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It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. Hey guys, thanks for tuning in to another episode of final settlement. We had a really jam packed and tight episode this week covering all the recent investment in business news related to cloud fair and Google launching stable coins as well as some really bullish indicators coming in from Vanguard, Deutsche Bank and also BNY Mellon around digital asset adoption. Quick word from on RIM. We have a lot of exciting things coming out in the coming weeks as far as products. We're also piloting the new pricing structure. We've, you know, heard from the market that we have the Rolls Royce of custody. A lot of clients and prospective clients love it, want it, but pricing has been a big prohibitor of adopting and so we're piling out some new pricing that I think you all will enjoy. If you want to get ahead of it and learn more about it, shoot me a note personally, Michael at honor@bitcoin.com. I'll relay it to you or happily take the console one-on-one and look forward to hearing from you and hopefully you enjoy the podcast. Onto the show. All righty, gentlemen. Good morning to everyone. It's another episode of Final SETTLEMENT. Today is Monday, September 29th, 10 O 5:00 AM Eastern Time. Gentlemen, how are we doing, Michael? Liam. Well, if we just got the last shakeout before it's it's game time, then I think doing pretty good and we're going to sit for another quarter at, you know, chop salvation of 100 to 120. I don't know if my my body can take it. Let's just. I was almost going to say October. I was almost going to say, let's let it RIP to like 70 just a weekend. I almost honestly, I wouldn't even mind if it went there because then we, we probably wouldn't get the, I think we've talked about this. We're going to get the upsurgeance or the the resurgence of the the dat insanity and then the real craziness or the real carnage will occur, You know, 18 months from now. I don't think that would happen if we got to 70. It would just get flushed and everybody would be like, that was a good game. Next game. That's a good. Point that that's a good point. It does feel like, you know, one thing to point to to say that, you know, we definitely haven't topped is that a lot of the a lot of the treasury plays haven't even bought Bitcoin yet. They, you know, they've announced allocations are announced plans to announce, you know, business operations and or Bitcoin buys. A lot of them, most of them haven't even happened yet. Yeah. I mean, just imagine like the level of again, the main reason we haven't talked about it, because I think they come back and then it'll be the next level where the the real carnage and losses. But imagine the amount of like from all time highs where these companies are trading nobody out there talking, just just silence, you know, And how many people bought at these like tops were sold a bill of goods. I see these notions on Twitter. We're like, I'm down to 100K you scammers. Like what happened? It's not supposed to be. I was promised better Bitcoin and I've gotten worse Bitcoin. Well, look, it's the the old notion if you, if you're nearer to the space, they used to say you know you are the yield if you don't know where the yield come from, comes from, but also that the friends you made along the way. Because the real yield. So your community will will ultimately be the the yield you can hang your head on. But no, in all seriousness, just be careful out there and stay away from the debts. Just buy the good stuff. Buy the good stuff, hold it Well, All right, guys, we didn't get to talk about this last week, but this was the biggest news item in my mind from last week. Tether $500 billion valuation on this latest private raise that they're doing, they're raising 20 billion. Michael, I'll kick it to you. First thoughts? Yeah, I think and more time to think about it and I think that's where starting it's it's obviously huge news. We didn't get to chat about it, but also I think there's a very interesting notion of how much assets tethers holding is filtered into that valuation. One of the valuations obviously pretty insane and put we put it, I believe, like top five private companies in valuation. I think it said it made the the Co founder that's behind the scenes one of the most wealthiest men in the world. I think even like second baby ahead of Satoshi, I think was a headline. But anyway, I think that there is a lot to the fact that they probably end up getting some level below this. There's a number of assets sitting on them. I think they generate $5 billion last quarter profit. They're the dominant stable coin issuer. So there's a real opportunity to get access to that business. They probably don't get the full 500 billion. We talked a little bit about it. You know, the notion of strategic investors is probably one of the biggest ones to align with who whatever parties you are going to insert, you know, Tether dominance globally. The thing that I think is probably the most interesting I talked about is really how Tether and USDC are actually different businesses. And when I say that is in maybe tethers going to be try to be USDC and maybe USC is going to try to be tether, which probably is likely. But tether is really for like, I don't want to say even emerging markets, because I think that's how they hide under the emerging markets. And what was the other one that was like a sigh up the global S. Those are just like these terms for people to get investors, you know, capital into for, for it's almost like a ESG for venture. Point being is they work in like black markets. They work in dollars that exist in large amounts. You know, nobody's working in emerging markets gets a $500 billion valuation. Like there's real serious capital being moved. And point being is they're more on the street, like they're more on the corners. They're going to be in different networks across the world. And those dollars are going to be fundamentally different than where you see Circle and USDC playing, which is more in trad Phi D Phi, very much regulated. You have a lot of KYC constraints when it comes to, you know, interacting. I think it just came out last week's CFTC allowing for stable coin deposits for derivatives. You can imagine they're probably not using Tether to start there. So I think they're just different companies. And I think what's most fascinating is who else will will come about and will participate at real scale in this world of stable coins. So yeah. Well, what do you make of whatever they're calling it USAT? So, you know, they're, they're new stable coin, their new Tether stable coin that's specifically for U.S. markets. Because that that to me is, you know, a pretty, pretty overt play against the circles of the world. Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar. I mean, it's not similar. The first thing that came to mind is TikTok, like TikTok didn't necessarily at first have a bifurcation of different geopolitical regions. It started at one and everyone could have access to it. So now when you go and like segment it out, it already has like a certain level of penetration to just shift over versus something like this. Even though they have the liquidity, it's like you're starting over from scratch. And I think this is what Liam had brought up a while ago when we talked about it. It's not to say that they won't have the connections. I think that they're just starting in a different level and they're probably going to be launching at the same time Fidelity and a few other larger players enter the space. And that's really probably goes back to the investment opportunity is because if you're going to go to whatever largest financial institutions, asset managers, you're going to want to be able to get liquidity already like baked into the offering or to be able to like white label or whatever they're going to do from an issuance perspective. That's honestly probably the real reason to give up any of your business that's producing $5 billion in net profit on a monthly, on a quarterly basis is because you're looking for, you know, to win the whole game. And to do that, you need to make sure that you can basically entrench your, your coin and their rails. Yeah, there. There was a few things that stuck out to to me around this as I sort of digested it over the past week or so. One of them was, was interestingly over the weekend, they put out sort of a, an ad or a sort of a video commercial for USAT, the new US version of a Tether stable coin. And I just found it interesting because they opted to create a video from AI, like they didn't go hire somebody to do it, spend a ton of money. They probably, you know, spent a couple $1000 to create like a pretty good looking AI commercial or video. And it just struck me as like, you know, this massive company that's just valued at 500 billion is going to be discerning with their capital and leverage deflationary tools to create an AI commercial as opposed to going out and spending a ton of money, which they clearly have and, and could have spent to create an ad. And it just struck me as as very sort of aligned with with how they've done everything from an efficiency to efficiency standpoint, how they think about their balance sheet holding a ton of Bitcoin, holding a ton of gold. I just thought that was a, you know, a little little detail worth highlighting in all of this. Yeah, this is going to be really fascinating to see who they bring on because to Michael's point, like the the real thing is this is a net new coin. And just like anything else, they need liquidity. So it's probably going to be some of the largest financial players in the space, maybe even a little bit of a nod to the US sovereign wealth fund as well, possibly in there, even though they're pretty much already the same thing. And I would also say MGX is the same one who invested in finance recently is an interesting one. There are a lot of different exchanges all across the world who would be potential investors in this. But 500 billions does seem a little bit rich, especially if interest rates are going to be going down in the medium term, especially on the short side of the curve. But yeah, I mean, it's, I wonder what else they're doing this for if it's not just because they don't need the money. They have all the land, they have the gold, they have the Bitcoin, and they're printing cash with the other side of their business. So it has to be strategic investors that they're really looking for, otherwise why raise any capital? Well, I wouldn't say they don't need the money in the sense of Brian actually. I mean, I would say if they can keep this same trajectory of how they've been efficient and prudent with capital spend, then any money in their hands is worth almost 10 to 100 X in anybody else's hands. And if you're getting any near anywhere near this level of valuation and getting 10 to $20 billion, you can park in Bitcoin because you know, that's where it's going. And you get any form of lift into that, whether it's a 50 percent, 100%, which is probably conservative based on our, you know, personal projections of where Bitcoin goes. You're effectively getting 40 to $50 billion to give up 2% of your business. It's pretty asymmetric along with the the the partnerships and, and it. Yeah. And I guess the last part is like, I think that they really recognize and I've, and I've been going on this rabbit hole. We'll talk about sending a rabbit hole. It's just like this level of power, the level of power needed for AI in like where this is all heading is really kind of, it's going to put us in a weird place. And I think they know that. And ultimately whoever has the most capital is going to be able to be key maker in that sense of controlling the data centers. And I think they're probably wanting to play in that world. And it would make sense to bring on capital, especially right now at the price. I don't think, I think most people probably shocked that we're sitting in late 2025 and we're only at $100,000 Bitcoin, yeah. In a related headline, Michael, I think you brought this one along the lines of stable coins, but also AI. And we have some other AI links to get to, but I'll bring up this one. Google AI, stable coin payments, a first protocol for autonomous agents. Would you make of this, Mike? Yeah, I think the there was this link and then the other one because I can loop them together is the cloud fair and the new stable coin. I think there's a couple of interesting parts. We touched a little bit about just the notion of, you know, digital native money online is people are waking up to, it probably wasn't really couldn't happen before because of interchange in the microtransactions. I think you take that coupled with the amount of like agents and proliferation of just software online and you're starting to see it make sense. I think we all understand on a long on a time horizon, you want a neutral money that's probably has more programmability. And really the two aspects are you don't have the regulatory and the just everything that would come to the apparatus or something like this. So like at face value, it goes back to being the lipstick on a pig, right, Where like stable coins are the lipstick on a pig in in a stratified world where you know, Bitcoin, lightning, other forms of rails on base layer Bitcoin or the real innovation. So I think like that is obvious. The one that's a little bit less obvious that it goes back to the power generation that when you have these cycles being run in the number of tokens that are increasing because it's my understanding like now open AI like has 800 million users, right? It's like fastest growing business like ever. And then the amount of inferences based on what they were initially cycling for, based on now with reasoning has increased, increased exponentially as well. And so you basically have to get in real time, not only that spend from the user, but spent back to whether it's your power users, what you're paying for with getting GPU chips, like the whole production line has to effectively be streamlined or somebody's having to hold the float on whatever capital is being spent. And I just, I never really like thought of it in that way where it makes complete sense that as you start getting the proliferation of AI models across applications on the front end all the way to the power production, it's going to make more and more sense to start having payments just flow through all of that, which is very bullish Bitcoin because at the end of the day, like there's a 10 different reasons why you'd rather take Bitcoin and SAT streaming versus USCC. But