Transcript+
He goes back to first principles of finite scarcity because at the end of the day goes back to can Bitcoin credibly enforce the 21 million fixed cap supply? If it can, then I'll have value in the future. If it can't, then it won't. But nobody ever gets to that basis, including Druckenmiller. So this guy understood that. The other thing that's always interesting about him and where I think Luke Grohman come into it is Paul Tudor Jones anecdote was that somebody put it across his desk back in 1718 and he looked at the UTXO said, and he realized that when it retraced 80%, there was this insane number that never sold. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. These people are either crazy or I'm missing something. And it reminds me very similar to different framing, but similar in what Luke Roman said. This is a currency problem. That conviction grew from there. What you're telling me is that the music is about to stop and we're going to be left holding the biggest bag of odorous extra ever assembled in the history of darkness. 1974. 198792972000 and whatever we want to call this, it's all just the same. Thing. Over and over, we can't help ourselves. I say when we sell. Hey, OK. I say when we sell. We are back. We are live. It's the last trade. We're live in Vegas. Brian, Michael, gentlemen, how are you doing this? Is the penthouse suite right behind me? This is, yeah. Brian travelled with his art to Vegas, that's how important it is to him to have that backdrop. There's actually a story that the audience doesn't know about where we all got together. Maybe the first time meeting in person was the launch in Vegas, and this was 2023 at Money A20. And we ate. We did have a penthouse suite, but we are a young bootstrapping firm, so there was limited rooms and some people we won't name slept on couches facing each other or not facing each other. The Vegas has a special place. I actually didn't tell the guys, but I called Venetian late last week because there's so many people asking if we're going to be there. And I was like, what kind of, what kind of penthouses do you got? And it was, you know, inflation's really hit that. I think the rooms back in 2023 were 2000. They were like $4500 a night. So anyway, we, we, we're not, we didn't go to Vegas, but we've been busy. It was a busy five days, probably world setting five days for on ramp as far as the onboarding from the finance, a lot of people that were listening reached out saying this is the thing to help them at least start in you setting up to trade or multi institution. Think we saw a lot. I mean we didn't think I don't think we saw a lot of deposits. I think a lot of folks have been waiting for us to release some of this stuff so they can unify a lot of their just kind of Bitcoin financial service life. So appreciate everyone out there. And then the last thing just to call out is Genesis is still out. So anybody that wants to sign up got all the swag. I'm actually picking up the shirts today. Parker, I got to go stop by his house or wherever I'm going to meet him to get the books. But I'm going to be personally wrapping these things up. So if if for nothing else, you just don't like my takes specific, they're on stretch. If you go sign up for finance, you're basically going to have me with duct tape. It's not really duct tape. We got a nice on ramp package putting together all the books and shipping them out personally 1 by 1. Yeah, that's probably the best way to spite Michael. So if you don't like them, definitely sign up for On Ramp Finance. It doesn't spike though. That's the thing. It's like you got bit paint out there. He might sign up. I think he might need a little bit of like education on like Bitcoin game theory, centralization. So I offered anybody that's following him, he's been, you know, pumping up our business that they can sign up, get extra sats. I'm not actually going to say the code because you're listeners, you're pretty savvy. So if you go find it on Twitter and you find his code, there's actually more Sats than TLT than TLT. All right, let's get into it. This week we got a lot to cover trying to get the image of Vegas and 23 back into the memory hole. That was something I had closed out of my memory so. Good times that. Was one of the best times. It's always, it's always the early days you, you forget at the time they feel a little bit uncomfortable, but. That was actually the sickest I've probably ever been in my adult life. I came back from that trip and it was 2 weeks before my wedding and I was just, I was out of Commission. I wasn't. Good. Worth it? We had Asian. We had Asian like at 12:00 at night, 1:00 all right under the series so. We're locking in loyal listeners of the last trade before we get into this week's episode. If you can do me a quick favor, I would really appreciate it. Leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you have not done so already and leave a comment. If you enjoy the conversation, let us know. Comments, questions, feedback. I will respond to each and every one of them. Thank you for being here and hope you enjoyed the episode. I think a lot of the listeners have probably caught clips of this episode with Paul Tudor Jones on Invest. Like the best. It's a good interview if you have an hour to spare. Seems like a great guy. And of course one of the best macro traders, one of the best hedge fund managers of all time. Going to play this clip here real quick. See what PTJ has to say on the topic of Bitcoin. And then in 2020, when you saw again all the interventions both on central bank and the Treasury, you just knew that the inflation trades were going to take off. And what was of all of them, what was the best one at that point in time? It was Bitcoin. Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge that there is more than gold, because Bitcoin is finite. There's only so much Bitcoin that can be mined. The problem with it is inflation hedge is if you got into kinetic exchange, it's clearly going to be cyber warfare and anything that you have to deal with electronically is going down, including Bitcoin. So strike one. And then secondly, quantum computing, who knows if and when with AI advancing as fast as it is that we may actually have quantum computing now quantum computing, someone can come in and can hack any back and hack anything they want to. So in terms of it being a great inflation hedge, gold increasing supply every year by by a couple of percent, Bitcoin, there's a finite amount that can be mined, it's decentralized. And so in that sense, it's has the greatest scarcity value of anything. I wonder what Ryan? Hey, I think I call you Grimace in the middle of that clip. If I if I called. That, yeah, the kinetic warfare piece, it's like, well, it, it doesn't kill Bitcoin Like that's, I think that's kind of a fallacy. Was he saying he killed it or? I thought he was just explaining like what could happen if. He was explaining it's a perceived weakness for him in the instance of cyber warfare. He perceives Bitcoin to just be a weaker store value than gold because of its connectedness to the Internet. I I think that's fair. I mean, in the sense of like, it doesn't kill Bitcoin, it doesn't change the UTXO set, but it does prevent a lot of people. Yeah. Like an EMP as an example, may you may want to hold some physical gold. This is where yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, that, that's was kind of my only qualm with it, but no interesting, some interesting quotes. I I just appreciate it because I feel like Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Drunka Miller were like the two probably earliest, like Travis, more macro hedge fund guys that got into Bitcoin. And I think we talked about this maybe a few months ago that drunken Miller like sold his Bitcoin within the past like 3 or 4 years. Maybe he still has some, but I think he materially at least trimmed his position and now is is all into stable coins and stuff. So shout out to PTJ for having conviction to hold through not only be early but not get shaken out and sell his position. And obviously he's still focused on it because he's thinking about whether it's an EMP or he's thinking about the quantum stuff. He's staying up to date on potential risks. So good to see from him. Yeah, all I can think of is that that's what that's what a boss looks like. You know, I mean, this guy is one of the greatest traders regarded from Travi and he goes back to first principles of finite scarcity because at the end of the day, he goes back to can Bitcoin credibly enforce the 21 million fixed cap supply? If it can, then I'll have value in the future. If it can't, then it won't. But nobody ever gets to that basis, including Druckenmiller. And so this guy understood that. The other thing that's always interesting about him and where I think Luke Grohman come into it is Paul Tudor Jones anecdote was that somebody put it across his desk back in 1718 and he looked at the UT, XO said. And he realized that when it retraced 80%, there was this insane number, whatever it is, 6080% that never sold. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. These people are the crazy or I'm missing something and it reminds me very similar to different framing, but similar in what Luke Roman said when that similar that same time frame that this isn't this is a currency problem and that conviction grew from there. Now they they're traders, so they trade around it. They're very smart. So they're probably making a lot of money trading around it because they just have access to information that we may not or temperament. But he fundamentally gets that that finite scarcity. And then I also think he references gold because everyone's talking their book and you can imagine his who he's advising, who he's capital he's managing is in gold. They understand it. It's probably over allocated to gold versus Bitcoin. So he has to reference why he has that position. The last thing I think that's the most important is it's just math. Like there's gold and Bitcoin, there has a certain level of scarcity as compared to the rest of traditional assets across all other asset classes and then that are outside money that you can take delivery and reduce all counterparties. That doesn't exist. This guy's a big boy. So when you're 6570 running real money, you're not buying all this other crap that's has you exposed. And so Paul Tudor Jones can do it. You can too. One thing he said in the interview as well, he was talking about his early days as a fund manager and the Hunt brothers, who are the brothers that pretty much cornered the silver market. I forget the guy's first name, but he became the richest man in the country, I guess, in the world for a brief period of time. And PTJ connects back to that anecdote in that memory from early in his career about the illiquidity of these precious metals market. So he saw this guy go from essentially the he was the richest person in the world to essentially bankrupt in a matter of days, maybe weeks. And he cites that specifically as a trader not wanting to be in a in a corner, backed into a position where he's not able to get liquidity. And so he didn't necessarily connect the dots back into the Bitcoin story because it was a very brief part of the interview. But I'm sure that plays a role in his calculus for how he allocates to Bitcoin relative to other other types of what's a commodities as well. I mean, even crypto, right? If he went and had to underwrite Bitcoin and then you look at crypto and how can you unwind those positions if you're a large holder, it becomes increasingly untenable. One other piece I want to talk about on this interview real quick, just because again, great interview. It's got a lot of attention in the past day or two. And the other piece, besides the Bitcoin clip, the other aspect of the interview that's been clipped a bunch, we don't have to watch it. There's actually the full podcast. But the other point that people are pointing out quite a bit is Paul Tudor Jones talks quite a bit about where equity markets are relative to GDP. And I'll connect this back to Bitcoin in a second, but he says that we're at 252% of stock market cap to GDP. In 1929, we were 65%. In 1987, we got to 8590% in 2170%. So we're far above previous, let's say, bubble periods in terms of the stock market to GDP. He didn't necessarily say that this is a bubble, but he kind of inferred that valuations are stretched and when you have a forward-looking approach to markets that typically means that returns are going to be diminished into the future. Now where I kind of struggle with this and he started going into some of the math is if you know 10% of our tax receipts are capital gains. If you have a big mean reversion event in equity markets and call it 3035% or so draw down, then that actually starts to that sorts of impact, not only the tax receipts from the capital gains, but then you start to bring into the equation consumer spending. So it didn't go really far down this rabbit hole, but the top 10% of the US is like 5060% of consumer spending. So as I was listening to this, I was kind of making the case in my head, well, regardless if the equities go down or the dollar goes down, just for more accommodative monetary policy and a lot of the stimulus that we saw in 2020 repeating at some point in the near future. Either one of those scenarios is actually incredibly bullish for Bitcoin because I can't imagine a scenario where we'd actually see a significant correction in equity markets that plays out over a sustained period because we're just so dependent on that part of the economy now. I mean, it affects consumer spending, It affects tax receipts directly from capital, great capital gains and then actually challenges directly the confidence that investors would have in the US Treasury as well. Because if you start to see this fiscal position erode, then the investors that are already starting to move away from U.S. Treasury assets may be at more inclined to do so at an accelerated rates. I think actually he didn't connect the two in the interview, but I think that's probably the most important piece, at least it was for me, where either one of these scenarios that he was discussing is incredibly bullish for Bitcoin long term. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean this ties into what we've been talking about the whole notion of a real versus nominal and how you can kick this can much further down the road than than we expect. Because when you're the largest traffic firms in the world and you're, you're married to a 6040, the individuals just looking at nominal terms, how they're increasing, you know, X percentage year over year. But the math doesn't equate to keeping pace in real terms. And so, yeah, it's just there's no way out of here. You can go up and then think about that. That's only for the people that have traditional financial assets. What about the rest of the market that isn't playing the stock market? They're just going backwards because all that capital coming into juice, the stock market goes to higher cost of services, goods, it seeps into the system and then people's wages aren't keeping up. So it's, it's a, it's a relentless flywheel that's just going backwards. Yeah, 100% that the data that you had just pulled up is good. It's, it's basically if you've ever heard of the Buffett indicator, which is like it, it uses, it can use different equity indices. It's typically the Wilshire 2500 I think. But it's, you know, it's equities to GDP and it, it also reminds me of if you guys remember there's some chart or infographic that shows like, you know, 50 years ago. What the market cap of gold was relative to what the stock market was. And it's like they were like about the same. And now it's like the stock market, it's like many multiples the size of gold's market cap. So it's kind of a similar story where it's just like, yeah, like the the equity market has increasingly for the past, you know, 30 to 50 years been used as a store of value. Whether that's right or wrong, I guess it's kind of a separate question. But the reality is, is that now, yeah, it's it's super integrated, as you were saying, Jackson, into not only the fiscal situation, what, you know, the sort of maneuverability that the government has in terms of tax receipts, but also