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THE Bitcoin Podcast
SBR INEVITABILITY, $1M BTC FOMO, & 0.2% BITCOIN ADOPTION | Jesse Myers (Croesus)
01:32:52
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- [00:00]
Jesse
Any bitcoiner who is mad that governments are getting involved in bitcoin was always being unrealistic about what the path of maturation is for a nascent store value asset. The path to becoming the world's preferred store value asset goes through institutions and government. There's no way to become the preferred store of value asset without becoming part of how governments and institutions manage their assets and allocate capital. But it also will accelerate the game theory of bitcoin adoption globally in ways that I think are hard to appreciate at the moment because every country on earth saw what Trump just put into policy, and every company in the US and globally also saw that. Every wealthy individual also saw that the Overton Window has shifted dramatically here where it legitimized bitcoin as an asset. How it's going to go is you're going to get FOMO because you're going to watch the price of bitcoin go to a million dollars. At some point along the way, you're going to wish you owned some and then it's going to keep going up without you. And then you're going to say, okay, I should fucking own some.
- [01:19]
Walker
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin podcast. Bitcoin continues to create new blocks every 10 minutes and the value of one bitcoin is still one bitcoin. If you are listening to this right now, remember you are still early. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast@primal.net Titcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search WalkerAmerica and find this podcast on X and Instagram. Itcoin podcast. Head to the show notes for sponsor links. Head to substack.comwalkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you and head to bitcoin podcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this bitcoin talk.
- [02:17]
Unknown
If you come out of this discussion and spin up a Nostr end pub, I would be very pleased. And then I can go ahead and when I blast this out, I can tag you. It'll be a wonderful journey. Like we're still early to bitcoin. We are still early to Nostr. You've got time.
- [02:35]
Jesse
I buy it that that's the future of social media, but slightly hot take. I feel like my value, the service I provide to people new to bitcoin is best on Twitter because people who are deep into bitcoin go to Nostr and typically it's in that direction So I feel like if I'm going to have any value to help orange pill people, it's probably on Twitter.
- [03:06]
Unknown
I definitely, I will not disagree with that point as it comes to orange pilling at a large scale. I know of a number of cases on Noster where people had not had any knowledge of bitcoin prior to just seeing Jack or Edward Snowden post about this new open protocol for social media. They joined it, found out, what are these people talking about? Zapping. They're zapping bitcoin. What is this? They went down that rabbit hole through that. Now, most of the people to your point that are have made their way to Nostr, the majority are probably already bitcoiners, but I think we're seeing an increasing number from not just the US but like around the world who are not bitcoiners. Come on, Nostr realize, wow, this bitcoin lightning network thing is kind of cool. And then start going down that path. But you, so you also, and this is like, correct me if I'm wrong here in terms of orange pilly normies. I seem to remember when you doxxed yourself and were like, I'm going to start going full blast on like LinkedIn.
- [04:05]
Walker
Under my own name.
- [04:07]
Unknown
Am I remembering that correctly? That that's kind of how that went down?
- [04:11]
Jesse
Yeah. Wow. So that was about two and a half years ago. I decided that I should come out from Croesus, which was my Nim, and put a face to the, to the, to the account and use my name. And the thought there was. Well, it was, it was kind of twofold. It was one. I think it's more effective to reach people as a, as a person. You know, in bitcoin culture it's fine to, to be a nim, but I think you build trust with pre coiners faster if you're a person. And the other part was I felt that there was a moment in time there, an opportunity to start something in bitcoin, which I ended up doing and that I was going to need to be a person to do that. So that was kind of the twofold logic there.
