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- [00:00]
A
Mr. Arnold, here we are again, another Monday morning. How was your weekend?
- [00:05]
B
Terrific. Great Easter. Hope everyone else had a great Easter as well. Got to mass, jam packed as we were talking about before we started. So very bullish in a world with not, not always a ton to be bullish about. That was bullish.
- [00:17]
A
Yeah. There is one number going up and that is Catholic converts in recent years. But we're not here to discuss Catholicism. We're here to talk Bitcoin markets and what's going on in the world. You titled this week's 1031 timestamp Schrodinger's regime Change and basically highlighted that it's very hard to discern what's going on if you're simply looking at the headlines coming out of the Trump administration particularly, and the IRGC for that matter. Obviously, we have two sides of a war that have very specific motives to try to get what they want in terms of leverage, and that is leading to a lot of chaos and uncertainty in markets. And a lot of your focus this week is what should we be focusing on? To actually discern some signal from all the noise out there?
- [01:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. In putting this newsletter together week to week, it's just gotten to the point where you try to stay on top of all the headlines and all the data points that could be pointing one way or another. And it's just gotten to the point where it almost all feels kind of pointless to really follow it all that closely. If you pull up the first slide for today, I just kind of screen capped a piece of the newsletter with the bullet points showing all the different ways that Trump and the administration more broadly seem to have flip flopped intentionally or not, often within the same hour on key things like whether the Iranian regime has changed or not, whether he's now working with people who want to make a sensible deal or whether they're doubling down, whether we're going to force the Strait of Hormuz to be reopened and take all the oil or make other people do it, or we're just going to leave without dealing with it. You can see kind of all these things. Basically every single hour there's a version of this and it feels very for the, the under 50 crowd, maybe under 40 crowd, there's an image you can hear on the left side of the screen here. And the over 50s probably will not even be able to relate to it, even if they look it up. But for anyone who's aware of Leroy Jenkins, that's what it all feels like, right? Whether intentionally or not, whether you're a plan truster or a panic in whether you think that there's a bunch of strategic logic under the hood or whether Trump is in the early stages of dementia and is flushing the country down the drain as a result. It feels from the outside like a lot of Leroy Jenkins with everything that's going on. And so it just got to the point where I was like, okay, well, what are the concrete data points that we can actually that we should be focusing on? What can we attach to to figure out what might be actionable or happening under the hood as a derivative result of all this, regardless of what happens from here, regardless of what kind of logic might exist or not in the plan, such as it is. So that was kind of my focus for this week. And I definitely think there are a few big things that we can dive into that are worth thinking about that are going to be relevant, regardless of what happens with Hormuz, regardless of what happens with Trump and Israel and the irgc.
- [03:03]
A
Yeah, I think maybe starting with barrels of oil and how much are actually not only being produced, but actually being delivered from that part of the world. And you touched on this. Roughly 4 million barrels of oil exited the waterway on Thursday, the largest outflow since the start of the conflict. At the same time, the French owned container ship crossed the strait, marking the first explicitly Western crossing since February. And so it seems like the activity in terms of ships actually making it through the strait is beginning to increase consistently. And I thought I was telling you before we hit record, I thought it was very fitting that Citrini released their report of analyst number three heading to that part of the world to observe with his own eyes what was going on, because it essentially confirms what you wrote about this week, which is that it seems like activity is increasing. And I think not only did it confirm that quantitative data, but I think the qualitative data of this is not really a binary situation here. It's very nuanced. There are obviously multiple players and different incentives at play. And I think the most important incentive that was highlighted by Citrini in their report was that Iran wants to keep the strait open because they need to project that they actually have control and are acting as a responsible actor in that part of the world, sort of enticing countries that need oil to work with them to create this tollway that many people have discussed.
