Matthew Mazingas (2:23)

The old power curve. I messed up. I got to go edit it. We've talked about this for years. I dropped power.

Marty Bent (2:32)

What did you mess up?

Matthew Mazingas (2:32)

I dropped power law trend in there.

Marty Bent (2:38)

Yeah. Power law triggers people. You and I have been talking about this I don't know how many years. I first posted it in 2018, so seven years. Yeah, it's. It's funny how there's. When you talk about, like a model or an idea, the word law can trigger. Trigger people. But I've always. Yeah, I've always used the word regression or curve because it's. There's Exponential regressions, there's linear regressions and there are power regressions. So.

Matthew Mazingas (3:14)

Well, let's dive into what your friends think.

Marty Bent (3:18)

We can look at the chart. You want to look at the chart?

Matthew Mazingas (3:20)

Let's look at the chart. Because you said that Cena said that August was the worst month ever or.

Marty Bent (3:25)

Just this year, it's traditionally bitcoin's worst month as far as performance, but that's a different thing. That's just simply simple monthly changes, right?

Matthew Mazingas (3:35)

Yeah. Okay, then I'll set up this conversation. I wrote a newsletter last night. The trend is your friend. I don't know if you've been observing this, but I've seen a lot of people within the bitcoin Twitter sphere which is consistently losing signal throughout the years. But I feel like it should be addressed for those people who are freaking out. They don't think the bitcoin price is going up fast enough, despite the fact that we hit a new all time high, a fresh new all time high at 124,019 days ago. Now at this point, and I was trying to be a good analyst if you will, and being like, okay, let's look at the numbers and I went to the chart and August ended at the price of bitcoin ended at $108,316.45. The power aggression model at the end of August is showing 112 to 62. So we're 2 1/2 percent, ended the month of August 2.5% below trend. Then I just trying to compare it to something went to the end of July. Bitcoin priced in at 115,848. The trend was saying 108,993. So we were 6.2% above trend in July. And so I was looking at those two months, those two data points and saying eh, it doesn't seem like the price is abnormally suppressed if we're looking at this model.

Marty Bent (5:06)

Yeah, there's a few different things going on there and we can go through all of them, but I think the overall power trend is something. So we should talk about that first. But then also we have this idea of paper bitcoin that's leaking its way back into the space, I've noticed recently into the memosphere. And we also have the idea of, I mean it's tangential and related but institutions, bitcoin, treasury companies sort of manipulating the price with excess leverage, sort of unbacked by real value. And there may be truth to some of that, but the overall picture as far as I can tell. And I've been like I said, I've stream about this most days, European morning time. Nothing has really changed underlying. I haven't seen any of those signals and I'm definitely a sort of a if it's not broke, don't fix it type of person. So, so we can jump into it. Let me share here, Logan. There we go. So this is the old power trend. I can't remember. I'm now putting it always on this 10 every 10 percentiles. So you can see sort of exactly where we are. Before I was doing kind of like sigma is like one sigma, two sigma with less bands. But anyway, very quickly so people understand why is it power? Why is bitcoin power not exponential? Is. This is a log left scale, log linear. And you can see it has this nice sloping, nice down. I got to zoom in here a little bit. This nice sort of little bit fast at the beginning, but then a gradual descending decelerating growth rate which is how networks grow, cities grow. It's very sustainable. And it turns out that bitcoin is growing like that. If bitcoin was growing like the stock market or gold or the bond market or any other tradfi market actually then when you put this on log, linear log scale you would get a straight line for the trend line. And we can show, I can show you some of those as well. But it doesn't. It has this nice gradually sloping curve which is the 96% R squared on the power trend. Another thing I'll just show you very briefly top level. If I show you log bottom here. And I know that for the listeners it's a little bit better if you watch this one. But so a power, a power trend will turn into a straight line on log log. So I do log bottom. Oops, need to reset this. Sorry Logan, might need to cut that. Just did it once and now it's. That's buggy on log bottom. Ignore the Januarys at the bottom. But anyway you basically see it's a. It becomes a straight line. Okay, we're not going to look at this long this way but power trends become a straight line on log log scale. And the point is what does that mean? It just means basically that as the thing grows, it grows proportional with itself. And that's different than like I said, every other tradfi market, stocks, bonds, gold, because they grow constantly at an exponential rate which more often than not eventually will lead to some sort of a collapse or a crisis. I actually spent the Nordic circuit of bitcoin conference, bitcoin conferences here this summer. Talking about this at Riga and Helsinki and Prague as well. It's not really Nordic, but. And we talked about this last time, you remember that idea, this Jeffrey west book. And so just to remind people, well, let me hold off on the Jeffrey west actually, because there's so many topics to introduce and that basically bitcoin is not growing, it's just not growing like other stuff. And before you get too disappointed or you think that it's not exciting enough or it's not growing fast enough, I can show you pictures of the growth rate, charts of the growth rate. And it's still, still pretty solid. All right, so if you look in here, we got all, every 10th percentile. The 0 percentile would be 0.1x the trend. It's way down here. That's like extremely rare, obviously. And the -hundredth percentile is 7.8x the trend that's way up here. Probably never going to happen again, either of those. Never say never. I know, but probably never. Based on how the network has been growing, that leave us that, that leaves us the 10th to the 90th. And if you just zoom in on the last two to three years here. Remember 2024 was the start of the ETF approvals. We've been pretty much bouncing around the trend line, the black trend line. And the trend line itself sits at about the 65th percentile. So that means two thirds of the time the price is below this black line. One third of the time it's above it is true. We're recording this on the second. So it's 109k price when I pulled in the model. So my trend line, which is different than some other people's trend line, some people are a little bit lower. But my Trend line is 112,000. So we're just below it for a couple days. But again, as far as I'm concerned, it's like nothing to worry about. It's totally normal. It's all totally normal behavior. And as a very, very basic rule of thumb, if you're below this black line, you could kind of argue that this is an undervalued time in bitcoin's life. And if you're above the black line, you could also argue on the flip side that it's slightly overvalued. But there's a lot of caveats there. We have the four year cycle to contend with and a lot of other things. So a lot goes into that. I could stop there if you want to. I just want to comment on the.

Matthew Mazingas (11:42)

Psychology of the people who are stressed that bitcoin isn't pumping as hard as they expect it to. I mean if you look at the chart you can see early years, massive explosions in price corrections. And I think you mentioned it like the introduction of the etf. Since then we've had sort of a more calculated and less volatile step up and to the right, which I prefer. But I do think many market participants, even if you came in earlier, you just heard the lore of the crazy four year cycles and you wait for what is it, 18 months after the halving and that's when fireworks happen. And I think many people are anchoring to those expectations and becoming sorely disappointed that they're not materializing in the way that they would expect. And underappreciating the fact that we have this somewhat very regimented and what's the word I'm looking for? Just stable, Structured. Yeah, yeah, structured up and to the right. It's boring, but it's still moving in the right direction.

Marty Bent (12:59)

Yeah, and I would comment on that too because I sort of am on record of saying again, like I said, if it's not broke, don't fix it. I'm not discounting the four year cycle idea. A lot of people are, a lot of people are saying now is going to be just sort of a more stable, less volatile bitcoin. But my next question would be at what trend? What is it going up? Because a lot of these people will either don't understand the power curve or haven't read about it. So from that side I would not be too worried. I think there's still plenty of time to overshoot and have this euphoria which is again, if you do want to play the markets or you want to take some coins off the table for some lifestyle changes or whatever, it might be totally fine. On the flip side, if you're a hodler or if you're younger just getting started, or you're older and you have a stack and you're not thinking of taking too much risk, again, it's caveat emptor, the hardest thing in the world to do. Speaking from someone I know you as well have been through these cycles. The hardest thing to do really is to sell bitcoin. It doesn't matter what price, no one knows the future. And if you sell it and the price doesn't collapse as much as you think and you can't buy as many bitcoin as you would like from that exit that you made into fiat before, whatever into Gold, whatever, then that would be extremely disappointing. So that's why I totally respect the HODL meme. I think it makes sense and all the rest. But about the four year cycle, I honestly, I wouldn't count it out. I mean we haven't been through it, right? It is right now. This is the for sure with 2017, for sure with 2013. This occurred both times in November. December 2021 was a little bit of a wild one. This time could also be a wild one. 2021 we had a double top, but the first top was actually probably the real top. If you look at other metrics which we can talk about, like the price extending over say minor revenue or something was actually probably the first one and then the second one was sort of. I know people have called it the scam top or whatever, but it was, that was actually kind of like a. It was a huge dead cat bounce. But it was not, you know, it was just not in relationship to other metrics when it usually extends. And likewise in 2013 we had a double top, although in that top the second top was five times higher. So you never quite know. We could always be thrown for a loop with bitcoin, but there's enormous returns to be made here compared to any other traditional market. And if all you want to do is hodl, great. If you want to ape in and out with 10% of your stash, also great. So yeah, I don't think that there's any reason to discount actually the four year cycle yet. And we can look at some charts if you want to look at that. Talk about paper, Bitcoin and all the rest.

