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Michael
There's a couple charts this week just showing the returns of bitcoin. Every time that there were any 50% drawdowns and returns after six to 12 months from the all time highs and 97% of buys are profitable two years later, the median forward returns are over a hundred percent for a year and higher after two. So while everybody else is trying to chase the hot shiny object in the room of all these IPOs, there are other value investors who can just buy bitcoin with profitable free cash flows for themselves and just go back to focusing on the craft and knowing that the money's going to be higher. It all comes down to computers communicating.
Brian
The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless. Artificial gold.
Liam
Is it still rat poison?
Brian
Probably rat poison squared.
Liam
We need to get into the world
Michael
of okay, this is actually foundational technology.
Brian
What the Internet of money does is it creates a single network which can do a micro transaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one
Liam
of the major forces for reducing the roll of government.
Brian
The one thing that's missing that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash.
Liam
All righty gentlemen. Welcome back to another episode of Final Settlement. Today is Monday, June 8, 10:49am Eastern Standard Time. Boys, how are we doing?
Brian
Doing good. I needed. We had a little like pre powwow. Had a little extra time this morning just chatting about state of the world insanity of the, the. The dat, you know, the Orwellian, you know, changing the, the discourse and moving the goalpost on whatever the hell their KPI is at the of the current week along AI. We'll have to have some lost tape somewhere that we can get to some of the loyal listeners. I think they'd appreciate hearing what goes on behind the scenes.
Liam
The inner cabal squabbles. Never been, never been hotter. But yeah, I mean lots to get to. We've got a list. I would say there's not as many like deals over the past week or
Brian
so, but it's a dark time in digital assets.
Liam
Dark time in the world. Let's be frank. There's a lot of crazy things going on. Bitcoin's dead, crypto's dead. But we're tokenizing the world and AI is also taking over. We've got some heavy hitter IPOs coming up. I think that's where we're going to start. This isn't necessarily on the AI side, but SpaceX IPO I think is the end of this week and Then I don't know, correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know if there's dates set yet for anthropic and OpenAI in terms of those IPOs, but those are looming as well. And I think the big narrative over the past couple of weeks is that those looming IPOs are sucking capital out of the room, particularly out of bitcoin. That's been a narrative that the reason bitcoin is down is because everyone's rotating out of bitcoin to buy these IPOs. Now, I will talk a little bit more about this, but I don't think that, that, I mean there's a component to it that maybe that has contributed to some of the downward movement. But I think it's a classic example of trying to ascribe a narrative to price action after the fact. And I don't necessarily buy that there's massive capital rotation from directly from bitcoin basically into cash waiting to buy these IPOs. But let's start, I guess with SpaceX. Yeah, go ahead.
Brian
Maybe just before going into the SpaceX, I think, you know, there's a few pods that I, I try to listen to weekly and I don't know if the guys like them, they can share, I've shared them. But one of them is the Empire podcast. And it's very interesting because I think there's different pod podcasts and I think one of our angles is trying to come up with a well rounded view, but also understanding fundamentally that the money's broken and then you can go downstream of the incentives. And so I really like enjoying listening to certain specialists in different areas of the market because you can get their take. But then you kind of see it, spot the gaps because if we are right that the money's broken, you can start to discern like what are, what's more objectively true. So anyway, that's the Empire pod. It's Jason Yanowitz, co founder, Block Works, Santiago something. He's been a like venture crypto AI investor. And then last dude, Rob Haddock, he was at somewhere else and he has a dragon. And they're very sharp at, at where they're at. You know, they're, they're operating at the highest level, specifically like Rob, pretty savvy. And anyway, there was an event last week in. It was a liquidity summit in Napa that all in guys had and they were out there and there was just referencing the state and the dichotomy and contrast between digital assets in the salt that exists, whether it's Digital assets, Bitcoin versus traditional tech and just how it sucked the air out of the room around. If you think about where people were into alt and bitcoin, it was sexy and they can make money. So much capital has been made by private investors coming into this asset class, AI, SpaceX, all these just like hot emerging asset technologies and these people that are setting up SPVs in the past couple years via retail, returning billions of dollars to investors. And also. So you take that and then there's just a whole like there's no one size but around the relevance or logic of the valuations and where they can go. And so it's just fascinating because I think like what we've said on this side is there's no real valuation that make up when you think about the cap X and the data center build out. But when you move the goal post on the money being broken, you can start to make up numbers on how it could potentially return X, Y and Z. And so you have this just whole like dispersion of people that think that this is insane, it's a bubble, it's going to blow up. And then others that are looking at the SpaceX example and they have like their, you know, IPO docs say that they have like this 10 to, I don't even know, 200 trillion. That trillion. You start getting lost once you hear trillions. But it's like 210 to 200 trillion Tam and like space data centers are like 25 trillion that they're going to make like this is crazy numbers and all that to say. It's just a very fascinating time to be looking at this asset class. I think the thing that I think about is that right now is probably the worst time to be investing in AI because of how hot it is. And if you're, you know, a ticker on cnbc, you probably should run the other way. It's probably the best time to be looking at bitcoin digital assets because as that like rotation happens, that's when you want to be looking at investments, when it's not the hot thing. There's probably a lot more to unpack, but it's just something I'm looking at and fascinated by because the markets just like suck the air out of everything digital asset related and everything tying to AI has just gone through the roof and all the attention's there right now.
Michael
Yeah, I don't think that they have to mutually be exclusive though. I think that bitcoin could still rip while all of the other asset classes and IPOs are hot too. And so I do think it's a little bit of cope of just people who want to say that this is doing better related to the IPOs and the timing being right versus not. I just can't help but think back to the Paul Tudor Jones podcast that he did earlier this year when thinking about back to 2000 and really thinking about all the lockups and when these B.C. investors were able to sell their shares and how that just caused the IPO bubble to burst or the Internet bubble to burst. Some of these SpaceX investors have been in the stock for upwards of 20 years. They just have to return capital to investors and they are going to need to sell in order to do that. The float from the IPO is only $75 billion at I think it's $1.5 trillion valuation. And so I don't necessarily see a lot of capital being able to just be able to buy all these DC shares that they're going to have to return. So I don't think that this is the best time. And then we can talk about it a little bit later too. And Brian, there's a couple of charts that were in the open range this week that were great, just showing the returns of bitcoin. Every time that there were any 50% drawdowns and returns after six to 12 months from the all time highs and something like 96, 97% of buys are profitable two years later, the median forward returns are over 100% for a year and higher after two. So while everybody else is trying to chase the hot shiny object in the room of all these IPOs, we've just seen this game of bitcoin drawdowns and coming back so many times that there are other value investors and people who don't necessarily have to wait for, you know, the hot kind of catalyst at an institutional level or worry about risk adjusted returns. They can just buy bitcoin with profitable, you know, free cash flows for themselves and just not necessarily have to worry about it for a long time. They can just go back to focusing on the craft and knowing that the money's going to be higher. So for anybody who's in that kind of spot, I think it's, it's much more prudent to know, be able to take a long term time horizon view on bitcoin as well.