- [04:32]
B
Yeah, for sure. It's a great piece. Everyone should go read it and highly recommend paying for a Citrini subscription to do that. But yeah, I think the big takeaway this Won't be spoiling anything. And there's a lot more alpha in there that you can go read about. But I think the big interesting takeaway from it is everyone on the ground seems to think both that we're going to get messy military escalation that will not end soon and more oil is going to progressively flow of the strait, because as you said, there are a lot of interests aligned on all sides to keep oil moving through the strait. Iran wants to do that both to project an image of itself as kind of the wise governor of those resources in that waterway in opposition to the crazy Leroy Jenkins US Also a key source of revenue for the country, so shutting down oil flows there and also for its adversaries that may get even more aggressive with it if they literally can't ship massive amounts of oil through that strait for a meaningful amount of time. That all leads in a very bad path. Path for everyone. So there's this kind of tacit desire and understanding that everyone wants oil to flow out of the strait in one way or another. And Iran has thus far, it seems like, erected some sort of tollbooth system that you can go read about that seems to be getting broader and broader and the participants that are allowed to be involved in that. But I think that the piece also has an interesting set of implications that they outline at the end, which is basically kind of undermining both poles of reading what's going on. There's been on one side this very frankly, you see it a lot in our camp. You see it a lot in the pro Bitcoin or pro gold sound money death of the dollar type camp saying this is the beginning of the petro yuan and the only tankers that can get through are paying in yuan. And this is the beginning of China dominating global oil flows and energy markets. And on the other side, you've got, and perhaps it's not even appropriate to call it the other side. But guys that we've flagged on this podcast before, like Anas Alhaji, who are real experts in global energy markets, kind of saying that the Western consensus reading of what's going on is basically all a sham. And the only reason that you're not seeing shifts flow through is because of the issues in the insurance market with all these tankers, which maybe is driven by US Interests. And so in some sense, the US Is kind of driving all this. And I think the report's interesting because it basically puts both of those somewhat. It really undermines both of those to some degree. Interestingly, Citrini's analyst, unclear who that guy is. I have to think he's not a denizen of traditional finance because I can't imagine anyone who I actually worked on Wall street doing what this dude did. Very entertaining stuff. Again, I recommend people to read, but you know what he found was that yeah, there's a little Chinese Yuan facilitating payments, but a huge amount of it is just through diplomatic channels back channeling between different countries and different quid pro quo trades being made totally out of band between those countries to guarantee safe passage for tankers that are aligned with different countries or different groups. There does appear to be ongoing fear of OFAC sanctions and so that's forcing kind of different way of facilitating this. I think that's interesting and relevant as it relates to how dominant the US dollar system still is realistically globally. On the flip side also, a lot of locals are reporting that their main concern is not getting killed, not getting blown up, trafficking through the strait and insurance is kind of a secondary concern. Also some interesting data points in there on the rates that some of these tankers are getting paid just to basically be floating storage in kind of the current disrupted market and how that also is kind of a disincentive insurance or not to go through and risk your life and risk your ship. So all that is to say, I think this just highlights what we've been saying in the last few weeks. The simple stories just don't really work. You're going to have to have an interpretive lens that's kind of multivariate and isn't reducible to one simple story. And so again, I think that just further highlights the need to focus on data points outside of the constant stream of headlines, whether pro Trump or anti Trump, pro Iran or anti Iran, and look at what's actually happening in other markets that are maybe downstream of this or potentially orthogonal of this and flow that back to the decision tree that the US is going to be looking at over the next month or two.
- [08:46]
A
Yeah, I thought after having read the piece that the tidbit here, which you've highlighted a bit, I don't think the direct highlight, but some countries are unfreezing sanctioned assets, Iranian assets, to let things flow. And to your point, that does throw a wrench in the US and Western sanction regime. And it really highlights like when push comes to shove this rule based order that many people have talked about for decades and Trump specifically called out in his National Strategic or Security strategy letter last year, it definitely seems to be fading away. And this is yet another sort of data point that proves like, okay, this, the sanction regime that has existed, that's been dominated by the west seems to be dissolving in front of our eyes. And push is coming to shove, whether the US Likes it or not. The countries that are working with the IRGC right now need the oil. I thought two names on the list and they've made the headlines the last couple of weeks. But I think this report verified. I mean, Japan and France are essentially forced to play ball. They're deciding, hey, we need this oil more than we need the sort of social cachet with, with the United States right now. We need to make sure that our systems are operating and our economy can actually function. And so you're seeing the sort of physical reality enter into the realm of geopolitics and reshuffling of the board in real time. And you posted this as well. But obviously, again, Leroy Jenkins on Easter, Trump is praising Allah and saying that we're going to blow up power plants. Open the fucking straight, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Very Caligula esque, as some were describing yesterday. I was not on Twitter much, but I did catch this. Bitcoin reacted to this. Who knows if it reacted to this? But coincidentally, after this true social post was sent out, bitcoin rallied a bit.