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Marty Bent (18:00)

I can show you actually let's look at the, let's, let's look at one more here. So just so everybody knows at least my opinion on where the price could go by the end of the year. So here's what I would say. If you look at this every tenth, right, zooming in to basically the trajectory here or the price history. Bitcoin is traditionally during the booms very easily gotten above the 80th percentile each time it's in the earliest booms before that is 2021, it's gotten above the 90th percentile very easily each time. 2021 again was a little bit of, a little bit of a ringer. The first top, which is what I think was the real top this time which was early, it was very easily above the 90th for you know, a month to three months, three to four months is actually typically all the time that we get above the 90th percentile and then it barely got above in November 2021 right where it should be. So again just to remind you, these dotted lines are multiples above trend and then how percentage wise how often that has occurred. So it's been pretty easily done for the prior three tops. But if this time we're different and if it gets invalidated or this four year cycle for me, I think it would be somewhere around for sure it would be bitcoin not getting above the 90th percentile, which it did do in 2021 and all prior cycles and probably even I'd say the 80th. That would be the only reason that I would say, okay, Bitcoin really is on this totally different trajectory that doesn't have anything to do with the halvings or excitement after, you know, 18 months after the having just general hype cycles that markets have. I would say if it doesn't get above the 80th percentile, which by the way is 1.3x the trend and if we look at the end of 2025, the trend is 125k. So 1.3x is 170k. So if we don't get above 170k by year end or into like the first couple months of next year, then I would say okay, time to rethink the idea of the four year cycles. But not doing any technical analysis, not looking at these impulses or Elliott waves or whatever, we're just looking at the power trend and where the price typically is over or under trend every four years. It's actually pretty clear, it's pretty clear what's been happening. And there's nothing to me that would invalidate this idea until it's invalidated. And it hasn't been invalidated yet. So that's actually a bull. I would say that's a bullish message if you're listening.

Matthew Mazingas (20:52)

Hasn't been invalidated yet. Could potentially be, could potentially be, may not be. Turn on the 90th percentile there. What will we have to do to.

Marty Bent (21:00)

Yep. So the 90th is, is 2x pretty rare.

Matthew Mazingas (21:04)

Right.

Marty Bent (21:04)

So that means 90% of the observations would always be below this dotted line. So 2x is 250. Okay. And I can throw on, by the way we can make this even more refined and go to the top 90th and above and we can look at the 91st, 92nd, 93rd, 94th, 5th, all the way up to the hundredth as well. But very simple rule of thumb. Yeah, I think 2x based on the prior trends could easily happen by the end of the year. But if it doesn't say in the next six months, then I would consider the four year cycle being invalidated or different or something. So here's. Now let me show you. This is the top 10 starting from the 90th. Now this is very exciting, very exciting. Rainbow take off the hundredth. That's extremely rare. Now let's look at what happened. So the thesis, by the way, that people should understand is as bitcoin gets more adopted, these peaks do come down. Right? So notice I now have the 99th painted on this chart. It has for a couple weeks in 2013 and in 2017 gotten above the 99th percentile, which is 4.6x the trend. Okay, so 4.6x the power trend, which I told you is 125k at the end of the year. Bitcoin has achieved that every prior cycle, but it did not in 2021. Okay, so this is where we talked about softer tops and I agree with that idea. So if we take off the 99th, 98th, even 97th, then we start to see what we hit. In 2021, it was a 96 percentile to 2.8x. Round it here, 3x. And this is where I would say again, totally base case, totally possible.

Matthew Mazingas (23:05)

Would.

Marty Bent (23:05)

Be 2 to 3x the trend. So if you just look at this now, go to the end of 2025, 125k, 2x happened every time pretty easily. That's 250k bitcoin 3x, roughly, that's 375k bitcoin. Although I will admit, with lower highs on each one of these cycles, I think this is indeed the max. I would be very surprised if Bitcoin went above 350 or 375k by the end of the year, but I think it's possible. Bullish.

Matthew Mazingas (23:38)

Again, I heard we're getting to 444,000 in November.

Marty Bent (23:45)

Who wrote that?

Matthew Mazingas (23:47)

I don't even know if he's a microstrategy guy, but Josh Mann.

Marty Bent (23:54)

Well, 400,000 is the 97th. Let's go 98th. So yeah, on that 98th percentile, somewhere between the 97th and 98th percentile. It's pretty rare. It's pretty rare. You got to think about what that's saying. Three and a half times the trend line, basically 97. 97 and a half percent of the time, it doesn't happen. So this is how I'm looking at it. Basically. This doesn't tell you the time, right? It's kind of like a caveman analysis, honestly, because we're just assuming the four year cycle, four year cycle doesn't happen or if it extends or not. I can't tell you that from this chart. But what I can tell you is if the market gets heated, if people get, you know, if grandma's getting excited this Thanksgiving in the US and giving her grandchildren money to buy bitcoin, then perhaps it could happen again. But yeah, absolutely possible. That we have lower highs and even possible that we get out of the four year cycle. But I'm still not seeing it. Based on the price action and based on where we are, I'm not seeing it. And we can look at some other charts as well to maybe further talk about that. But base case what I'm thinking 2 to 3x the trend by the end of the year or the first couple months into next year, that's 250k to 375k. That would be how I'd look at it.

Matthew Mazingas (25:22)

I'll take that humble 375, humble 250.

Marty Bent (25:29)

And you can imagine on the back end of this, by the way, because maybe people will reset the narrative at this time and be like oh, because remember this happened in 2021 by the way, people like to res the narrative and say oh, bitcoin is now on this trend and is going here forever. Well stick with this trend line which I've come back to time and time again. This black line, Marty, has basically remained consistent since 2016. It's like the best trend line in all of finance. Way better than anything else and certainly better than the old stock to flow ratio. So take comfort in that. Doesn't mean it has to go there. But if people start to think oh, we're now at a new plateau, the old Irving Fisher sort of talk and we're at 350k bitcoin and then all of a sudden you have X number of bitcoin treasury companies which have levered their balance sheet up and their convertible debt facilities with less than three year duration to buy a lot of bitcoin and then the price starts to get soft and then the short market participants get a little bit excited. You could see absolutely a cascading liquidations of these bitcoin treasury companies. You could see, who knows, it might go as high as the White House. I'm not saying that it will, I'm not saying that it will. I'm just saying you can imagine plenty of scenarios where this whole thing rinses.

Matthew Mazingas (27:12)

And repeats just on a completely different scale. Matt and I have been talking about this Matt, Adele and I on Rabbit hole recap for the better part of a year and a half now with this cycle you have nation states and Wall street getting into the degeneracy and we could see blow ups unlike anything before. It would make FTX and the ICO bubble look funny in retrospect.

Marty Bent (27:39)

Yeah, precisely. And I think for those blowups to happen you probably got to get a little bit Extended on the high side first, I think doesn't have to be the case, but basic stuff. At the end of the day, you know, I think a player like Saylor, obviously, you know, he's completely changed his, the makeup of their balance sheet with the new facilities and they've gotten away from the converts with pretty short duration at the beginning, which in those days of 2022 was looking a little bit difficult for him, as you recall. But I certainly think someone like him and his, his cohorts, his colleagues around the microstrategy table are expecting stuff like this. But the next 500 bitcoin treasury companies, I mean, would you like to buy a convert from them? I don't know. I don't think too much about it. I know there's a lot of people that have strong feelings about bitcoin treasury cos. But buy bitcoin and be happy.

Matthew Mazingas (28:46)

There is. But let's, let's dive into this, the paper bitcoin. There's a ton of people out there who are looking at the price chart saying, do something, you're not high enough yet and pointing at bitcoin treasury companies, ETFs and saying, hey, they're creating paper bitcoin. Coinbase is rehypothecating, giving, giving allocations to the same bitcoin to multiple players and this is why the price is going down. Throw in CME futures and the games that Wall street have played with other assets like gold. And many are wholly convinced that the price is being suppressed by the combination of rehypothecation and financial engineering using derivatives.

Marty Bent (29:35)

And here we can, here we can easily just look at a great chart from our friend Checkmate. Great on chain analysts. And you know, this is the light pink. There are above one year. But as you can see when the price is really skyrocketing. Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, sub one year hodlers that exit when we get over 100k, particularly this little spike at the start of this year. But as we've gone on, there have been more and more and you know that that ratio, that mix above one year Hodlers just one year, one year and above becomes pretty large. I mean for a lot of the middle part of this year it was 50% and above of the coins that were taking profit, which cohort did they come from? Way more than or at least 5050. But sometimes I think clearly 60, 70% of the mix was above one year HODLers sometimes, you know, five. So there's plenty of coins that are coming onto the market. And as Chuck says here, you know, nobody ever sells their bitcoin. They said it was all paper. Bitcoins, they said. I think that summarizes it pretty clear to me.

Matthew Mazingas (30:54)

But why would the OG sell? Do they know something? Do they know the top is in? Is that why they're unloading coins and converting to fees?

