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What you're telling me is that music is about to stop, and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of bodarous extras ever assembled in the history of doubtless 1974198792972 thousand. Whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same thing over and over. We can't help ourselves. I say when we. Sell, hey, I say when we sell. Oh Logan, you're going to ninja launch on us. We are recording. We are meeting, as you can tell anybody who's who's watching this, there's only three of us. This week. I'm in Nashville, TN. I'm at the Lightning Summit being hosted by the Bitcoin Park here in Nashville, an incredible coworking space and Event Center for people building in Bitcoin. Wanting to learn more about Bitcoin, I wanted to pull one of the attendees. To this summit in to be our guest this week. And I got Rugged. I'm not gonna, I'm like gonna name who it was. I don't wanna put them on the spot publicly, but we got Rugged. So it's just the three of us. This week it's gonna be an intimate episode, a tight rip. Gentlemen, how are we doing? We're doing this new format and it's just the three of us this week. Are you OK? New format different time zones. I'm in Mountain Mountain time right now. Jesse on the West Coast and the the rugging will maybe we announce who who rugged when we have him on the pod because it was a great idea and good concepts that we do want to talk about so. And we will touch on that. But before touching on those big news of the day again, I do love these summits and these Bitcoin events that are like. Very busy and high signal and you're like forced to engage and actually pay attention. I haven't been on Twitter all week. I wasn't on Twitter this morning and I was only made aware of this video clip like 20 minutes ago. So Logan, let's pull it up. We got Larry Fink on CNBC saying some stuff. I can't talk about Bitcoin, but we have a filing with the SEC so I'm prohibited. I can talk about crypto in general and I can talk about what we have done. You know, we believe we have a responsibility to democratize investing and we've done a great job and and the role of ETS in the world is is transforming investing in it. I think we're only at the beginning of that. I mean we we, we believe. The fixed income market is going to become multiple trillion dollars in in in ETF. Equities will continue. More and more the market will be will be delivered through an ETF platform. If you think about what was done 1520, no 20 years ago now with the advent of a gold ETF, that really democratized gold. Investing it broadened out of the cost of transaction for gold. I mean, the cost of transacting physical gold is absurd. And now with crypto, the idea of democratizing that role, the cost right now, the transact, it's quite expensive. We're talking points, not decimal points. And so that's a big .2 over the last five years. More and more our global investors are asking us about the role of crypto. And as I said, I do believe a lot of crypto is is going to be it's an international asset, it's going, it is, it has a differentiating value versus other asset classes. But more importantly because it's so international, it's going to transcend any one currency and currency evaluation if you just look at the value of. Of our dollar and how a depreciate lasts 2, two months and how much it appreciated over the last five years. I mean a international crypto product can really transcend that and that's why we believe there's great opportunities and that's why we're seeing more and more interest and that interest is broad based worldwide. Before we jump jump in, can you guys help me understand what he meant by appreciate and depreciate? He said like in the past two months, it's appreciated and depreciated and I. Think he fumbled through that? It was. He was. Fumbling. What do we think he meant? Cuz that's just very confusing us, the whole story. Yeah, Dixie that the dollar index is down over the last couple months. It had a strong. Year or two before that, but it's down now and that's just a measure of how the dollar is performing versus other Fiat currencies, which is to say that for you know for a couple years there other Fiat currencies were printing more than the dollar. So they were debasing faster than the dollar. So the dollar was doing relatively better and now the that's kind of flipped like the Swiss franc right now is, is kicking butt versus the dollar. And so that's a trend that's been been playing out and I think he was just kind of extrapolating that. Yeah. Yeah, but probably it was. It felt like watching that. It was the third time I watched it in the last 10 minutes and it seems like it was like fed some talking points and yeah, and fumbled through it. Like, I don't think he really believed what he was saying, but. It it did feel like he hadn't really practiced them, at least. And yeah, there's. He he had a week ago he came out and said that Bitcoin is a product that BlackRock wants to get into. Because then he made this strange leap of the foundational value of BlackRock is about hope. Which of course is hope being this, this word that Michael Saylor has has linked to Bitcoin and made part of the Bitcoin ethos that Bitcoin is about hope. So. He, in a kind of fumbling way then, was trying to connect BlackRock with the Bitcoin ethos, as if a bitcoiner had been coaching him the same way that I think, like RFK and other politicians have been coached on Bitcoin recently. I think the whole thing's insane. I was listening to one note, the one notice, he said They're democratizing crypto vis a vis Bitcoin. It's like this week it's such a prescient or like. It just within 24 hours, at the same time, Mutiny Wallet announces you can, you know basically spin up a lightning note and a node accept a transaction in a browser. They're democratizing crypto in the same way that they democratize gold. He's touting as a good thing that they made paper gold and that you know good luck getting your gold if you need it. When when the time when at the time you need it. Imagine like good luck getting your Bitcoin at the time you need it. Like it's just it's completely nuts. Yeah, and I think. Again, he was leaning into the transaction cost when I really, if I think about rocking it correctly, is comparing the cost of getting exposure to Bitcoin via an ETF to buying Bitcoin directly on an exchange and the the different fee structures that exist between those two. And that's funny. He still believes that, like transacting in Bitcoin, just buying it and like holding it in the ETF or just holding it on an exchange and not rocking like the actual. Cost of sending an actual Bitcoin transaction at the protocol layer and viewing it as this bare instrument that people will actually use and spend and move around. And he's really stuck in this myopic view of, oh, Bitcoin is just gonna go sit in our fund at Coinbase. That's what people are gonna want. That's right. We got confused with Jesse what he mentioned on the two year cuz it the way I interpret it was that Bitcoin against the dollar you know has been against. That you know the price relative to dollar the past two years, but over five years, the past five years, and it seems like he had like 4 different or five different talking points he was trying to like string together and they all just got lost within him, just like, you know. Yeah, that, that, yeah, the time frame comparison thing was confusing. I'm not really sure what he was trying to trying to say there. And yeah, it does feel like for better and worse here, Larry Fink has wrapped his head around maybe. Bitcoin is digital gold, and he doesn't understand