar becomes 1/4 is valuable and so that the existing assets are nominally 4X more in dollar terms. But his and from there he came up with his bear case, base case and bulk case. His bulk case kind of lines up with my full potential evaluation of of well, $49 million per Bitcoin divided by 4 to get, you know, 12, which is pretty close to my 10 million per Bitcoin number. His his base case was 13 million per Bitcoin and again, you got to divide by 4 to get what that would mean in today's dollar. So that's three million, $3,000,000 per Bitcoin in today's dollars. And his and his bear case was lower, lower than that. But yeah, that's the that's the full summary of what I put that article out there. Sailors been using that graphic and then and then ended up running with that framework and putting out his own model, which has been really, really cool to see it it I I told him on our podcast it's it's definitely the the biggest honor I've had in in my Bitcoin career. So I'm thrilled that it happened. And it was projected out over how long? Like 10 years or something. So I, I didn't, I said decades and I'm and I, you know, I didn't put a number to it. He said 21 years. So he sort of set the 2045 and obviously using the 21 number as a meme. But yeah, that's yeah, full potential I think probably takes longer than two decades, but I think that's part of why his his base case is lower than full potential. Love it. So I love the my turn now. I love the full the full potential framework. I just celebrated five years anniversary of Why Buy Bitcoin and Why Buy Bitcoin includes evaluation, you know, evaluation. What chapter is it in there? Oh. Since you asked Jesse, it's Page 1. 100 Are you sitting comfortably, boys and girls? No, it's a, it's Chapter 9 is the investment case for Bitcoin and, and so the categories, you know for me at the time where it's going to take market share from gold, it's going to take market share from Fiat, from offshore assets and other stores of value including real estate, stocks, etcetera. OK. And then what I did is I, I took a 10 year view. I was, I guess I was too short term, too short term greedy here people, right? Too high time preference. But the number I came out with for the 10 year view and remember this is five years ago. So we're halfway there was $400,000 per Bitcoin and at the time of publication the the price of Bitcoin was like between 8:00 and 9:00 K OK, let's call it 9 K. So you're talking about a 10 year time frame where you go from or let's call it 8 if you go from 8K to 400K, that's what multiple 50X OK. So, and if you assume it's somewhat exponential, you say, OK, what's sqrt 50 roughly? That's sqrt 49. So you figure out maybe get 7X and then you get another 7X. Well, it's we're halfway there time wise. It's five years out of 10 and 7X on 8K or 9K is about 60 K. So we're kind of, you know, probably by blind luck right on schedule or right on target as far as my 10 year projection. But that's just a 10 year view. You know, there's no guarantees. That's certainly much. That that 10 years is up in what, like 2029? Yeah, five years from now. 5 Five years from now, 400 OK. Which seems kind of reasonable, right? I mean, you know, order of magnitude you're talking, you still get one more. That's yet another cycle away. It might even be five years might be in the teeth of, you know, the final bull move on. If we get a bull move in 2025, you know, then four years later, you're talking 2029. Look, it could be an under an undershot. I, I don't know, time will tell, but but that's kind of where I came out. That is not my view of potential full valuation. I, I like Jesse's framework because that's the, you know, that's the apotheosis. That's the the ultimate outcome for this thing if it reaches its potential. But that's my 10 year view and we're we're kind of halfway there, yeah. You kind of you're exactly on track. That's going to be a hell of a victory lap in five. Years it's. Spot on, Andy. Fingers crossed boys, although it won't be as fun. It won't be as fun as Grandpa, Grandpa Jesse, you know, telling his his kids and or grandkids about about the how yeah, we've Bitcoin reached its full potential that the grandpa wrote about her dad wrote about, you know, 30 years prior, one years prior, whatever it is. He'll have his grandkids on his knee reading them Bitcoin on the yuppie elite. He's like and here's an old one from the from the days of Andy you you've got you've got a halving 17th of April 2028 right in there. So. Like my chances? Yeah, there's your juice to get to 400. Yeah, wow, plant that one in your Diaries, plebs. But to bring this, I mean, it's been a great meandering conversation as always. But to bring it back to what we started talking about at the beginning, and this is, I know through personal conversations, Jesse, This is why you started looking at like the, the cold storage options. And how do people protect that? Because if if you're listening here and you got a coin or two anywhere that we've just been talking about, the next decade or the decade after that just becomes like such a significant amount of wealth. And if you're holding more than that and