- [10:45]
B
Yeah, my guy's out here having a normal one on Easter morning with this tweet and I threw the bitcoin chart in there just because I think it's an interesting direction for it to move. This is the 24 hours after this tweet was posted. So do I think it was popping on this? Exactly. No. But this is the kind thing that I think my knee jerk would have been like, okay, we're going to dump another couple grand on a comment like that. And we kind of did the opposite even over the weekend on kind of a liquidity constrained time when most markets aren't open. So an interesting counterfactual data point. We'll see if it ultimately means anything. But yeah, I think it gets to the same Leroy Jenkins point we've been talking about. And I think that maybe we can jump into from there a couple slides down some of the physical world realities that you're talking about that I highlighted in the piece or in the newsletter this week. And we've mentioned this before on show, but just a couple to flag. You're really starting to see headlines about helium production shortages biting. This is a key input to, among other things, semiconductor manufacturing, which is among the most sensitive perhaps the most sensitive advanced manufacturing industry in the world right now. The split there is basically a huge amount from Qatar. A lot of that's offline now with all the damage to infrastructure in the Gulf. And that leaves basically the US in pole position to kind of control flows of this critical input. And you also see, interestingly this past week, Qatar and Exxon's joint venture to produce LNG 18 million metric tons per year, which would more than offset the amount that's currently offline as a result of the attacks on Qatar's facilities in the Gulf. That's coming online. And interestingly, that's not a replacement facility in the Middle east or somewhere else, it's in Texas. It's a 70:30 joint venture between Qatar Energy and Exxon. And headlines I've seen suggest that's going to ramp up to full capacity over the next 12 months, roughly. So we'll see if that happens. But just interestingly, highlighting the cards to some extent that the US does have to play on the physical production and reality side definitely does not mean that the US Is out of the woods. But things like this are, I think, going to be increasingly important to watch as supply chains fracture and basic materials that a lot of us either took for granted or had never really heard of or thought of before become the poles along which this fight progresses and along which countries kind of try to exercise leverage on one another. And the next slide shows the same thing in kind of different ways. These are not, again, things to necessarily trade on or to construct a thesis on, but I think they're all, collectively, they form an interesting mosaic for what the US Might be trying to do, tbd, whether they can. But our friends to the north in the province of Canada that produces most of Canada's oil, Alberta, seem to be on a separatist path, a secessionist path that is not going away. And they've got apparently the required signatures now to launch a referendum vote on starting a separation process. That vote will take place in October. And it seems like there's a decent amount of linkage, perhaps engineered by the CIA, perhaps not, but a decent amount of linkage between Alberta separatists and the Trump administration. And on the rare earth side, you see on the right hand side a couple headlines from last week about the US Kind of moving aggressively to gain some control over some key rare earth materials. A key question here is still the refining of these things. They're actually not that rare in terms of deposits, but actually getting them refined is a very messy and difficult process that China has gladly taken up over the last 20 years as the west was collectively casting out all dirty industries. So moving in a strategically relevant direction. Still very much first or second inning on those things, but collectively I just think those are key data points to be watching things like that outside of the headlines, outside of Trump tweets, those are the types of things that I think are forming the base that we should be watching more and more closely and are kind of telling you collectively as a mosaic where things might be going over the next 12 months.
- [14:52]
A
Add a few tallies to the 4D chess column right there. Again, that's why I love doing this show with you every Monday, because I think you do a good job of zooming out and really trying to filter. And I think these are definitely things that make me believe, okay, maybe there is a plan here. Despite what Trump may be posting on any given day or any given hour of any given day, these are strategic moves to re industrialize and create alliances. Whether it's in Africa, Latin America, or soon to be our neighbors to the north Alberta, it's always been on my mind. There's so much potential there. The sort of thirst for freedom that exists in that particular province is palpable. Knowing some Albertans ourselves, having one very staunch Albertan in the portfolio and Steve Barber in Upstream Data, I'm cheering for them. If I'm being honest, I'm letting my bias shine through here, but I think we risk becoming too much of a macro geopolitical think tank podcast. And so I think we should shift to some bitcoin specific topics. And I think the big one last week was the reemergence of quantum fud. It seems like that is re emerging at a quickened pace as new papers are released. And obviously I'm sure most of you know, Google released a paper last week that basically cited or basically claimed that the amount of theoretical or the amount of logical theoretically the amount of logical qubits that would be needed to use Shor Snigger algorithm to break ECDSA was reduced significantly. And this led many of the quantum pannikins to come out and say that Bitcoin needs to upgrade as quickly as possible to be quantum resistant because it seems like a cryptographically relevant quantum computer may be on the horizon. And so this started a lot of conversation. Last week I had Brandon Black, also known as Rearing Code, on the TFTC podcast. That episode dropped Saturday morning and we tried to do our best to do a methodical walkthrough of the spectrum of the quantum debate as it relates to Bitcoin and where we actually sit, I will put a hand up and say, obviously I think Brandon and I are a bit biased towards the. It's not as big of a worry as many are making it out to be, but I think we tried to cover all the bases there. What are your thoughts on the quantum debate?