- [05:13]
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, I remember thinking like, oh, that's like very brave of you to go on LinkedIn and do this because I have to imagine, I don't even know if I still have a LinkedIn account, but I have to imagine it's kind of like Facebook or Instagram where people are like, it's very anti bitcoin. Is that the vibe you get? Because like I go on, I started an Instagram account for this, this podcast and like, I'll just see some of the comments on there. I've not made a plunge and created a Facebook account for it yet. I don't think I can bring myself to do that. But like you, you realize how much even on X, the algorithm puts you in a bit of a bubble where you're kind of just talking to bitcoiners, people are agreeing with you. You think that all this FUD must be behind us, like we must have educated everyone, right? And then you realize, oh God, no. The vast majority of people have no idea what's going on. It's. It's kind of like it's good to remind yourself.
- [06:10]
Jesse
Yeah, I completely agree. I tried posting on LinkedIn for a while and found it too painful really and sort of stopped using the platform. And I, you know, I don't really understand how the inner workings of it at this point. I've spent so much time on Twitter, I feel like I understand it pretty well. And LinkedIn is just so full of shit basically too.
- [06:37]
Unknown
It really is like, I feel like it's something that people feel like they need to do. Like it's a, it's like extremely, it's like hyper fiat, you know, it's just like, you know, people getting social credit credentialism scores and trying to boast about their various accomplishments, which like, is fine to be proud of those but like I love the, the memes that you'll see on Twitter about, you know, like, basically like, okay, you know, my, you know, my four year old son like broke their leg today. Here's what that taught me about corporate finance. You know, just like, what are we even talking about here? But man, stoked to have you on the show. A lot of stuff going on right now that I wanted to dig into with you. Can we start out though? Like for people who do not know you, can you just give a little bit of a.
- [07:24]
Walker
Who are you?
- [07:25]
Unknown
How did you get here today? What brought you down this path?
- [07:29]
Jesse
Yeah, okay, the quick version. Yeah, so I, I guess my background is I'm a, I'm a yuppie elite. Um, I was a management consultant at, at one of the, the best firms. Bain and company went and got my MBA at Stanford. One of the best business schools. You know, learned, learned business, learned finance, learned money through these like blue chip environments and it was all Keynesian. No mention of Austrian economics ever. Maybe as a, the butt of a joke. And you know, I was deeply steeped in that. At business school I got interested in ethereum because I heard it about it in a few places at Stanford. And then I kind of stumbled down the ethereum path, you know, into altcoins more broadly, totally bypassing bitcoin. And this was 2016, and thought I was really onto something in 2017 when that thesis was working great. And then I got my ass handed to me in 2018 in the bear market there. That hammered everything that wasn't bitcoin. And that forced me to go figure out okay, shit. Well, taking a step back, I had started an altcoin hedge fund in 2017 and pretty much at the top. And so then I got my ass handed to me and then my investors were along for the ride. So it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. Year and a half there and I had to figure out like, what was I missing? Why was I wrong about altcoins? Why was bitcoin doing better? What's here that I'm wrong about? And that led me to, you know, a series of really it was a couple books in sequence that I read that cracked it open for me of the Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth and then Ray Dalio's Changing World Order, which kind of, he doesn't, you know, he's not a bitcoiner, but it sets the tone for like the, you know, the world reserve currency changes every hundred years or so. And his sort of conclusion is China is ascendant. And that's a fine conclusion because he's not a bitcoiner. But once you understand bitcoin, you start to think the Internet is ascendant. And so like an Internet native world reserve currency makes more sense than anything else. So those two. And then bullish case for bitcoin, just an article back then. And then finally I was ready for the bitcoin standard and that just undid my mba. So totally replaced my Stanford MBA in one book. And I hated parts of it. You know, it was really hard to get through. And it made me. There were a lot of things I had to wrestle with because my existing worldview was non compatible with some of the things that safe was arguing. And I had to get through that dissonance and realize that he was right about everything. And that was the beginning of my sort of bitcoin era in bitcoin epiphany. And as you know, and probably everyone listening to this, that, you know, the first six to 12 months that you're in that, you know, new landscape, it's euphoric, it's exhilarating, it's, you know, all you want to do is talk about bitcoin and how, like, you want to wake up everybody around you because it's so obvious now all of a sudden to you. And, you know, I went through that process and, and everyone in my world started to, you know, ignore me or not want to talk to me or brush me off or, you know, I was, I was going crazy, right? I was going off the deep end. And that led me to some of my first contributions to bitcoin. So I started using my, my management consulting toolkit, which is really like crunching numbers in Excel and then turn the. Turning that into graphics in PowerPoint to present the insights. So I did that for a variety of topics around Bitcoin. And then I wrote why the Yuppie Elite Dismissed Bitcoin, which is really about my personal journey and the frustrations I was facing with my friend group who continued to ignore bitcoin. And then, yeah, I've just been contributing to bitcoin ever since. And yeah, that one resonated with people a lot. And some of the other articles I've written since have also really struck a chord with people for various reasons. And then the other big thing I have been pleased to make a bit of a mark with was I put out my analysis of bitcoin's full potential valuation. And Michael Saylor kind of took that model and adopted that framework as his own, um, valuation framework, and then added to it and adjusted some assumptions, which is what I wanted people to do with it. So, so yeah, you, you know, you probably see Michael Saylor present some of my slides. Um, and that's been really cool too.
