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- [00:00]
A
John, we're back Monday morning after a pretty, pretty crazy week in bitcoin. I mean we had our first recording seven days ago and between then and now the price of bitcoin dipped, tipped, tipped into the 50s, the high 50s there, 59, 58 or second on Thursday I believe has since recovered. Currently trying to break past through 70,000 and stay above there. It's been drifting up and down. Long winded. Introduction to basically say that people are scared and you took some time to write a newsletter that was published on Saturday, really get people back to the fundamentals. Price is what you pay, value is what you come for. Why do you feel compelled to write that this week?
- [00:46]
B
I mean I feel like the only all the time. Regardless of what's happening in the market with any asset that you own, what you should be focusing on is the underlying reality of the thing it is that you own and what its prospects are. Whether it's a cash flowing asset like equity in a business or a commodity and you know, playing some sort of demand cycle or a monetary good like gold or like bitcoin, you should always be focusing on the fundamental story, like why you're there in the first place.
- [01:17]
A
Right.
- [01:18]
B
And I think that's even more true and it's most true when the fear and greed index goes to 4, which it did this week. So like literally lower, lower than the COVID Wick, you know, when everyone thought the world was literally ending, lower than ftx. Right. And you know, everyone constructs those indicators differently and they're only of somewhat limited value, but I think it's still indicative. You know, the RSI this week on bitcoin went the lowest, it's basically ever gone. That was the, the lead chart for the timestamp this week, but I made the, the subtitle of the, the newsletter this week. I didn't hear Nobel quoting philosopher Randy Hirsch, who I think puts you in the mindset you need to be in when you're getting punched in the mouth on price of anything that you own. And the only solution to manage the emotions and to not make rash decisions and to keep yourself level headed is to reevaluate your thesis. Ask yourself if anything's changed, ask yourself why you're there in the first place. And certainly there are times when the market's giving you new information, the market's dumping something and everyone wants to get out because something has fundamentally changed and you need to reevaluate that information in your thesis. A lot of the time that's not the case. And so I think it's important to follow Buffett's advice, which is where that quote comes from. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. Buffett by way of Ben Graham. And I know he's not a favorite among bitcoiners, but if you read his shareholder letters over the years, you'll find that he's spiritually a bitcoiner, even if he didn't fully understand what was going on with bitcoin. But here he gives great advice that I think all bitcoin holders need to take to heart. Evaluate the fundamentals in situations like this, in weeks like this, and don't tap out until you hear the bell. And I don't think we've even come close to hearing the bell here.
- [03:14]
A
No, it was a bit poetic. Ironic maybe. Not ironic. It was poetic because as this price was dumping Thursday over the course of the week, over the course of the last month and a half, really I've been talking about it on rhr, I think I mentioned it last week and this is a good segue into the next chart we'll pull up. But me personally, I've been playing with Open Call for the last three weeks and have been pushing my agent to the limits to see when I'm trying, still trying to map the territory of what's possible with these agents now. And one of the things I did over the course of the last 10 days was get my agent to spin up a Phoenix D server, so a Bitcoin wallet, a Lightning network server and begin signing into websites using ln URL L auth, which is for those who are unaware, it's an authentication sign in flow where instead of putting an email and a password, you basically use the private key in your Lightning network server to sign into a website and that is your identity. And so my, my agent signing into websites with its private key that it controls and going back to price versus value like it is the confirmation is something that we've been talking about, me and you personally, it's part of our thesis at 1031, is that Bitcoin is native Internet money. And as AI becomes more prominent and agents begin doing more things, they're going to need money to do things. And the ease with which my agent was able to spin up a Phoenix D server, use bolts to submarine swap to open up a channel and begin signing into websites and sending Bitcoin to them was astonishing. So as the price was falling, I was being starkly reminded of the fundamental value that exists within Bitcoin and particularly at this intersection with AI, which you want to talk about today, you have this chart that is highlighting the capex spend of these hyperscalers which is exploding this year above 600 billion.