Liam
Yeah, that, that's all well said. I mean a few things in there that stood out to me. I mean one, just the short termism of all of this. Right. Like if you're thinking about Rotation trades and chasing a momentum like that is inherently short term thinking. But going back to what you said around the people that have been in a name like SpaceX for, you know, 20 years, whatever it is, I think that's what most people are missing in terms of like, you know, I would, I would argue that like it's more likely that there's going to be a capital rotation from people getting liquidity from these names into bitcoin than the other way around. Like I would, I would make that bet that like there's a ton of people that are going to get liquidity from these IPOs that probably understand bitcoin, probably already own some bitcoin and would be looking to add at these levels. And I think that that's just not only a larger pool of capital than this proverbial sort of retail rotation bid of people that have bitcoin exposure but now want to chase these IPOs. So I think it's almost the reverse of the narrative that's being espoused over the past few weeks. And then to your point, Michael, just at a higher level. Yeah, if the classic, if your taxi driver is talking about the SpaceX IPO and he's going to ape it, that's probably a pretty bad near term single. And then the other thing I would say is like, you know, I'm not one to like bet against Elon necessarily. Like I think SpaceX could do well over time and same with anthropic and OpenAI. But I guess where I come out is like, okay, if these things are IPOing at 1, 2 trillion dollars, what is the, you know, because you're inherently taking a short term view if you're rotating into these trades and chasing the momentum. So what is the one to two to three year outlook? Are they going to double, triple, quadruple to a 4 or $5 trillion company in that timeframe? Probably not. It's probably going to take a lot longer than that, maybe closer to five to 10 years. So on a risk adjusted basis, I just think Bitcoin at 60k is just much more attractive than that over the next few years. So even if you do have a short term view, I think bitcoin would be more attractive than like aping these IPOs.
Brian
Yeah, I have a lot. I was taking notes, so a few things. That's a great paper you should write because we were talking about the contrarian take. It's like that is, I would say 100% certain that there's more likely rotation out in the bitcoin I remember this specifically, especially if this is a bubble, because the best people that know about the bubble are the people internal at the organization. When I was at WeWork, I knew actually. But the counter to that is that a lot of people like smell their own farts and don't think that they smell like when you're at that. That company. Because I remember specifically I was, I was having this conversation with Parker when I was driving to Houston one time. We were both at Unchained and I was explaining to him my journey, like at WeWork, realizing how crazy it was. And then when SoftBank was doing the tender offer to like sell the shares, we were supposed to IPO at 48 to buy Bitcoin because the opportunity cost. This was April of 2019. So Bitcoin was in. It's like dumped. It was like 3,000, $4,000. He's like, that's interesting because most people want to do that because when you're in the middle of the machine, you think. And then I was like, when I went back, I was like, yeah, that's what a lot of people so tbd. But I still think you're right. If you've been sitting on those assets, you know, they know what they've been
Liam
waiting for and they've been even longer like this. This is the moment that they've been waiting for.
Brian
And it's insane amount of wealth. Like a SpaceX holds Bitcoin. So there are probably a lot of people familiar with it. But then B, like in Austin, I think it's rumored that there's 100, 100 millionaires will during this IPO. I think in Southern California, it's like a thousand hundred millionaires. So there's a lot of wealth going to be made. The other thing that this ties into, I was thinking about is like, it makes a lot of sense how bitcoin's so hard to understand because you can effectively pick whatever bucket as an investor and it just still sits there at the 60,000, even at $100,000 price. So if you're looking at like growth equity venture, like real estate, like you can start to if you understood it well enough that you can get those slivers while reducing the counterparty risk and having the liquidity profile. And in the the last part that I think this is a testament to how crazy the world is from a financialization that like, I'm getting fomo and I'm getting FOMO because, you know, whether it's like hyper liquid or like, I remember Solana early and it's similar. It's FOMO like that. Like, I know where things. You can see where the market's going from a fives perspective. But. But you have all the opportunity cost. You have to become a trader. You have to know when to exit. You got to deal with all of it in the same way that I see how people love the intellectual challenge of trying to pick winners. And I think equities, you know, equities will naturally need to exist for a long time from a, From a trading or investment perspective. But you can see how people want that diversified portfolio. And this may sound like co, but when you step back, you really realize, like, if you actually just. I mean, right now, there's more volatility. So this is where the diversification matters. But over time, if you just have this asset that compounds and then you go back to actually producing value and building or investing in your craft, it doesn't look like it in the short term on the price chart, but most people aren't making money on this short term. They're all losing it. But on the long term, it's compounding. And you're building a business, you're building equity with a company, and that's the thing that generates real wealth. It's not sexy in this world. Nobody talks about it, but I'm certain it's right. But that's how crazy the world has gotten, that you have to like, really pull yourself back to, like, first principles and we'll get there, but it just makes sense that how insane the world is. Because if we can sit here with this understanding and been holding Bitcoin, but still be like, man, I'd love to get in on some, you know, secondaries like a couple years ago, but you just realize that, like, that takes away from. You ultimately have to become a trader versus just doing what you're good at and then making your money that way.
Liam
Yeah, and there's also. There's sort of this inherent. It's almost like a survivorship bias in the sense of like, you know, the average person hears of the great trades that are being made and they think that they can do it. And the reality is that most people will time it wrong. They'll ape the top, they'll get shaken out. And most people are not great traders or not great, you know, professional investors because they have a day job. It's very similar to like DraftKings, like tweeting out some crazy parlay bet slip. It's like, oh, I could do that. I can make a ton of money. Sports Betting when in reality most people lose and the house usually wins. It's a similar idea. And so I would agree with that. The other way I would parse it is I think there's a reasonable stance of having a certain percentage of your net worth and your allocation that is a bit more speculative and you are making some proverbial bets on equities. But like the component that isn't that if you're storing it in Bitcoin or gold or you know, sound money, like that is not speculative. It's, it's saving. And so like I think there's a rational approach where you know, you have your savings and then you have a sort of more speculative bucket. But I think the problem is most people, particularly younger generations, feel very behind and so their entire bucket is the speculative bucket and they're not thinking about saving. And so that's kind of where we're at. But yeah, real quick and just two things.