you've been stacking diligently away for the last five years or so, then this is something that you're going to, I really have to think about now. And those to your point earlier, those hardware wallets, those signing devices, whatever you want to call them, they get pretty heavy pretty quickly in these ridiculous like RIP UPS and the social engineering that's been happening. And I'll point people to go and listen to a Jim Seth's podcast. I think he's released another one since, but the one I listened to, yeah, I think. He said, I think he's had three now. Really. Yeah. He said, well, the third one, he said that this guy jumped into the boat. Like, you know, this fish jumped in the boat because he was a hacker who wanted to be interviewed about being a hacker. And so he proactively sought it out because I guess John Seth has become like known among these these hackers. I like the the balls on this kid that he like he was still a senior, right? He, I think he was like. 15, Yeah, He claimed he was a high schooler, Yeah. Driving around in the most ridiculous cars. And I'm thinking it was really sad actually to listen to because the kid thought he had found like the the key to life, not realizing there's just a full on felon at the age of 15. Like you, you're a criminal. There's no coming back from this. Like you, you will not well, once you're caught and you will be caught. And even if you're not like you know, you know, inside your soul knows. And that's never a good place to be. But do you want to explain to people what's going on, how this is being perpetrated, and what people really need to be very, very focused on? Yeah, let's tag team that one Andy there. There does seem to be an uptick of scammers, scammer activity targeting bitcoiners, targeting crypto holders in general. I suppose a big part of that is there have been leaks of customer databases. Ledger and Swan being two companies where their, their databases are, have been leaked and are available on the dark web. And recently Swan customers received 2 separate phishing emails where the emails were sent out. And they look, they look like they're official. They, you know, they use the, the, the logos and have the right kind of voice to them. And they say, you know, they, we've had a, a data breach and you can secure your coins by following these steps, right? But if you, if you actually, if that, if you see that e-mail and you believe it and you start taking those steps while you're actually falling into a fishing trap and you're, you're handing over your control of your swan account to, to hackers who are going to try to log in as you and then sweep your funds to, to an on chain address that they control. And then you're screwed. So you know that that's been going on. And then and and part of that too is. Customer phone numbers are included in these databases. And so there's this cottage industry that's popped up of, of scammers who pretend to be tech support calling, trying to help you solve some other some kind of crisis with your coins. And it's the same outcome of they are trying to social engineer you into handing over control of your, of your account so that they can sweep the funds out of it. And John Seth is an OG Bitcoiner who's who's been recording calls that he's received from because he's on these lists and he records these calls. And, and weirdly enough, these scammers are a few of them have been happy to talk, proud to boast about how successful they've been in, in accumulating I'll gotten wealth by by perpetrating these frauds. And so it's a problem. It's kind of it's a, a silent epidemic in a way, because evidently they're being successful in, in John Seth's first, first call, the scammer bragged about a $1.2 million withdrawal from Swan that John Seth was then able to, you know, alert Swan was, was in progress and Swan was able to stop it before it happened. But if it wasn't for that call, maybe it would have happened. And if there's a cottage industry, it means that they're having success. And so there's hundreds of Bitcoin holders who are being tricked out of their coins. And you know, maybe, maybe it's a, maybe it's $100,000 today and you get scammed out of that and it hurts immensely, but it's just $100,000. And you know, maybe you, your salary is $100,000. And so that's will take you a few years to to save that back. But this is Bitcoin. And if Michael Saylor's projections are right, his base case is a 200X over the next 20 years, So that that $100,000 in Bitcoin today would become $20 million in Bitcoin in in 20 years. And so if you lose it today, that's, it's a tragedy that that, you know, alters the financial trajectory that you as a bitcoiner would have been on. And, and you, you, you can be right and you could be early and you could have have stacked Bitcoin. And if you allow yourself in your security arrangement to be breached and you lose that Bitcoin, you may never get that opportunity to stack that much Bitcoin and realize the, the upside that's coming over the next 20 years. So I think that's what's happening. What's what's going on? There's an uptick of that. And I think it just underlines the importance