- [13:15]
Unknown
It's quite a journey. I. I'm going to link the yuppie elite piece in the show Notes here for anyone who hasn't read it. But can you kind of talk through the, the core thesis there? Because that was like, I read that pretty early in my own bitcoin journey and it just kind of really perfectly encapsulated what I was feeling when talking. Like, I have a lot of, like, all my buddies from college are in. They work for very large banks. They work in some sort of high corporate finance. They're, you know, they're. They are at that level, right? And, you know, and it's like, I love these guys. I wanted them to try and go down this bitcoin rabbit hole some now, years later, have begun to. But at the time I was just like, really frustrated with it. Like, I know these guys are smart. Like, why are they missing this? I read your article and I'm kind Of like, ah, okay, so can you walk through kind of that core thesis of that a little bit? Because I just think it's like, it's really powerful.
- [14:17]
Jesse
Yeah. So I guess the starting point for it was back in 2020, there was a meme going around that was like people on the IQ bell curve. On the far end, the very smart people and the very stupid people are both bullish on bitcoin. And the people in the middle are like, well, actually, here's why it won't work. And that was a popular meme, but. And it scratches some itch, like it speaks to some part of, of the truth. But you know, there I was with my Stanford MBA friends, knowing that they're all like on the super smart extreme end of the spectrum and none of them are into bitcoin. They all are the most dismissive people in my life. So, you know, I thought about that for quite a while and there's something else here as well. And I kind of realized that the main difference between my Stanford MBA friends and the bitcoiners that I was interacting with on Twitter was it was, there was a political rift between them, but it was really like a worldview rift. And it seemed to be more about like, what do you believe? Like, who do you, what sources of information do you trust? What do you think about the establishment narrative of this or that? And the bitcoiners all distrust, very disagreeable distrust, establishment narratives and what you're told to believe and yada yada. And my MBA friends kind of just party line on most topics, certainly political topics. And so it started to crystallize to me that the difference is one of trust and trust in the system, trust in what you're being told by authority. And that MBAs, the uppie elites, as I characterize them to sort of include, like doctors and intelligentsia in general. You know, they're high intelligence, but high trust. And then bitcoiners are high intelligence, but very low trust. So they're kind of the two extreme corners of a two by two matrix. And I centered the article around that kind of that insight and teasing out what secondary effects come from that. Like, if that is a reasonable representation of the world, what kind of second, second order conclusions can you draw from that? And it does kind of line up with how I experience bitcoin and, and my yuppie elite reactions to bitcoin. And then, you know, the, the point of it too is to point out that, you know, that people who have invested so much time and energy in the system are not very quick to question the system and to say, you know what, I've spent my whole career in business, in finance, going to the best schools, learning from the best professors, and all of that's wrong. And these guys on the Internet are right. So I think that's a big part of why the more credentialed a person is in business and finance, the less likely historically they have been to consider Bitcoin on its own merits.