- [05:14]
B
Yep. It's a crazy chart in terms of order of magnitude here. This is, I said in the newsletter, but we're now at a point where, and this doesn't Even include Oracle, NeoClouds, Core Weave, et cetera. You know, the hyperscaler complex, broadly like the AI data center complex is basically spending like one tarp a year now on, you know, the thing that led to Bitcoin's creation in the first place, the bailout of the banks in 08 during the financial crisis. We were all just like pearl clutching at the time that you know, we were spending $800 billion on this bailout packages. The numbers are so high you couldn't even imagine it. You couldn't conceive of it. And now we're just kind of casually, you know, doing that in a year for data centers. Right. And granted, yeah, you know, it's not a constant dollar comparison, whatever. Like I think it just goes to show you how, how much the monetary base has expanded and how much our kind of expectation of, you know, what a dollar buys has changed. But these are huge numbers and I think there are, this chart says a lot about a lot of different things that are going on in the market right now, both in and out of Bitcoin. I think number one is what you first said is on the most fundamental level for Bitcoin, what this chart tells you is the smartest and most well capitalized and most, shall we say, singularly oriented people in the world, in the world of tech are going to bring about their version of like digital God or die trying. We can debate whether that's a good thing for society. I think there are a lot of implications we get into of that, but this train is not slowing down. I think all the commentary on the earnings reports over the last two weeks, which is where these estimates come from, all these companies updated their capex estimates for the year on those calls. The commentary is like I think Sundar at Google has literally said we would rather go bankrupt than lose this race. Right. They're all thinking that way. And you can see in Marty what you're talking about with progress on the agentic side in the last couple weeks that you're just, that's just scratching the surface of like what's going to come as long as scaling laws hold. Which is basically, you know, the idea that very simply and there's a much more technical kind of way to think about it. But like you are getting, you know, more output relative to the input of computation and training and GPUs and power that you're throwing at these things, right? So as long as this curve continues to produce positive ROIC or positive returns on, you know, positive intelligence returns for, for the spend, it's just going to keep going up. And clearly the plan among all these companies, supported also by the Trump administration with the run it hot agenda is this line just needs to keep going up and that's going to have implications for all these agents that people are playing with in the last few weeks just getting more and more capable again, assuming scaling loss continue to hold. And you know, that's the first kind of fundamental indicator to me about where Bitcoin's going, right? Like you often hear people bemoan that Bitcoin doesn't have a use case, it's not being used as money. Well, you're starting to see we can talk about other ways that in the real world you're starting to see it uses money, but we've got a growing army of bots out there now that pretty quickly discovered with some human prompting, maybe somewhat autonomously, maybe somewhat not whatever, but discovered how to use Internet native money and are using it, right? And that's. This chart tells you like that kind of thing, that kind of trend is only is just we're in the warmups, right, of the nine inning ball game, like that's just starting. And I think we're going to see a lot more of it over the coming year, two years, et cetera. So that is fundamentally like a positive tailwind for the most widely accepted, largest network effect, most robust Internet native money, just full stop. The other piece that I think is worth highlighting here is there are a couple other things we can say. One other thing I'll say before pausing is there are implications to that on employment, on white collar employment. And this is one of the things that I was alluding to a second ago, the many potential social near term downsides of the implications of this chart. Dario at Anthropic has reiterated multiple times in the last few months that AI or AGI or however you want to define it, over the next couple years we'll be able to do an increasingly percentage of white collar work autonomously. There's some book talking there because there's massive capital required for all this stuff. So he and Jensen and all these guys are incentivized to overplay it and to talk it up aggressively. So Maybe it's not six months when everyone gets disrupted, but is it like two years, is it three years? I don't think it's 10 years, I don't think it's 20 years. Assuming again, scaling laws hold, assuming the spending continues, et cetera. So what does that do to the run it hot agenda? What does that do to the federal budget, which is already historically constrained? We talked about last week non discretionary spend relative to tax receipts already running up right at 100% with fairly low unemployment. If you get like a couple additional percentage points of unemployment even due to kind of white collar workforce disruption, what does that do to automatic stabilizers in the budget? What does that do to everyone's mortgage payments, everyone's car payments, the household debt, et cetera? This chart tells you you could quickly get into a situation where, yeah, you get a ton of productivity, you get a ton of nominal GDP going up, but, but potentially at the cost of meaningful employment disruption, which is something we typically haven't seen historically. Right. At least at any kind of like accelerated pace, like what would be happening here. So the other implication of this chart for Bitcoin is for all of this agenda to hold together and for all of us to work and for all of these projects to kind of bear fruit in the way that people are thinking and hoping. You know, they're probably. Unless it all goes at exactly the right pace, there's probably some implication for employment and unemployment benefits and the need to finance those without blowing up the whole system. So I'll pause there. But I think those are some key things that we can take away from this chart as it relates to what's fundamentally happening in the world as price goes against us.