Brian
Yeah, the speculative like is more from like an intellectual knowledge perspective because if you have skin in the game, then you're learning. But the opposite is if your savings is. Here is where this stuff gets really Orwellian because if you think about there's a lot of different discussions whether it's BlackRock and Larry Fink, I think specifically saying that like grandma's bonds and like grandma's pensions tied into the data center build out all the way to putting in SpaceX into some of these indices, that if there is a bubble, which I think we all understand there is a bubble, that a lot of people are going to get left holding the bag. And so that's like this set the other part of it. And it's also there's an insane amount of centralization of where we think about like GDP and the growth of the fang and then now with the AI companies that there's a lot of concentration of wealth sitting here that you're starting and we'll talk about it later about the sovereign and like the government owning these companies. Like it's just starting to get really weird when you think about the amount of capital starting to concentrate with X number of companies that it doesn't really leave you like with a lot of options if all of your capital is tied into five equities and then you know, negative yielding bonds, it's a very precarious place to be. And today.
Liam
Yeah, and this is what you mentioned, what I just pulled up here. So this is a headline from late last week. Former aizar so David Sachs calls Sanders proposal for a government equity A stupidity tax and warns against nationalization as Trump molds public stakes. And so this was in response to, I guess Bernie Sanders proposal that like, you know, 50% of all these AI companies would be owned by Americans in some manner. And to me, like this, this is a signal that all this is a bubble because these things are not sustainable. We know that, you know, the $20 or whatever you're paying for your ChatGPT or Claude subscription is heavily subsidized. These companies are burning money. They're borrowing ungodly amounts of money to build out all this infrastructure. And I read this as basically like a necessary or inevitable bailout of some kind where the government will need to take stakes in these things. Because again, all of this stuff has this almost existential implication around the AI race, global competitiveness, we have to beat China, all these things. And in addition to that, you have then what you described, Michael, like the pension angle of like, okay, if you know, Americans savings are now tied to the success of these companies, well then, yeah, like at some point there needs to be some sort of quasi bailout that looks something like this. But because you can't just let those things fail and basically let people's savings evaporate. So any thoughts on this headline or any of this contemplation?
Michael
Go ahead.
Brian
Well, so I'll throw a couple more gasoline bombs and then you could take them into all different directions. So what Brian said is super fascinating. I think would be very taboo in most markets. And this is where I think the first principles, understanding Bitcoin and value, where they derive from help see the world for what they are versus what people want. Because nobody would say that. And it's absolutely true. There's a lot of gaslighting on why the amount of infrastructure. I mean it's ungodly. It's crazy. The amount of infrastructure being built out right now across the United States. The other part that nobody will say out loud is China is either 100 to a thousand X better at effectively making anything. There was a. I forgot what I was listening to, but it was describing. It's like the number of square miles at San Francisco. It exists is like a manufacturing facility for a car. And because they vertically integrated the full thing, you can basically come in with all the components and on the other side of that comes out the car. And when you look at a car that would be made in the US it let's say it's five to ten major manufacturers have to all like ship it to Michigan or whatever. But it's just this idea that we can't compete with China at least today and at least for a while now. And so it just ties back to a lot of a bubble. But B, we've seen this before and people get left holding the bag. And even if it's indirectly because you have to print more money to give more capital to these firms that are effectively now the overlords of owning all your data and you're like tied to them because whether it's how you get your doctors know or your work, you can see where this is going. And that subsidy is something that I think smart people are paying attention to. They're looking at open source or looking at owning a lot of their data, but that's like almost like self custody bitcoin. Like how many people are actually going to do that? They're going to go the convenient route. And the last thing that will tie into digital assets as we will want to get Liam's take, but also we'll go to the digital asset side is they're already saying in one of these reports about dividends, like the dividend structure for your data or whatever, like, you know, Sam Altman's saying, it's like you can see where this is already going. And I honestly think it's like Tether and USDC where like they're both the same side. It's just different companies. It's the same thing with I think like OpenAI and anthropic. They look like they're against each other, but in reality they're just like the whole Hegelian dialectic where they're both on, you know, working with the government.
Michael
Yeah, there's, there's a lot there first of all on the stupidity tax for government ownership of these things. All taxes are stupid. So. But in addition to that, you could see a world in which all of these companies actually do end up getting profitable because the token cost declined so fast on the other side of things. So like cost to actually do a job. Early writers ran the numbers earlier this week. Like it's declined from like 305x over a course of three years now. Everything is kind of getting 80 to 35%, 35x cheaper over period of time. And so you do see a period where these margins do expand. But I just don't necessarily know if all these AI companies end up actually being able to hold the margin themselves because they're not only competing with OpenAI versus anthropic versus the cursors of the world, they're competing with these Chinese open source Models on the other side of things. And I know that it's unlikely that folks do open source models and have everything themselves, but they're just going to get easier and easier to do over time, just like almost running Linux. And maybe you have somebody who's a specialty expert that can help set that up. And similarly to how everything from using Bitcoin has gotten so much easier over time over the past 20 years or so. And so I do see a world in which these businesses end up not being able to do this at a profitable level. But then all of these businesses are going to compete the profits away. Like anytime that doing more with less and adopting new technology really goes across industries that just causes better products to be made. And if everybody has access to all these models, a lot of these profits end up getting competed away too.
Liam
Yeah, that's well said.
Brian
It's a great chart. Yeah, it's a good angle around the competing firms. Like I wonder if you went and did a retrospect retrospective of like how we got here because I feel like it wasn't until recently that a lot of these companies with free cash flow started taking out debt, mainly namely Google and Facebook. But if you have like it's similar to the softbank angle where they used to compete and go to the Lyft versus Uber or DoorDash's versus whoever and said like take this money or we'll put the canon at you the other direction what forced them to go. And then you have the opposite where like Apple just said like f that we're not going to do any of it. Especially given where they sit on the hardware stack side. I think it'd be interesting to see if like a lot of these firms just had to play in that world if they were going to be relevant and how that ties into that competition 100%.