Marty Bent (31:04)

I think not at all. I think OGs are not watching your podcast. I think OGs are not thinking about the power curve. I think OGs bought Bitcoin at sub $10 and they're enjoying $100,000 gains. As they should. As they should.

Matthew Mazingas (31:19)

Agreed. The psychology of this is having been a part of it for 12 years now, going to go on 13. You're just observing it throughout the different cycles, throughout the years. It is. One of the most interesting things to me is how the psychology evolves, especially as you get new entrants coming in, like the class of 23, 24, even go back to 2020. Seems like they're young fawns looking to get their sea legs under them, completely unaware of just how this. Not unaware, but I don't know. To me, there's a ton of pattern recognition, particularly on the sentiment side, in the sentiment this summer. And it's funny, like I said, August is historically the worst month. Summer's historically slow. Not only in bitcoin, just traditional markets. You have the concept of the summer doldrums. And it's funny when people are unable to recognize these seasonal and cyclical trends that been pretty constant not only through bitcoin, but through financial markets more generally, and they succumb to the monotony of boring price movement.

Marty Bent (32:35)

Yeah, and we should look at some other charts. But just to piggyback on what you said there, I think that's a crucial point. And I think five years ago, or certainly after even the activation of SegWit, even the 2017 top, every time that there are tops, the narrative actually changes to the complete opposite of what you said. Right. We flip onto a new plateau, new money. This is going to be something that the world has never seen. All of which are points that I very much agree with. But the timescale is way different, I think, than people are expecting. And the. The idea that bitcoin will sort of absorb the financial system next week, next month, or even next year. I got another few charts to show you on that one. It's just too ludicrous. Right? I mean, as another quick example, like bitcoin, Max, I think, has done well, actually. No, Max but the trailing 12 months, let's just say has done something like $7 trillion worth of transact chain. All right, if you take everyday's transactions, roll them at the price about $7 trillion. Fedwire, which is the core of the financial system 1 only 1 of Central bank central banks around the world's real time gross settlement systems. When I say real time gross settlement I mean it works just like Bitcoin. It's literally banks transferring reserves like payments for stuff that they owe to other banks, like checks to clear and all the rest. Right. That's called Fed wire. That does $1.1 quadrillion a year. So you're at $1,100 trillion that the Federal Reserve does versus seven that Bitcoin does. Bitcoin can absolutely get there. And the only thing that has to happen actually is the price to rise. But it's just not going to happen overnight. And so going back to the power curve, I think that the power curve actually should give a lot of people a lot of comfort and nobody still is paying attention to it. Again, I posted this stuff before the stock to flow ratio still with a marketing budget of $0. I know, but most people don't sort of understand it. Think about it, whatever. But it's just a trend line that is showing how typically networks have grown. The Internet actually followed a power curve, crucially not if you think about that S curve of network adoptions, crucially not like cell phones and other things like dishwashers or whatever. Usually if there's a company that has a sort of a large share technology products will not follow this. They follow more that S curve where that sort of explosion in the middle, Bitcoin, the Internet, other networks, cities themselves, they don't have that. They have a decreasing rate of growth which if you looked at it sort of as a supply, it looks exactly what we saw with the price on log scale sort of faster at the beginning, slower over time. And so there's like huge comfort there. And I actually again I keep saying I should reference charts and we just talk about it because I like to try to show people facts with what I actually say. I believe Marty, that 95% of what we see in the market today in Bitcoin is the power curve of network adoption itself. I don't think it has anything to do with the money supply. The Fed interest rates literally 5%. That's my latest thesis and it's not really as of late. I've been saying it for a while now, but that's what I think I.

Matthew Mazingas (36:19)

Think you first brought this up earlier this year and I completely agree. And I think that again if you want to anchor in confidence and filter out all the noise, I think anchoring to that and just taking price and exogenous factors like monetary policy and geopolitics and macroeconomics out of it and just view it as network adoption of which price is just an output of that adoption. I think it makes a lot of sense.

Marty Bent (36:52)

More and more people, you're a representation of it.

Matthew Mazingas (36:54)

Yeah.

Marty Bent (36:55)

Of this endogenous idea as you, to use your continue analogy, it's, it's just within Bitcoin itself. That's what we see. We're looking at the adoption of Bitcoin the system when we look at the price curve.

Matthew Mazingas (37:08)

I do have to give you props too for that Fed Wire comparison. I've actually used that a lot at 1031 talking to prospective LPs when they really get in the weeds and they're trying to understand a good comp to Bitcoin. And many people naively will say Visa, MasterCard, Venmo, PayPal, it's like no, it's the Fed Fed Wire Central bank settlement. And that chart you have of the sort of multiple of Fedwire volumes and settlements compared to bitcoin over time, this one is one of the highest signal charts out there.

Marty Bent (37:46)

Agreed, Agreed. So there's your 1.1 trillion 1,158. Sorry, there's your 1.1 quadrillion 1,158 trillion. That's what Fedwire does over trailing twelve month basis in transfer value or some people even call that payment volume, whatever you want to call it. Bitcoin 7, it's maxed out at closer to 20 back in 2022 on a trailing 12 months, but seven at the moment. And then this supremacy. As you see, we used to be very. This is log scale on the right but this black line, we used to be millions of times smaller or more properly stated, Fedwire was millions of times bigger than Bitcoin. Now it's only 157 times bigger. Still huge. So again, keep it in perspective. Don't get worried. We're going to wake up tomorrow and there's still going to be a Fed wire. I know people hate that. I'm not defending them. I'm not saying it's great that we have to rely on these Jackson Hole speeches and all the rest, but it's going to be there. It's going to be there. So you know, keep that in mind. Use these things as A benchmark to stay grounded, spend time with your family, stack sets, and if you want to, like I said, ape in and out on the extremes, we have very good tools to do that.

Matthew Mazingas (39:12)

Yeah.

Marty Bent (39:14)

Here'S another one, by the way, while we're not going like to zero and Fiat tomorrow, even though Fiat is a terrible storer of value. So this is the. Through June, only the top five broad money supplies, meaning usually M3. It should be M3, so USM3, 36 trillion, euro, M3, 19. These are all dollar numbers. The yen 11 trillion. China only publishes an M2, which I can explain the difference, 45 trillion. And then the sterling, they publish an M4 which is even more liquid, is 4.3 trillion. But the broadest money supplies, if you add that all up, is 116 trillion. And I think in value and I think that you can add another 20% for the rest of the world. I need to get a full chart ready eventually for you when I come on, but I just don't have it yet. So you're getting somewhere close to 145,150 trillion, probably in global money at this point. And then the question is, people like to talk about 100 trillion. We're definitely getting there for sure. But it's not now, it's not tomorrow, it's not next month, it's not next year, it's going to be a while from now. And by the way, all the other stuff is going to keep going on with their madness as well.

Matthew Mazingas (40:36)

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Marty Bent (42:26)

If we think about podcast content, it could be 95% is indeed the exogenous factors. And I understand that very well. So we could talk about that as well.

Matthew Mazingas (42:38)

Before we get. I know you're not his, I know you're not a fan of him at all, but did you catch the Richard Werner Tucker Carlson interview?

Marty Bent (42:46)

I did not. I mean a few things about that. First of all, didn't that guy say that like the CIA created bitcoin?

Matthew Mazingas (42:55)

He did years ago. But I've heard from behind the scenes that he's become more open minded toward bitcoin.

Marty Bent (43:02)

Yeah. Okay.

Matthew Mazingas (43:06)

Yeah, that's sort of Tucker. Tucker said that too. Are you talking about Tucker or Richard?

Marty Bent (43:10)

Richard.

Matthew Mazingas (43:11)

I think both of them said it. Yeah.

Marty Bent (43:14)

Well, Tucker doesn't know much but if, if, if Warner himself said it that he's backed off that then I guess that's a little bit better. But yeah, I mean the, I didn't, I didn't watch it in full. I saw some clips and generally a lot of things I would probably agree with.

Matthew Mazingas (43:31)

Yeah, I think it was the most thorough and thorough and approachable understanding of money creation happens via credit creation but really piqued my interest. I think his solutions, I think he's missing bitcoin sort of hand waved about gold. But I think when it comes to how money is actually created in the system via credit creation, it was really the clarifying in many regards like walking through the mechanics of it, particularly going back to Japan in the 90s.