- [11:44]
A
Yeah, I mean, we've been talking about it. I mean, it's been very clear with the Trump administration. Trump too. Scott Besson came in before he came in, famous Manhattan Institute interview where he says there's going to be a new monetary order, there's going to be a reordering, I want to be a part of it. And it seems like that is certainly in play with this Don Road doctrine of the national security strategy that was laid out at the end of last year. And then you couple that with. It has become very clear as well that this AI race is existential for the long term. Dominance of the United States at least is viewed that way. I think it's pretty clear that whoever wins this race is going to have a lot of leverage in the brave new world that we're venturing into. And to your point, it's going to have the win at all. Cost is going to come with some negative externalities in the form of job disruption and they're going to have to print money. And there's a very strong case to be made that the fundamental value that exists in scarce assets, the scarcest asset in the world that is bitcoin, is not priced in yet. And like you said, we're warming up before the game is even started. And it's going to be very interesting what happens. And there's a ton of people out there thinking that we're going back into a bear market. Four year cycles are still intact as it pertains to Bitcoin's price movements. And I think I would just take this information in mind when thinking about where bitcoin could go from here. But one thing, I think there's other knock on implications that are more direct to Bitcoin than we can see. You've got a chart here of hash rate and I think this is actually an important chart to bring up because there's a lot of misinformation floating around about bitcoin mining as an industry right now and what's happening, what's causing this collapse? Not collapse, but a very strong correction in hash rate. I think we had our 12th largest downward difficulty adjustment ever at the end of last week. And it was this largest downward adjustment since the Chinese mining ban in 2021. That that adjustment was 28%. Last week's adjustment for bitcoin was, let me pull it up here, 11.15%. So pretty, pretty massive downward difficulty adjustment. You have people saying that with the price down, like all miners are unprofitable. The quantum FUD miners are diversifying away from bitcoin mining because they're worried about quantum risk. They're all going to AI quantum risk. I don't think many bitcoin miners really thinking that way. I think there is certainly increased competition from AI and an appeal to diversify into AI data center infrastructure because of how profitable it is. The chart we just looked at, the hyperscalers are going to be throwing a ton of money at scaling this stuff. And so with that is going to come sort of, they don't care about energy prices. They'll pay whatever it takes. But I think I'll start with debunking one of the lines of FUD that's been out there, which is all miners aren't profitable. I'm sure many of you have seen the stat that the average cost or the cost of mine a bitcoin. There's a stat going out there like it cost $100,000 to mine a bitcoin. And, and obviously the price is at 69,000 right now. So all miners are unprofitable. And this is just completely idiotic because each individual miner is an individual actor with their own sort of setup, their own electricity price, their own hardware that they bought at a certain price. And I would just say that not every miner is unprofitable. There are miners out there that are using electricity that they're getting for very cheap. For example, I've got personal miners on a stranded natural gas well. And the cost of that electricity is probably around $0.01 per kilowatt hour. So it's not $0.13 per kilowatt hour, which is the stat that you'll see floating around is that all mine will take the average residential or industrial cost per kilowatt hour of electricity and just basically paste that on bitcoin miners and say, look, this is how much it costs to mine a bitcoin. That's not true. There are miners out there with very low cost of energy, very high performing machines, and there are plenty of miners out there that even at $69,000 are plenty profitable. And now that we've had a 11.15% downward difficulty adjustment, it's easier to mine. So their revenue in SATs should be going up after this, despite where the price is. So I'll end it there, my little rant, and pass it to you. Any comments on this chart?
- [16:32]
B
Yeah, I think it's all great. The other piece that I would throw out is just so people are aware because I saw a lot of posts about it this week looking at this recent drop again without usually the charts presented on a six month basis or maybe a one year basis. So not really zooming out and saying, oh, look how massive the drop is. It started in earnest with the crazy winter storm a couple weeks ago which we talked about last week on the show. So there's an element of major drop off that you would kind of expect, especially in a more like sideways or down price environment. So that's a big piece of it. I think the idea that everyone suddenly decided that quantum is an existential risk and that they need to turn their miners off or they only just now realized they should pivot into AI is I think pretty suspect. And I think that's just illustrated by zooming out on the chart like we have here. Right. Like for the last couple years, you know, the data center story has been Very much in play. You've seen many, many publicly traded miners moving to AI capacity, using their, using their rack space for that kind of a hybrid, hybrid strategy. And yet hash rate has just continued to climb higher and higher and higher. This is a crazy chart and this is the first real meaningful pullback that we've had in hash rates since the China mining ban, which now you can barely kind of even see on this chart.