Bitcoin yet, but he sees, oh, gold is a product that BlackRock has, quote UN quote, democratized with an ETF that's been very successful. Maybe we can make money doing that for Bitcoin and and I think that might be as far as he's gotten, but that might be enough for him to suddenly be an advocate for like legitimizing in the in the mainstream finance. View Bitcoin as a product, as an investment asset, and that that's a good tailwind. Though. Michael's right that you know they want to ingest as much Bitcoin as they can and have it sitting in a single fund without actually enabling people to to use the underlying asset or even take self custody down the road. Because we know that the Bitcoin ETF that BlackRock has proposed. Doesn't allow an average Joe to take an income redemption out of it. You you're not allowed to do that unless you're a registered broker dealer and you're doing the whole Bitcoin rather than fractional. And that's not that's not going to happen all that often for for, you know, an average individual. But what? But what does give me hope here? Is that this seems to be a trend and this is where I'm going to get out. I'm going to get on a strange soapbox that I wasn't expecting to get on, you know, a week ago. But Larry thinks excitement about Bitcoin right now. There's there's just under the surface there's like a, you know, an affable grandpa's excitement and that might be why he's a killer because you think that he's, you know, a friendly grandpa but really he's he's stone cold, ruthless, but. At any rate, there is something about his language right now with Bitcoin of he's realizing the things that we've all realized in in our own journeys into Bitcoin that first of all, Bitcoin is not Monopoly money. It it has real substance to, it has real value. And then once you have that fundamental switch, you start to appreciate just how much value it it it brings to the world. And you know, at the end of the day, Bitcoin is American values. It's about personal freedoms, property rights, you know, self determination, not allowing anybody to steal your wealth over time, being able to save and build a brighter future for yourself and your family through saving that, that's that's fundamentally American now. Wall Street Titans, despite all of their. Sins. They love America. You know, if you're if you're a selfmade billionaire who has, who has made a long career in Wall Street and you're you're hanging out in the Hamptons in the summer and your lavish spread in the backyard watching your kids play in the pool and circled by grass, which is the Hamptons way, you're going to love the country that helped you. Live this life even if you were an absolute wolf in in getting there. You love the foundation of America. You love American values. And now here comes this thing that you are starting to recognize is American values more so than the US dollar. the US dollar is actually not American values. And so I think we've seen this with Paul Tudor Jones and Bill Miller and Stan Druckenmiller where when they. You know, dig a little under the surface. They realize that Bitcoin has merit and is actually something that aligns with their value system. And then they become advocates for it, as we've seen those three men do. And now every other Wall Street Titan is forced to reckon with Okay. I respect those three guys, and in fact, all of my friends who look into Bitcoin start to become advocates for it. So maybe there's something here. And then they do their research and come away discovering that Bitcoin is American values. And I feel like Larry Fink is at the beginning of that orange pill epiphany and for many reasons he will probably never get there fully. But I think he just went from vocally anti Bitcoin to, you know what? Bitcoin is good for the world. And that's a huge step. So few few things. I agree because because what I'm going to say after is going to be a very controversial. I agree that the game theory obviously aligns for everybody to adopt and hold Bitcoin and Bitcoin is the most American thing. At the same time are you telling me Black Rock the creator, the most anti American? You know basically ESG is now getting Bitcoin from American ethos is that what you're saying Jesse? I'm going to say that I'm going to bend over backwards here and try to make this argument that that the EFG thing was them falling for, you know, that that political narrative and wanting to do something good for the world and ham fisting it, That's my argument. Yeah. No, I mean, so because I'm curious, like, yeah, I said there's that. There's also like I was taking notes on this last time, again the third time like Marty in the past 20 minutes hearing it and he said a lot of key things like I think there were tales on BlackRock about like transcending the US like absorbing capital global investors. I I think what they ultimately got is they they recognize like 1. The asset is coming. It has like there's certain market structure of. We know inflation, what happens to gold and hard assets. Bitcoin will do its thing. There's an understanding what will happen. There's a having coming ETF has to come. You know they're having the SEC lawsuit with GBTC. They get the nod, get the ETF. But the idea is that there's so much liquidity like to be absorbed by whatever 1617 million BTC that's out there. That there's two parts and then you know, pumping the bags that they will accumulate. Well, also he referenced like this ETF, this model that has started the past 15 years of centralization of assets. They kind of, he didn't say tokenization, but there's also this Wall Street thing happening right now where the next wave where we're starting to see it. And again, we did this in like 1718 and like St. O's at the time, whatever, they're going to refer to tokenizing bonds and ET F's. In this world. But there's just this play on it, at least in my view of centralizing assets and at a click of a button, being able to say these aren't yours anymore. Because that's effectively what he was communicating about the gold centralization of we made it cheap and costly to be able to or less costly to hold gold. Which sounds really good. It's like the great, you know, Turkey meme where it's good for 364 days and on the 365th day, when you actually, you know, whatever needed, you need the gold. In this case, you're dead. It can't, it can't come to you in the same way Bitcoin. So yeah, this, the whole thing doesn't smell good at all. I think these guys are not working in Bitcoin's best interest, and I don't think that's a problem. It's just more of we should recognize it. And plan accordingly because anything otherwise specifically with this situation I think would be everybody. It's a disservice, agreed. Well, not only I'm gonna take it in a different direction, which is I don't think he understands PIC at all yet, but I do think the last line of that clip, particularly around Bitcoin and quote, UN quote crypto. Being able to transcend any individual sovereign nation currency is a nod towards like the black rocks of the world. Larry Finks of the world Understand the the geopolitical and economic landscape of the world is extremely fragile right now. And he's probably sent a bunch of analysts like, all right, what's going to be the next move or one of the next moves? And they've come back and they've said all right, Bitcoin and crypto is probably that. And he's sort of rushing. To market with this ETF and with this narrative that, again, obviously hasn't practiced enough. He was fumbling through that whole interview. And it's like, all right, just like I'm being told this is the right thing to do, like we're all in a Bitcoin. It