anyway, so that that was just like, I don't know if you're expecting that take, but that's kind of where my mind was going with these different dollar stable coins with these like AI driven Internet economies. And then this was the other or I just found this link related to clear Cloudflare launches. Net dollar stable coin for AI driven Internet economy was just the other one that you were referencing. Yeah, I mean, this sounds like Chuck E Cheese tokens, I guess because this is like just their own intranet. I don't even know how it would work or what's the interoperability, but it's still the, the same point of like they, they Cloudfare has its own payment gateways or gateways in general to protect the Internet. And if you're going to be, you know, moving across them, you're they're going to naturally want some form of payment. And this just streamlines that whole process. We have any thoughts on on either of these? It is interesting because I'm not. That's an interesting point you bring up about just the instant payment. Especially as these types of businesses scale faster, I think that there's going to be a lot of credit that these companies are just used to like paying with net 30, net 90 days with discounts. If they pay upfront, I think that they're going to still find that credit elsewhere if they're not necessarily given to buy their other partners rather than just saying like, hey, you can pay us in 90 days or, or whatever it is. I don't necessarily know how that's, that's going to play out, but that is a really fascinating opportunity. And then kind of on a related note, I thought that it was really interesting about the Circle Explorers perversible USDC transactions. I think that many people when they're looking at, you know, getting paid, they they essentially just want exactly what they have right now, but with slightly lower fees. Like it's too much to understand that transactions can be final, especially when you're dealing with significant chunks of payment. And so I think that this is this is naturally going to happen and going to be the most popular kind of B1. I think that there will be fraud from this, but it's going to be interesting how they enforce it. I think it's going to be really human capital intensive. And I think that Tether will probably likely also follow suit just because the market forces will demand it. Was curious your guys saw as well. I agree. I I think this is the big thing that it's the biggest one of the biggest opportunities for anybody listening, whether they're building or investing. And ours is the delta between what the utopian, or I don't want to call it utopian, but vision for digital currencies in bitcoins final settlement versus when it gets there might be 100 years. Like it's truly a, a great renaissance, like a complete rethinking of everything. Because what you're describing in finality that everyone accepts really changes the whole dynamic of like a relationship with a merchant. Meaning maybe you're on a long enough time horizon. We get to a world where businesses actually do what they say they're going to do and they return the money or the, or the goods if the the client doesn't receive it and they don't want their social score. And there's other things, but that's just like a whole different way from a user interacting. And so to your point, Liam, if everyone is used to, whether it's both sides, if you're the, you know, merchant, you're used to this way and it's made sense and your mental model of everything is aligned with that. And on the other side, if you interact with, if you buy something increasingly in a world where client services and products are degraded, you want to be able to have recourse, but you can't. Like everyone's going to get more familiar, comfortable with just the marginal increasing. We have to be OK with that. Like we can't. It goes back to do you want to make money or do you want to be right? Most people be like, well, that's insane. And like, sure, I agree there's a lot of value just accepting final payment for goods and services in Bitcoin. But there's a time and place for that. And there's very like, you know, small things. Today we talked about it, I think last week's. If you're selling gold and you ship gold to somebody, it's like I want the Bitcoin before I ship the gold. But if you're selling a shirt or somebody has to do a return, it just makes a lot more sense. So anyway. Yeah, I think what what I have on screen here, I think captures kind of what we're referencing here, like immutability doesn't reflect how institutions work. While immutability is central to blockchain design, the idea of every transaction being irreversible under all conditions has only served the ethos of early crypto industry. It does not reflect how financial systems operate at institutional scale. And I think that actually it's fine if it's essentially just moving money forward and back between pretty large parties of, you know, exchanges and very large hedge funds through banks. Those are kind of like the three large touch points that stable coins touch at this point. But as it goes to more on the margins and there were final transactions for anybody who buys and sells large goods and services that doesn't actually have a direct relationship or somebody they can call up if thing doesn't go necessarily according to plan. There's just going to be so much fraud, especially in kind of the B ones of getting these stable coins to decent scale. And so they, they're either going to accept, all right, well, I'm going to lose a massive amount of money on the fraud on the B1 of trying to integrate stable coins into our payment flows, or I can use reversible transactions and kind of settle this with Circle. So I don't know exactly how it's going to play out, but that's it's interesting to see. It's such a great point because something that I'm ashamed we haven't even talked about, or I've never thought about it personally, is like, so if everyone's holding these stable coins, well, theoretically they're holding private key somewhere or authentication. So we already know, like there's a certain sample size of people holding Bitcoin that are just getting robbed and hacked and social engineered all day long and nobody hears about. Well, theoretically that's going to increase with stablecoin proliferation from an order of magnitude from like 2 to 100 X, which would mean if they're holding their own private keys, well, people can barely hold their own personal, you know, house keys. And then if they're on a on a server or somewhere and your phone is authenticating, it goes back to it. You're going to have to reverse these things. And how do you credibly prove that somebody else didn't lose it? So that's like on that side. And then it ties into the like self custody route, which I've always already gotten to this place. When once you get enough, you're long, long enough in Bitcoin, you kind of like, you know, you would see value. I think it's going to make more and more sense where if you had a bank account, your savings account held Bitcoin, you have your checking account and let's say your checking account is either depleted or you need a larger purchase. How it would just auto convert from your savings and your checking and you could spend those dollars into it. And point being is like you can't do any of that