Marty Bent (44:18)

So let me Pivot off of that with another chart. And this one is what I was. This is a part and parcel of presentations I was giving throughout Europe this summer. Goes back to the idea, I think we talked about it before about super exponential growth, and Werner talked about it as well. Basically, at the end of the day, most people understand that we can't go back to at least the system we're on right now. You can't peg anything, you can't fix it. You can't not grow with the amount of fiat and obligations that we have out there. You actually need to grow faster and faster. And some of that I would actually argue. Again, I'm not defending the system, but I'm just trying to look at what's actually happening. As I just showed you, with those broad money supplies keep growing and growing and I think will continue to grow because that's all that they know how to do at the basis, continue to print. But if you look at this, Jeffrey west, very interesting theoretical physicist who wrote this book Scale, and I drew a lot upon his work in my presentations. He makes the observation that it's not even only inflation. In fact, he doesn't really talk about inflation much at all. It's just the way that we grow, the way that we do things socioeconomically, we're moving faster and faster. You know, what would have taken thousands of years to evolve in the Stone Age or the Bronze age can take 30 years now. Right. And the idea is we're going faster and faster. And his question, which he leaves open, is this idea of a mathematical singularity where you increase the growth rate every time, but you get to a mathematical singularity. So if I show you the S and P here, which is a derived S and P, back to the 1800s, because the S&P started in 1955. But you can run a trend from 1800 to the start of the Federal Reserve, and the stock market grows 2% a year. It's very rough. It's probably even lower than that because there's survivorship bias. There was a ton of railroad companies that went bankrupt. I'm sure they're not included in this index. But anyway, from the start of the Federal Reserve until 1971, we went through a Great Depression in the US and we grew the markets faster at 4.8% per year. CAGR. So that's the trend line, is the slope of the value of the market. 1971 until 2008, we went even faster. Trendline growth of 9.6% per year. And then 2008 caught us right in the middle of the crisis. A new monetary epoch, clearly. So that's where I delineated a new trend. 2008 trend actually was below, like. Like. Like a truck sliding down a muddy hill. Right. We were way below our base, but we grew faster. All right, so if I put this trend line up now, the red trend line you can see from the 9.6% CAGR before 2008 for the markets, we now grow at 11.5%. All of these are before dividends reinvesting. Reinvested. It would be probably 2% more on your CAGR if not. So these are all targets to shoot for, right. For your returns. The trend line for the stock market since 2008 is 9 point, or, sorry, 11.5% per year. So you could see this idea of the faster and faster treadmills is clearly happening and I think will continue to happen and probably at shorter time intervals still.

Matthew Mazingas (47:46)

I mean, if you just do the caveman eye test on this, number one, it looks like you have that sliding truck with every new trend line that you've put on this chart going back to 1914. It was below the 1800 trend. Go to 71. It was below the 1914 trend. 2008. And yeah, this is pretty illuminating in that sense. And you can feel it too. Not only it is weird. I think we talked about this the last episode when you brought up scale in these concepts, but you definitely feel it socially in your life with inflation, with prices certainly becoming more palpable. Not palpable, but very tangible.

Marty Bent (48:36)

Right. He focuses on the growth, though, as far as actually good things like inventions, patents, patents. Kind of weird for us in the libertarian world to focus on patents, but inventions, discoveries and increases in gdp, things like that, which again, we would say a lot of that gets papered over. But I think it's fair enough to say that there's some of both. Right? There is. It is undeniable that I'm very glad that we live in this time right now than in the Stone age or even 100 years ago. And I think there's a lot of hope there. Actually. There's a lot of, you know, there's always the apocalyptic view. There's always the view that we're really on for, you know, in for a train wreck. But as long as we can jump to the first of all, this is back to the point of Warner, which I wanted to address, is if he's saying that they always paper over things or they have to keep growing faster and faster, it's True, I agree with him. But there's actually a positive way to look at that, and that's we are increasingly getting better health care stuff in the US it's always more expensive for lots of reasons. But in a lot of places, health care is improving, people are pulling themselves out of poverty, and there's, there's actually a lot of good things to think about from these trends now. They are absolutely countered from the fiat madness of the money printing. But we have to, we have to sort of parse through these things. But here's how it relates to Bitcoin. Okay, so this is the, this is kind of the. One of the things that I was trying to show is notice, Marty, all of these trend lines, right? You see that they're straight lines, right? They're increasingly faster growing straight lines on log scale. So they are exponential. And they are, in fact, what he calls super exponential in his book. This is, I think it's a very good graphical representation of super exponential trends. But then if we look at Bitcoin, oops, go the price, let's go the trend. Here's our old power trend, our friend. We do not have a straight line. We just do not have a straight line on log scale. And if you actually showed the growth of that black line, it decreases. So the interesting question will be, and this is again also what I kind of left open in my presentation, my different presentations throughout the summer, is what will happen when this super exponential growth of tradfi meets this decelerating growth of bitcoin? Is that the singularity? Is that a new bitcoin standard? I have no idea. Jeffrey west, when he wrote his book, he was not thinking about bitcoin at all. He wrote it in 2017, but it wasn't on his radar. He left it open that hopefully it's a new invention. Hopefully we can figure it out. Maybe we're just moving to another, faster singularity for the 15, 20 years. But Bitcoin was not on his radar. The interesting thing is if you look at, for example, the stock market's growing at 11.5% without dividends. If you reinvest it, it's probably closer to 13, 14%. But that's constant, exponential, constant growth Bitcoin. If you look at the returns from the beginning until today, we're right about 42% per year. All right? So on a curve, you'd actually get way more in the past. But, you know, on a curve, you'd be at thousands of. Sorry. On a curve, you're at a couple hundred percent if you hold till today. All right, if you have it today, 41%. And then as you move toward the future, we go down and I could pull this all the way out to 2050. We still, we still only get to 23 and a half percent. This shows you. This is why, again, people need to back up and look at the power curve. These are monstrous returns. Even with all the inflation and the craziness in the stock markets today, we're still at 41% CAGR. 42% CAGR for Bitcoin. Right. Now.

Matthew Mazingas (52:38)

I know you said you have no idea, but you have to have some thoughts on what happens when these two trends collide.

Marty Bent (52:46)

Well, I think it's a very. Yeah, it's a very interesting graphical representation.

Matthew Mazingas (52:51)

That's what I think.

Marty Bent (52:51)

If you zoom all the way, all.

Matthew Mazingas (52:53)

The way out on this, even though it's a power trend, still 23.5% CAGR. If you go back to the exponential log chart that you just had, the 2008 line is what, 11 and a half percent CAGR. So even though this looks exponential, the power trend is still producing a bigger cagr. And so like, oh, God, I gotta turn these things off.

Marty Bent (53:17)

Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. But leave that on the final, final cut.

Matthew Mazingas (53:24)

I guess maybe you have to extend the power trend out even further. Is there like a point at which.

Marty Bent (53:30)

So this hits. This hits 10% in 2070. 2070.

Matthew Mazingas (53:35)

Okay. And maybe like is the singularity when the exponential CAGR converges with the powertrain?

Marty Bent (53:43)

Well, that's the idea. I mean, that's one of the ideas I should say. No one I do not know, to be honest. There's so many things that could happen, right. Obviously there's. The world is sort of on fire. The eastern authoritarian autocracies are trying to get more power away from the western democracies. We got people in western democracies fighting amongst themselves. We're in Eastern Europe here. Everybody should know my position now. So there's a lot of stuff that could happen until then. Maybe we do peg into bitcoin at one of these points and then things could change from there. I wouldn't actually want to. If you think about all of the. If you think about all the newsletters. I've talked about this a lot, right. That gold bugs have written since the year 1980, especially in the 70s when gold got depegged. This is only 50 years ago. 55 years ago, you would have thought that you would have absolutely won. Civilization was moving back to gold. The fact that gold went from 35 bucks an ounce in 1971 to 850 bucks for two seconds on the COMEX in January 1980, you would have thought that sound money was returning. The rest of the world was going to catch on. And then lo and behold they went into a 20 year bear market. And in 1996, Alan Greenspan said that the Federal Reserve stands ready to sell gold should the price rise. So I'm not saying that bitcoin can be co opted like that, although that is always some good doom porn on Twitter about any number of topics as we know. I think it could be mixed. This is another idea that I've been throwing out. There is it's totally possible by the way that bitcoin, if we think about go to the math and back to the ideas of the different curves, we have the power curve, which in my opinion is a more sustainable growth rate and we're looking at that now versus a traditional instrument like the dollar. But let's go the other way. Let's say that bitcoin turns into growth rates like this, where now I'm not actually showing the growth rates but I'm showing the growth of the, of the supply. Right. Of the supply of the stock market value. Right. It's still straight lines on log scale and it grows faster and faster and faster. If Bitcoin would move at some point, right. If this straight line sort of stops being the scale invariant, generally sloping curve, decreasing rate of growth, right. And somehow it just shoots up and turns into a straight line like an expo curve and sort of just mirrors the rest of the financial system. That might be good for bitcoin holders, that might be good for value, but that might not be good for the world, you know what I mean? Like that's just sort of bitcoin like bitcoin kind of matching into what it's trying to. It's kind of like gold 2.0. Like it's just, it's there, it's better, it's much better. But it's controlled for whatever reason. Like there's a lot of fiat units that are paying, you know, bitcoin, treasury companies, people, lines of credit, all the rest. I mean it's actually totally possible that bitcoin could turn into an expo curve. By the way, it's not now, but it could happen. On the flip side, what would happen if the rest of the world, the tradfi world, and again, this is not next month, next week, next year. This has to be decades from now. But if everybody can start to see the beauty of bitcoin we really stay decentralized. We don't have government fiat mandating how everything is going. If bitcoin keeps on this idea of this sort of nice, beautiful sustainable growth rate in other fiat currency. How would you even charge interest if bitcoin was rising in a power curve? That actually is one of the key questions. And I think that you can't. How do you keep. Why would you even accept a fiat loan? More and more fiat interest in this asset that you know is scarce, you know there's only 2.1 quadrillion sats. Why would you even accept as a lender, let's say, to lend out your satoshis, when you know that you're going to go at this very nice power growth and you're going to get paid back in some fiat interest on those satoshis, you might not get your collateral back. That's what I see. Those are the warring sort of two sides. It's basically either bitcoin goes exponential, kind of like the tradfi world, or bitcoin pulls the rest of the world into its sort of nice power growth. But if that happens, you can't really calculate interest on loans. All this stuff, bitcoin, treasury companies, people taking converts and everything. It won't actually work because loans literally interest will only work in exponential fashion. Compound growth is exponential. So you can't do it. You can't do it with this power growth. So it's a very sort of deep philosophical way out in the future idea. But those are the two extremes as I see it. And I honestly don't know. I see so many different things that could happen on the spectrum where we could go one way or the other. I would say probably the less optimistic side is if bitcoin just kind of turns into Gold 2.0. It's a great hedge, but the system is what it is. Bitcoin is exponential, just like gold and stocks and bonds and everything else.