transcends. Like he was given a few lines to try to remember he he did it pretty poorly and then ran with it. But to Michael's point, like it it is a bit alarming, the way they're framing it. Disingenuinely like again using is sort of equating the transaction cost of exposure to an ETF versus you run in the middle Bitcoin exchange like river or cash app, whatever it may be, and equating that with actual like Bitcoin transactions that people, individuals and businesses can make at the protocol layer or layers above it, be the lightning network. That's that's. Disingenuous #1 Very alarming #2. BlackRock and others that come after them were able to successfully lull the public into believing that getting exposure to Bitcoin via these products is going to enable them to leverage the the properties of Bitcoin, which it's not The BlackRock specifically. We know that unless you're a blessed participant, blessed broker, dealer, you're not going to be able to take that Bitcoin in kind and do. And things with Epiquit that you want. And another thing here too is if BlackRock gets this approved, which I think we all agree is probably very likely, then others follow suit. And it seems like I believe there's six filings out there right now and four of the six are using Queen Base as their custodian. I believe the two others using State Street and I believe State Street maybe Fidelity, but if we get to a situation where the ETF. It gets approved, it gets popularity because Larry Fink's of the world are successful in conning the public and believing this is the best way to get exposure to Bitcoin. Like we can have a situation like again this, the fact that he was comparing this to gold and what the ETF market did for gold. Like if the ETF, the Bitcoin ETF does does what? Like it's it's not going to be like, well, like all the supplies going to concentrate in coin base and then queen base just becomes this massive honeypot and this target for governments to be able to show up to and be like, hey, we see you have 3,000,000 Bitcoin there, we're gonna, we're gonna need you to to give that to us or to to not move it off your exchange and that could really hinder a large part of the market. Yeah, I think that's been the big the big unlock is what you said on the global it's the reflexivity that they recognize that. If you think about gold, what is the ultimate if in a world where Bitcoin does everything, we think, what's gold At a tryout like $10,000, that's 5X from here, the reflexivity and understanding a single Bitcoin from 30K could be 300 K, 3,000,000 based on supply demand that they can aggregate that. I think it ends up just being a simple equation of a if we, you know. Screen light, the ETF, we can accumulate trillions in assets and that's fees. And to your point what I think the 2nd is a call option that we potentially can control this and A is great and B is just extra gravy on it and I think that's as simple as what's happening here. Yeah. So I think I hear, I hear what you guys are saying. I think there's I I'm probably being a fool here because I think that there's an earnestness that. They'd think they have, because when people find out about Bitcoin, what what does everybody do? Everybody shows up and says, I'm here to fix Bitcoin, right? And and this is their version of that, right? Bitcoin's an asset that makes sense in a world where the US dollar hegemony is, is fading. The rise of the bricks is a threat to. The Western dominance of the international markets and you know, that's what Ray Dalio got wrong about the changing world order. He implies that, you know, since there's a 600 year track record of the global reserve currency. Rising and falling every hundred years and and it being a new nation every time, the ascendant superpower takes over as the global reserve currency because that's the currency that you can trust your value in that. That pattern led him to sort of suggest that China is going to be the next global reserve currency. But what he missed is the rise of the Internet. The Internet creates this super sovereign currency. That transcends international borders and it's Bitcoin and that super sovereign currency is greater than any trusting any individual nation. And so that, you know, that's what I think Larry Fink and and his team at BlackRock are better suited to understand right now is in the current global landscape there is a case for neutral reserve currencies, hard assets and that means. Gold, historically. But now Bitcoin in the digital age, and holy shit, this thing could be big because of that. And then then they come in with Okay. Great. So Bitcoin has value. Let's do what we do and try to quote, UN quote, democratize it by spinning up an ETF. Yes, yes, I just discovered Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it. And that's where you think right now. And so, you know, I think it's this combination of like earnest intent and the classic fallacy that everybody comes to Bitcoin with and Bitcoin humbles you. And when you have yet to come to Bitcoin on on its terms, you are setting yourself up for hard learnings because you will eventually be humbled. And then you will figure out, oh, this thing just wants to be held in cold storage on chain and and and outside of the Tradfi universe. That's coming for Wall Street 10 years from now, but right now they're they think Bitcoin is great and they're here to fix it. So the two, the two counters that is again we're, I'm not I won't say what I think they're doing, I'm just looking at their actions. We've all known. I think anybody paying attention like the government can't create a CBDC, they cannot create a digital unit that can be transferred and it would be a public private partnership BlackRock owns basically Circle. BlackRock has already signaled they're the the horse they're riding on international trade and settlements as the things are going. So I think like from a that perspective and the second part is like I go back to this Block 5 is the closest because we're still so early but block 5 come in to you know fix Bitcoin or do lending in the Bitcoin world. You know like to your point they got wrecked. It's the same thing like black or Block 5 BlackRock coming in and. Attempting to do what they're doing, but at an or, you know, 100 X to 1000 X broader exposure, being the largest asset manager. Like we know that when people come into Bitcoin, they whoever they come in through is going to be how their journey, it might dictate their whole journey. i.e. it goes to 0 or it may you know push them back on the curve of learning based on the education information. That's where we focus so much on it here. You know you guys kind of. Carry that torch longer than I have in the sense of like the content Marty you put out content Jesse you put out and people that have come in I used to say this that Unchained when they found Unchained like and it was a very bold statements that he found like the signal will help you walk through it will help you out of custody will help you how to lend against it if you decide to stay it's up to you but but it's up to your you know it's up to your kind of like risk you want to take because we know you know what happened with genesis block file that and so it's a very similar thing with with. BlackRock except for it's again orders of magnitude larger When you think about app that managers capital allocation they're going to go to BlackRock and they're going to say you understand this, you bless this tell me what to do. Govern me harder. Daddy do where do I put the bitcoins? Where do I send them to How much should I let you hold. So again it's just. You know even if they did, you know, in good faith think