just for the everyday person like that, that is their savings. And so we really can't afford for there to be like a material correction. And and anytime we've gotten a glimpse of that, you've seen what happens. Like there's efforts to stimulate the economy, do some form of QE under a new name to prevent exactly that from happening. And it also just speaks to the overall fragility of this entire thing and why you actually want outside money, gold or Bitcoin. Right. And and you reminded me of one other aspect to this as well. Another data point that was relative to the conversation that was interesting is so this is the same thing, right? Paul Tudor Jones talking about we're over equitizes a country and ties into Brian, your point that you made about the the Warren Buffett indicator. And so this tweet says using Fed data, the average investor equity allocation is at 55% as of October 2025, which is at an all time high at least back to 1945 S The initial thought that I had here was well, that rationally makes sense. If you exist in a world where you perceive your only options to allocate capital or public equities or public fixed income, which is most people 6040 portfolio, naturally it would make sense to have a higher equity allocation and maybe even higher in the context of where we find ourselves the past couple of years where real rates are clearly negative, even if the CPI and data from different inflation metrics are manipulated to say otherwise. So this actually sets up very nicely for Bitcoin, of course, but also this other chart that I saw with gold. So this was a survey Bank of America on asset allocation and you can see here. Well, first of all, this is talking about the sleep Like a Baby portfolio, which is 25% stocks, 25% bonds, 25% commodities, 25% cash. It's having its best year since 1933. I thought the most interesting aspect of this tweet was the Bank of America private clients hold just 0.4% of their allocation to gold, despite its annualized 31% annualized run rate. So as this tweet says, it's a glaring underweight. And if you tie it back into this conversation where equity markets are stretched, but if you're a traditional investor, where do you go? You don't go back to bonds. You don't want to just see your purchasing power get destroyed year after year. So naturally, you're going to be seeking out things like gold and you're going to be seeking out things like Bitcoin. So this is just like a really nice macro set up for these asset classes longer term. I love that you brought this up because it goes back to sleep like a baby is like sleep like a baby from the beginning of time is the whole notion of 1/3 of your money goes in the money, right? It was gold. A third goes into your craft, your business, and then a third goes in your land. And if you think about it from risk mitigation or management, that is like what you're doing, right? Because you have the capital for the uncertain future. You have the craft that's delivering value. So in case that moves away, you can retain it and then you have your land so you can at least live off of. And I just can't help but go back to like how insane the financialization of the economy where this is just understood that everything gets basically pushed out away from you and you have to manage this crazy portfolio that's outside of your domain of expertise and control. Because all these things are external factors that that are factored in your livelihood and your family's livelihood is dependent on it. It's just a very insane place. We got to that. I think we just haven't all got back to first principles of like, do we have to live in that? Because you can't actually, it's, it's overused, but you can't opt out and not be acquiesced or reliant on whatever the hell the feds going to say or a stock market or the overpriced housing market relies on you'd rely on. Yeah, right. It just takes so long to get and it's an interesting point you make there, Michael. It just takes so long for people to get there though, right, Because most people are doing the exact opposite of what you described. They're adding employer, their savings is their four O 1K. It's in markets, to your point, how they have no control over and they probably don't understand in most cases, right? Most people aren't investors. And So what you're describing is so far away from what they're currently doing. But I think it's going to like, that's the direction people have to get to, and they're going to be rewarded for doing so sooner than later. And one thing just to add to that is Seifa Dean probably has, if you had to pick one podcast or books or channels, if you listen to nothing else related to Bitcoin, it's that because it's more of just like money and and isn't, I don't want to call Austrian. It's just like first principles. How do you think about value? And one of the things he said, and this is I think in another book, but it was referencing. The very first thing after you do is save for optionality is you invest, but you invest in yourself because if you invest in yourself, then you can make more money because you're opening your skill set. And I think that's one of the big things we lacked because when we took the money and then invested into other things, we're effectively like pigeonholing ourselves into optionality what we do. But if you took that extra cash and went and bought some extra clod tools or whatever it is, and you increased your mobility, that opens up optionality to make more capital. And then you can ultimately go out on the risk curve if you would like. But you have to first start with yourself. And I think that's a big component to all of this, Yeah. That that kind of opens up a can of worms, though, because then it speaks to the basically the faulty nature of what academia and universities had become. Because people think by going to a university and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars that they're investing in themselves. That's rapidly changing in terms of like, what is that degree actually mean? Has that actually allow you to produce value and earn into the future? Like that's rapidly changing and has been for a while. But like, so I think the the other part of that, that story that you referenced is like people were sold a bill of goods that that's how you invest in yourself and when, you know, that's really no longer the case basically. Yeah, And the math doesn't check out whether it's a stock market or academia. If everyone's doing it, then where's the alpha? Like if everyone goes and gets a degree, then what? So it actually is inverted when you don't have a degree and you have a trade is where the capital is. So it's like you got to think independently. Yeah, I agree with that. And so the last thing I want to do before we get into some signal noise is this one other data point. I think Brian, this is from you. I'm not sure if you have any comments, but I want to at least give you some air time. So Ronnie Stoferly had this point about it's actually City's take about Bitcoin and portfolios and he's just talking about Bitcoin being incredibly unloved right now. And so Brian, you have any thoughts there before we move on? Yeah, I thought this was interesting just from the perspective of, you know, we're sitting still in the 70K range. Nobody's at the Bitcoin conference. I would say retail sentiment is still pretty poor. I would say the average speculator has kind of moved on from Bitcoin. They're, you know, gambling on prediction markets. They're, you know, waiting for the 2724 seven leverage perps on whatever platform they're going to do that on. While at the same time, like you have Morgan Stanley launching their ETF, Goldman filing for an ETF and then this like pretty fair and balanced take from city. I won't read the whole thing, but it's basically saying, like Bitcoin shown resilience relative to gold and equities amid sort of the Iranian conflict. And it's showing these characterizations of a decentralized asset with limited supply and being a hedge for the basement. It's it's basically, you know, in in formal suit speak words laying out the Bitcoin thesis. And I think it's easy to lose sight of this that like