- [17:19]
B
Yeah, I mean it's funny as it relates to the theme of what can we actually know, what can we actually reasonably assess. That's why I titled the essay this week Schrodinger's Regime Change and said the subtitle was like a superposition of hot takes because you very much have that on the geopolitical macro scale of what's actually happening. Is there a plan? Is there not a plan? Is Iran almost as strong as it ever been or are they about to fall? Both of those things are the case at once. There's kind of a superposition as well of takes on quantum where we are almost in the there and bitcoin's cooked or this is literally never going to happen and it's all fairy dust and anyone thinking about it is completely wasting their time. I think your episode with Brandon did a really good job of. He's very skeptical of the claims here. I think I would put myself in that camp as well. But I think you guys did a balanced job of walking through the puts and takes and the pros and cons and different cases that one could make as well as realistic mitigation strategies. And I recommend people go listen to that. And I also do recommend people take as some as middle of the road an approach as is possible here generally. I think both of those polls that I mentioned are probably not the place you want to be. Even though I would probably say if you gunned in my head, I would make the bet that if you said is it ever going to happen? Is a CRQC ever actually going to be instantiated in physical reality? I would probably still shade to know. That said, you made a really good point, I think over the weekend that we should already be assuming that ECDSA is not going to last forever. Right? There are always advancements in cryptography, advancements in technology. You never want to short human ingenuity, especially when there's, you know, value involved in any kind of system that is monetary in nature or that has an incentive to be. To. To be attacked. You know, whether that's Bitcoin or any other system that depends on ECDSA or RSA or any other cryptographic scheme. So generally I think it makes sense to have some level of, you know, preparation, some level of understanding of the problem space. I think it's important for people to look who see the scary headlines from, from Google and Orat to like Brandon recommended kind of think through. There's the mathematical and theoretical side of things and then there's the actual physical reality like we talked about earlier with other elements of the world, the physical reality of bringing this into being. And the advancements on the latter have not been nearly as impressive as the advancements on the former of kind of the theory of how this could work on a machine that does not exist. But regardless of what your ultimate view on all that is, I think the thing that you can most clearly anchor to as something that's observable is that there has been a lot of work done on by bitcoin devs and people who are generally just around the cryptography space. I listed a bunch of them in the newsletter that people can go back and look at. Jonas Nick had a proposal just last week, coincidentally timed I think on the same day as these papers dropped for he's calling it shrimps and you can just go look at what that involves. But basically it would be post quantum signatures on Bitcoin that are substantially smaller in terms of data requirement than prior proposals. That's irrelevant trade off for us to think through as we add any novel cryptography to Bitcoin the way that heavier signatures to have quantum security might affect throughput. So that's one of the trade offs to think about another big one. The last thing I'll say that I think people need to always keep in mind with this or any other situation is we as humans naturally have action bias toward any problem. I think we all saw that, especially during COVID But you see it during any kind of crisis event. The impulse is to do something, just literally do anything. And oftentimes it's very easy to forget that doing something is not itself riskless and can carry, especially if the thing that you do is very rushed in nature and done in a sense of panic or false urgency that can carry its own downsides that need to be thought through. And I've said this elsewhere and I think you said it too, but if I were a state actor and I wanted to disrupt Bitcoin, one of the things that I would definitely do would be to engineer some sort of panic state that would make people add untested novel cryptography to Bitcoin, right? And make people rely on that and potentially have the possibility for backdoors that are undiscovered due to being untested or not tested sufficiently. So not at all saying that that's my base case for what is happening here, not attributing any bad faith to anyone who is involved in quantum projects or talking about this on Twitter or elsewhere, but simply just stating that's an example of an unintended consequence, a potential downside that needs to be thought through through as we look to kind of restrain our action bias and just approach things from as sober a lens as possible.