that this was American valleys and health it. Like if they don't fully understand it and they're still, they're going to cause so much pain and disruption for a bunch of people that yeah, it's just a hard thing to like rationalize how it's it's positive other than yeah. I I think you're right that the good intentions here don't amount to much in terms of the experience that BlackRock may be. Creating for its investors down the road here or or other Wall Street firms. I mean, last week I ranted about how Wall Street is going to get burned. Some Wall Street firms are going to go under in the next 10 years because they they engage with Bitcoin in the wrong way and they rehypothecate and they have a hole in their balance sheet when the tide goes out and and boom, it's bigger than the enterprise value of the firm. And poof, some venerable Wall Street institution of 150 years is is gone just because they underestimated Bitcoin. That's going to happen. It could happen to BlackRock. And so the the good intentions here don't create good outcomes necessarily for an in fact, what they do create is a giant new surface area for attack for 61O2 for a honey pot of of assets. That that government forces could leverage a wedge that that they could exploit in the future. But I guess I'm, I'm, I'm excited about the narrative shift that Bitcoin is good and I think it is very concerning the kind of the product that people will be herded into and the weaknesses of that product. Down the road, but but I I'll take the win. But I do think it's on bitcoiners. It's on us to raise the alarm about which vehicle you're trusting. I mean that was the the, the metaphor I was going with when I wrote my recent piece about digging into the the BlackRock S1, the filing laying out all the specifics about Blackrock's proposed ETF. And my take away was that it is a bicycle with one good normal wheel and one square wheel and the square wheel is BlackRock governance and custody and and how they're proposing to approach that using the old world way for Bitcoin and and that's a centralizing force and and a bit of a scary force in in several ways so. So I think that you know it's a bad vehicle. But I'll take the win in terms of, you know, Larry Fink saying that that Bitcoin is good for the world. Yeah, yeah. I'll take that win to take the wins where we can get them. They want to pump our bags, definitely do it. They're certainly trying to pump their own bags and. Michael won't take this the. Onus is on us to wait wait, I'm. Gonna get on something. You're gonna like don't worry, the the onus is on us to get people into the good products and then This is why Onramp exists and again there's either a. Mental blocker, blinder or just pure ignorance to the way Bitcoin works, particularly around the native properties, particularly multicig that enables very unique custody models which on ramp has built with the multi institution multicig where the Bitcoin sits within the trust like I think as educators and his people. Maybe even advising tratify companies getting into Bitcoin, providing Bitcoin products the the way we should be pitching this. Again, like bitcoins, distributed nature works at many different ways. You have the distribution of full nodes to make sure that's really hard to change the protocol and shut it down. You have the distribution of hash rate geographically and the the ownership breakdown. To make sure that the mining sufficiently distributed so that the network's secure and the blocks are being produced, you have the distribution of nodes and channel management at the lightning layer. And then again, private keys is probably the one that is least talked about, but arguably one of the most obviously one of the most important, just equally as important. As the rest of those those factors, if you want Bitcoin to be as robust and resilient as possible, and if it's as robust and resilient as possible, it will be extremely valuable. The more robust and resilient it is, the harder it is to shut down. The more valuable it is, the more people are like, oh, this is ironclad, I need Bitcoin, it is our money. And so I think an area that's been a lack of focus throughout Bitcoin's history has been the private key distribution, like distributing keys. In creating these quorums of multi institutions to make it extremely hard for governments or large investment firms like BlackRock to essentially take a large portion of the Bitcoin supply and either create a honey pot or control it unilaterally on behalf of millions of people. And so that's again Jesse to your point about educating people about these different structures I think when doing that. Aid to get people to understand it. It's like all right, you use this distributed multi institution, multi sig model because it makes the distribution of private keys more robust, which makes it harder to unilaterally control Bitcoin on behalf of governments or large institutions, which increases the value prop. It makes it more valuable as a result. So with that pitch. To people to help them understand this, I think you just add like the sprinkle on top and like, yeah, this is gonna make Bitcoin more valuable cuz it's much harder to unilaterally control large swaths of Bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, so there's a couple things. When Jesse was like all this, I empathize and. To get where the different takes or like our stances on it because it it makes sense. I think there's partially whether we met or not, like BlackRock coming in we like to go because it's going to pump our bags. Like this thing's going to get insane quickly. I think we all agree there but when Jesse was breaking down like how how this is going to play out and and BlackRock, all I could think of was the greatest trick that ever the devil ever pulled was convincing everyone he didn't exist and right when I thought that. Jesse mentioned the people getting herded into this product and I think that's exactly right. Like they get hurt into the product. As Marty mentioned, keys needed to be distributed, but keys needed to be distributed is not intuitive and it's not it doesn't make sense to majority of people like majority of people have not come into space. It's the same thing. Where yield doesn't make sense or the the fact that you shouldn't generate yield on Bitcoin didn't make sense and a bunch of people lost all their funds. And so I think of like you know Bitcoin just flips kind of how the products in the financial environment will be built similar to again blockvised loans. With rehypothecating you take a more and a pragmatic conservative approach. You get your Bitcoin, you can you know get U.S. dollars or you know lend lend against it if you need it, but you get your Bitcoin back. You know, high or low loaded LTV, similar with keys. Looking at it saying oh, I want a conservative approach. I want multiple people to hold these keys and have a governance in place. That sounds great. The reality is that's not how traditional finance works. It's everything. It goes against everything that they believe in. When it comes to centralization of assets, how do you, you know, financialize them which comes with risk generally you can print your way out of risk, you can't print more Bitcoin and so this whole thought of. Yes, I think we all agree here that we know the model for the future but at the same time I just can't like Champion or be excited about well this is how that it's we're just going to have another five years of just blowups and craziness and doing it the wrong way and and all of this just like I think it is what it is and money will flow in and and realities. We can't change any of it but we should