of having the right custody solution. And if you're technical enough, if you're up to it, multi sig that you control, you know, collaborative custody, great. Like do that. Just get your coins off an exchange. Like, you know, if, if, if you're using in exchange, don't leave them there. If you're using a single Ledger, don't leave it there. That's, that's what they're targeting. You know, get your, get your coins into a multi sig setup. And, and if and if you're interested, multi institution custody helps solve this problem as well. And, and without the technical and security burden on the end user. So that's part of our motivation that on ramp is to, you know, help people prevent this tragedy of coins that could be lost today, preventing the, you know, financial outcome that a bitcoiner deserves because they were right and they were early and they they stacked their coins. Andy. Yeah, that's really well said, Jesse. I think the only thing I would add is I, I know two people personally who have been scammed specifically out of Bitcoin 1 was scammed out of, you know, other crypto as well. And on the one hand, I take the, you know, the really high level view. There's a whole online scamming industry, you know, that's that's grown up over the years. The Internet is the perfect place to scam people because you're not face to face and you can just, you know, create a connection to someone from the other side of the world. And it's a numbers game. You know, they contact 1000 potential marks. And if one of them pays off, it's worth their it's worth their time. And also they get really good at it. They get really good at creating urgency in particular. So that's one of the red flags is, you know, if you get contacted by someone who's talking about, oh, you know, there's been some breach or there's something wrong with your security setup or there's something wrong with, you know, the exchange where you, you got coins, you know, and, but, but don't worry, you know, if you take the following actions quickly, right? Often it's quickly, you can fix it. And then the, the, the corollary also is some of these scammers play a really long con. Most don't, but some do. You know, they get to know you over time. They sort of build trust, you know, they can feed you trading ideas and and you make money on trading ideas. And then they sort of build the trusted relationship over time. And then they convince you to part with some of your funds while they, you know, set up the next greatest trade or other financial transaction idea for you. So there's so many ways it can go wrong and obviously education is the main thing. Know what you hold under learn about understand Bitcoin, you know, listen to listen, listen to Princey on the regular, especially those technical episodes with people, you know, his brilliant guests that talk about how Bitcoin works in detail and how the security works and how multi sig works and how to keep your keys away from the Internet and all this these important concepts. And yeah, that's that's that's all I would add. And I think is Bitcoiners, we all go through our journey of learning and understanding and we make reasonable decisions and trade-offs about, you know, how we want our coins and what setups and what baskets, etcetera, etcetera. And that's an individual choice that that you have to make on your on your own. But the more you know, the better off you are, the more confident you're going to be and the less likely that you're going to get scammed and tell your friends and family and and everyone else too. They got a these scammers are out there, scammers everywhere. Goldstein is right, everyone's a scammer and be careful. Stay safe. And one thing that I will add there, because it was that very shocking in the during the interview, he was talking about how he was using emails or phone numbers or whatever to emails specifically, actually to hack into people's Google accounts, For example, you know, if you've got the e-mail somehow you can give me the password and all of a sudden you're in the Google account. And they would just go in through photos. Oh, yeah. Look, someone took a picture of their seed words. Thank you very much. Swept the love. And it's like, no, when I'm helping people set them up, get a pen and paper. But yeah, yeah, whatever. I'll just take a picture. No, no, no, no, no, no, please don't do that. Do not do that. Do everything offline and be prepared because if they've if they've got your your phone number, you've got your address, they've got your Gmail account, whatever e-mail then they can hack into or what's the Microsoft like OneDrive or is that G Drive? Yeah, G Drive for Google OneDrive, they'll get in there. So even if you're even if you've written out on your computer, even if you're offline and you've written out on your computer a file for your wife or your spouse or whatever to do, like, no, that's a bad idea. Hand write it because they will go to any lengths. But as as we were talking about the very beginning of the show with Lauren, if you've got a multi 6 setup and you've got something set up with on ramp as well, just not they can't get to that. There's