that is the discourse happening in in various stratified circles and retails always going to come later, like retails always going to hop on the train once it takes off. And so I would expect to see these types of informed takes on thesis and its relative strength in in a period like this. I'm from the cities of the world. And so I think it's very encouraging in a time when like you could get pretty pessimistic about the price action or sentiment like this is what's actually going to move things going forward. Yeah, good on them for at least reporting it. And Ronnie, high signal over at Incrementum, the I lost my train of thought it was related to the retail interest. Like what would be fascinating is if you could see portfolio managers allocations or portfolios, Because my instincts tell me that these individuals that are working at City are starting to build their own positions way before because they have the ability to before they can start to push others. Because the way they always talk about this is hedging and these small nominal amounts versus really sizing it appropriately because there's too much risk. 100% you position yourself before you start selling it to your clients. They can't. Yeah, I think they can. They can't though, right? Because I don't know what city, the city have a big wealth group or no. Do you know Brian? I'm not sure but why? Why are you saying they wouldn't be able to do that? Well, no, I'm not saying they wouldn't be able to, or I guess I kind of am. So like, think about Morgan Stanley or Merrill. Think about a shop that has a really big wealth management platform. They make so much of their money selling product that are related to traditional portfolios. And so I'm just, I just had a thought where what you guys are saying is true, but there's also probably some nuance in there as well because they don't want to just talk the book against too much of where all the money is made for those firms as well, if that makes sense. Well, that. That's what I'm saying. They can't. Like that's the whole point of some of these other larger firms that are sitting on trillions of dollars in assets that are heavily exposed to the 6040 that they can't. They can only dance around this subject while they're individuals like the people working at these firms or stacking coin. And it would just be an interesting experiment to be able to get an insight into their portfolios to like how they're moving because you can imagine it's starting to move up into the right. Another random thought that somebody needs to develop podcast software where you're just talking and then the AI is like giving you the actual real like how big is Well, like imagine we were talking on the right side of the shows like cities it shows, it shows cities, wealth management under assets under management. That we wouldn't have any. We wouldn't have any interesting takes at that point. The droids would just take us over. That's happening sooner or later. If something happened to you tomorrow, could your family access your Bitcoin? Not, probably not. They would figure it out with certainty. I thought about this a lot. You may feel confident managing your own keys, but are your loved ones? Billions and Bitcoin have been lost already because someone died without a plan with on ramp inheritance planning is built in directly into your custody setup your Bitcoin stays segregated and in your control insured through Lloyd's of London and accessible to the people you choose when they need it get started in 15 minutes book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me all right so let's get into some signal or noise. I just wanted to do this one real quick from Larry Leopard. You don't need to read through all of this. And and Michael was pretty staunchly against talking anything related to the Fed, even though we got some news at the Fed today. But the short of it is so there's a post here from Larry. I thought it was interesting because he's talking about, you know, Warsh is going through that's going to be that's going to be on May 15th. And what he points out here that I wasn't previous aware of, Brian, maybe you are since you're closer to these types of pressors, is he recently was speaking to the inflation stance, just he doesn't think they're accurate. He thinks that they're overstated. And he was suggesting using a trimmed mean, which throws out outlier prices and is currently printing much lower than headline CPI. And so Larry is kind of making the case that this is teeing up or allowing or green lighting more accommodative monetary policy. He even says here, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a hundred BPS rate cut on May 15th. I mean, that would be incredibly aggressive. I don't know if I agree with that or not. But the main point I do agree with Larry is like the data is going to be manipulated to fit the narrative to allow for there to be more accommodative policy. And then this kind of ties into his big print thesis. He says, is it? Is it this time around? He said yes and no and explain some more nuance here. So if you guys want to check it out, you can find his post. But Brian, we're even aware about the trimmed mean. I haven't. Heard that, but that's not surprising like it's just you find a new tool in the toolkit to manipulate the data. Like, you know, it makes total sense what Larry's saying here in terms of they want the at least the perception and inflation to be lower so that they can be more accommodative. Because if inflation, if they if they acknowledge inflation for what it is and, and you know, but say they they didn't change how CP is calculated over the past 30 years, like they'd be in a much tougher spot. They would probably be being crutchered or at least there would be the perception that they should be raising rates instead of lowering rates. And so, yeah, I mean, that's none of that surprising. I would, I would say 100 basis point cut is probably aggressive. I don't think, I think Warsh is going to have to slow play it a little bit. Don't think he's going to be able to come in and and cut that aggressively basically because he will then run the risk of, again, this is all perception in theater games. But like, he would then run the risk of being perceived to be just like Trump's little hench men who's going to do exactly what he says. So he's got to slow play it. He's got to maybe do a little 25 basis point cut here or there. Yeah. What do you got? Michael loves. It I just think of Fugazi Fugazi. I look, I appreciate reading the tea leaves that you guys are wanting to do that. I think I always feel like I find myself defending the whole like lack of interest in Fed speaking. It ties back to this that they're always just going to manipulate the things. We see this all the time with the job data inflation. They peed on your back. They tell you it's raining, even if the if inflation is not tempered in whatever way they want, they'll still figure out a way to cut rates. The thing I'm most concerned looking at as a participant in the real world is like, what is the catalyst that they potentially use? We saw COVID as a huge reason to print an insane amount of money. That's the thing that kind of keeps me up at night. That's the thing I think about because that impacts the business, that impacts individuals, that impacts our lives. If like is it a war? Is it XY or ZI think that is still hanging out there. My hopes are it doesn't get used because we already use this in 2020. But that's actually what. But I'm probably like more, I guess interested in or keep an eye out, trying to see around the corner of what's going to be the catalyst because they need an actual normie catalyst. Not like this because how many prices? Yeah, energy crisis, because how many people pay attention to like the tea leaves there and then that you're just quailing that area of the market, but there's still a whole bunch of other people you have to acquiesce. Yeah, I don't know, I agree with you, but I just had to stop paying attention to the, the the theories of what what it could or couldn't be in terms of the next catalyst because I was just going insane, man, like years ago. I just, I couldn't