we should be aware at least admit this probably is how it plays out. Versus oh, this is all like in good faith because it's just in the history of everything Blackrock's done has not shown any of that to be the case. And if this disintermediates all other assets, then this wouldn't even and they understand anything around what's happening, then they wouldn't be acting in good faith moving forward. So yeah, BlackRock. Larry thinks may may, you know, love American values and see them in Bitcoin. But the other things that BlackRock. Clearly love loves is they They love control and they love influence. And so you can you can like American values and that's good and that makes you a Bitcoin advocate. But. So how do we know they how do we how do we know they like American values. Like Marty knows way better than I do but Marty like just from an offshoring in the amount of energy production that's been halted. What that means from like just pure you know what what that means from low income individuals in America feel the access and flourish. Like how do we know like explain the logic behind they love American values. Yeah, it's speculative and it's. It's the odd exercise of, you know, these these guys who are The Who are Wall Street billionaires. They're really smart, very well read dudes all, all guys. Know how to play the political game. I think that's important factor here. That is like when it comes to ESG and all that stuff. I think a lot of that's driven politically. They're hyper competitive. And and as part of that, they're hyper social, So they're always, they're in the business of finding an edge and that means talking to each other constantly and they're constantly evaluating like Okay, who do I respect? Who's on to something, whose mind do I admire? And so that's the game they're in, that's the game they're playing and it's all a wealth accumulation game for them. But that game is only possible with with, you know, American rule of law. And the American culture of of like entrepreneurial endeavor to try to accumulate wealth and build wealth and create a brighter future for your family. Of course they, you know, have to engage in this by engaging in a political game. They're, you know, doing things that that are successful, that are not admirable. But I think that you know every all of these guys think that they're good guys. And that they are, you know, the pillars of their family. And that puts them at like an American patriarch identity at their core. And America has values that have enabled capitalism resonate with them. You know, like they they think of themselves as good guys. And what do they like? What are, what are their values? What are they embody? What are they champion? I think it's not a too much of A leap to think that the shared the common values that they have as a group Wall Street Titans is that they love capitalism, they love American rule of law and they love that culture of building a brighter future for your family. And ultimately that's America. So that's my that's my thought exercise. I do, yeah. So I do agree. And I think, what? This is this is a good. I'm glad you're having this conversation because as we're working through this and like it can almost see and curious you guys thoughts like where this ends up like everything's good for Bitcoin, right. So the price pumps, people come in, they have to hold it. So the people that weren't even wanting to hold it at 30 K want to hold it at 150 K through every K they can't hold it because of the liquidity profile. But then ultimately we see this fork from Black Rock that says oh you can't take your Bitcoin, you can take the green Bitcoin. And so everybody that got herded in basically through the BlackRock solution or orbit, right, Because it's going to go to Coinbase. Anything else associated, it's like, hey, this thing's crazy, like you could take it, but it's just not the actual Bitcoin. Yeah, I think that narrative shift of we just went from from BlackRock saying Bitcoin is bad because ESG to now Bitcoin is good because ESG. And that can never be undone. Like that narrative shift will will remain, but what can still happen, What I think will still happen is people will get burned. People who are being herded into Wall Street products will get burned. They they will learn a hard lesson. And so all this incoming demand is good for the price, but you better be sure that you're holding actual Bitcoin that you can count on. Otherwise that good for the price isn't good for you long term because you may end up with a 0. So. But even when that happens when you know when some Wall Street firms get burned and and their investors get burned. We don't go back to Bitcoin is bad. We go we go from from Bitcoin is good to oh Bitcoin is good and I better control it the right way. So what you can do is get ahead of that learning. By recognizing it now that there are some ways that that you know to have better custody and and promises assurances about you have actual Bitcoin and you control it versus learning the hard lesson with the herd that is currently being herded into Wall Street products so. We're going to get a what you're saying, what we're what we're I think saying is we're going to get a New York Agreement 2.0 in four years with Cocacola, Google. And everybody saying, Oh no, no. Like this is not the good Bitcoin. And they're gonna get, they're gonna get wrecked. I'll take yeah. I'll take a contrarian taker. I think yes, she is on its way out. I think it's dying. I think the public's fed up. I'm not gonna call peak clown world, but I do definitely think there is a shifting in sentiment of the broader public. I mean, you can see this in confidence polls whether it be presidents and. The federal government more broadly, the media like faith in institutions, is crumbling. BlackRock is an institution that people are going to be like, all right, what the hell are you doing? Why do you have 10% of all these companies? Why are you pushing ESG down our throats, which is that driving this world insane at a social level and really hindering the stability of our energy sector materially and. I like from when it comes to ESG and BlackRock, I do think the broader public is getting wiser to things that are going on with that particular initiative and I do think it is it will be ephemeral. I think we'll look back in retrospect and four or five years be like ah ESG that was that was pretty funny did. You hear that? Was. Did you hear the latest? I saw a quote. It was very recent of Larry Fang. Said that he's ashamed of of what ESG has become. Yeah, the. Politicized nature of it. He he does. He doesn't like what it is now and he doesn't. And he's not planning to focus on it. Or I forget what exactly is. Yeah. So people like, like on the social and like having like things forced down their throat from large investors like that sentiment's definitely changing. And on the other side is just like. Empirically, objectively not profitable. Like these ESG funds don't make any money like you're you're, you're not gonna return for your investors. And at the end of the day, that's what these guys really care about is like, how could they make money? You can only make money on fees via AUM and management fees for so long without providing actual returns for the end investor before it just doesn't work out. So I think you should. We should in many ways. You know, we didn't have a fourth guess or one rug dust. We should have just had Odell on. I feel like I need a counterpart to the, to the, to the, to the statism on this on this show. Because like, Marty with the like, yeah. Status. Well I mean it's it's kind of was like issues on its way out like