- [18:00]
Unknown
I am definitely not a trader.
- [18:01]
Walker
I'm trying to hold my Bitcoin for the long term.
- [18:04]
Unknown
And if you're like me, you need.
- [18:05]
Walker
To make sure you keep that bitcoin safe by going to Bitbox Swiss Walker and using the promo code walker for 5% off the fully open source Bitcoin only Bitbox 02 hardware wallet. Then get your bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody.
- [18:23]
Unknown
Bitcoin is chopsolidating, but we have companies, nation states and a whole lot of plebs like you and me who are.
- [18:30]
Walker
Stacking harder than ever.
- [18:32]
Unknown
So it's going to keep ripping higher.
- [18:34]
Walker
But now is the best time for you to get your security locked down tight with Bitbox Plus.
- [18:40]
Unknown
And I can't emphasize this enough, the Bitbox 02 is just easy as hell to use. Whether you're brand new to bitcoin. It's your first time setting up a.
- [18:47]
Walker
Hardware wallet so you're a little bit nervous. It's understandable. Or you are a well seasoned psychopath. You will have no problem with the.
- [18:53]
Unknown
Bitbox and again, it's fully open source and bitcoin only. But you don't have to trust me.
- [18:59]
Walker
You can go and verify that for yourself on their GitHub. When you go to Bitbox Swiss Slash.
- [19:05]
Unknown
Walker and use the promo code Walker.
- [19:07]
Walker
Not only do you get 5% off.
- [19:09]
Unknown
But you also help support this podcast. So thank you.
- [19:12]
Walker
It continues to blow my mind that.
- [19:14]
Unknown
There are bitcoiners out there who are.
- [19:15]
Walker
Not yet on Nostr.
- [19:17]
Unknown
Seriously, what are you doing?
- [19:18]
Walker
Just like you shouldn't need to ask permission to use your money, you shouldn't need to ask permission to speak freely or have control of your own account. But that is exactly what you are doing. If you are still trusting centralized social media platforms on Nostr, you can't be censored, you can't be banned, and you can't be deboosted for saying words that.
- [19:37]
Unknown
Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk don't like like.
- [19:39]
Walker
And honestly, the vibes are just better on nostr. Plus Nostr has Bitcoin payments built in. So when you post a meme, a.
- [19:46]
Unknown
Spicy hot take, or just a photo of your steak, people will zap you.
- [19:50]
Walker
Bitcoin to show you they like it and find your content valuable. And if you are a content creator, you can start monetizing your work immediately on Nostr. Unlike on X, YouTube or literally any other centralized platform where you have to hit engagement thresholds and then kyc yourself.
- [20:06]
Unknown
You can find me on Nostr by.
- [20:08]
Walker
Going to primal.netwalker and you can find this podcast on Nostr@primal.net Titcoin Primal also has a built in bitcoin wallet. So you can literally get zapped by people for your posts. Then go use those sats to buy a coffee or do whatever you want all from the same app. Search for Primal in the app store, go to primal.net or choose any of the hundreds of other Nostr apps that are out there, because you can freely switch between any of them anytime you want. So come join the largest bitcoin circular economy in the world and start zapping sats on Noster.
- [20:45]
Unknown
I think it's, it's such a good point. It's, it's kind of like an intellectual sunk cost bias where, whereby, okay, I've spent so much, I've sunk so much into this, my education, into my worldview, into just my identity as like, this is who I am. What you're trying to tell me right now completely throws that on its head. It completely flips the script. And to your point, reading the bitcoin standard, I give you credit for coming from that world and then being able to kind of go through the process of saying, shit, I was probably wrong about a lot of this. Not necessarily through a fault of your own. Just because this is the pipeline that you came in on, this is the path you were on. It's natural that that pathway would develop these certain characteristics within you, certain worldview characteristics. But to then be able to shake that, we clearly see that's not very easy to do. Otherwise a lot more people would get bitcoin, right?