with self custody. Like so are you just never going to spend the money? Like what's the plan? You know, these things just haven't been fully thought through. Anyway, that just came to mind when you were referencing about fraud. It's like, so everyone's gonna hold stable coins and that's better rails. But like what happens when somebody logs into somebody's account, drains their full account on Charles Schwab or whatever, and then like how do you reverse it if that gets auto converted into BTC, like who's on the hook there? Yeah, all great questions. One other stable coin related headline. I just wanted to share it. I saw it come across this morning, but SWIFT to work with consensus on blockchain prototype for cross-border payments. I just thought this was a poetic headline just given, you know, I think a lot of the crypto narratives over the past decade have been, you know, the, the sort of proverbial thing is like we're just going to replace SWIFT with XYZ protocol, more efficient database, etcetera. And now SWIFT is just going to disrupt themselves and create a better database themselves. So everybody's getting into it, the incumbents and the crypto crypto natives. But I just thought, I thought this was a a curious headline given given sort of the past 10 years of people claiming to disrupt SWIFT. You know, but this kind of maybe we've gone like full circle of what I've really enjoyed about having these podcasts is more in client meetings and discussions. You get to really get your position work through because we're just effectively having like and you have to be a little bit tighter obviously on a recorded podcast. So point being is what if this is, this actually makes logical sense of the way we had to get to like a decentralized Bitcoin futures like you effectively had to go from a centralized storage system or database, however the contract was. And then you had to come to the false primitives that, you know, again, not decentralized, blah, blah, blah. But it at least had the concepts of Bitcoin. And then as because it was, it's again too big of a leap to go from like X all the way to Y or whatever Y is in the future we just talked about like this kind of actually makes sense that it would go down this route. Yeah, I mean it's not a bad thought. I I would normally file this under just noise to to ignore. But I think I think you are right in the sense that this could be just the logical progression of it's, it's the same thing we talked about with the stablecoin stuff in, in generalities around the normalization of of these digital rails necessarily helps the adoption of Bitcoin over the medium to long term. Yeah. And I think the one caveat is I don't even know what this is like to be honest. I just, I'm just mainly referencing like Swift consensus ETH stablecoins. It's makes sense that would be the the choice or whatever. I do think that with all that said, whoever has a clear vision for the future, we will will be the winners and key makers in the future because they will have more time to look at the problem and we'll understand where the markets going having a 10 to 100 year time horizon. So it's not to say to do any of this. It's like if you're had a good like Jack Dorsey's probably a great example at square. There's probably things that 5D chess that they're playing and what they're what they're doing because they understand Bitcoin is a long term winner and it lets them take a long term horizon versus a lot of this stuff. Some of them may never make it out because their businesses won't, you know, make it through whether it's the solvency, because that's the craziest thing when I think about stable coins and derivatives and collateral is just the thinking about the amount of rug pulls that are going to come in when, like Liam mentioned, interest rates being reduced. That's another concept hit me. Hit me the other day is like, so interest rates go down, more capital is inserted in the system, more tokens, more USDC Tether are created, more insanity ensues in the token to economy. And like that's effectively going to draw, that's eventually going to pull everyone down with it. At a certain point, it feels inevitable. Yeah, yeah. Liam, any any other thoughts on that or we can move on? No, we can move on, I think. So I wanted to talk a little AI. There was a headline and a Bloomberg article that caught my attention over the weekend. Hedge fund legend David Einhorn of Green Light Capital, I guess, was interviewed by Bloomberg, and he's cautioned that the unprecedented amount of spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure may destroy vast amounts of capital, even if the technology itself proves transformative. And I think that this is reflective of a lot of what we've been talking about on the show over the past several months, honestly, in terms of all these headlines that we see every week around AI spend. And effectively, you know, even from Zuckerberg, just saying, we're going to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at this and we basically can't afford to lose. Like there's there's a achievable goal. So great that all capital discipline is effectively out the window. And, and Einhorn is kind of just calling out that line of thinking and saying, you know, there's a reasonable chance that a tremendous amount of capital destruction is going to come through this cycle. I'm sure it's not 0, but there's a reasonable chance of a tremendous amount of capital destruction. So I want to get your guys thoughts on this. I think it's, it's very reflective of, of what we've been discussing on this show around capital discipline and, and just, you know, how what capital allocation is going to look like as we move forward into a new world where we have some money, where we have all these deflationary forces. And then we just have, you know, massive amounts of capital being thrown at the infrastructure build, which, you know, there, there seems to be a, you know, a pot at the end of the rainbow, but it, it's still an unknown, generally speaking. So there's likely to be a lot of capital destroyed as as a result of this. But curious your guys. Thoughts. Yeah, I think that's very well said. And that just kind of happens every single time there is a new industry that's gets to be pretty large. You can think about the Internet and how much was destroyed in the.com boom and boss, as well as just even like the digital asset space in general. And just how many different tokens have been created, how many different hedge funds and venture capitalists have been born trying to, you know, create a better Bitcoin or, you know, better digital token? I think that it's just any time that there's something that's truly transformative that has just a massive total addressable market, there will be like a massive misallocation of capital because everybody wants to get in there. And they think that even if they're on the periphery, they somehow will be rewarded just because they're in the same type of category. And also just because there is a lot of the investors will demand that they are in the hot category, even if they can't necessarily be in the right deal. And so the investors necessarily have to chase bad deals in order to continue to raise capital. Everybody hope you're joining the podcast. Wanted to give a quick word from early riders, the venture