issue was was by definition ephemeral. Like it had no definition like it was just this thing it just had this weird thing that it can be on its way out and you can just usher in something it something else that. You can use to craft a narrative of control. And then you mentioned like the centralization of assets are going away. It's like actually the opposite, like all the tokenization, the ETF's, everything is going back. You know, like tokenization is in my opinion like the best rugging because you're putting an asset on the blockchain and where does it sit and how many layers of counterparty risk exist? And you're basically sitting, you're going into a like for anybody. Listening out there, you can put a tomato on the blockchain. But if on en route your tomato from wherever it's was produced to to your plate. If in the middle of that route, I take that tomato and I eat it, you can have a claim to a token of a tomato on the blockchain all you want. But I ate the tomato. It's not yours. You get no pizza. You get no pizza, You get nothing. You get, you get nothing. You can't tokenize physical assets like. But what you can tokenize is information, and money is information. And that's really kind of the only thing of value that is information. It's a it's a Ledger. Money is a Ledger of who owns how much of something, and you can exchange that but and and. So that's the argument for why tokenization of real world assets is fundamentally limited, but money is really the only use case that it makes sense for. The beauty of what we're gonna get is we're gonna get tokenized Bitcoin. That's what everybody's That's what we're all talking about here. Like we're gonna get tokenized Bitcoin. They're gonna say they figured it out. We tokenize Bitcoin because that's effectively what an ETF is, right? It's just an ETF. And then they're gonna trade it on it. It's gonna be a token and you're gonna have a claim on it. And nobody's ever gonna get the bit. Nobody's ever gonna get the Bitcoin. Like, that's basically where this all goes. We said this like the second or third pod, It's like the trap has been set. And it's just yeah. You want direct UTXO exposure? Anybody listening out there? And yeah, and you sure as hell want to the ability, the right and ability to take that if you're not currently ready for it now, which is the whole point of on ramp. Yes, yes. We got a lot of work to do gentlemen, that's why. We do the show. That's why we're very passionate about educating people the right way and that's why On RAMP has really dedicated ongoing sort of advisory services as you're learning about Bitcoin. That's why outside of this show, I produce a newsletter and two other shows to to really try to get the message out there and educate people correctly. It's important and if you're out there and you. Can see that we may have a better understanding of this stuff than the black rocks of the world. And you have people that are exploring this like send them, send them our way, send them the content. Because again, if you, if you do believe, as I do, that this is, I mean may sound crazy and it's probably why people think we're a cult, but I do think it's a moral imperative to make sure that Bitcoin succeeds. In the digital age, and if you do too, I think it's very important that you point people in the right direction and get them access to the correct information. Yeah, we will never tokenize your Bitcoin. And and I I can't help but think about like this. This is why I've titled my writing series Once in A Species because the the scale of what's. Happening here is a once in a species event of going from analog value system to digital value system. That's a zero to 1 moment that only happens once, and we just happen to be living through it. Now the that's an incredible opportunity. It also creates a massive risk because if you fumble this transition, you set your. Dynasty back you you could, you could be wealthy now, and if you screw this up, your future generations are not wealthy because you didn't manage this right. Maybe you trust the wrong Wall Street firm. You get your Bitcoin allocation, it goes to the moon, and then you get rugged and you find out you have zero. So you got to manage this well. If this is as big of an event as we think it is, and the way to do that is. By getting smart, by seeking out more information, educating yourself, talking to people, talking to people who know about this stuff because they've been in it full time for, you know, a half dozen years like all of us have been, Marty, more so longer than that. And so you know this, the scale of the decisions you make right now with regard to how you approach Bitcoin. Could be the defining factor in whether or not your grandchildren live well or not, and it all comes down to how much education you get about Bitcoin now in order to make the right decisions in this zero to one once in a species event. Yeah, it's the most important thing. I think that's exactly right in in what we're going through right now actually. It aligns with everything else that's happening. Marty, our friend Tom, when I bring up we're in a bull market for for statism and you have the prescient or non prescient claim that we're in a clown world peak I think two years ago and it's just continued to get worse and I think it will. We think about like social networks, the news money, like they're all in the most like highest. Point of centralization. And we're gonna continue to go that way. In the same way we're gonna continue to go into government overreach until there's this like pushback. And then we go the opposite way. And I think of like gold and gold having free banking and the way that the notes were claimed. And then we went to the centralized point where we needed dollar claims and everything that's happening now. So I think like to this is just like a natural progression. BlackRock will own a bunch of Bitcoin and then we're all going to like hit this confluence of all this central points where the market recognizes this is actually not the natural and organic way that we should. You know basically systems should be created in long term sustainable like the high volatility at the end points where then it starts to go back out into the fringes. And one of the things is like we talked about the centralization of gold, but there's two products, one in Europe, I'm sorry. Canada and then one here in the US, they basically let you like have the claim on the gold but then take possession of it. And I think we'll see more and more of that where it's like you can have a claim on a unit but then there's a check and balance of it like knowing that you can take possession. Because that's what allows for the free market to determine if this is like an unsavory or savor actor. Instead of just waiting and pushing that volatility out until the very edges where there's trillions of dollars sitting somewhere and you can never touch them. And now you're holding a 0 or a paper claim on green bet coin. So anyway, I think it's a long winded way of just saying like, this is all part of it, but if you recognize what's happening, it's not just like crazy people telling you it's like, oh, this makes sense under the like rules of Bitcoin. Also the rules of what's happening just on a like societal level. And you can get ahead of it. And getting ahead of it allows for your family to have like the wealth to live the life you want, but also pass it, pass it down. And I think. The event going on here in Nashville this week is indicative of why you want to make sure that you're in exposure to Bitcoin the correct way like on RAMP. Maybe if you're you're not comfortable taking self custody of your