Michael
And the other thing to note is that if there is a change in administration, I think it's very likely that there are worse and worse, more punitive regulations and or breakup fees across any of these companies, the larger that they get. So even looking at a SpaceX and likely how they're going to try to acquire Tesla, I could see the US government trying to mandate some sort of breakup for them. It's just, I think that's just where we are. And Elon has created so much wealth for himself and other people and AI is incredibly unpopular by a lot of people. Like seeing these products create fewer jobs in some instances and the amount of wealth that's created, I think with just how bad the inflation's impacting so many people it's just going to cause breakups of these companies or just really punitive regulations. And I don't necessarily like while I would hate to see that, I just kind of see it almost as inevitable at this point.
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Liam
Yeah, totally agree. All right, next on the list, we don't have to spend a ton of time on this, but it was a pretty big story from last week. The zcash inflation bug. To make a really, to make it a short story, basically a bug was found in one of the privacy pools for Zcash that basically allowed the unlimited minting of Zcash over a four year period. So this goes back to 2022 and because of some of the elements around how Zcash works with these shielded privacy pools, basically there's no way to actually confirm or deny that this was exploited in a material way where people were printing a ton of zcash. So the interesting part about this and why I think it's relevant to bring up is that the way this was actually found out was by someone just using the latest version of CLAUDE to basically review the code and this exploit was found and then they patched it within a certain amount of time. I mean that's another story in and of itself in terms of the decentralization theater of a lot of these altcoins where basically a few people found out about this quickly hard forked and you know, patched it up, but just shows you sort of the centralized forces at work with a lot of these other protocols outside of Bitcoin. And so not sure if you guys have anything on this, but I think it's relevant in what we've talked about in the past few weeks around the advancement of these models and basically the potential for exploits for a lot of these fragile crypto protocols out there that haven't been battle tested for years, built on pretty often proprietary, but also just more fragile cryptography that is going to be exposed. And I think this is a prime example of that.
Brian
Yeah, I think there's two big angles here. One is the notion of like these models, these frontier models might be the death knell for crypto. I mean it's increasingly looking like crypto was just a test net for the equity and traditional financial markets to go on chain and then the ruggings that will ensue after. Because a lot of investors specifically around like the defi side of things are just realizing like why would I put capital at risk even if there's some marginal yield when all I hear about every week is hundreds of millions of dollars evaporating. And so I think there's that component that's interesting. And then on the other side of it, I think of it as, you know, there's no shortage of people that are out there talking a book on whatever it is, whether it's a dat, whether it's zcash and private bitcoin. And you saw this for six months to a year. I mean zcash did some crazy numbers. I think they were at its low like 25 to $50 a coin. And it was sitting at like 450 before I kind of retraced with this exploit. The point being is it was up
Liam
to like, it was up to like 650 and then it retraced 50% in like a day.
Brian
And the main point there is like there's no shortage of people out there talking their book. But you have to really dig deep and look at what are the incentives, what's the value, what are the fundamentals. And anybody that knew anything understood like this was another like affinity scam effectively because you're saying that this is like private bitcoin when there was, there's no sense of it. So I think that's just something to pay attention to is we live in an insanely chaotic world today. We're at the late stages, no matter what anybody wants to say of this like fiat financialized world where people are trying to make money on money. And that's the construct when it just looks so crazy to try to figure out where the signal is and you don't really have to overcomplicate it. Like if you want to be in the indexes and you can go to the top companies, like that's shown to have a return. Now maybe we're in a bubble, maybe you see a retrace, but you're probably still going to make out with X if you want to be in gold, if you want to be in Bitcoin, these are sound assets. They have the properties of monies, but everything else starts to just become this narrative and you're buying into that. And yes, you could make money, but you also could lose a lot more, especially given these durations where we see different assets where they'll fly and people, they're the exit liquidity, which I think this has been. And then how long did they get out of this pool before they announce the bug? Because it's my understanding you can only get so much out, in and out, that how much was able to leave before? And I think a lot of that capital is now trapped in one of these pools.
Michael
Yeah, all great points. And it's a real great reason to highlight the slow methodical development of Bitcoin compared to many of these other alternative asset classes and some of the risks that come with zero knowledge proofs and why it's best to remove all these other more private ways to spend Bitcoin in two different layers. But yeah, I mean, I think that crypto is almost uninvestable at this point, outside of Bitcoin in general, just because these things are only going to ramp up from here. This was, I think it was Opus that did the, that found the bug, not actually Mythos itself too. And so if there's any real, any real backing behind the improvements of being able to find additional flaws within protocols and things like that, it's going to even make crypto more and more uninvestable. And obviously these AI models are only going to get better. So not great for a lot of these folks who just plan to have their identities and really thought that the tokens would accrue value in the ecosystem outside of bitcoin.
Brian
We can move on. But remember Defi Summer with the sushi swap stuff? Imagine if this thing was running rampant there. It would have just been like absolute chaos.
Liam
Yeah, no, totally. And it's fascinating as we'll sort of transition. You have that happening and sort of that, even to your pointly, I'm like on the horizon. Like this stuff's only going to get better at exploiting these protocols and finding these vulnerabilities, but at the same time, we're going to keep tokenizing the world. Guys, it's the crypto revolution led by JP Morgan. We're going to tokenize deposits. And so this was a headline from JP Morgan, the bank, alongside Chase, Citigroup, bank of America and Wells Fargo have confirmed plans to build a shared tokenized deposit network through the clearinghouse Real Times Payment Company. They collectively Own, which will launch in the first half of 2027. And then similarly another consortium type deal payments giant, Stripe, Visa, mastercard, said to be among backers of a soon to debut stablecoin platform. So I guess this is in addition to Stripe's Tempo, which I believe is also a stablecoin platform. So more stablecoin platforms, more tokenized deposit platforms. Regardless of the vulnerabilities of all of these blockchains, we're going to keep tokenizing the world. So any anything on either of these two headlines?