firm pioneering Bitcoin as a hurdle rate, the only Bitcoin denominated venture fund. There's some real exciting announcement that recently came out of the stables. If you haven't seen the news, Bitcoin Magazine did a report and you can also go to earlywriters.com to check it out. But ultimately why it matters is if you're building in the space and looking to either leave your company job or looking to partner to get, you know, funding to build things in the Bitcoin ecosystem or even outside the Bitcoin ecosystem. But coming at it from a first principles lens of trying to make more Bitcoin. We're going to have a four week fully funded Sprint at the Texas Hill Country campus that we are launching next year. We'd love to hear from you. You can book time with us or you can shoot us a note. A lot of exciting things happening on that front. So it encourage you to check it out. And if you just want to stay ahead of some of the research that Early Writers is producing, you can actually go to earlywriters.com and subscribe. Hope you guys enjoy the show. We have a great last trade coming up this week and again, some very fun, exciting product announcements in the coming week. So hopefully you stay. Tim. Thanks. So I'm so glad you brought this up because I was just thinking about this. I think William said it is obviously right in technological waves, capitals destroyed. We saw this with the railroads fiber. Dark fiber's one of my favorite because I had experience with like 20 years later than fiber getting rolled back out. I think it's completely different though, with AI and because I've been thinking about this and yeah, it's different in the sense that it's not apples to apples. I've been thinking about this a lot because it what Brian said, it's instinctually makes sense. Like there's all these numbers being thrown out there. Like how can everyone recoup it? We've loosely talked about this, but I hadn't been able to reconcile like what's actually happening. This is going to be a little fringe, but I'm curious of guys thoughts. And I think this is directionally bright is nobody's going to get paid back in real terms. And I don't even think they actually other than the companies that win. And the angle is that we know. I mean, we don't fully know. But the things I've been listening to is like the level and the amount of energy that we do not have to support. And this is really where the Renaissance of like nuclear fusion and all this stuff happening. But it was said that the amount of solar that China is going to put online this year, I believe is more energy total than all of the US, right? Like they are just so far ahead. And the main point is this. So when you look at the capital intensity of this race from the ASICS to the models to the data centers, to energy and standing up, the different forms of power generation, that it's exponential in the sense that as more computes being used, more people are using it goes back to the inferences in the amount from when GPTS first started to where it is today. Point being is energy is going to go through the roof, right? And energy already is like a proxy for kind of like human growth and intelligence, all the things we know flourishing. Point being is every. I think this is how we usher in Ubi. Seriously. Like I think that if you're holding hard assets or if you're holding real assets that accrue in real terms in the future, you are going to be fine. If you're not accruing that, you are going to be losing in real terms. But because AI is going to be ubiquitous from every aspect of everything we touch, it's going to be looked at as a public good that everyone needs to use it. And so people are going to get all this capital to spend, whether it's tokens or dollars. I don't know what it looks like because that's what's going to allow for the capital to be returned is those in nominal terms, not real terms, is all this cost is going to go up because the energy is the main output, right? And we don't, I think we'd all agree that energy is going to go exponential from here if like this is where the race is on. I think I did a decent job there because I just came up with this this morning. I was always listening to some stuff before this, but like it's kind of starting to come together of like what the actual strategy is. And that's why these numbers, nobody cares about them because they're not playing for like the tokens anymore. They're playing almost for like global superpower. And anyway, and this is where Bitcoin fits beautifully in the whole thing. Yeah, that's an interesting thought around. You know, Ubi taking a a form that isn't necessarily dollar based even. What if it's just, you know, the AI tokens or credits that that the humans need? Yeah, in the last part, this is really where also this is like where different information starts to connect and you don't even know it is. Paulo from Tether had a great podcast. I don't remember who it was with, but he was ultimately saying like, we don't even know for certain if like it's inorganic. When you think about these, you know, the status of the world, right? We have these like centralized, you know, banking institutions or whatever you want to call it, media companies. And it makes more sense for things to be distributed for for a number of reasons and the notion of compute and AI to be run locally, right from privacy perspective to even how you would train the model. There was other reasons to use, but the point being is that we don't even necessarily know. Like to your point on the Ubi stuff is like if you have these tokens, we've seen digital ID come in, right? So now you're tied to getting it through that. But there's going to be like this parallel track where you're going to have your own models. They're going to be on Prem or maybe they're going to be other localized. They can verify that data is not shared. I don't know. But point being is you're going to be able to interact with that. If you have a form of money that's better, that's censorship resistant, you can see kind of how like this starts to play out already today. And so that's the, I think the angle of the Ubi, it's like, well, if that's ubiquitous across everything, it's like, sure, you get it, but you need to like be able to do XY and Z and it'll start easy at first. Right, You've got to be a good, you've got to be a good digital citizen in order to receive your your credits of any kind. That's that's. For sure that's already happening here in New York though, which is Governor Kochel announces inflation refund checks are being sent to 8.2 million New York households. You know, as a way it just goes back to the fact that you need to be in control of the token if you're going to and be able to increase its issuance anytime if you want the Ubi to be directed on that certain token. Otherwise, you're necessarily going to run out of them in the long term just because no value will accrue to it. Yeah. I do want to move on. We have some other links, but before moving on from AII, did want to share this tweet which summarized a note from JP Morgan around, you know how much of the stock market in particular is just being driven by AI related stocks. I thought some of these numbers were pretty startling. So 75% of the S&P 500 returns since Chat GPTS launch in November 2022 have come from AI related stocks, 80% of