- [22:02]
A
Yeah, completely agree there. I would just add, Just to clarify, to me, you referenced the tweet I sent out, but I think, and again, I'm not a quantum physicist, I'm not a cryptographer, but from what I can gather, the theoretical side of quantum computing is advancing at a rapid clip, which is great. You know, some of the smartest people in the world working on these theoretical physics problems and they're making strong advancements, but the physical applied physics side of things just hasn't made the same advances. And again, Brandon said it during our conversation, there hasn't even been one sort of standardized quantum computer that you could benchmark to itself that has made progress consistently over a certain period of time. And the way he put it is until you see one standard set and being iterated on and improved at a consistent pace, then there it seems like you're panicking for for no reason the just a steel man it or to be fair to both sides, the other side will say, well we're not going to get the warnings that these advancements on the physical applied side are being made and Q day is coming faster. So you have to prepare now. And I'm not convinced. I think methodical, consistent progress towards a solution. Like you said, many Bitcoin developers think on a long enough timeline ECDSA will be broken eventually. And they've already been preparing for new cryptographic signature schemes that we will transition to. You mentioned Jonas Nick's Shrimps paper that he released. I think one sort of point of context I want to add to that. It was an iteration on Shrinks plus, which was a solution that Jonas Nick and Mikhail Kudinov came up with through the research of hash based signature schemes that could be added to Bitcoin to make it quantum resistant. They released that paper in December. So here we are beginning of April, end of March, a quarter later. Jonas has already sort of advanced that primitive idea and made it more efficient. And so the progress is being made on the research side of what we need to do to upgrade Bitcoin signature scheme for apartment a world in which ECDSA is broken or a world in which quantum computers manifest, exist and are scalable and efficient. And so yeah, I think a level headed approach to this is the best way. And another thing, last thing I'll say on this, when you're out there and you're not immersed in this debate and you're an outside observer looking at this, and you have Chamath Pala Papitia, you have Nick Carter and others saying we need to do this now and they're saying Bitcoin developers need to get together and solve this problem. I think think one thing to understand is that not every bitcoin developer is qualified or equipped to solve this specific problem. There's many different parts of the Bitcoin stack, people working on the P2P layer, initial block download, networking between nodes, wallet, GUIs, all that. And there is a subset of a subset of Bitcoin developers that really understand the cryptography. And then within that subset of a subset, a subset that understands how to make it quantum resistant. So finger wagging at every bitcoin developer and saying do something is completely unproductive because not every Bitcoin developer is focused on this specific part of the Bitcoin stack. The people who are, are making progress.
- [25:13]
B
Yeah, I mean the last thing I'll say is there's a, to that point, there's a concept called a load bearing Internet person. Someone who's just like 10,000x the median engineer or the median computer scientist on questions of the design of the Internet and the Internet person protocol. I think it's very much like a similar concept here of a load bearing cryptography person. I mean, there are literally probably under 50 people in the world who are truly masters of this domain, or maybe under a thousand. I don't know. However you would frame it. But to the extent that you think that that's a risk to Bitcoin, it's also a risk to every digital system that we have in the world that there are so few people who are really equipped to think through all this stuff. But it's worth noting, as you just asked yourself to that point, why isn't this solved? Well, it's a very thorny that not everyone in the world, or even a majority of people who are deeply involved in Bitcoin, are really qualified to weigh in on and opine on. So all the more reason then, right, to be methodical about it and to make sure that nothing is getting kind of rushed or pushed faster than it needs to go, particularly given some of the questions that you highlighted around the actual physical scaling progress of getting the stuff out into real world. So, yeah, again, avoid the black boxes. Focus on what you can actually analyze and get your hands around. And try not to weigh in on the stuff that's borderline impossible to really, really figure out.
- [26:31]
A
Yeah. And to flip the frame there. That the fact that Bitcoin, the Bitcoin project has a few of these individuals who are qualified and equipped to do this work is high signal that it is a very valuable protocol. The fact that it's able to attract that type of talent that can actually solve these problems is an endorsement in and of itself. Yeah.
- [26:51]
B
Cosign.
- [26:52]
A
All right, see you guys next week.