Brian
Yeah, I mean I thought they were super fascinating to see the level of groups coordinating together. I can't help but think there's something to this and like where you see the, the Fed and President dynamic of wanting to raise interest rates, lower interest rates, and you see this around the banks trying to control and build a tokenized deposit networks while the like emergent companies are trying to develop effectively like loops around the existing system. And I think this gets lost on a lot of people that the tokenized deposit aspect that the banks are working on are this like kind of walled garden but you need other banks to participate. And so there's different ones. Where that came on my radar was Caitlin Long who's been working on this with Vantage. Their tokenized network I believe is called Haven. Could be wrong, but I think it's called Haven. And the idea is that they're also building a network out for challenger community banks, regional banks. And so you see these large incumbents that have been kind of disintermediating those banks, working on it with the firms you just mentioned because they see the writing on the wall. And then you have these other firms that are closer to the money from a transactional payments perspective. And I think Coinbase was also rumored in this Visa Stripe consortium, whatever they're building. So I don't know, hopefully like that competition's healthy for the consumer. I think it probably ends up being. But at the end of the day money is getting digitized and with the digital layer, yes, you're going to get efficiencies in the same way you get efficiencies with AI, but you need that underlying controllable asset that can A, not be debased and then B cannot be censored or seized. And so all this routes to where this ends in Bitcoin being transacted and used day to day. I think that's something that people still get lost on here because we try to like meet the market in the middle and not seem like insane people saying Bitcoin will be the global reserve asset. But when you look at just monetary properties, it either is worth nothing or it's a global reserve asset. There's no like in between where it gets to be this like construct that sits within institutional walls but nobody would ever want to transact in it. That's not how money works. And I think that's what you just fundamentally a would get here and listening to what we're doing, if we're right, there's a long shot that people believe it. But if it's right, it fundamentally changes how you invest and manage your assets in the future. And that's where you see the mess across all different people talking about it, whether it's the stripe they, they bought Privy and that founder was talking about like inflation adjusted stable coin. And then you have the dad people creating digital credit and saying you're just going to spend all these different various digital credits at Starbucks. It's like they're literally just creating Chuck E. Cheese tokens thinking that's how money works and that's just not how it works. It doesn't work today, it didn't work yesterday, it's not how it's going to work in the future. And so you always have to like really look at it through that lens of how much can people really understand what's happening if they fundamentally don't even understand how money actually works and how it accrues value.
Michael
So. Well said. Could stretch it on ramp. Use code stretch to sign up for on ramp.
Brian
We'll see how long that goes. Yeah, but if you do use code stretch you do get an extra 50000 stats maybe for the whole week because we got some, some more stuff coming out on the stretch. Glenn, Glenn Cameron, give him a follow. But on this.
Michael
Yeah, it seems like it's crazy to see all these folks working together. It seems like right from the start they're trying to position almost both of these two competing consortiums of the big legacy banks and the regional competitors is too big to fail. And I don't necessarily know exactly how it's going to work with tokenized deposits and how correlated all of the different loans are going to be and different consumer books. It seems like it's probably not going to be great and it will probably honestly be a little bit more competitive with bitcoin in the near term just given the amount of monetary weight that they're going to be able to throw behind and have the tokenized deposits that are able to compete on a fairly large scale. But inevitably these things will be bailed out as they just try to position themselves as being too big to fail. And the properties of central decentralized globally or censorship resistant money with a fixed supply is obviously always where this was going to end up despite any innovative kind of moves in the near term. But this is going to be interesting to track over the medium term and I do expect this to get a lot of traction.
Liam
Agreed. Okay, moving on, a couple other sort of tradfi slash digital asset related headlines from the past week. This one Morgan Stanley lets clients lend Bitcoin and other assets for in kind spot crypto ETF conversions. What was the main story here? I was kind of confused by what the actual takeaway was here is. So is this just letting people do in kind transfers or what is the lending component here? Liam, did you add this one?
Michael
Yeah, it allows folks to essentially lend their bitcoin in order to transfer it for in kind bitcoin spot bitcoin ETF conversions. And so obviously I think this is pretty big in the fact that it just allows folks to, you know, not necessarily have to buy bitcoin and have a new cost basis if they actually want to go into an ETF. And Morgan Stanley came out with the lowest 14 BIPS ETF. We've talked about this slightly and I don't know if we've said it on the show before, but pretty disappointing launch in terms of AUM numbers by Morgan Stanley. Maybe it was because they were positioning this that they would allow for in kind conversion of bitcoin and weren't marketing it quite as heavily. But I think this kind of speaks to the broader tradfi folks who are coming into bitcoin. Even like the Charles Schwab launching bitcoin trading, if there's not a big concerted effort in order to market what you're doing and why it's valuable and you just offer bitcoin in a vehicle that's similar to what's already out there in the market. I think that just the lindy of financial services and lack of knowledge around why Morgan Stanley ETF is better than IBIT is just going to cause a little bit of a cold star problem. Same with just buying bitcoin through, you know, Charles Schwab versus E Trade. I think that there has to be a concerted education effort otherwise folks generally won't necessarily understand why this is something that's going to be differentiated and why being first really does matter in the space too.
Brian
Yeah, can you scroll down? I just wanted to see that mechanism because I still don't fully understand. It says right here Morgan Stanley Wealth Management will enable its high net worth clients to lend their crypto assets to Galaxy in returns for shares.
Liam
It sounds like a leverage bootstrapping of the etf. Is that the correct read? You can borrow against your spot assets and we'll give you more shares of the etf?
Brian
That's what it sounds like. It says letting clients convert cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ether and Solana into traditional investment vehicles without cashing out could cut incline crypto ETP onboarding times by 75%. I guess the angle. I should have read more of this but I think the angle is rather. And it says from 5 million to 25. So these are large holders. I think the angle is for certain people that want their assets in the ETPs because of the financial. The ability to get like some leverage on there. So I guess it's leverage on leverage because a lot of people there's the two conversations or narratives that have happened around spot holders wanting to go to ETFs. There has been anecdotally and I've heard this and it's been talked about how large holders have wanted to go into eds. From a security perspective. This doesn't sound like that because it doesn't sound like. I mean they're probably still holding the asset or some of it. But this is a way for them to get Bitcoin into these constructs so then they can lend against them to do other things. Maybe it's get actual dollars, maybe it's covered call positions. So that's what it sounds like. But. And then the only other thing worth commenting on is I think we got to give Morgan Stanley some time simply because of the market timing that they launched this ETF that I don't know how indicative it is. I do think there's a lot of validity to the Lindy and the notion of you want to be first in these markets. As we' seen with Coinbase and custody and BlackRock with the ETFs but also their inflows just because of the timing. It's. It's a precarious time. Like they talked about it with Sailor, whatever the hell is going on with him paying off the debt and taking out the preferreds that like what did he see in the market that he was so bullish? And the same thing that like what did Morgan Stanley see in the market to launch this at this current? Timing. Timing's just interesting. And we can only look at it back in hindsight because the Other aspect, timing is like the amount of liquidity for all these ETFs. There's something somebody knows if you have SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all teasing that they're going to effectively come out this year.