do it anymore. So I I have no idea. But unfortunately, I think you're right. They're just going to have to be something that would justify massive, you know, massive intervention in markets, massive intervention economy. I don't know. I think it was when Jackson wanted to write a newsletter referencing lizards and we had to stop him. And now, you know, he was just like, maybe I shouldn't pay. Attention to it. Was published. It was polished. It wasn't polished from honoring. Yeah. Yeah, Then I was never allowed to touch the the newsletter again. It's all right, All right, We're going to check in. We're going to check in and see what's happening in Vegas. Apparently there's some signal. Apparently there's some noise. We'll. Check in. We'll see what happens. A big announcement of the strategic Bitcoin reserve is coming in the next few weeks. Patrick, was this was this just the individual that took over for Bo Hines? Do you know, it kind of looks like executive director president's count? Yeah. So Bo Hines junior, Let's see what he has to say here. It's his Department of War. What'd you say? I think it says he's got. Multiple. He's got multiple. Department of War. Strategic capital, war, all the things. So he's just OK. All right. Well, we'll call him Bo Junior. The. President signed the strategic Bitcoin Reserve executive order last year and we've gone to work and, and figuring out exactly the the machinations necessary and and legal interpretations that we need to, to get that right and solidify that and protect the digital assets, but specifically Bitcoin that we have on the government balance sheet. So in the the next few weeks we'll be making a big announcement. I think we have a bit of a breakthrough there and obviously that needs to be followed up with legislation. Senator Lummus's Bitcoin Act over in the House, Representative Beggets has talked about the ARMA Act that he has put together. So we need to to codify it. But in the meantime, we do believe we're going to be able to take a a big step forward from the executive branch side of the next few weeks. That's huge. On Bitcoin as a. Brian, next few weeks, what do you think is the audit, is the audit coming? Maybe. You think it's the audit maybe? It's not. I don't think it's anything. I think this is just more gaslighting. Like I don't like there's now there's a new bill if you pull up that that Conor Brown who tweeted, yeah, the American Reserve Modernization Act. So now there's a is it a separate bill? Is it replacing the Bitcoin Act? I'm not exactly sure. But yeah, man, I mean, I won't believe anything until I actually see it. I think everyone that's associated with this administration has lost all trust. They said a lot of things haven't followed through on basically anything. So hard to hard to have a lot of faith in anything they say at this point. And it's also just insane that like half the panels at the Bitcoin conference seem to be like people in the government. Yeah, I mean. And the guy mining Bitcoin 20 years ago of. Course. Yeah, that was crazy. Go ahead. Yeah. No, I was just thinking about that. You always get into those conversations like I was, you know, found Bitcoin in 2009 and I was mining 20 years ago. I look, I'm as as skeptical as anyone may be overly skeptical. I do think something happens here. But I think it really has to do just with what we continue to say, that there is geopolitical consequence for the US to figure out this whole game from the Treasury market to dollar, it's to China. And that came out this past week about the UAE moving over from OPEC. We've already been talking about gold settling for oil that I think Bitcoin is going to play a strategic role. I think it's part of all of this. And if you go down that trail, you could see how it makes sense that they would figure out a way for the US to have a a reserve in some capacity for a number of strategic reasons, how they get those Bitcoin. But we have like we have Bitcoin. So what's what is the announcement? Well, yeah, I don't know. I don't necessarily know. More we're we're market smash buying like what is. My instincts without thinking deeply here, is having a favorable bent towards an accumulation of a stockpile because it's a strategic asset. You kind of saw two weeks ago whatever they pulled out with the Lowry stuff about this is of strategic importance. It probably is a second and 3rd order beginning of how it ends up being seized because you're like this is geopolitical significance and blah, blah, blah. But I do think this is the track they're going down. I think that like there is a machine that's moving in this direction to get it embedded into the US, US. So that's the only reason why I give some like credence to they keep putting this stuff out unless they're just completely like, you know, insane and they just like have to go because they, you know, went to the conference. They want to get some. Because vias Trump's children are are running American Bitcoin company, they had said you have to do this. Yeah, I mean a. Business here. So, so this kind of just ties into a little bit related of how I've just heard anecdotally, when you talk to folks in the industry that go to conferences and they come back and how everyone's like beaten down and and just investors feeling uncomfortable that it really is a true like no man's land we're in. Because all the things everyone ever wanted in Bitcoin to get it to go to the moon or to get it to be like a name brand investment in households effectively happened. And then it never did any of it. So now everyone's just sitting around like, wait, what the hell else is going to be the catalyst for that? And so I can see how you hear these things, and everyone's just like, in this weird spot, and they don't know how to react to it. Because we got everything you wanted and the price is sitting, you know, Basically, yeah. This one, I think this perfectly encapsulates what what you just said. Crypto will likely go down as the biggest opportunity cost asset of the decade and it's you, you have this tweet here, $100,000 invested five years ago in Ethereum is worth $85,000 today. 100K invested five years ago and NVIDIA is worth 1.4 million today. That would hurt us to look at for for many people. And then imagine the one of the thing I have to say and then go ahead, Michael is the, the other aspect of this is that all these all coins that people were trading in 2020 and 2021 are just down 99% from their all time highs. And so that is really where the, I mean, we know that Bitcoin is long term a good place to be. If you bought the top in 2021 at 69, most people didn't do that. Most people are DCA and right. And so those people are still doing pretty well just regardless of where they got in. But imagine being a bag holder of like pretty much any shit coin from 2021 to present and then just watching everything else just moon. I mean, that's that one's got to hurt quite a bit. Yeah. The crypto part is, is a different story, but I think a couple of things is related to you and what we talked about. It's like the whole notion of time in the market versus time in the market. It's why you don't want to be in these other ancillary exposures. You want your BTC because when Bitcoin moves, it moves and there's all those stats around number of days in a year that you're holding it. And that's where also this is going to just tie into one of the most hated rallies because this apathy, my background is on investment management, but I know that this discussed around apathy is the thing that killed his people not being able to sit on their hands. And so all this capitals flowing into these stronger holders, these ETFs, the dats and the people are just not holding BTC. So when this thing finally rips, there's just, and you already see this now, there's very few people that actually hold real material back when hanging around from 2117. So if you're holding, it's bullish because when this thing goes, it's going to go and there's going to be a lot of people on the sidelines. Yeah, and the shit coins got one shot up by the prediction markets as well. So I got we got the new form of gambling replacing the old. Let's do one