Matthew Mazingas (59:59)

Well, in the latter of the two extremes, I know safe and many others have talked about potential transition from debt financing to equity financing, where instead of giving a loan to somebody with an attached interest rate, a lot of financing will be equity driven, where you give somebody money, you get a portion of the business and you reap the benefits of the commensurate cash flows that come your way from that equity injection.

Marty Bent (60:28)

Yeah, equity equity does solve. Like just simply to say that you have equity would solve that idea. You don't have to worry about it like interest rates or anything. And maybe that could happen, but things would have to turn into very short term. Like even if you're thinking about working capital or something, it would have to be very, very short term. Fixed rates of interest and they can't work very long. That's my thought about that idea. Is the world going to be ready for that? Upends everything. And hey, we're ready obviously for bitcoin to upend everything. But the credit markets are huge. The biggest markets in the world, bondholders all over the world, they get paid back first before stockholders. It just upends everything about the financial system. And so if we go to this sort of, everybody's a stockholder, everybody has equity. There's no interest rates or interest rates are very, very short term. Yeah, it could happen. And I would say that's probably the better outcome. That's where bitcoin stays on the power curve. It stays on a sustainable lower and lower rate of growth. But if you're on that curve, you literally by definition cannot calculate interest over the long term. You would explode the system with fiat interest. There just wouldn't be enough sats to go around.

Matthew Mazingas (62:02)

Yeah, it's fascinating. It is fascinating to think through these philosophical discussions of what we transition to. And I've always been partial, I think we've talked about this, but it's always good to touch on. Like, I think when you talk about transitioning and what it looks like, I think we're beginning to see that manifest in the form of bitcoin becoming part of collateral packages. A lot of people look at microstrategy and the converts and all that. But I think in private markets, particularly what we're seeing with the emergence of products like Deify battery finance, the tools, the infrastructure is getting built out to begin seriously injecting bitcoin into the credit stack as collateral. I think you can squint and look at that and see that as a first step towards equity financing. Particularly if the lender and the borrower are sharing in the upside of the bitcoin appreciation over the duration of the loan.

Marty Bent (63:10)

Yeah, it depends on the nature of the contract. As a borrower. I think it's an absolutely great deal. Obviously Saylor himself doing a lot with that idea. Borrowing with bitcoin as collateral or borrowing to buy more bitcoin and then have that as collateral. It still is, though, the tradfi model. Have you seen these collateral deals where. I've seen some. I think in the US they've done it where the lender will have the developer of, say, real estate take a loan, but also a Portion of that loan should buy bitcoin. I think that's very interesting. So you have sort of a dual hedge, dual collateral hedge against the loan. All of that stuff, at least as far as I can see, is still modeled on like the tradfi world. It's modeled with rates of interest. And since bitcoin has such explosive growth, like as you see here and the hold your holding time, we're roughly on a curve. We're increasing the power trend at $100 a day. So as a CAGR, that translates into 42% per year. We're looking pretty solid, right? We're looking pretty. We have a lot of buffer, even enough to take care of the drawdowns or the bear markets, if they come again, which we talked about already at the top of the show. I think they probably will. There's still a lot of buffer before we get down to your senior collateralized debt of major companies or major real estate companies where people are trying to get 5 or 7% now, maybe with a lot of crazy treasury markets, but obviously Treasuries themselves. I mean, you want to be even below 5% depending on your duration of the curve. But there's a lot of delta there. There's a lot of room to play around when Bitcoin's doing 41% tradfi roughly, let's just say it's 5%, maybe leaking a little bit higher. And as we talked about with the s and P500, it's probably leaking a lot higher. As far as stock returns go, I think they're going to careen. I do think that they're going to hit each other. And before they hit each other, we're probably enough people will see the writing on the wall or understand bitcoin, that it's the place to be. But what I'm very curious and I think what will start to take shape. Let me try to put some more substance on. What I'm saying for the listener is in the, you know, 20 years, if, you know, if we're pretty locked down in developed markets, if you can't withdraw bitcoin, if there's just KYC up the wazoo, like you can't do anything in like the real sort of the real quote, unquote, real world, if, if nobody cares about key management or even node management, then that looks to me like a pretty traditional tradfi world going back to exponential. And in that world, interest rates work totally fine. They work totally fine. They're just going to get the boom, bust cycle. You're going to get a lot of government intervention and that's what it is. I think that's not that exciting. But in the other world that's really hard for bondholders. I mean it's just the math doesn't really check out. So. Yeah, again a long winded answer to your question. But I think there's even those examples like you, I don't know, have you ever seen debt contracts or bitcoin denominated contracts that are fully equity? And that's kind of like. Is there a marketplace for that where it's like fully equity, only bitcoin? Probably not. I think pretty young, immature.

Matthew Mazingas (67:07)

I think the converts are like the closest thing because they convert to equity.

Marty Bent (67:11)

Right, right. That's going to have a duration that's probably pretty short. Saylor rotated out of that market. Right. And he got more into preferreds which have no duration. So he's kicked the can down the road on that idea. Yeah.

Matthew Mazingas (67:30)

I'm looking at Cormant the Miner, West Texas shout out to Jamie McCavity. They did an interesting Series B equity funding 20, 29 million. I believe they did use both equity and debt financing, including unique bitcoin denominated loans that was debt to fund its expansion. Low cost bitcoin miner. From what I understand they those instruments perform very well. I think all this is to say that we're still in the very early innings of people getting creative and really beginning to explore and innovate with bitcoin based financial contracts.

Marty Bent (68:16)

Agreed. Yeah, I would say I would prefer the equity based but I think about it a lot. I think about the different things that would have to happen for that to occur and a lot of that is self sovereign stuff. People standing up to some of the draconian financial regulation that we've seen grow and grow and grow since the 1970s. So yeah, I think it could go either way. Honestly, I think it could go either way and I think bitcoin would do well in either scenario. But different people will be hurt in either scenario. Yeah.

Matthew Mazingas (68:56)

Well, let's paint the picture for people. What does an ideal landscape and capital stack and tech stack on a bitcoin standard look like in your mind? I mean you experienced it earlier this summer in Riga particularly. What I think is very underappreciated and not really talked about enough is the maturation of the lightning network, particularly as this connective tissue between disparate second layer technologies, whether that's liquid ecash mints. In the case of Riga they were using Ark in the background for all the Merchants. And this is something that I'm very passionate about. And I can actually see it materializing in front of our eyes is this sort of emergence of a new tech stack for a banking system with all these different second layer technologies. And so I think if we want it to be true and if we want it to manifest and materialize, the tools are there to make it happen, make this cypherpunk bitcoin standard banking stack possible.

Marty Bent (70:18)

I agree. And I think that we're going to go in that direction. I think that it's very good and I absolutely, absolutely support everybody that's doing that. I think obviously the NOSTR ecosystem is helping a lot there. It's amazing. It really is amazing. I'm all for it. I'm all for it.

Matthew Mazingas (70:43)

Are you? I think a Larry White, Hal Finney. We're going to have a free banking system built on top of bitcoin. I've been partial towards that.

Marty Bent (70:56)

Yeah. Well, the risk of the free banking system is that it can be unfree. Right. And that's the interesting thing that I think bitcoin's trying to break.

Matthew Mazingas (71:08)

What do you mean by unfree? Just overregulated.