Bitcoin right now, but in the future you may be and you may want to leverage some of the products and technologies that are being built out on 2nd layers on bitcoins. Right now Nashville, we're at the Lightning Summit and there's people from around the world that are building products on. The Lightning network to to make Bitcoin more useful and more accessible for individuals. And you're probably going to want to use these products at some point in the future. And if you do, you're probably going to need like to self custody Bitcoin to some extent and like by siloing yourself to Bitcoin exposure via something like a BlackRock ETF. You are essentially. Preventing yourself from being able to do that in the future, to be able to utilize the technologies that are being built. The best case scenario, you're going to have to sell that ETF exposure, pay the taxes, and then buy back Bitcoin properly via another vendor so you know when you're making this decision. Yes, you may think Bitcoin is only digital gold right now. It's just going to sit there forever. And that may be the case, may sit there for a while, but I'm pretty confident seeing everything that's being built like you're actually going to be using Bitcoin as a payments network, as a money, as a daytoday currency at some point over the next decade. And when that point comes for you individually, when you're ready to shift from using Bitcoin purely as a savings account to as to an Internet native currency that you're spending and using on a daytoday basis, you're going to really want to make sure that you have the correct exposure. Yeah, that's a good threat is like if you if you want Bitcoin, if you think it's going to appreciate in value, the extension of that is you will the people the things that you want people will demand Bitcoin for them and you can't just, yeah, I know you're jumped in. They're not going to take partial shares of the BlackRock ETF like you're not. No, they won't. Jesse, I'll I'll throw to you but but after that Marty would love to hear kind of your big takeaways, said we weren't able to make it down to Nashville. Would love to hear kind of like some of the talks yesterday or like some what are the announcements that are notable. Yeah, let's go to that. That's been a great event and I mean getting them in person at these events, whether it's the Nashville summits that they have here, the takeover events we have in Austin, many conferences around the world, it's great. Getting together, the Bitcoiners are actually heads down building. A lot of people believe that there's really nothing being built on Bitcoin, but once you come to these events, it's hard to to actually go out and say that earnestly because it's obvious that there's a ton of building going on. And so this Summit again is particularly focused on the Lightning Network. So it's a bunch of developers building wallet software, building products that that leverage Lightning, and I think for me. The big theme, I mean, I moderated the panel, so I'm a bit biased in terms of probably my favorite discussion. But I I did a panel on Lightning and AI with Paul Toy from Stack Work, OB from Fetty, and Jack Mowler's from Strike yesterday. And I think again, this is going back to the point I just made earlier, like you're going to need to actually use Bitcoin and spend Bitcoin I think over. The Lightning network, particularly at some point in the future and the convergence of Bitcoin in AI is happening in real time. And so that's actually one thing we really touched on the panel was last week Lightning Labs announced that they had an L402 implementation in Lang Chain, which is a very popular AI developer kit. And tool that is being used. And so we're basically at the beginning stages of the lightning that we're getting integrated with artificial intelligence companies and I think this is going to be massive Bitcoin particularly over the lightning network solves a massive problem or many massive problems that AI companies have #1 like like chargeback risk right now if you go to mid journey you go to ChatGPT. And you're you're paying a monthly fee for access to their models and to their to their AI agents, whatever it may be. And you pay monthly fee. A lot of people are paying with credit cards and a lot of people are charging back that. So there's massive chargeback risk that exists for these companies and it's particularly a big risk for them because on the back end, due to the energy intensity of the Gpu's, there's a lot of capital expense expense on that side of things. So they have to make sure. There's capital efficient as possible from business perspective and so like what Lightning Labs just released, makes it extremely easy for these artificial intelligence companies to create paywall gated API access using Bitcoin lightning network. So if an individual like myself, if I get a mid journey I want an image instead of paying a monthly fee with a credit card. Every time I want to produce an image using mid journeys models I get a I get a lightning invoice. Likely will automatically be paid. I'll probably set an allowance on mid journey like hey pay any invoice that gets sent to me up to this limit. And so like every time I ping their API to get an image, I'll pay them a little bit of Bitcoin. That's one way in which it'll be implemented in the AI world. The other way which stack work, which we're invested in at 1031. They've been at this for years, but it also helps AI companies actually build these large language models because it enables. Companies like Stackwork to pay global workforce to add data to their models because they can pay people in Southeast Asia and Latin America and Africa very small amounts of money using the lightning network in Bitcoin globally. Since it's international currency like Larry Fink seems to grok right now and since it's very low fee and since anybody can download a wallet on their. On their cell phone it's very easy to pay global distributed workforce to help you build your large language model. And so long winded way of saying yesterday, I think the Bitcoin in AI the lightning in AI panel is very high signal because it's very early on in this trend and I think when we talk about like Bitcoin usage the. The amount of usage that is just gonna be used from machine to machine, like these AI agents just going out with Bitcoin allowances, the complete task on the Internet. Like you can make a very easy argument that actually in the future the most transactions on the Lightning Network will be conducted by AI agents. And so, yeah, I think that's that's a trend that nobody seems like rock right now. Absolutely. And I think that tour tour to Mr. Just went on Preston's podcast and and made the case that. That right now is the 1995 moment for Bitcoin, meaning that, you know, 1995 was kind of the the hockey stick moment for Internet adoption. And you know, if you zoom out just a little bit of the few things we've talked about here, AIAI using Bitcoin as its preferred currency because it's native to the Internet. That's Jack Dorsey's whole argument that's happening now. A couple other data points are are big at this moment in time for Bitcoin adoption, those being the rise of bricks. The BRICS countries just announced that they're going to have a gold backed currency and that's going to compete with the US dollar and that means the US dollar hegemony is eroding, hard assets are back on the International Monetary stage, that being gold with. Gold being held by China and you're trusting China and they're reporting and and honesty about what they're holding and and your ability to get it back. And of course that contrasts with Bitcoin where you