earnings growth over the same period and 90% of capital spending growth. So this is it really just reiterates everything we've just discussed the amount of money being thrown at these things and really sort of this hopeful, this hopeful thesis that it all works out that that it's all worth it, right? And that that hopeful sort of trajectory is now being sort of manifested within the stock market itself. And, and that, you know, potential is being priced in effectively where, you know, a lot of the, the growth we've seen over the past year is, you know, really just being propped up by a lot of this AI hype. Yeah. I mean, I know you want to transition, but I think this is a good indicator of nobody talks about enough. You hear a lot of the tradified crypto people and definitely tried by people talk about the the Fed, Fed speak around GDP growth and we're not in a recession. It's like we've been in a recession since basically 1971 because GDP correlated to the amount of monetary units has been, I guess, inversely correlated. That's right. Point being that when you hear like we know the job numbers are cooked, we know GDP in nominal terms may be up, but in real terms it's not because cost of everything is going up. So when they look at like price earnings in, you know, revenue, they're not actually like the right numbers, they're not using the right benchmarks. And then this is the latest example of that because it just conveniently happened. I don't know, I won't make any claims because I don't really know. But like 21 when everything sees up or 22 after everything sees up with low interest rates, how AI just stepped in there? Because when velocity of money goes down, then naturally things start like seizing up. And AI like naturally stepped in for like all the different hedge funds, LP funds, endowments to start stepping into those markets. And then again, goes back to the stock market, which a majority of people hold their wealth in outside of houses. I also got juice. But there's no growth happening there from a, you know, GDP perspective. And so people, like, dance around AI and that we're gonna get this growth out of there. And it's like, yes, on a loan of time, there's gonna be a lot of crazy things. But today, there's not that much GDP growth happening. Like, nobody knows anybody really using effective AI outside of, like, individuals and maybe some units that I found really specific niches when it comes to like, legal and accounting and certain things that are just like, data set structures. But yeah, this is just yeah. A lot of that near term stuff would also, you know, likely be net negative for GDP as well if it's replacing jobs. Exactly. With all the layoffs, you're looking at that and those people aren't entering the workforce back like that's a. Yeah. Yeah, there's a there's actually a random plug for all this. I think you guys will appreciate him. Only halfway through is the long like he's from a lot of smart people. They call him like he's just a puppet for those Ponzi is. It's the NVIDIA CEO and he was with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley. On the half of that, yeah. Yeah. But like this is the kind of notion of this is the speak in Silicon Valley. Like this is where it's all going. And I think it's directionally right. But they're not the second and 3rd order consequences are not fully understood or appreciated. Or maybe it's just, it's just, you know, being a bloody server because it's your own bug. All right, moving on slightly. This is kind of related actually in the sense that you know, we've been talking around AI and and sort of the glut of capital spend headed to to that trend or that narrative. And this is a tweet from our our buddy Eric Balkunis talking about wind, solar and general ESGETF closures that have been occurring over the past couple years. And it's sort of accelerating. And so to me, this is, it relates to everything that we're talking about in terms of capital destruction, fads, narratives that ultimately wane. And that's, you know, effectively what we saw with with ESG. A lot of issuers got excited about ESGTFS, this sort of new area of thematic investing. And the reality of it was that, you know, there was no sort of excess return or alpha there. And most of these things ended up underperforming just broader indexes. And so the sort of fad and the narrative around them began to wane. And there was obviously sort of social pressures or social sort of more cultural evolutions that occurred in the ESG space as well. But I just thought this was interesting in light of everything we've been talking around. AI is I think you are even crypto for that matter. You know, I think you could see something similar play out with, you know, all of these ET PS, all these ETS for Doge 2X leverage, you know, all these things that feel very hot and in vogue right now. We could look back in a few years and see a lot of these these things just close as the issuers realize there isn't real demand for them. Yeah. The one thing this reminds me of that I wanted to say on the AI stuff is ultimately it goes back to the the claim of the futures here. It's not evenly distributed in the sense that there is a way to make money on Bitcoin and it means that you understand the tailwinds of what's happening. And then the businesses that are leverage for them in a positive way are going to create meaning like Bitcoin adoption, different things that we'd be seeing in this new world. But if the investor isn't aligned, if they're paying back in dollars or they're investing in ESG or what we just talked about in the CapEx around AI, you're better off holding spot Bitcoin. And then as that price appreciates, the market's going to naturally find it equilibrium where you can get a return on your Bitcoin. And I think that's the like maybe the most, the biggest take away I would leave. And if anybody listening with is like, if the investor doesn't understand what we're talking about or you don't feel confident that like the tailwinds of what their business will produce, you know, especially if a 10 year horizon is going to pay dollars. We don't even know where the dollar is in 10 years. But then going back to if you believe that Bitcoin's going to proliferate AI agents, you know, custody, like whatever it might be, that's going to have a positive spin in in the other side of it. Is it, imagine if it was Tethers, founders, CEOs that we're building something not even adjacent to Bitcoin, but they swept everything in there. I would still take the bet with that because they just are good business builders are efficient and that would produce a higher outcome than what they're spending their money on. But I think that's my big take away is there's going to be a lot of capital in Destroy. It doesn't have to be yours. You can just sit in the background and then wait for the right opportunities. That's what Bitcoin affords. You know you don't get rid of the dollars that are losing purchasing power yearly to figure out to go in a private investment. Yeah, I would say on this one as well. It's just, it didn't make any sense any of the ESG stuff because it came top down from government mandates and then the S&P 500 companies had to make changes in order to be compliant with every rule that they had. And then the ETFs came out of it because it was a trend