- [17:51]
A
Right.
- [17:51]
B
So this is a fundamental KPI as we think about kind of values or prices. What you pay, value is what you get. Here's a fundamental KPI that I think is worth paying attention to. Are more and more real world resources, physical world resources over a reasonable amount of time being applied to bitcoin mining by some set of actors.
- [18:12]
A
Right?
- [18:12]
B
And I think this chart tells you like the answer is just absolutely resoundingly yes. You know, we shouldn't expect, if we continue to range here or dump here, you know, should we expect some ongoing consolidation or decline in this chart? Yeah, probably that would likely happen. But this is telling you, as we think about the rotation that is now just starting to be like popularly discussed in mainstream financial press of, you know, the rotation from bits to atoms, right. You're seeing software getting killed, unfortunately. Bitcoin's kind of traded basically like igv, like a software stock, like the software ETF over the last few weeks or months. You're seeing software get killed. And anything that is kind of capital light or thought of as immaterial or leveraged to the world of bits, the world of the ones and zeros and just pure data is kind of getting sold hard on the various theses about running it hot and reshoring and needing to aggressively build out physical infrastructure again and not being able to rely on just in time supply chains that are mostly dependent on China. Right. This chart is, should be a reminder to everyone that Bitcoin is effectively the one system in the world that we've ever invented that on a decentralized basis controlled by no one, dynamically links bits to atoms.
- [19:32]
A
Right?
- [19:33]
B
There's a whole massive like unbelievably large amount of infrastructure that has been deployed to make this chart happen and to make Bitcoin run as it does, it adjusts dynamically based on a whole host of market forces, again without any central coordinator. And the long term trend on it is very, very clear. There's clear utility to bitcoin mining even and probably most especially to actors that are not primarily profit oriented or who use it more as a tool or an input than A standalone business, that could be HPC data center, that could be a sovereign, that could be an oil and gas company, that could be a grid operator using it for load bal and saying that it can uniquely do that nothing else can do. And so again, for the people who are watching Bitcoin's price decline and saying, well, obviously this was this, you know, it's going to zero, it doesn't have a use case, it's, it's $69,000 too high. I think this chart is a good reminder on a long term basis of one of the most interesting and valuable elements of, you know, what Bitcoin is and why anyone selling it on a bits to atoms rotation thesis is really missing the force for the trees on this.
- [20:43]
A
Yeah. And I'm just going to pull up a more dynamic chart. I'm going to pull Up Mempool Space 1031 Portfolio Company See the same chart, but with the difficulty adjustment going back to the value of Bitcoin and the protocol itself and how it operates. You had the hash rate, so you had this chart. But I'm just going to overlay difficulty which reacts to the amount of hash rate on the work on the network at any given point in time, which the network basically guesstimates that by looking at the time it takes to produce a block every 2016 blocks. And I think to your point, the value, this connection of the world of bits and atoms via proof of work in Bitcoin is something that many people do not appreciate fully yet. And when we're talking about the price falling, hash rate coming off and people wondering is it profitable to mine Bitcoin? That is the beauty of Bitcoin. Satoshi designed the system in a way where it dynamically adjusts based off of the amount of compute dedicated to the network at any given point in time. And so as difficulty, as the price goes down, as hash rate comes off, the network knows like, okay, it seems like people aren't incentivized to mine as much right now because blocks are coming in longer than 10 minutes on average. And so I need to adjust, the protocol needs to adjust down to make it easier to mine, to incentivize more people to come in and construct and broadcast blocks and keep adding them to the ledger. And there is incredible fundamental value just in that, that little design aspect of Bitcoin in and of itself. The difficulty adjustment is one of the most important parts of the Bitcoin protocol. It's working as designed. This is exactly what you want to see. So but just add that as well. We're talking if the theme of today is price versus value, the difficulty adjustment has a ton of fundamental value that will ensure that the network persists into the future. That blocks are being produced and miners are incentivized to produce blocks. Try to keep this a tight 30 minutes. We got five minutes left. What should we end it on?