Marty Bent (71:11)

Yeah. It becomes monopolized and captured and overregulated. And then we don't have a free banking system anymore. We have a centrally planned central bank system which central banks have no idea in Washington D.C. they have no idea what the bank reserve ratio should actually be in Wyoming or something. It's completely gone. We had that in the 18th and 19th centuries in a few different markets, actually in a lot of markets, but big in northern Europe and in Canada as well. And then we lost it. So I think people got to look at all sides. I think. Anyway, the good thing, I know we're going to be too heavy on this. People are going to do bitcoin, you're going to hold Bitcoin, you're going to do what you need to do on Nostr or all the different relays and L2 L3 options that are coming, which are awesome. Absolutely amazing. I'm just wondering about. You brought up the free banking system. The problem is when you get to that sort of centralized. Too big of a centralized hub. Right. And we can already see, I mean, look, it's already happened. I know people don't like this company, but let's say Binance, this was totally shitcoin company. They were an ICO company, but it's absolutely one of the most successful ICOs ever. Right. And what happened with them? They didn't. They didn't stay free. They didn't stay, you know, the mission obviously no Bitcoin is really going to sort of like agree generally what they're doing. But they were a untethered, unregulated, zero fiat company. Same with Bitmex. Same with Bitmex. These guys were free banking, untethered, using Bitcoin primarily, but also check coins I guess more in Binance's case they were a decentralized free system and they both got captured. So that to me is the interesting question really about what will or could happen with a bitcoin like a true bitcoin free system. Because those examples, I agree they're more sort of free banking like they're more, you know, but any system, if you're going to get big enough, you're going to have enough money, people are, your footprint is starting to get around, they're going to want to get you and they're going to want to tax you.

Matthew Mazingas (73:34)

Yeah, well, and I think this is where implementation details really come into play and obviously Bitmex, Binance, Bitmex I think most beautifully and I don't think they get enough credit for really building a primitive bitcoin bank with the way they implemented multisig and did all their payouts and geographically distributed. But in the case of Bitmex and Binance, I'm trying to figure out how I want to describe it. You need those core teams who really understood the space and were able to spin up a business like legal business entity with processes and all this and they had like their siloed sort of way of operating and building their businesses where I think I've been really on this tip that I think like the reemergence of ecash mints, particularly the two protocols, Fedimint and Cashew, the fact that you have these protocols that are open source, permissionless and you sort of had these out of the box, this out of the box banking infrastructure that doesn't necessarily. You have a team of open source developers building out these protocols and anybody can leverage the product of the work of that open source team. Whereas in the case of Bitmex and Binance you're really dependent on those closed source teams to build out that infrastructure. And I think you can squint and see an implementation of a rapidly growing competitive and hydra like free banking system with these cash humans. And if you go back to chaum in the 80s and what the holdup was there is that it failed in the 80s because you needed permission from the banks to actually do anything. Whereas with These E Cash protocols, you don't need any permission. You just go to GitHub and figure out how to peg in and peg out Bitcoin and issue E Cash tokens and boom, you have a bank. That is my dream. Maybe it's naive, maybe it's too optimistic.

Marty Bent (75:42)

But I think implementation 100% me as well. The, you know, to use the old parallel word rights, fiduciary media. It's a, it's a. You're setting up something that's related but different to the underlying base which in the old days was of course gold or silver at times. There are so many better things about the both the systems that you just mentioned, Fetty and Cashew than any other prior system. But even there, right, the, the different coordinators or I can't even forget the language of Fetty. But you know, say you're a farmer. Like say you have a big farming opportunity.

Matthew Mazingas (76:20)

Guardians.

Marty Bent (76:21)

Africa. Yeah, the guardians. Right. My understanding is there still is a possibility that guardians could certainly in some way shape or form rug you. You're right. Right. I mean for lack of a better word. And that's totally fine. But I'm not totally fine but that's natural the way that the system needs to scale. I'm absolutely not poo pooing any of this. Like you said, this is basically one of my dreams as well. That's why I like reading about free banking history because it's something that existed, it worked, it was there, then it failed. So we have to do better than that and I think we're on the way. I think it's amazing what those guys are doing and I think it's totally possible I do that. The rub will be though probably two main things, right. It's be of course co opting it at some point like you said, if you know, however that form might occur, it could be different in different places and different geographical factors and socioeconomic factors. It might be, you know some, some guardians turn out to be mafia like some guardians might turn out to be co opted by the state. I have no idea. I'm just saying I know these guys think about that stuff too all the time. We got plenty of time. So that's probably the main risk that people think about. But then the other risk which goes back to the power loss stuff and the exponential stuff is you can start to make money off of these systems. If you can be like, well you know, let's just, let's keep the bitcoin here. You're just going to start using our fiduciary media, our sort of certificates. Yeah, this Chaumian mint is backed one to one. But this one isn't because the state is involved and then this other state is involved here, here, here. And you can just imagine that there is. If the economic growth is big enough anywhere, it doesn't really matter what we're talking about. If the economic growth is big enough, there will be that sort of perennial tendency of wherever you are operating to come after you and fill their coffers with tax revenue. So it's just going to be interesting. It's going to be interesting to see how that works. I mean, on the one hand we could maybe set up the true dream of the old, the anarcho capitalist paradise where things, everything starts to have a fee and a price and a service can be delivered from infrastructure, water, Bitcoin mining can give heating. There's all sorts of amazing things that can happen. I'm sure you've done some shows with some of those miners talking about that, like Gridless was doing that and stuff. But the, the question will be is if we can overcome the state monopoly there when they want to come in and start doing it their way. Very mafia like, as Rothbard said, there's only the mafia and the state are the two groups that can just sort of come and demand, demand revenue from you without necessarily providing a service.

Matthew Mazingas (79:42)

It's fun to dive into these deep philosophical where we'll go. And I think it's not only fun, but it's important, I think, to anchor, to put something down, like here's a vision to strive for, to at least test out. And I think it's also important to recognize where we are still in the very nation stages of bitcoin overall, and even more so these second layer technologies and these financial contracts and his way of doing things. But I think it's also important to recognize that the stuff is getting built out. Really tying this back to the overall tenor of the beginning of the episode, which was people are somewhat disappointed with where bitcoin is from a price perspective. And there's another contingent of people who are disappointed because bitcoin doesn't seem to be maturing at all at different levels, different parts of the stack. But I think that's inarguably untrue. Like if you are actually paying attention, all this stuff is getting built and getting more mature and getting used more every day. Yesterday we have somebody helping us out with the YouTube thumbnails, the clickbait, to make sure that we're getting as many views as possible. And he sent me a. He sent me an invoice via Blink Wallet, which I was not expecting at all. This is some dude, I think we found on YouTube and he asked to get paid in bitcoin using Blink Wallet, using the Lightning Network. And that was a shocking sort of signal to me, like, oh, people are waking up. This network adoption is happening.

Marty Bent (81:23)

Yep. There you go, man. It's a great. No, it's a great thing. I'm super bullish. I mean, we talk about all these. Don't get me wrong. If listeners, again, I'm doubting. I am absolutely, very, very confident that at least one of these paths to sort of stay free in bitcoin will work. And obviously it's not limited to just one. I mean, there are just so many different ways to do it. I think it's for sure green pastures, but yeah, it is. The sort of the current fiat world that we're in can be quite unforgiving for people.

Matthew Mazingas (82:09)

Very depressed.

Marty Bent (82:11)

Yeah. I don't know.

Matthew Mazingas (82:12)

I think people are waking up, though. I think people are getting fed up. You gotta have to have optimism we're going to break free.

Marty Bent (82:23)

It's inevitable that they will get fed up and look for other options. And bitcoin's going to be there. Gold failed there. Right. Like I said, you were the gold bug. If you were the gold bug in our. We were at some gold conference in 1981. Like, this is it. This is on. Came on. And then 20 year bear and Alan Greenspan in the 90s is telling you that he's got the gold market captured. Bitcoin is not doing that. I mean, it's. It could. It could happen. But absolutely, you know, actually capturing it, actually. Actually stopping every single person from running a node and, you know, being able to censor every transaction and being able to control the market price. We're a long, long way from that. So I have no, no doubt that we're going to give it a good run here with bitcoin. It's the best chance we have.

Matthew Mazingas (83:19)

It really is. But speaking of gold bugs and gold, gold's having a moment right now. It's having a moment.

Marty Bent (83:28)

I saw your tweet about the gold getting to the highest reserves ever and more than treasuries. I'm pulling it up right now.

Matthew Mazingas (83:41)

35. We're at 35. Six three.

Marty Bent (83:45)

Corn's even pumping a little bit up. 111K. The model that I just pulled in earlier at the start of this episode, I think was 109. So we just pumped like 2k during the course of this episode of this chat. 2.5k.

Matthew Mazingas (84:04)

Hasn'T even been posted yet and the universe can feel signal coming from it. Smash buying bitcoin.

Marty Bent (84:11)

What a letdown if it's 105 when this thing is released. But no, I love it, dude. I mean, yeah, gold is pumping. I think it makes sense geopolitically that states are doing that. It's funny though, the trend. I do trends on this stuff as well. Also to look at comparisons with bitcoin and the trend is still generally flat to even slightly down since the 60s of central banks holding gold. But since 2008 they've been consistently buying. And like you said, we're getting now to the point where in dollar terms gold is, you know, your gold reserves are more than your treasury reserves. That's big news.