that of mandated by government. Same thing that you saw over time, especially with too much hype and then capital destroyed from top down mandates from anything from solar and EBS etcetera. On the other side of the one thing that we haven't chatted about is the bottom up demand and the Vanguard now looking into Bitcoin ETFs for their clients as well as other crypto ETFs. We've seen that's just been a bottoms up type demand from all their clients. They've, I don't know what their actual numbers look like, but I'm sure that they saw a number of their clients just net the, the platform because Fidelity, BlackRock, etcetera offered Bitcoin ETFs as well as they just saw that BlackRock is that's their most profitable product is their Bitcoin ETF. And so naturally, it's just going to kind of like we can talk about all the stable coins, etcetera, but it's just going to be natural economic and market forces that are going to drive all of the companies and consumers just who adopt Bitcoin rather than any other savings technology over the long term. It's it's definitely not evenly distributed in terms of knowledge around the asset, but it's just going to increasingly Dr. more and more people into the space. And that's kind of, you know to Michael's point about why you should focus on businesses that are that consumers are actually adopting rather than just top down based on any demands for stable coins and etcetera. Yeah, all that's very well said and and nice transition to this infographic that I wanted to pull up, which sort of just summarized a lot of headlines from the past week or two around trad fi incoming firms, you know, placing their chips on the table in in in terms of, you know, getting their clients access to digital assets, crypto, Bitcoin Vanguard is, you know, one that's very notable in the sense that they for a while were very anti. And I think the ultimately the end client demand, I think probably spurred them to to change their positioning on this. And so now they are going to buy crypto ETF access for their brokerage clients. Some other headlines on here. Morgan Stanley close to offering crypto trading through E*Trade calls it the tip of the iceberg. JP Morgan to enable crypto purchases via credit cards and a Coinbase partnership. BlackRock filed to launch a Bitcoin premium income ETF, which I believe will use a covered call strategy, and Citigroup considers custody and payment services. Charles Schwab plans to launch crypto trading. And Visa announced A partnership with Fold and Stripe to bring Bitcoin credit card rewards to the checkout aisle. Michael, any thoughts on on all these headlines from the past couple weeks? Yeah. I think we made a good point on ultimately what's going to drive market adoption is, you know, a better product and bitcoins just a better product from a store of value. And so these companies are going to be forced to play. I think from a pure market winning and investment perspective, most of these companies don't end up winning long term. And mainly because I've seen this first hand, but it makes sense too, is that Bitcoin really starts at first for these businesses as revenue driver, revenue driver. But unless they hit a certain market penetration in revenue and you could make the case BlackRock could get there or not, their existing businesses will eventually start to compete with them. And unless they can transition fast enough, they start to have to effectively like hamstring or just deliver subpar goods and services. The best example is when you think about custody, because most of these businesses are familiar with how they custody traditional assets. And that's completely different with Bitcoin. And if we go back to bitcoins bottoms up and the best products will win will then eventually these businesses will lose capital because people will go to the best product and service. And something that we've shared a little bit here, the guys have probably heard me say this 100 times, but I'll say it again is because Bitcoin was an emergent asset. It started from the individual and worked up and just has to do with being consensus of one that you don't need a, you know, a board or a, you know, you don't need any kind of consortium to to outside of maybe somebody's wife to agree to go and purchase material amounts of Bitcoin. But because of individuals have been in this market for the longest time, they are the most sophisticated investor. I don't think that's ever really happened in any asset, probably outside of just gold monetization hundreds or thousands of years ago. Point being is these companies build products for other companies. They don't build it for the individual and individuals just make up companies. So it's, it's not even logical to say, well, individuals won't hold a bunch of Bitcoin. It'll just be companies like no, no, individuals just have the longest time. So they'll first get to what the best exposure is, But then secondarily the individuals you're made-up of companies. So if the individuals are using it, then why wouldn't the company eventually use it? And so I think that's another just big gap in opportunity because it comes up a lot of like, well, why would an XY or Z just do on ramp when it comes to like BNY? It's like, well, they probably will on a long enough time horizon, but they have no reason to do it at first for like 100 different reasons. So that's kind of my big take away with this. I'll pause if you guys have thoughts on that. But then I did want to pull up two other reports that tie into this because I thought they were very interesting that. Yeah. Let's let's move on cuz I know we have a we have a hard stop in a few minutes. So the Y Combinator one, do you want me to? Pull that one before that just on the Tratify stuff. I'll do it real quick. So the first one was BNY Mellon put out a report last week and this wasn't tied to crypto currencies. It was basically titled 2025 investment insights for single family offices. They did a report on I believe 284 family offices across all asset classes. The core concept here was on digital assets are becoming mainstream. 74% of investment professionals have either invested in crypto currencies or exploring the possibility 21% rise in 12 months. The share of those with no exposure interest has slumped 30 7% year over year, driven by favorable regulatory developments. And then they have a whole page. And I thought it was so cryptocurrencies. The feature is now nearly 3/4 of family office professionals have either invested in cryptocurrencies or exploring the possibility of 21% increase. So that's the first one. The second one I wanted to share was I know this bank is like not, I don't think they're solvent, but but they're still, you know, name is Deutsche Bank. They had this report that I don't know if anybody's even pulled up yet. I didn't I need to like do a tweet so we can have a link that's easy to go to, but it effectively is breaking down. The title is let me find real quick. So Bitcoin versus gold, the future of central bank reserves by 2030. And the core thing I want to pull out from it here is while gold is long been the standard alternative, the Trump administration's landmark decision to establish AUS strategic reserve this past March reignites the argument for central banks to hold Bitcoin as a reserve asset. And then it shows USD share of