- [22:50]
B
I think the last thing maybe that I would just direct people to. I referenced it in the newsletter, but if you've never watched Parker Lewis's video, his talk Bitcoin is not a hedgehog, I think that would be good to play this week and kind of delve into his points there. When you see the price fall rapidly on market uncertainty or correlations to the NASDAQ or the S and P. When bitcoin's not acting like a quote unquote, safe haven, it's not acting like gold or the ten year or something, everyone comes out of the woodwork, all the concern trolls come out of the woodwork to say, see, it's not acting like an inflation hedge, or it's not acting like a debasement hedge, or it's not acting like an uncertainty uncertainty hedge. Why would anyone own this? I think it's important to realize that Bitcoin is not a hedge right now. It can become a hedge. We think by doing what we're doing, owning bitcoin, trying to help the ecosystem develop, investing behind it, that it can and will become a hedge over time. But despite the crazy gains in market cap that it's made over its life, without any marketing department or central force pushing it forward, it's a tiny asset relative to global capital flows. And the vast majority of capital is controlled by, I wrote in the newsletter, somewhat sarcastically, septuagenarian central bankers or bulge bracket wealth managers. And those classes of people are just barely beginning to wake up to what bitcoin even is. A lot of them are still dragging their feet on it. They still think it's going to go away and it'll die. They won't have to worry about it or learn about it. Vast majority of the world hadn't heard of Bitcoin 10 years ago. So the idea that any massive allocator is going to reflexively shift allocations into Bitcoin when things get hairy in the world, when markets get more uncertain, when they're worried about an increasingly multipolar world, increasingly fractured world where globalization is kind of ending or changing, the idea that their knee jerk is let me just up my bitcoin allocation a few percent to keep the portfolio Balanced and to keep myself hedged against tail risks that may be growing is kind of insane. It's a meme, but it's also very true. We are so early in the development of what bitcoin is. Gold has been around thousands of years. The treasury market is obviously quite a bit younger, but also has the backing of trillions of dollars of US military aggregated capability and force behind it, and a massive network that's been built up around that. Bitcoin is just so young. And so when you see it fall on market uncertainty, when you see it fall in periods when you thought, because you understand it, you thought it should have been going up, remember that we're not yet in a place where it can meaningfully function as a hedge. The longer it goes without dying, the more converts it wins. The more knowledge of its fundamental properties that we've discussed here distributes around society in a especially within circles of large capital allocators, the more it will tend to act like a hedge if we're right about what it is and if it continues to operate. And there's the old phrase, somewhat morbid phrase, science progresses one funeral at a time. Portfolio management also progresses one funeral at a time or one retirement at a time. Maybe less morbidly, the composition of capital allocators is changing. It's going to change, but it changes slowly. And knowledge also, among all those different classes and ages of capital allocators has to distribute slowly. So don't be fussed when bitcoin doesn't do what you think it should do, because you deeply understand it and you've read every bitcoin book and listened to every bitcoin podcast. Remember that the vast majority of people who have money have never done any of that and they don't really want to still at this point. Right? So just keep that in mind as price action goes against you.
- [26:47]
A
I'll end it with a short story to validate this. We've got the boys in the new Catholic Montessori school. And the school is very good about getting all the parents together. So we had our kindergarten parent party on Friday. And it's always weird for me. People are like, what do you do? I'm like, I work in Bitcoin. And they're like, oh, what's that mean? And then you try to explain, I run a partner at a fund, I run a media company. What do you do? But one woman just deadpan looked at me and she's like, oh, you're in fake Internet money. Is that what you do? I was like, yeah, I guess that's what you think. I do. But to your point, knowledge has not been distributed evenly amongst the masses, and not even a subset of the masses, those who control the wealth of the world. So you're early. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get. There's a ton of value in Bitcoin. I think we just spent 30 minutes. We could spend hours diving into the fundamental properties of Bitcoin that give it immense value. But I think this was a good little short, ripped to highlight some of the areas in which that value is emerging today.
- [27:53]
B
Cosine. All of it.
- [27:55]
A
All right, we'll be back next week. We're getting good at this. This is nice. I like this. 30 minutes is a good. A good form factor for this. We'll be back next week, freaks. Okay.