- [21:47]
Jesse
Yeah, it's not very easy to do. And I think there's an interesting thing there about every bitcoiner. It's a fun exercise to think about what are the reasons why you, you are here ahead of most people. Like, I think every single bitcoiner has a different set of characteristics that make them, you know, differentiated and open to bitcoin this early. And I think that's different for everybody. But you know, some of the commonalities are like you know, distrusting authority or you know, having been exposed to Austrian economics or libertarian ideology, these things help. For example, several early bitcoiners that I can think of spent some time in Argentina and saw the currency collapse fall out from that. Vijay Boyapadi has a, a story of watching his dad have to carry their family net worth in gold on a plane. I think going from India to Australia and wow, that's a formative experience. So anyway, I think each bitcoiner has their own unique characteristics and circumstances that made it so that they are possibly it was possible for them to get to bitcoin this early. For me, I think another element of it was like the reason that I made it faster than any of my classmates as far as I know, is I think the trauma of running a crypto hedge fund and being so wrong that I had to figure out, I had to be open to this crazy possibility that the bitcoin maximalists were right and I had to be willing to consider their view. It took me a couple years to get to that point of being so wrong that I was willing to consider my worldview being wrong, but finally got there. I think about in high school biology class we did like a lab where you, you basically trick bacteria to take up a gene, like a gene that makes them glow. And the way you do that is by heat shock. So you expose them to hot and then cold and hot and cold and it's so traumatic for them that they're like willing to take up some new DNA to try to survive. And, and you know, I think there's some similarities there.
- [24:39]
Unknown
Do you think, do you think that's the natural progression for everyone who, who starts out? Because granted there are some people who come into bitcoin and just ignore the whole crypto part. Like I think that's, that's, that's a smaller set. I think, I think most people in some way mess around like I know I did before I realized what are you doing? You are not a trader or anything like that. You are just losing here. You are losing in bitcoin terms. But do you think that's something that does that path? If you do start out with altcoins without a bitcoin only focus, does that path inevitably lead to bitcoin only just because you end up, maybe you win for a while, but finally you just get wrecked. Or there are some people, you think the folks in crypto VCs that are still able to come out on top because they're basically getting pre mined tokens and things like that do they just keep the gravy train running for themselves, but more and more of, let's say retail gets disillusioned.
- [25:47]
Jesse
Yeah, great question. I think for most people, you, you have to learn the lesson of why bitcoin only? And it's not something that we've grown up around and have the wisdom of some collection of experiences passed on to us. So it's all, we're super green and we get tricked by the marketing of, you can catch up to where you should have been because you should have gotten bitcoin earlier, but you didn't. But here's your opportunity. And it's just a siren song that is so tempting. And I think that there are people out there who have been in altcoins and remain in altcoins, and it's because they've done well. And that's either luck or having an edge. And I think that's having an edge is what all the insiders have. Like, if you're at multicoin capital and you're early to Solana and you become a Solana billionaire, which is sort of the story of those guys, then yeah, sure, altcoins make sense because you haven't been burned and it works great for you. So why the hell are the maximalists talking about bitcoin only? But that's, that's not economically feasible. It's. It's not reality. For it doesn't generalize to the population like most people. 99.9% of people really are better off with bitcoin only. And that lesson will, is. Is learned by everybody who goes through altcoins who doesn't have an edge. And, you know, I think most bitcoiners today had that experience of like going through altcoins, not having an edge, maybe doing well for a while, and then underperforming and then ending up with less bitcoin and then realizing, okay, I'm just going to stick to bitcoin and most, most of the world at the same time. Most of the world has yet to arrive to crypto at all, like bitcoin or crypto. And probably most of the world will go through some painful process as well. The way of pain through altcoins. What does give me hope, though, is that, you know, the more stories there are, the more collective wisdom there is of people's experiences of, you know, passing that on to others of just, just bitcoin. I think that that starts to become consensus as the, the, the number of people who share that perspective grows. And then those are the winners too. You know, like if, if just stacking sats and holding for 20 years is the winning strategy for, you know, the next 20 years. And so people who do that will be winning along the way and then they will be increasingly listened to finally because they have the winning strategy and it's working for them. And then everybody wants to copy that winning strategy. So, you know, I think that in 2017, everybody was going to get into altcoins and then now most people will get into altcoins and then hopefully five, ten years from now, the minority of people go through altcoins.