more on the conference real quick. Michael, you, you forced me to bring this one up, so you better have it. You better have a shake on it. Look, I shared a few. I don't actually have any huge takes out like there. There's a few that we can talk, we can touch on that I thought were noteworthy. There was blocks turning on 800,000 merchants. I think they actually rolled out a few other things. There was, I don't even know the firm's name, but offered a Bitcoin line of credit up to $1,000,000 on a card. Their background's interesting because they're like Coastal Ventures backed $100 million plus raised. They're started in home equity line, which I don't know how I feel about getting, you know, access to a credit card on your home equity, but independent of it, they came in, which is a bigger name in Silicon Valley. There was like one or two other deals that I thought were just noteworthy to call out. I don't think any of them are like of any insane significance. It's honestly part of the testament of like how long we've been in a bear market. That's just like such little innovation happening, such little things that are able because you could actually make the case that Square could have done this also five years ago. I don't know what drastically changed outside of like Jack and reorienting the organization around Bitcoin because all of these rails, maybe lightning got a little bit better. The one thing I will we'll talk about on final settlement, I do think Light Spark and Spark are doing interesting stuff because they rolled something out with Visa like 100 currency pairs, some crazy stuff. But they they get it from the sense of Marcus came from PayPal. He was at Libra. He understood you needed a unified universal money, which is Bitcoin. But then they understand flows in partnerships. And I thought that probably was the low key most interesting thing that I've seen come across from the conference. Tune into final settlement next week. So that was signal, that piece of signal we said. Clearly the Jackson isn't too happy about any of this shit. He's. The announcement of the announcement was noise, just to be clear, and the reason why there wasn't much to cover, I don't think this year on our side for Vegas was just because the most exciting thing for most people is Michael Saylor. And so I don't think we need to get into that topic today unless you really want to, unless you want to poke the bear. But I think that's probably where most of the excitement is at the conference would be related to the different product suite there strategy. Otherwise I haven't really been, I mean, I haven't been paying attention at all. That's why I didn't have any licks links besides Bo Junior saying the thing about the announcement. Bojangles. That's his new name. Patrick Wiz. Bojangles from now on. Yeah. So that's that. Let's see what else we got here. I want to go ahead. Well, just without going deep on the Sailor micro strategy, it's worth calling out for anybody that hasn't been online or on our e-mail, you should sign up. There was a few pieces written about just stretch DATS, MSTR and just market structure, just pointing out different risks that live within that, that stack tomorrow, which is we're recording today. So when anybody listening tomorrow on Thursday, Glenn, Cameron, Brian and the team been working on pretty long report to go deep there because a lot of folks were kind of a little interested in like what was the methodology or can you expand on XY or Z had insane amount of responses from our client base CE OS in the industry. Happy to be able to just like articulate that risk to do live within these constructs and they're not all as they're marketed. So if anybody's interested in checking it out, sign up for research or you'll see it on Twitter and LinkedIn. Boom, if the Bitcoin price doubled tomorrow, would you feel good about how it's being secured right now? Most people have not really pressure tested that and I get it. I have talked to people who have self custody for over a decade and others who stayed on exchanges because they could never get comfortable managing their own keys. Both camps have real concerns. That is why we built on ramp multi institution custody so no single company can lose it, move it or use it. Lloyd's of London insurance inheritance planning built in and a team that can walk you through the entire setup. Get started in 15 minutes. Book a free consultation at on rampbitcoin.com on ramp secured by three controlled by me. All right, Brian, I think this was yours. So you're going to tell us if it's signal or noise here. I think it was yours. Bitcoin hard fork. Good old Paul. Tell us what's going on here, Brian. Good old Paul. Yeah, I mean, this is this is an interesting one where I'm going to, I'm going to couch some some both signal and noise. The fact that this guy is going to fork Bitcoin. He wants to do a hard fork of Bitcoin. He's calling it E Cash, which is unfortunate because there are implementations and legitimate projects in Bitcoin that use Xiaomi and E Cash. And he's kind of like taking that name for something that has nothing to do with Xiaomi and E Cash. But basically the idea is like, it goes to the kind of what we were discussing last week on this whole discussion around whether or not to freeze Satoshi's coins, seize them in some way. And his suggestion is basically, yeah, we're going to, we're going to seize those and then, like, distribute them to investors in my new hard fork. Completely ridiculous. Like this guy, I think isn't very credible hasn't been for a long time. The reason the only piece of signal from this, which I thought was interesting. And and Michael, I'm curious if you have thoughts or any knowledge on this topic of because I wasn't really as deep in the Bitcoin cash days. So I didn't you know, I didn't receive any forked coins to a Bitcoin wallet. But what this post here is describing is like there's basically some risk associated with like attempting to claim forked coins. If there's not relay protection basically associated with those coins, it could get rebroadcast on Bitcoin chain and then you can actually lose your actual Bitcoin by attempting to claim the fork Bitcoin. So I thought this was just worth calling out in that sense. Like that would be the signal of like be aware of this thing. The the fork itself is complete noise and bullshit. Yeah, it's a good thing to bring up this. Actually. I was talking to the person's been around a while about relay protection, and this is getting a little beyond my depth, but there's two aspects of this. So with isolating them, there's one related to whatever Paul's attempting to do with creating a hard fork and then ultimately taking those Satoshi's coins and maybe others and then redistributing. I think that this is important to pay attention to. We talked about it a little bit last week that I look at this like a test net for what is probably going to come. Because if you listen to the narrative of the quote UN quote tastemakers and I say that with very big quotes, they're already they already broadcasting or projecting that this is where the industry is going to go. They a leap. They take multiple things and this is really hard for individuals that are just on the cursor. It's the same thing with the DAT stuff. We just like take for granted that DAT should exist when from first principles, a close in funds shouldn't theoretically trade above and now unless they're adding and showing value. But going back to this is a quantum is theoretical. It's not a foregone conclusion. People are working on it. So you shouldn't have to like just jump and accelerate to something that may be less secure. But then, B, that it's just understood that you have to seize and move into effectively steal somebody's coins because you're changing the, the code, you're changing the governance that people signed up for. But what you're also doing is just putting another theoretical that A, they would be hacked, B, they would be dumped and see that the market wouldn't be able to absorb it and it would die. So you're taking all those and that's what's being perpetrated or talked about right now. So anyway, I think