Matthew Mazingas (85:00)

Yeah, I'm just going to pull this up here. I'll share screen for the first time ever during one of these episodes. But just to put a visual on this for Everybody watching on YouTube or wherever, here's the chart. We're talking about Foreign central banks hold more gold in Treasuries for the first time since the early 90s.

Marty Bent (85:27)

Yeah, that's a good chart. I gotta get that. I gotta get that data online.

Matthew Mazingas (85:33)

Yeah. I mean, even though exogenous factors only factor for 5% of Bitcoin price movement, in your opinion, it is fascinating to observe what is going on, if only because just take bitcoin out of the question. It is very obvious that we are in some sort of phase change in terms of the global monetary system, as is evidenced by people falling back to gold in favor or in disfavor of Treasuries.

Marty Bent (86:08)

Yep. You see there, it's 75%. That's an $850 gold price for like I said, two seconds on the COMEX in 1980. That's a huge valuation there of gold. And can we go back to that? I don't know, but I absolutely think that bitcoin will be a part of that now moving forward. But also I'm not. I think there's a lot of conflicting messages between bitcoiners as well. You have a lot of bitcoiners that are even, I don't know, you have a lot of bitcoiners who are saying that it's a good thing that governments are starting to reserve bitcoin. You have a lot of bitcoiners that think that that's a bad thing. Right. The governments reserve bitcoin. What's Your take on that, if bitcoin starts to become a mix in that.

Matthew Mazingas (87:08)

Basket, I have a very MVK view on this, which is Bitcoin is money for enemies and there's nothing you can do. You just have to. If you're worried about the government potentially co opting or Wall street co opting, BlackRock, co opting, whoever, the only way to prevent that is to hold your own private keys, run your own node and make sure that hash rate's sufficiently distributed.

Marty Bent (87:38)

I think what if they say no withdrawals for Americans? Like no, no Americans could hold gold.

Matthew Mazingas (87:45)

That's when you take to the streets and you say no, that's why, don't wait for. And it is certainly a possibility. As you just mentioned, it has happened before in U.S. history with Executive Order 6102. And to best prepare for that is to make sure that you get your bitcoin off the exchanges and into your own wallets that you secure. And I think luckily we're still in this period where a majority of bitcoin is held in individual wallets with private keys secured by individuals. The trend is going in the wrong direction. But that is a product of the institutions coming in and buying via the ETFs and paper Bitcoin summer with the treasury companies. Right. I do think everybody should be proactive. And if you want to protect yourself from the withdrawal button being turned off by the US government at exchanges, just don't, don't wait for that to happen. Be active, get it into your own wallet, secure your own private keys.

Marty Bent (88:59)

Yeah.

Matthew Mazingas (89:00)

And if the government does do that, like I think, I think it would be hard for me to believe that people, bitcoiners specifically, really the early adopters, would just roll over and allow that to happen without some pushback.

Marty Bent (89:21)

Right. I was on a panel with pitchad and Helsinki and he said similar things. I mean on some level it is going to get political. You know, you will have to push back. He gave the example of the, you know, if code is free speech, right. The cypherpunks had to sue the government in the 90s. He actually won. Although that analogy is still very hinged on a US centric world, which we're moving away from now, frankly. So in any event, I think it's still better. Bitcoin is, I still think going to do well in this world, in a more multipolar world, even though these Russia of course has no gold because they're stupid, they lost it all. But China does have a lot and they continue to buy. And so Gold will be a part of it. And I do think bitcoin will be a part of it. But yeah, I hope it like the other side of whatever comes here. I hope it's not too bloody, too violent. But like you said, I think people are going to have to push back. If, you know, if you're basic rights and private property rights, free speech rights start to get taken away, you will have to push back.

Matthew Mazingas (90:47)

Yeah. And I can think of a number of founders that run exchanges in my mind that if the government were to signal like, hey, we're going to turn off the withdrawal button, I like to think the romantic in me likes to think that there are principal bitcoiners in positions at many exchanges that would sort of force their users to withdraw, saying like, hey, you need to figure out how to download Blue Wallet. We're going to send her your bitcoin, because we don't want to. We don't want to be holding this.

Marty Bent (91:23)

Do you think that there are principled owners of bitcoin treasury companies?

Matthew Mazingas (91:30)

God, I think a lot of.

Marty Bent (91:34)

Sorry, I just had to lob that one out there for you.

Matthew Mazingas (91:38)

Well, you want to hear my theory? What are your thoughts on the US government taking a 10% stake in Intel?

Marty Bent (91:45)

Hold on, I want to hear your theory first.

Matthew Mazingas (91:47)

Well, this is the setup for the theory. What are your thoughts on the US government taking 10% stake in Intel?

Marty Bent (91:54)

I'm not going to, not going to throw too much judgment out there. First of all, you don't want to get too much back into the geopolitics of this episode. But, but if you want to envision yourself as a citizen, fully sovereign way in the future, or your grandchildren or your heirs way in the future, I think that's sort of easier to envision. But if we talk about even just 100 years ago, the consolidation of power between monarchies and a few governments around Europe, we're completely consolidated and completely hopeless. As far as the proletariat, I think we're somewhere in the middle of that today. Okay, so what I'm saying, to answer your question is I think it's a gray issue. I don't think it's just black and white. If someone wants to. If we talk about pure capitalism in a free market, I think that's one thing. But if you're talking about an entity like the government buying 10% of Intel. Okay, but what about if the Chinese government came in and tried to buy 10% of intel, or the Indian government tried to come in and buy 10% of intel, you don't think that the US government would stop that. So there are pros and cons there. I understand the idea of the US Government trying to do this for a defensive. As a defensive play. And those, those though that position is not without merit. On the other side, as a free market person, obviously, yes, I'm not a fan of seeing the government come in and, you know, take bigger and bigger stakes in companies. So it's mixed.

Matthew Mazingas (93:45)

I could see there being merit to it. But also like Intel. Why are you buying Intel? Like, has been good since Andy Grod died and you're basically buying a loser in hopes that the injection of. Or it's not even. They didn't even inject. It's the CHIPS Act. They're basically converting subsidies from that act into equity. It's like they're getting the money anyway. US is getting. The US Government is getting in. Taxpayers by extension, theoretically are getting a return based off of that equity injection. But the point bringing up is if you didn't want a 6102, if you were the US government, if you understood the game theory of bitcoin adoption and particularly tipping your cards to your adversaries in terms of what you're doing.

Marty Bent (94:43)

On.

Matthew Mazingas (94:43)

The bitcoin adoption side, one great way to build a bitcoin stack is to have somebody in the private sector acquire 3% of all bitcoin and then come in one day and just print money, acquire that company and their balance sheet and make their shareholders whole via printed money.

Marty Bent (95:08)

That's a great way to.

Matthew Mazingas (95:09)

That's a great way to build a bitcoin reserve.

Marty Bent (95:12)

Sure, sure. And are you referring to anybody in particular by chats? Yeah, MicroStrategy, you know, large Bitcoin holder, perhaps? Yeah, 600,000 plus coins.

Matthew Mazingas (95:24)

Yeah.

Marty Bent (95:26)

Now the theories are out there for sure. I mean, the headquarters is at Tyson Corner, I believe it's right next to every defense contractor in the United States. No, I mean, look, you and I are pretty skeptical on a lot of that stuff, so I'm with you there.

Matthew Mazingas (95:43)

No, actually, like, honestly, like, it's just a theory. It's fun to talk about and to surmise, but honestly, if you're thinking of, like the most sort of painless way to do a 6D102 like event, just like you have MicroStrategy acquire all the bitcoin. Once it gets to a certain level, the government's like, okay, this is a good strategic reserve for us. You print the money you make, shareholders hold, maybe even at a premium. Everybody gets paid back. The Government gets their bitcoin. And I'm not saying this is happening, but it is funny.

Marty Bent (96:22)

Yeah. So I share your skepticism. Most of our listeners who've listened to me and you chat for all these years hopefully know that I share your skepticism. But I also have this other layer of skepticism towards other governments and the United States actually I don't think is the worst. I still think it's the best looking horse in the glue factory, as I usually say, agree the dollar and even the government in some cases, not in others. But a very simple example, all the nice hard right anti woke podcasters, or some of them, let's say, were contracted by Russia earlier this year via a company called Tenant Media and were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars an episode to create content. You know, the likes of Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, these guys. It's, it's not, it's not only walled to like it's not the US not the government is not playing just with itself. There are, there are a lot of other players happening. So that's what I meant with my intel answer of trying to say it a little bit of both ways, like.

Matthew Mazingas (97:29)

It'S a defensive man.