- [29:24]
Unknown
I mean, I certainly hope that that's the case and I think that that's a fair framework for looking at it. It's, it becomes, as time goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that if you just stack sats and stay humble, stack sats, hold bitcoin.
- [29:41]
Jesse
I love that phrase because it's go west, young man.
- [29:44]
Unknown
Yeah, shout out to Odell because it is a brilliant one. It's a very simple heuristic. Stay humble, stack sats. And that is going to be the best performing strategy over the long haul, unless you are an insider who manages to keep being an insider. And, you know, if you also have no qualms about the moral reprehensibility of knowing that you're screwing over, you know, thousands and thousands of people by dumping your insider tokens on retail, apparently a lot of people have no qualms about that whatsoever. So I guess that's a different story. But you know, it's interesting too, because we're seeing now at a, and this is just wild to say at a nation state level, we've seen now the United States government make a distinction very clearly between bitcoin and crypto. There's a strategic bitcoin reserve, there's a digital asset stockpile. One of them they have grounds to add to, in a budget neutral way, bitcoin. The other one they do not. And they also clarified that they won't sell bitcoin, but they will potentially sell the digital asset reserve. So I'd love to get your thoughts on this because I think first of all, it's just like, wow, what a surreal historic time to be alive. This is wild. Where do you fall on this good thing, bad thing, inevitable thing? How do you see this playing out?
- [31:14]
Jesse
Yeah, good thing and inevitable thing. Yeah, I definitely, I'm of the opinion that any bitcoiner who is mad that governments are getting involved in bitcoin was always being unrealistic about what the path of maturation is for a nascent store value asset. You know, the path to becoming the world's preferred store value asset goes through institutions and government. There's no way to become the preferred store value asset without becoming a part of how governments and institutions manage their assets and allocate capital. And so inevitable. I certainly didn't think it would happen this soon in the US I'm a little bit giddy about that. It's, it's kind of unbelievable that El Salvador is the first. And it makes sense why they, you know, with their particular circumstances, why they would be the first adopter. You know, having a, a leader with huge political mandate, not having their own currency that they print. I think that was very important for like, you know, you're not losing anything by, by allowing Bitcoin if you don't control the money printer anyway, so it made sense for them. But the US Is, you know, controls the world's reserve currency, so it's a little surprising to have them be kind of the second to adopt Bitcoin as, as a legitimate part of treasury strategy.
- [32:59]
Unknown
That's.
- [33:00]
Jesse
That's incredible. Yeah. And it's very much a good thing for Bitcoin overall because it's inevitable. But it also will accelerate the game theory of bitcoin adoption globally in ways that I think are hard to appreciate at the moment, because every country on earth saw what, what Trump just put into policy and, and every company in the US and globally also saw that. And, you know, every wealthy individual also saw that. And so Bitcoin has, the Overton window has shifted dramatically here where it's not a legitimized Bitcoin as a, as an asset. You know, the legal gray area that it has been plagued by before of like, you know, where does it fall in terms of regulatory stance? That's gone. You know, this is, this is a legit asset, and it's something that you need to get smart on and consider an allocation to, because if you have, if you, a few years ago, if you had a 0% allocation to Bitcoin, fine. But now if you have a 0% allocation to Bitcoin, the question is why? Why are you excluding that from your portfolio when a balanced portfolio would include that? And so the career risk has flipped for like a CIO for a pension or anything like that years ago, it would be crazy. It'd be career risk to consider Bitcoin as part of your portfolio. And now it's kind of the opposite.