don't have to trust a a nation state to hold your gold. With Bitcoin you can take self custody and control it yourself. So that's happening. And and then finally, Wall Street. BlackRock, the most important capital allocator in the world has gone from creating a narrative in you know in mainstream media. Pushing a narrative in mainstream media that Bitcoin is bad for the world, bad for the environment, bad for, you know, harboring and and enabling criminals. And now suddenly in the last month if you look through the. Headlines about Bitcoin in in Forbes It It's all positive. All of it is positive. Now it's all about how Bitcoin is good for the environment because it reduces emissions. What? Bitcoin is what people like Marty have been saying for years, and the mainstream media has been actively gaslighting the world about to convince them otherwise. But now BlackRock is aligning itself with Bitcoin and so now they're saying the same positive things. And that it's actually not a haven for criminals and in fact it empowers people in developing countries to have savings accounts who otherwise would be unbanked. Bitcoin is good for the world. So those three forces have are happening right now and they weren't happening last cycle a I and Bitcoin the the the changing monetary world order of the dollars on the way out is it going to are you going to trust your. Money in gold currency that's controlled by China or you going to trust a hard asset that lives on the Internet and you can take self custody of and now Wall Street's an ally for Bitcoin. This could be our 1995 moment for the Internet of value in the same way that we all saw how that played out for the Internet of information. You jump and I do want to make one more point about the Bitcoin, the lightning and a I convergence that Paul made on the panel last night that I really never thought of, is that you need privacy when calling on these large language models, especially if you're a corporation or a company. And if you are, you have an account with Open or chat GB T with open A I. And you put your credit card information there and like you're they know what you're what you're searching like they they can get some inside information of like how you're thinking about your business. And so these companies from A, from A, B to B perspective, companies that want to leverage A, I tools, they need a degree of privacy and the lightning network provides that for them. If you can just pay an invoice over the lightning network without having to put in any personal. Identifying information like that is actually a massive unlock for corporations being able to to have some sense of privacy when leveraging these AI tools to make their businesses better. Yeah, no, that it's fascinating. You know, we talk about it a lot, you know, inside conversations about just how exciting like Bitcoin and AI and where that's going or the world's going with like emerging technologies. Part of the goal for this show is in. We've started to do it, but it's like really bringing to light the overlap of Bitcoin with existing market structure technologies and then also innovative net new technologies that to just a point need a native currency. So I think that'll be a broader focus as we like. Week over week, find experts and be able to talk about like what does AI mean or Bitcoin and AI, whether it's like music, whether it's data search, Marty's Point privacy and like B to BI think there's going to be a lot of money to be made in these segments and they're going to look very different as we've talked about with the the market structure of like Bitcoin custody and how like financial services will look, just because it's so different than the traditional world being a lot of these. The new companies, the way they're formed will look very different. And so part of the goal for for us is to like kind of bring them to surface and have discussions around it. These, the landscape over the next decade is very exciting and there's a lot of opportunity outside of just like holding the spot underlying asset, but the infrastructure or for like individuals with businesses that are trying to get ahead of curves of where the market's changing things that are happening. Strikes working on it and others when it comes to interchange and remittances and what does that look like using lightning. But there's no shortage of different applications that'll be built out. And so we can kind of figure out a way in the format to really showcase that. I think there'll be a lot of like value for us to discuss, but then also from the external market to glean from it. Yeah. It's happening, It's happening gentlemen and anybody listening is just getting exposed to Bitcoin. Again, I do want to stress you may not want to use Bitcoin transactionally or like leverage it at the payments network. Quite. Yeah. You may view it solely as a savings vehicle And I I actually think that's probably likely the smartest move at this point of Bitcoin's monetization phase is to view it as a savings vehicle and sit on it as. It appreciates some value over time. However, the decisions you make today will determine whether or not you're able to leverage Bitcoin to its full extent in the future. So when you're trying to figure out how to get exposure, if you're not comfortable taking possession of Bitcoin now, buying an exchange, sending it to a wallet that you control, we're not comfortable with that now, and you're basing your decisions off of that. Make sure you make the right decision that allows you. To have that option in the future when you are going to want to leverage the utility that's being provided at the different layers of the stack. One thing is we were talking about I just mentioned innovative stuff, but also how things aren't innovative cuz it feels like a way. And whenever the cycle happens, it's gonna be crypto and AI and you're gonna have to rehash why you don't need a new token for AI for everything. And so I just think that's part of this as well as explaining that so people can share with their network and then go let the trap. I mean, I highly recommend Logan if you want to pull up that tweet from Lalu again, like go, we'll, we'll link to this in the show notes. Go read the the blog post from Lightning Labs, it's in the quote tweet that Lalu sent out. And I actually think Bitcoin's going to have an advantage to cycle, particularly around the Lightning and AI because of the dev tooling. And that's been built to date and the fact again, this is L 402, so this is compatible with the HTTP stack like it's HTTP 402 compatible what Lightning Labs has built. And so I think from a dev tooling perspective, what Lightning Labs has built has a massive advantage over any upstart crypto token that wants to claim they can do AI better like that this is literally native to the HTTP protocol. What Lightning labs that build, and it's gonna be much easier to plug this in, to plug the Lightning Network in to these applications opposed to like creating a token and trying to like, smash it on onto AI. Yep. Here's hoping this is 1995. Let's do it. Gentlemen. Sorry I was late today. I must apologize, but it was a tight rip. It was a good one. Yeah, it was fun. No problem at all. We'll we'll we'll give our absent guest a ribbon next time. We will and we will, we will be back next week. Michael anything, anything to ended on. I was just gonna say Logan's our our 4th guest. Oh yeah, Logan do you have any any alpha to provide the listeners out there so much but I'm. Gonna keep it all a secret. I'll get it out of. We'll get out of Logan one day. All right. We'll see you guys next week. Awesome. Thanks guys.
Transcript source: fountain