that's that's the signal I get from this is that like, I think people know Paul doesn't have credibility. I think they mentioned his company was like failing. They need, he needed to spin out some fork and make some money, whatever. The other side to all this is that replay protection because it's my understanding that if it's like a soft fork and if it doesn't have replay protection, there's a component where you can spend the coins. It would have to be a hard fork if you're going to be able to effectively go and take either coin and market sell. So I have to go dig deeper. We and we need to have somebody on to talk about that. But my understanding is a hard fork would have would have replay protection because it would just basically be two separate change in the minors would be following whichever chain that they decided to. I think the broader thing for individuals that's probably the most relevant is you, if you're going to work with anybody, like if you hold your own keys, you don't really have to worry about any of this. You can sit back and you can just watch a play out and you can decide if you want to sell. I think what's going to ultimately happen is if you have entities you're working with, you want the titling and the right governance in place so you have optionality not only for any direction that the chain goes, but also that you're not giving away that governance. I think this is going to be a big deal for ETFs, centralized custody, the dats of the world. Because when you centralized that amount of economic capital, you're giving that right away. But you're also going to have to move with that area of the market because if your bags are so heavily predicated on their living existing, growing that and they decide to go, and you can see where this goes with Coinbase and other large firms that what you signed up for today may be fundamentally different 24 months from now. And I don't think people are that aware of that. And I expect this to pick up more in the coming months. And the biggest thing is I think there's going to be sophisticated participants that just sit back and they may not say anything because they don't want to be effectively stigmatized and saying, oh, we're going to do X or Y and then people won't do them because I expect people will not start going to certain institutions. That may not signal like even from an institutional investor. If you think about what you read in the S1, it's like you have no rights to that. So if you're going to go allocate in size, you at least want rights to be able to decide which direction you're going or have right have exposure to both. And you give a lot of that away when you go sign up for a centralized custodian or an ETF or a dad, for sure. Yeah, all well said. All right, let's get through these next couple things here pretty quickly. I guess that was signal and noise. Yeah, the rare, the rare double signal and. Noise. Jackson, where's your signal? I feel like these topics aren't interesting for you. What are you excited about? Look, man, I don't do this for myself. I do this for the listeners. So let's do you. Want to talk about your Sunday walks because I see that pop up on Sundays with your dog. Do you want to just talk about something related to Jackson's life? Would that would that excite you? I want to see your smile. Man, I mean, I, I like walking my dog, what can I say? Time, time well spent, better than monitoring the situation, I'll tell you that much. All right, so you got a couple things here. I'm going to run through them and then let's channel whatever is relevant. So we've got Charlie Bilello, who is the CIO at Creative Planning. Global inflation rates, they're taking up it's manufactured data anyway, so it's much higher than we expect. But I don't know, could tie back into what we discussed a bit earlier where there needs to be some sort of catalyst for broader reset or broader intervention in the market. So you know, we're seeing pressures in agriculture, more specifically food, energy, utilities, etcetera. So one thing to monitor here, this survey and just caught my attention, but it's actually kind of like a terrible survey, but I just, I don't know why I'm talking about it, but it's from Gallup and it says the high cost of living continues to top America's list of most important financial problems facing their families. Well, yeah, I mean, like that is the actual problem, right? Is like everyone, if prices are higher than it puts pressure on people financially. But you can see here high cost of living, energy costs, cost of owning or renting a home and healthcare costs. These are all things that people are thinking about. It ties back into what we said earlier, right, where 5060% of consumer spending is driven by the top 10%. The concentration of wealth in the top 1% or .1% because of the manipulation of markets post great financial crisis is insane as well. And so you really are just seeing this. You've seen a lot of pressure on the bottom half of this country and you're starting to see stuff like, you know, wealth taxes and and all that, all that stuff is playing out. Just going to be more and more tension there. And then this is interesting from Willem Middle Coop. He, I didn't actually read the research report yet from Deutsche Bank. It's 20 pages. I just came across it shortly before we started the show here. But this may be something worth checking out, reading over the weekend and seeing what's going on here. The return of history, gold, the dollar in the monetary future. And Willem points out in this chart here, the thing that he highlights is the 1990s began with a declaration by a story in Francis Fukuyama that humanity had reached the end of history. We argue in this paper that history has returned. But the contest and it's leaders will be different. This is the lens through which we think about the resurgence of gold, the decline of the dollar, and the International Monetary architecture that may await us this century. So this is probably a good read. I doubt that Bitcoin is discussed. I didn't control. Can you I? Can I? Can and we can see what happens. While while he's doing that, it's just fascinating because remember, Zoltan came out with this like five years ago. Yeah, it just, it just takes time. But this is just, it's math and its history. The system is unsustainable. Yeah. And then one other good one. And there were no Bitcoin. Nothing came up in the control. F last one from Luke Roman. If the world is breaking up into blocks again, then this chart is going back to where it traded the last time the world was broken into blocks. Gold is still one of the cheapest assets on the board. Would need to rise 2 to 3X to mean revert, assuming central bank reserves never rise again. Yeah, I mean, this really ties back in everything that we've discussed. These assets are unloved, particularly Bitcoin. No one likes Bitcoin right now. I don't even know why people listen to this show. I I didn't know that people liked it at all. I thought it was all about strategy at this point. Bitcoins unloved, gold is unloved. We saw that in that survey from B of A 0.4% average allocation from private clients. Really. You see the barbell we've talked about probably in second-half of last year with gold where it's either the sovereigns are buying or you had just like retail lining up at Costco and depleting all all of the ounce, you know, silver and gold oz coins. But yeah, there's a lot of room to run here. And I think that's why it's just so challenging right now to think about how to allocate capital because everything that we brought Michael, he didn't have a, a formal education at all, actually, but he, he's not a finance guy, right? So, but Brian and myself went through the finance undergrad, did the Wall Street stuff and like all this stuff that we're talking about, it was not discussed at all. So it's like everyone is kind of coming to conclusions at, at different rates and people are still trying to figure out what does this all mean? Because it challenges everything that we've been taught. Michael works for a a gold dealer. He has he has better education than than either of us. On this, that's true. The, this