- [34:57]
Unknown
It's essentially, at this point, seems like a breach of fiduciary duty, not to have some exposure to bitcoin, if you're managing other, like, to not have exposure to this seems incredibly risky at this point.
- [35:11]
Jesse
Yeah, we're not yet in fiduciary obligation.
- [35:15]
Unknown
Territory, but we're a little, A little loud. Yeah, I went a little.
- [35:18]
Jesse
We're certainly. That's, that's a scary phrase for a fund manager. Yeah. But we are in like, you have egg on your face if you don't know what you're talking about territory, which is, you know, just as good, perhaps even more effective in terms of getting people to warm up to something.
- [35:39]
Unknown
One point I want to just re. Emphasize is the, the inevitability point that you mentioned, because I think this part seems to get lost in.
- [35:48]
Walker
And I'm glad that bitcoiners have very.
- [35:50]
Unknown
Spirited debates about these things and you know, call, call each other out and try to point out hypocrisy where we can, like that's, that's good. That toxicity keeps us healthy. Right. It's, it's, it's a good immune response for the human side of the bitcoin network that I think we need to keep up. But what I think often gets missed is exactly what you said about, like, this is a natural step, you know, strategic bitcoin reserve, you know, treasury allocations. This is a natural step in a consequence of bitcoin winning. If bitcoin was failing, if bitcoin sucked, this wouldn't be happening. It's happening because bitcoin is winning, because bitcoin is succeeding, because it is becoming too obvious to ignore that you need bitcoin. And I think that people, it's not a question of should the government or should not the government hold this from a bitcoiner's perspective. It's just the government was always going to do this and every government will do this. If bitcoin was going to win, bitcoin is winning. So you should expect this. Winning feels a little weird. Maybe it feels like the people were fighting, you know, we were fighting against. Now they're, they're going to be holding it too. But like it's bitcoin's money for enemies. Right? That's kind of the whole thing. It's money. It doesn't care who you are. If you're a government, if you're a corporation, if you're an individual, everyone's free to use the bitcoin network. And it's like if we, we don't want that part to go away of bitcoin, that's kind of like a big deal about bitcoin. It's, you know, it's an amazing thing. So I appreciate you, you, you mentioning that because again, I think it's easy to get lost in the sauce a little bit.
- [37:28]
Jesse
Yeah, it's, I think about the hipsters a little bit here. Like, you know, 10, 10 years ago, hipster culture was big 15 years ago. And part of the, you know, the, the joke there is like, you know, hipsters like stuff before it's cool, right? And, and, and then once something becomes mainstream or big, like you, if you're a hipster, you have to stop liking it because too many people like it and you have to stay ahead of everybody. And that's sort of going to have to. That's going to. That's part of winning here, is, guess what? The entire world is going to start liking bitcoin, and that's the cost of winning, is your, Your. Your amazing little hipster world is going to go fully mainstream and it. And that'll. That'll kind of be sad. You know, like, bitcoin Twitter will eventually become mainstream and like, less edgy and less interesting, and then it'll stop existing, you know, far enough down the road, but that, you know, in exchange for that, early bitcoiners get rich. So I think that's the cost you have to be prepared to pay, and it's the cost of winning.
- [38:49]
Unknown
Do you think, does this, does the strategic bitcoin reserve mark sort of a demarcation and an inflection point in terms of, I mean, it's, it's. El Salvador was one thing.
- [39:01]
Walker
Right.
- [39:01]
Unknown
And I think that that's amazing. And it's. I've been back there a number of times now, most recently in January, and it's amazing to see how that country is developing. El Salvador and the United States are very different. The United States is the global superpower, One of the global superpowers. Is this kind of the mark between if you, you know, if you were buying bitcoin before and around this point, you're kind of one of the early adopters after this. Are you late Majority kind of. Where do you think we're at on that adoption curve? And does this mark a specific inflection point?