Liam
So yeah, I mean the timing thing for the ETF in particular is interesting because while it's maybe not the greatest time in terms of sentiment and narrative around Bitcoin, like I do think from their perspective it actually made a ton of sense because on one hand
Brian
it's
Liam
better than launching it at the top. And then if you're trying to build a track record for this new fund, it's better to launch it, have the inception date at a lower BTC price and then have early investors be sitting on gains a year or two from now instead of launching at the top. And then those track record numbers don't look as good. So I think from their perspective it's actually probably made a lot of sense in terms of the timing, but in terms of the actual follow through on demand for it, I think that's just a function of the broader sentiment.
Brian
One thing, one thing just to add about ETFs or any of these financial products is I think that you're going to see, and we've talked about this, but it's just like I think you're going to see a rotation. You're going to see multiple types of rotations. One of them is the very wealthy people that take advantage of tax arbitrages. They're going to like it's going to end up whether it's on ramp or somebody else being in something like multi institution because they want the underlying and they don't. They want the underlying in its most pristine way. Because when you think about wealth preservation and managing it for generations, you're ultimately not trying to get it into a system. If you're already like thinking about gold in Switzerland and real estate in Singapore in the same way that if you're holding this pristine asset, you're going to want to get as close to it. And so I think a lot of the people we see today, whether it's in Morgan Stanley, the BlackRock ETF or even like the Dats, are very small percentage points in a portfolio. And generally when the conviction and confidence rises and maybe it's inflation, maybe it's the tax situation in New York or California or the uk, wherever it happens, you're going to, the people will get educated and the economic forces will demand for them to pull it out. And I think that's just bullish on the people building products the right way. Because the smart money is not going to want, you know, a billion dollars sitting in a hundred billion dollar pool where they don't have any eyes on it. No clarity. It's just not how economic forces irrational people will act with their money.
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Liam
Okay, moving along a few other headlines. I'll kind of rattle through these and you guys can pick out what you want to talk about. But Revolut's US bank to offer stablecoin services alongside FDI insured products. And then there were two similar headlines around what we've talked about a bunch over the past several months. 24. 7 trading. So CME Group goes live with crypto futures and options launches bitcoin volatility contracts. And then Charles Schwab launches 24.7bitcoin futures trading as well. So any thoughts on any of those three or things to pull out there? But these were all kind of forecasted. It's just sort of updates on what was previously announced from a lot of these firms.
Michael
Nothing much except for. Great to see that all these firms are actually following through on some of these plans. We've talked about bear markets in the past where there's been drawdowns in bitcoin and a lot of these just get shelved or abandoned. I think that that's happened enough times now that folks actually know that bitcoin will come back and they want to be positioned to benefit from it. And so the 24.7Futures is interesting too just because I know that there was arbs for a lot of folks and just having that futures gap be able to be filled is, you know, just creates a more complete market structure. For different folks in order to get structure, structured exposure. Nothing too much outside of that. Just like continuation of, you know, getting additional parties happy with where we're going with bitcoin.
Brian
Yeah. The only thing I, I got is like Charles Schwab. You need to look at it how much time it's taken. They're leveraging Paxos like these incumbents, they're going to pick up market share because of their size, but in reality of them building the right products, they're just going to be so far from what the market demands. It's just going to be an interesting time to see it play out, especially on the venture and M and A side. We've been talking about it, but you can just feel it. We just sit in this weird lull where people are getting their feet, you know, they're like sea legs on what's happening. Where does value accrue? You look at the mythos thing as an example. It's like in a world where AI is just out there running rampant, social engineering the cost, and then you have this asset that's sitting at 250,000 or $500,000. The notion that you're just going to like hold it in the same way you're holding your stocks and bonds, which we know you have assurances with them. If anything happens, you can just see how there's gonna be a lot of money to be made. And I think that's really where if anybody's listening or paying attention, it's like somebody building, thinking about investing. That's where I, if I was looking for the intellectual pursuit, which a lot of people are from, like it's intellectual slash paying for the education it's in. Where does early stage money movement go? Because if you can follow the money, you can follow a lot of how value will accrue, especially with like a lot of the AI stuff is you're going to ultimately have to be passing these tokens through. It doesn't make sense to be just be loading up every hundred dollars for API credits. There's just going to be a seismic change in like the company construct. And when we look back 10, 20 years from now, I'm like, who are the winners? I just don't think it's going to be Charles Schwab offering crypto.
Liam
You're not. You're not longing. You're not longing. Perps on Charles Schwab right now, definitely not fair.
Brian
It's also funny because the perp stuff is like the hot thing in traffi. It's like you just know where this is going to go. It goes back to people specul and back to people like getting rugged. Especially when you have, I mean Liam knows better than anybody but like these large hedge funds and prop shops that are just going to have all that forward looking flow and be able to completely wreck everyone else. Like why would you.
Liam
Perps are basically like if we're for making the equivalencies to actual gambling, like most people are bad traders generally, most people are bad gamblers. Perps are basically like parlays. Like you're just reducing your chances of, of winning in the casino even to a larger extent. And so yeah, it's like parlays when
Michael
you're sports betting and somebody is 30 seconds ahead of you in terms of like seeing the actual game. Like you're just such, at such a bad disadvantage.
Brian
Well, just add to it. It's like parlay. It's like parlays when somebody's looking 30 seconds ahead and you've been drinking because only time somebody really goes for the parlay is once you've been drinking. And that's when like, because that's when you just going for the, you know, and yeah, I mean we saw this October 10th. Like there was the last, the last cohort of degens that just got wiped out and they're like, wait, this isn't fair. I'm getting out of this game.
Michael
This isn't fair.
Liam
What happened? All right, slight pivot. This was a headline from last week, I think, worth mentioning. U.S. sanctions. Iran's largest crypto exchange over IRGC links. This comes on the heels of about a month or so ago, the US treasury also freezing Iran's portions of their tether, which led to all of the headlines and news around they were going to start using Bitcoin instead for the Hormuz toll. All of that remains to be seen whether or not that's an actual thing that has happened in terms of Bitcoin actually being used as payment. But, but the narrative is at least out there that, you know, I think the important thing to pull out of this is whether it's stable coins or the sort of on off ramps like an exchange, all of those can and will be controlled, seized, etc by government agencies, particularly the United States, if we're, you know, at war with you. So I don't know if you guys have anything on this, but I think it's sort of just a continuation of what I think the world is waking up to in terms of, you know, these crypto networks. While they may have Marginal benefits and utilities in terms of money movement. They are not, they're not like bitcoin in terms of their actual resistance to seizure or censorship.