Marty Bent (97:30)

It might, it might be a dumb move. It like you said, it could be a totally dumb move, but I don't actually know. Again, in the world where our grandchildren and their grandchildren are living in a purely anarcho capitalist paradise, running a node and maybe mining a little bit of bitcoin on nuclear fusion or something versus the world of 100 years ago, we are unfortunately, I think, and I would use this word unfortunately, we're still in a world where there are big, big powers that play with a lot of money and a lot of guns and there are wars going on right now. So it's very difficult. You got to watch out for that. And I also think, and this is where I kind of land more on the side of, I think the way that Peter Todd looks at some of this geopolitical stuff, he's a big Ukraine supporter by the way, is they're just our adversaries. They're government adversaries. There are government intelligence agency adversaries. There are good companies and bad companies in different jurisdictions. It's just not the US government alone by itself. Anybody can argue about the strategy the US government takes on a lot of things, I would certainly argue in many ways. But that little example of the right wing podcasters being paid by the Kremlin, which I have been again yelling for years as RT was ascending in the 2010s on YouTube that's just. That's one example to think about. You know, we just said there's a summit in China, right, right now, where all the. All the dictators are meeting, including Modi, Even though people like to say that Modi's a. Like, India's still a democracy because Trump had put all the tariffs on them. Right. And now he's meeting with Xi and Putin and Kim Jong Un is even coming in, is he? Right. By train. Yeah, he's coming in by train. And they canceled all the trains in China. Like, lovely communist move right there. Like, I don't know how many hundreds of millions of Chinese just got shut off of a train when he's coming in. But, I mean, he's coming in by train. And this is a very rare event, by the way. You know, Kim Jong Un would come, like, he might meet with Trump in Singapore or he might meet one on one with Xi, but this is a major dictator event that's occurring right now. You know, Erdogan's there from Turkey and. And then Modi, who's. I mean, we can say India is democracy, but there's. They're fledgling democracy at the moment. Modi himself has got plenty of autocratic history, let's say.

Matthew Mazingas (99:57)

I feel like he's been for quite a while.

Marty Bent (100:00)

He has indeed. That's really all you need to do is look at the track record. Like Putin for 25 years. Lukashenko was there, of course, from Belarus, very close to the Baltics. Here he's been in for 31 years. I mean, it's a wild world, man. It's a wild world. So anyway, there's that stuff as well going on. That's my long winded answer to your point there about the government getting involved in US businesses.

Matthew Mazingas (100:27)

Why can't we all just get along, man?

Marty Bent (100:30)

Yeah. Vipers everywhere, man. Vipers everywhere.

Matthew Mazingas (100:34)

I'm just trying to run around the block of my son, not have to.

Marty Bent (100:37)

Worry about and do that. Hey, let's go back to the top of the show message. We're getting close to the end, right? Enjoy the power curve. It's 95% of what Bitcoin is doing, the adoption. You can see it, you can visualize it. Let me finish off with one more chart here. Just so people, those brave souls that have stuck through our.

Matthew Mazingas (100:59)

You have one of the highest retention.

Marty Bent (101:02)

Particularly my rants, because I know a lot of people don't like my Ukraine stance. But let me show you. Let me show you the bitcoin as we close it out here. I think this is My new headline chart, as far as showing the whole thing, it got the power curve, we got the power curve, we got exponential curve, we got money, we got bitcoin. So this is now what I'm calling tradfi based money. It is available gold and silver. So it doesn't include industrial. And then since gold and silver is actually a little bit of part of the monetary base, there's like 4 trillion now because it's a huge value in backing the fiat based money, which is liability. You take that off. So you just look at unbacked, unbacked fiat money. That's what this is. Okay. At the moment, that total right now is 38 trillion. All right, 38 trillion. And the bitcoin network, all right, is right there. Okay, Bitcoin dominance, 5.6%. All right, 2.2.1 trillion. This moves from actual values right into the trend lines. Right? So you can see them. But this is actually graphically what I mean when I say 95% of Bitcoin's action right now is just the power curve itself. Like we literally. This is kind of the real bitcoin dominance. If fiat base money altogether is 40 trillion, gold, silver, fiat based money, central bank money, Bitcoin's 2 trillion, we're at 5%. All right, question would be, when do we cross? That would be here. Go out to 2041 or so. Actually it's changed a little bit here, but 2041, roughly 120 trillion. And there's an idea for you 15 years from now, something to shoot for. It's around this mythical 100 trillion. All right. And I think that we're going to get close there probably sooner. And again, when we do meet, it's still 50 50. So that's money that's valued in something like a dollar that has nothing to do with bitcoin. Okay. Because it's unbacked. Fiat based money would be something like 100 trillion. 120 trillion. Bitcoin itself. If it got to 120 trillion, there would still be 50, 50. So, so I keep saying these money supplies keep growing. Skate to where the puck is going. Yeah, I think 15, 17 years is probably where we will match. And this is, this is how you can see basically, you know, tradfi, which runs in a exponential straight line on log scale. Right. Versus bitcoin, which runs in a power trend on log scale, which is this sort of nice, gently sustainable curve. So that's what I think. I'll keep tracking this, keep tweaking it. But that's What I think is going to happen?

Matthew Mazingas (104:27)

You know what I think is going to happen?

Marty Bent (104:28)

Tell me.

Matthew Mazingas (104:29)

We're going to get to year 2041 and people are going to be digging through the archives of the episodes that we've been producing for seven years. This guy was a genius. He told us exactly how it was going to happen.

Marty Bent (104:42)

Yes, looking forward to that. No, it's tweaked around a lot. These numbers are super sensitive and the trend line is sensitive. I could tweak a couple things and this could go up to like 140 trillion. So I just want to make that caveat. This can be. I'm tweaking this all the time based on the changes in the numbers and the updates of the trend line itself when I do these quarterly reports. So it's big ticket numbers, long time period out. Might be like May, something like that. It was showing that before I did this quarterly update, it was already up to like 140, 145 trillion. Now it's down to 120. We'll see. We'll see. Based on all the price action and everything that happens. But who knows? It might be that mythical 100 trillion is exactly where bitcoin passes the fiat world. But this is how I see it. Sort of a headline idea. Yeah.

Matthew Mazingas (105:41)

I like it.

Marty Bent (105:41)

Very exciting. Very exciting. So all reasons to be bullish, all reasons to hodl never financial advice. But if you want to play around with the extremes of those percentiles and ape in and out, check my streams mostly every day.

Matthew Mazingas (105:56)

Check the streams. Check out Porkopolis I.O. or is it Porkopolis economics? Let me say.

Marty Bent (106:02)

Yep, yep, we'll link to all that basemoney world. You can get a lot of different. A lot of different places.

Matthew Mazingas (106:09)

It was funny because I was setting out to write the newsletter last night. I wrote the newsletter that I wrote last night because I was beginning to question myself. I guess bitcoin, is it not doing what it should be doing? Are we having a depressed cycle? And then I just went back to basics. I went to look at the chart and I said, no, it's right on trend. We're fine. People are the noise. For anybody listening, I think the lesson to take from this conversation, really every conversation that Matthew and I have every quarter is this is the best way to filter out the noise. This is the signal. If you're ever feel your emotions being manipulated by people on Twitter or gold bugs or whoever it may be, just fall back to basics. Look at the data. This is where the signal is. There's A lot of noise out there. It's only going to get louder and there's going to be more of it. So.

Marty Bent (107:03)

Twitter is not real life.

Matthew Mazingas (107:05)

Really isn't. Really isn't. Running around the block. Enjoy with your kids. Is real life okay? Good, dude.

Marty Bent (107:10)

I love it, man. I'm very happy for you. Good luck with the. The newest, getting some sleep and. And all the rest, but I'm very happy for you, buddy.

Matthew Mazingas (107:21)

Thank you, sir.

Marty Bent (107:22)

Go run around the block. Actually, you said. You said tonight, so you got a while.

Matthew Mazingas (107:26)

Yeah, we got a while.

Marty Bent (107:26)

I could run around the block with my little one. Maybe we'll do that. Yeah.

Matthew Mazingas (107:32)

We'Re going to be doing this until 2041, so.

Marty Bent (107:35)

I think we will, dude. I think we will. Oh, I just hope. I hope Central and Eastern Europe are preserved and safe until then. That's what we're working for.

Matthew Mazingas (107:48)

Yeah, I think. I think we're gonna be good. I think we're gonna be good.

Marty Bent (107:51)

Let's see. Let's see. And when in doubt, run your own node. Bitcoin. Enjoy yourself, Marty. Always a pleasure, my friend.

Matthew Mazingas (108:01)

Maddie. The pleasure is always mine. Peace of love freaks the cake. If you've made it this far, I want to thank you for listening and ask you for a couple things. Can you subscribe on the platform that you're listening to? Maybe give us a rating and a review that helps the show quite a bit, whether you're listening on Spotify, Apple, or Fountain. Speaking of Fountain, that is my favorite podcasting app. If you go over to Fountain, you can subscribe to the show. Become a paid subscriber to support the show and receive these episodes ad free in a day. Early Scope, find Fountain or go to Fountain fm. Become a paid subscriber.