there's no way like that that wall built around like a multi institution, multi geographical multi sig and it's multi geographical, right? I'm getting that right. Like the the the key holders, are they in different parts or are they all in the? US well 2, two of three in our in our standard model are in the US in different states, but we do have a multi jurisdiction option which is for a premium option. Yeah. OK. So it's there like if that's as tight as it gets, I think on the street right now. On ramps building. One day one of the keys will be will be held on the Moon and maybe not, maybe not Mars though there might be too much too much latency in the signing time, but. Multi. Planetary, yeah. Multi multi institution, multi planetary, multi sig. Yeah, Shoot, shoot for the moon, boys. All right. So is there anything else that you wanted to touch on before we do the final question? It was a great Rep, all right. If you want, if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody, who would you give it to and why all. Right, I'll go first this time. I was quicker on the draw. Kamala Harris. I mean, obviously, you know, people are talking about the politics they're talking about. You know what, what does the Democratic administration mean for Bitcoin going forward? What does the Trump admin mean for Bitcoin? I'm not actually sure that it makes all that much difference, but I do think that it's unlikely that she understands Bitcoin. Perhaps she's open to it, but I would feel a lot better about policy in the US for the next 4 years. You know, if yeah, if, if if any and all current political candidates understood Bitcoin and or were. Pro Bitcoin, Yeah, that's that's the right answer. Actually, before you said that, I jumped to Trump as my answer. That's but that's right too. You're correct. And, and obviously he's he's closer to understanding Bitcoin or the value. Of it, he's very close. He's on coin. Exactly, so his his recent forays and the shit coining tell me he needs that orange pill still. I think that, you know, the what Senator Lummus trotted out right after Trump's speech at Nashville and and the day after RFK talked about, you know, a 4 million Bitcoin US strategic reserve. And then Senator Alamas comes out with the, you know, 1,000,000 Bitcoin plan, a bill that will get shot down immediately. But yeah, I wish, I wish that Trump actually like if Trump could could actually believe in the imperative of a, of AUS strategic Bitcoin reserve and wanted to get to that 4,000,000 number in order to match what we have with gold. That would be the biggest yes, it does mean government buying Bitcoin. But you know, I, I think that's always going to be a part of bitcoins maturation as an asset and they would be incredible to have that happen. I don't, you know, it won't that time will come in the future, but it would it would not only be good for Bitcoin, it would be really good for the United States. I think it would cement the United States pre eminence and the geopolitical realm for the next century, which would be fantastic as an American. So anyway, that'd be mine and I feel feel more strongly about that answer than the in prior episodes. So, you know, the potential of a politician understanding Bitcoin and having the power to authorize using, you know, a, a budget, a national budget to purchase Bitcoin. Like we're we're entering into that world. And it will be a huge tailwind for for Bitcoin because there's how many coins are there that are available to be purchased by, by nation states? Not that many. So they're going to have to bid like held it to free up more supply. Yeah, and I'll, I'll just throw in there Scottie Pippen because what's, what's he doing? Scotty. It's really sad to watch such a legend. Somebody's somebody's in his ear, somebody's manipulating him. Someone's given him this great freaking idea and that you can see what they're doing. You know, he's every tweet is hashtag Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin. And then you're like, no man, like you're really misleading people here. And this is going to it's going to end really badly. Like the, the, the, the integrity of his whole career will be just come tumbling down right in front of his eyes. And somebody behind him who's in his ear advising all of this is going to walk off into the sunset. Very rich. So Scotty, if you're listening, please no more of the shit Coining Shield Bitcoin if you understand it and you clearly don't. Good advice. All right, lads, until next time, when are we going to do this? Q1, I guess of of 2025 maybe? Yeah. Q1. Yeah, we'll set something up. We could do a review of the of the MicroStrategy, you know, Q4 or Q1 report and the largest largest single quarter profit in probably isn't the largest single quarter profit in history, but it'll be up there. Yeah, it's going to be absolutely all right. Thanks for coming on. Let's take care. All the very best. Here's Princey. 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 on Rat 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 Schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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