central bank reserves versus gold and the, you know, heavy increase in gold over the past. I guess this is 12 months. The point being is that this stuff is like really happening fast now. And you can make the claim it's inflation, it's new regulatory, new administration, whatever it is like it's only going to accelerate from here. And This is why these market cycles and structures completely different from where we're heading. It's just complete uncharted territory. Yeah, we haven't even really chatted gold this episode, which is a shocker. We've been talking cold every week, but new all time highs almost every day. I think we're over 38, 3800 an ounce. And yeah, it's it's indicative of everything we're talking about that that Deutsche Bank note. There's been other research notes and just headlines from a lot of, you know, more Tratify incoming folks that are, you know, at least vocalizing support for, you know, material allocations to gold, right. So not the not the typical 1 to 3% that we've seen for many decades in the Tratify space as sort of this doom and gloom end of the world type hedge in portfolios. Now it's being talked about in a much different light. You know, anywhere from 15 to 25% in gold being talked about is reasonable. And as as we've discussed many times on the show, that is just the natural evolution of things that, you know, how we get people ultimately to Bitcoin is by first, first understanding that there's a, there's a stop, you know, a spot in portfolios for sound money, for hard assets with gold obviously having the longest track record as such. And so encouraging to see a lot of those headlines and, and people vocalizing this because I think it's, it's just more and more in the zeitgeist everyday, particularly as gold continues to run here. We have many thoughts. I know I did want to. I'll pull up this South Korea update deal because I know you, I know you had some thoughts on that. Yeah there was just I mean in addition to everything that we've just been talking about about tried by adopting Bitcoin S I'm definitely no expert on South Korea and their regulatory structure, but it seems like they're getting more and more open to digital assets the whole there and there's this deal is pretty interesting to me so up it is the largest crypto exchange in South Korea. It seems like they have around 80% market share and neighbor is a Internet e-commerce as well as payments and financial platform over there. It seems like they're worth about $40 billion USD and this deal is interesting to me because they're not true a traditional bank, but they're more of a payments company as well as a little bit of lending too. And they are buying a crypto exchange. I know outside of the US there's a lot more focused on just crypto in general rather than just Bitcoin only. And so I thought this was particularly interesting as we see everything from cracking and, and all those other digital asset companies here in the US starting to go public. But it's also interesting that there are natural exit opportunities of just traditional payments companies. They, they have a large amount, they're essentially like the one of the blocks or squares over in South Korea, a lot of online payment terminals as well as in person almost like a stripe as well. And so it was interesting, I think that they're probably doing it to incorporate stable points deeper into the usage of their platform in order to reduce costs as well as just continue to gain market share and and hedge on their bets. But to Michelle point earlier, I think that this is kind of just a a competition of their business internally. And I don't think that these types of buyers are necessarily going to be the ones who survive long term. But it is interesting to see the aperture of potential buyers for digital asset based companies open up wider than banks and other financial institutions in terms of just that that hold capital. And I think that's a sign to come of everything that's that's coming in the US soon as well. Yeah, maybe this ties into that last link is the main 1 Brian, the the YC you don't have to play the clip, but if you just pull up the the video, I think to yeah. So this is AYC most recent podcast. Why now the time is to build in crypto and it's with the base, I don't know founder, whoever runs that unit at Coinbase. It goes to a few things. 1 is like, I do think we're going to see, we'll see some premium on Bitcoin companies, but really that premium is going to be lifted. I think in the, the downturn of the next cycle when people recognize that a lot of this stuff was like lipstick on a pig because you naturally need a lot of like risk management and conservative building if you're messing with money, especially digit and digitally native money. And on this podcast, they were referencing, you know, these use cases that actually make a lot of sense when it comes to like areas of focus that I don't think Bitcoin is really focused at A, at a, you know, best in class scale. When you think about YC and, and Silicon Valley went better buying experience, social lending scale, networks, creator economy, a lot of these things that have been niche deals, I think will eventually win on Bitcoin. But then they obviously like missed the boat on like how the rails will be run. And a good example was referencing how there's interesting opportunities now for local Fiat currency, stable coins. And it's like, well, who wants their local Fiat currency and the stable coin? It just makes zero sense. But the other thing that ties into where I think a premium ends up with the Bitcoin companies and it's really widely missed in this space is I didn't know that Balaji had this tweet or a presentation at the Bitcoin Magazine conference referencing that somewhere between 100K and $1,000,000 Bitcoin, that Bitcoin billionaires will eclipse billionaires on the planet Earth. And why that's interesting. Whether it's 500,000 million dollars is as long as we have a long term time horizon, believe that number will get there, then that will happen. It's probably not at the exact number because the other person's assets are also, you know, increasing in dollar terms. But the point being is nobody's focused on that. Nobody's focused on where do they hold the underlying. They're focused on stable coins are focused on crypto. But that underlying base, well, that individual is gonna naturally not only need financial services, but if that asset is increasing, well then there's gonna be more monetization around that base asset. It's just a huge gap. It's obviously something we focus on, but I think that's like a huge opportunity. Well, everyone's focused on payments and E cash and all this other stuff. It's like, how do you get your arms wrapped around the client that's holding the underline? Because that is who's going to dictate the future of where that money goes, how it gets spent lent and everything above and below. Yep. Very well said. The the primary use case is store value and that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. Any parting thoughts? I know we got a wrap here. Good Rep. We got to do them quick now. Next time that was. I thought that was a good one. Good tight wrap. Thanks. Boys, thanks. Next week, thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. 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