Brian
Yeah. The only thing that comes to mind is a, like, how can the US sanction an Iranian firm or like exchange? Which is interesting. It reminds me of the whole notion of like Russian oil being sanctioned. But then when the Iran conflict happened, they started opening up the exports or ability for Russia to sell to like Europe. I think just there's so much posturing and window dressing that around like the, the China US stuff we talked about. In the same way that like the US has the ability to enforce economic or like kinetic power. I don't necessarily know if it exists anymore. It just is like window dressing because I don't understand, like what you would sanction or like what you would do. Isn't Iran and their flows and capital movements already sanctioned? Like, obviously they've been running processes through crypto dollars, bitcoin to manage their economy. I think that's been known. But like, what would they do? Seize the Iranian asset? Like I. Anyway, it's just an interesting observation, like the US is sanctioned Iran companies. Wouldn't they always sanction Iran companies for like operating. You know.
Liam
That's a fair point.
Michael
Exactly. They're triple sanctioned now. And so I do think that, kind of taking a step back though, some people have kind of pointed out that all these sanctions on Iran and the Hormuz Strait being closed is a little bit of a reason that bitcoin price has kind of slowed down over the past few weeks. I think that there is some validity to that. Back in 2019, before Bitcoin miners used TOR for the majority of time, I think they had over 6% hash rate. They've been cut off from the financial system in Swift. And so they understand that there is value in net settling trade and at least having some alternatives outside of gold. Just because they can't have US dollars or they can have USDT and it'll get seized by the US government. And so I do think that there is some validity with this trade being closed that when you can't really sell gold and transport it, do you get it anywhere that they're going to be, you know, selling some bitcoin in order to buy other goods and services? I don't think that's why bitcoin's been showing off entirely, but I do think that this is probably something that folks in the US government who are way above my pay grade know and understand and that's why they're kind of making the posturing of sanctioning the no node of X or their crypto exchange there.
Liam
You heard it here first. Iran is selling bitcoin to buy the SpaceX IPO. That is what is causing downward price momentum. All right, this is another headline, a continuation of what we've sort of been tracking around Tether and their investments, their partnerships, particularly on the tokenized gold side. So this was Tether collaborates with Facet to launch the first gold back card unlocking real world utility for digital gold. Don't really like that they're calling it digital gold when that could be confused with bitcoin. But nevertheless Card will operate on the Visa network enabling the users to spend fiat emerging stores worldwide 6% cash back in their gold backed stable coins on eligible transactions creating a reward layer tied to Tether's gold back assets. What do you guys got on this? Mike?
Brian
I just. Yeah, I thought this was interesting because if there's like a real edge, one of the biggest gaps or asymmetries I think is building financial products around gold or cross collateralization with gold, Bitcoin and then layering in digital money like stable coins. I think Tether is super sophisticated in understanding money and just the capital markets in the future and so they naturally gravitated towards Tether. Well started Bitfinex digital assets, Bitcoin, Tether and then realizing gold for a number of reasons would appreciate in this environment that I think the angle why there's such an opportunity is because if you look at gold it has this archaic analog version. We live in a 60, 40 world so very few young people A would find it interesting and B understand money. On the people that do find gold interesting and understand it as money, they're super old and so they're not thinking about technology, they're not thinking about innovation. Now there are firms starting to do that. We've obviously invested in Argo. There's what's Tether's doing. But I do think like in this world where people start to wake up to debasement, it's just a natural sequence that they won't all just jump directly into bitcoin, they will be holding gold. And so if they have the right counterparties, and this goes back to Lindy, if you have the right counterparty, the right structure and where it's custody from a deposit, bullion, depository, you can take delivery. But then maybe you do want to be able to spend it and you're going to be able to get, you know, stable coins on it. You're gonna be able to have cards. I think it's just fascinating that the market will naturally go there. And so yeah, that's why it's on here. And I think like it's just going to be the beauty of gold like bitcoin is it's, it's global and everyone recognizes it has the same price. No matter where you're at, it's recognizability that you're just going to see different markets form around the way that you can use it in your financial day to day life.
Michael
Agreed.
Liam
All right, Liam, unless you got anything on that. We had a couple more links on the list. I just thought this was kind of interesting. We talked probably many months ago, I guess. Yeah. December, January about the Agentix payments. I saw this chart basically saying agentic payments really spiked around that time that everyone was talking about it and have now basically fallen off a cliff. Which I think, you know, when we talked about it at the time, I think we said something to that effect of like, it's still very early for this, but you could see a future where this does take off, but doesn't seem like it's happening in a real way just yet.
Brian
Yeah, it looks like one of the zcash pumps. Like there was a lot of agentic conversations because there's a lot of firms, you know, either raising money or launching products. It's just going to be a function of time. Like everyone understands you want a digital asset to transact via digital, you know, technology or intelligence. But we're still catching up. And it's a lot easier and recognizable to upload your card and buy those APIs credits today.
Michael
Yep, exactly. It's just early. People probably conflated a lot of this with giving your agents like the ability to trade lost all their money and then moved on to other things.
Brian
Right.
Liam
And then the other headline from last week, which I thought was pretty interesting and Nick Carter did a good write up on this, but basically there was a poly market contract or market that was around whether MicroStrategy would sell any Bitcoin by X date and the date was May 31 and they did sell Bitcoin before that date. The problem was they didn't announce it until the Monday following, which was I guess June 1st. And so Polymarket decided to resolve this contract as no. Which obviously made anyone who bet yes. Pretty upset. And I think the shady part around this was that like they literally rewrote the terms of the contract after the fact being like, oh, it needs to be the announcement not the actual selling of bitcoin. So I think, I mean, the takeaway to me here is like, you know, people are very excited about these prediction markets. You know, you see them being integrated across all these different platforms, whether it's Coinbase, Robinhood, you know, name your favorite everything financial platform that is now leading into prediction markets. I think there's still a lot of basically pitfalls and ways that these things go wrong. And, and it ultimately there's some, you know, as much as polymarket was sort of built on crypto rails and there's, I guess there's narratives around this being this open market of information and being able to place your bets accordingly. Like there's still centralizing factors in terms of the resolution of a lot of these markets. And this isn't the first example we've seen of something being resolved in a way that sparks controversy. I would say this is just the latest in a slew of these types of happenings. But. But yeah, I don't know what the eventual resolution is going to be here, but I don't think that they're coming off of their initial stance that they're resolving this as. No. After changing the terms.