is super fascinating because you can just feel like, you know, the air with these macro analysts calling, but they're just on the fringes of the Internet. And a few things came to mind. 1 is like the money was so cooked that like people literally had to invest their, their capital into magic in your beans to preserve it. Like this just kind of a, it's like a corollary to like Eric Case and saying like, man, the millennials got so pissed off. They just like took the money. Like they just said, we're going to take it all and just create a new one. But the other thing that's really just fascinating is, yes, like gold when you think about it. And I hope like maybe these conversations, because anybody listening that's tireless or me talking about gold, I think the guys were there. But as we just get to so many conversations like this and with individuals and investors and institutions, the solution is similar, the problem's the same, and for a lot of people, gold just makes more sense. But what's interesting from the volatility, right, and the appreciation and keeping par with inflation, but what's interesting is what makes gold unattractive, right, Is the fact that you have to physically, if you're going to park all your wealth there. Now you have a problem with delivery is what makes a Bitcoin attractive. But the thing that makes Bitcoin attractive also makes it unattractive because you can't touch it. And so it makes sense that exists in this stigmatized world because there's the other angle that your version of what you said being coming from that area is that like the gold bugs were stigmatized. It's like, what are you a Luddite? We don't, you don't want to invest, blah, blah, blah. And it's reality. It's like couldn't be further from the truth that this is like the safest asset. It's shown. And there's all these like macro like charts or directions where Luke will call out whether it's oil, energy production, food, where gold is going to have to go to it's 2:00 to 5:00 to 10X to keep pace with sovereigns offsetting what they need and consume like expenditures incoming and an extern and going out until gold is going to do its thing. I think 5K is just the beginning. But in that world, naturally people will not settle in BTC as well. And that's where you'll see the appreciation, you know, higher than. Well said. They're simpatico. They they go hand in hand. Like that sort of complementary nature is what you just described. And for a lot of people it's just like a natural path. Like it's in my mind, it's a lot easier to understand why Bitcoin would matter if you understand gold 1st. And the reality is like going back to that, those B of A allocations, like the average person doesn't even understand gold. So like it is a helpful complementary asset. In the thing for you guys, I'll figure out we'll do like an offside and I'll I'll get my hands on some. Most people, especially listening has never put their hands on like 10 ounces of gold coins. Forget about a bar, just 10 oz 20 oz. It's the closest thing you can probably get to magic that exists on the earth because you have this thing. It's been used for money for thousands of years, but the density, you can't put a price like you can't feel. You can't talk about until you feel it. And you when you do that, you can realize, oh, shit, maybe I want some of this. Like there is some value here, especially it's been utilizing, it's universal. And so I think like we just forget the way humans are wired in our DNA, that this thing's money. It's been money. And the sovereigns are telling you that it's a $35 trillion asset class, the largest asset class in the world. Yeah, we are so far away collectively for about understanding money. I saw I'm not going to pull it out, but I saw it from James Safer at Bloomberg. He covered a filing for an ETF that is just allocating the prediction markets. And so I just like we can't get further away from understanding what money is right now. We'll we'll try our best. All right, We're we're coming up on time or actually over on time, but I want to do last take real quick, make sure we do it. I'm going to do mine just quickly. Mine is is definitely investment advice. Next time the government buys 10% of a company, you go all in, you don't ask any questions, you sell all of your Bitcoin and you go all in. Remember when the government, I think it was in August, September, took a 10% stake in Intel, they're up 350%. What are you doing? You're holding Bitcoin, you're down 50%. You could have been up 350 on Intel and then you could have bought way more coin. So my take is next time the government is buying equity positions in companies, it's probably something worth looking at. But then the the counterbalance of that is you got Jim Cramer. Intel is such a horse. I have no bear case. So you could just actually disregard everything that I just said. If you want to take the inverse Kramer approach here. What I said is not financial advice, by the way. I was kidding. So that's my last take. Pay attention to what the government's doing. I will say one of the thing though, I, I was very bullish last year because I saw Trump. I saw what Trump promised at least on the campaign trail and what he was discussing early in his presidency about Bitcoin and golden age and all this. And then I saw his family getting involved. Put the meme coin stuff aside for a second. That was, you know, that's a big issue. But I saw his family get involved in different companies. Board seat here, executive here. I thought for sure we would be ripping last year and I was totally wrong. So maybe you don't want to buy any company that the the government takes a stake in. Yeah, it's hard to put aside the the Trump coin thing, unfortunately, especially in the in the normie brain. That seems to be what people now tie not only him and his family too, but also broader crypto and they they hear the word crypto. My last take is short and sweet. I'm excited at the bickling Conference is in Nashville again next year and no longer in Vegas. I think it makes zero sense that they held that thing in Vegas two years in a row. The whole concept of Las Vegas is completely antithetical to saving and wealth preservation and it really rubbed me the wrong way that it was held there. So I'm happy to see it's come back to Nashville. Next. Well, it did make sense. It did make sense in the context of last year being the conferences you start dumping the bags on retail for the Treasury and that was A at a casino, right? So that made sense at least. Yeah, I guess you're right. It definitely rubbed Larry Leopard the wrong way if you seen any of his tweets on Twitter. Larry Legend. I think the thing I have is checking out. We have a webinar coming up and it's going to talk about everything we've been doing launching. I think they're still Genesis spots left, so you can sign up, but if you use TLT, you get more Sats. I forget the number, but it's somewhere our OPS and finance teams have it. But you get more if you use TLT. But then even if you're not ready, look out for the webinar that's going to be coming out because we'll walk through while we're building. I mean, I talk about this a lot. Like I just genuinely pinch myself when we sit in the position we're in because we know where the market's going. The smartest people in the world. Whatever Jackson pulled up, I wasn't ready for it. But there's like 5 different. Triad 5 firms and analysts explaining that the world's changing. It's going to sound hard. Assets, Gold's one of them. Individuals can on board, get a unified experience for dollars, earn rewards on it. BTC and gold that doesn't exist today. I expect that to be the future, but when that becomes the norm, we're going to be so far ahead, offering other financial services, mortgages, all the other things associated. So if you're interested in what we've been doing, sign up at least to the webinar. All right. Good stuff. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that On Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com/contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private Client Advisors.
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