Brian
Yeah, I mean, I think the natural resolution is like the callouses of the world, more centralized oracles and solutions. I think this is like a big component of. It's almost like reminds me of the per. The per stuff and what happened October 10th. It's like, sure, even if you want to speculate in size, like how are you going to find your counterparty? I wouldn't gamble, but if I was like, are you going to really want to gamble for a thousand dollars or you want to gamble with some serious money to have skin in the game. And if you are, then you have to make the decision if I'm going to deposit a bitcoin or whatever it is in a solution, am I going to get it back out? Whether it's because I get rugged or something like this. While I do think a lot of this is noise from a the prediction markets because it goes back to these investing culture, it does make sense for like Galaxy. I think last week came out where they're sitting in between like market making for high net worth effectively, I think it just given the assurance that they will take the bet from the high net worth. Think minimums are like five to $10 million. They'll place it, manage the liquidity and then ultimately give you the assurances that you'll get paid out because their balance sheet and also their credibility if they didn't pay it out. So I do see that probably taking place as well versus like this is more retail and somebody's in size. It's almost like going into OTC if you're going to place a bet like this.
Michael
Yeah, yeah, agreed.
Liam
You got anything, Liam?
Michael
No, nothing really. It's interesting to follow these because you can get signal from understanding where the market's moving but actually putting your own capital in there, unless you have any sort of inside information, it's probably going to end up with you losing your money. And if you do have inside information, you'll probably go to jail. So unless you just really love gambling, it's probably just best to stick to stay away from these things and find another better way to gamble. Great.
Liam
All right boys, we're right exactly at an hour. So anything else before we wrap?
Michael
Will the SpaceX IPO be up or down on Friday?
Liam
Down. I think it's going to tank. So what I had up earlier was the hyper liquid pre IPO trading and so I think that pre IPO share opened at like above 200. The IPO is priced at like 135. That market is now trading around like 160. So it's pricing in a bit of a pop. But that could easily change day of.
Brian
Yeah, my understanding like there's not much of a float that like all the main investors like Valor Fidelity, they have to, they're locked up for like a year including a lawn. So I don't know, I would say I would take the other side just because of market forces and like the notion that Elon's never lost money for investors now again. Yeah, like short term it could go in either direction. But I do think people are gonna, I don't think the exit liquidity is yet for like.
Liam
All right, good stuff.
Brian
This will come out after. But I guess Glenn will be live streaming with Laura Shin talking stretch today at 2:30 Eastern and then it'll be on our podcast. So for anybody that's wanting this will come out tomorrow morning. You can go download her latest podcast. I think it'll be out as well. If you want to hear what's what's going on in the stretch world and the insanity. If you want a sober understanding of digital credit.
Michael
Yeah.
Liam
All right, good stuff guys. Boys, see you next week. 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 Apple before we finish, a quick reminder that Onramp Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are on your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
Episode: Inside the SpaceX IPO And Why Bitcoin Is the Value Trade
Date: June 9, 2026
Host(s): Michael, Brian, Liam
Podcast Description: Deep dives into Bitcoin, markets, technology, and the evolving macro landscape, with a focus on actionable insights for investors and professionals.
This episode focuses on the convergence of major market events, including the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO, the looming AI-driven IPOs (Anthropic, OpenAI), and the impact on capital flows—especially as it relates to Bitcoin. The hosts dissect narratives around capital rotation, digital asset performance, the sustainability of AI and tech bubbles, developments in the crypto ecosystem (including a major Zcash exploit), and institutional market innovation. They also explore broader macroeconomic risks and trends in digital scarcity, government stakes in technology, and evolving banking/payment infrastructures.
Drawdowns and Long-term Returns:
Narratives about Capital Rotation:
Hot Markets and Risk:
SpaceX IPO Dynamics:
Contrarian Trade Thesis:
Government Stakes and Bailouts in AI:
China’s Edge and Subsidies:
Zcash Inflation Bug:
AI as an Audit Tool:
Major Bank Tokenized Deposit Networks:
Stablecoin Ecosystem & Gold-backed Cards:
Morgan Stanley Spot BTC ETF In-Kind Conversion:
24/7 Crypto Markets:
Polymarket Dispute on MicroStrategy Bet:
Layer of Trust & Centralization:
“If your taxi driver is talking about the SpaceX IPO and he's going to ape it, that’s probably a pretty bad near term signal.”
— Liam (09:32)
"Right now is probably the worst time to be investing in AI because of how hot it is…It’s probably the best time to be looking at bitcoin digital assets."
— Brian (06:27)
“Crypto is almost uninvestable at this point outside of Bitcoin in general, just because these things are only going to ramp up from here.”
— Michael (31:05)
"They're literally just creating Chuck E. Cheese tokens thinking that's how money works and that's just not how it works."
— Brian (33:31)
"It doesn't look like it in the short term on the price chart, but most people aren't making money on this short term. They're all losing it. But on the long term, it's compounding."
— Brian (14:15)
“That's what most people are missing… there's going to be a capital rotation from people getting liquidity from these [IPO] names into bitcoin than the other way around.”
— Liam (09:32)
"If you actually just... have this asset that compounds and then you go back to actually producing value and building or investing in your craft, it doesn't look like it in the short term on the price chart, but most people aren't making money on this short term."
— Brian (14:15)
| Segment/Topic | Main Points | Lead Speaker(s) | Time | |----------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------- |----------------------|-----------| | Bitcoin vs. IPOs | Proven returns, value trade, misguided rotation narrative | Michael, Liam | 00:00-10:00| | Tech Bubbles | AI/SpaceX overvaluation, risk vs. risk-adjusted returns | Brian, Liam, Michael | 06:27-11:47| | Macro & Policy | Government bailouts, centralization risks, China competition | Liam, Brian, Michael | 18:10-26:03| | Zcash Exploit | AI-aided vulnerabilities, centralization of altcoin dev | Liam, Michael, Brian | 26:38-32:13| | Tokenization | Stablecoins, bank token networks, inevitable Bitcoin adoption | Liam, Brian, Michael | 32:23-38:22| | Institutional Moves | Spot ETF in-kind, 24/7 markets, gold-backed cards | Michael, Brian, Liam | 38:49-47:56| | Prediction Markets | Polymarket controversy, centralized resolution, risk for retail | Liam, Brian, Michael | 59:06-62:23|
The hosts maintain a consistently skeptical stance toward new investment fads, highlighting Bitcoin’s resilience and reliability as capital cyclically chases “hot” tech markets. They reinforce the importance of first principles—decentralization, digital scarcity, long-term thinking—and highlight the accelerating convergence of banking, digital assets, and government intervention. Ultimately, the episode positions Bitcoin not just as a speculation tool but as a foundational monetary protocol resistant to both speculative manias and creeping centralization.
For more details or to listen to the full episode, visit:
onrampbitcoin.com