- [39:37]
Jesse
Yeah, that. So this is one of the first pieces of analysis I did for bitcoin, and we're way, way earlier than people typically think, because it doesn't feel possible that we can still be this early. But. But we are. There's. There's 4 million addresses on chain that have 0.1 or more Bitcoin in them. So that's, you know, that's a significant amount of savings, right? Like you've adopted bitcoin if you, let's say you've adopted bitcoin. If you have, I guess that's $8,000 in an address you control on chain. And then, you know, round that up for people who have bitcoin on, on exchanges. And, you know, like, there is the question of have you truly adopted bitcoin if you have left your bitcoin on exchange? Or like, it's just in microstrategy or an ETF. But sure, let's round up, call it 10 or 20 million people have some significant savings in bitcoin. They get it. But there's 8 billion people in the world, so you're still talking about, let's say 0.2% of the world has adopted bitcoin at this point in time, at that threshold that we've outlined. And that's super different from some of the numbers you see where you'll see the number of, like, oh, there's 200 million people have adopted bitcoin, but not really. What they're actually talking about is how many people have ever been a user of Coinbase and any other crypto exchange and maybe had $5 on Coinbase. And that's everybody. That's everybody in the US all my yuppie elite friends, they all have some tiny stash of crypto that they don't understand. And, you know, they're hoping that it's a lottery ticket, but that's not adoption of bitcoin. So true adoption of bitcoin, people who, people who get it and have shifted a material amount of savings into bitcoin is something like 20 million, which is, you know, 0.2% of the world. And in the classic Bell curve of technology adopters, the first two and a half percent is the innovators. That's the first category, two and a half percent. We're 0.2% into that, you know, by my math. So we're still in the very early stages of innovators, even though it feels like we're like crossing the chasm into, you know, from early adopters into early majority. But we're not, we're, we're way before that. We're still in innovators. And, you know, I think that people get excited about, like, try to, like, inflate those numbers about how many people have adopted bitcoin because. Because the industry, the crypto industry brought more broadly, wants to, you know, be taken Seriously. And look big. But, you know, from a bitcoin perspective, it does. Doesn't do us any. Any. It doesn't do us any good to inflate those numbers, because it's better to look at the reality and realize it's a lot earlier than people typically think. Because, you know, when you get that appropriate perspective, you realize, oh, shit, like, 99.8% of the world is still behind me, and that means that I can be stacking stats before all these people show up and bid up the. The price of bitcoin. So, yeah, that's my perspective on. On how early we are. It's way, way earlier than people typically.
- [43:21]
Unknown
Acknowledge, I think that it's such a hard thing to wrap your mind around, even speaking personally. And as somebody who has put a lot of time into this, so much time that I had to start a podcast about it. But this idea that I started stacking modestly in 2020 and started that journey down the rabbit hole, I'm still going on that journey.
- [43:47]
Jesse
But.
- [43:47]
Unknown
But at that point, you know, you see, I think it's very easy to look relative to the other people that you look up to or that you're, you know. You know, you see people that have been in since 2000, you know, a few from 2010, 11, 12, 13, and you're like, oh, my God, how can I possibly be early when these guys were buying bitcoin for, you know, a few dollars? Like, that's, you know, I'm. Yeah, I'm still earlier than some, but I can't be that early. But when you look at it from the global perspective, again, if we're in that bitcoin echo chamber of, like, these are the people you're seeing, this is what you're inundated with all the time. It's easy to forget that the overwhelming, vast, almost a rounding error of people own bitcoin at this point, that's basically what it comes down to, right? Which is just kind of like, it's.
- [44:34]
Walker
A very heartening thing, or it should be.
- [44:35]
Unknown
For anyone who stumbles across this and does not yet have bitcoin, you hear those numbers and it's like, oh, wow.
- [44:43]
Walker
I'm still really early.
- [44:44]
Unknown
But then it becomes a question of like, holy shit, if whatever we're at right now, 80 low 80 some thousand petrodollars, if that's really early, what does it look like when you actually get to that 2.5% of the end of the innovator phase and then the early adopter, what does that actually look like, for people, I think the numbers start to get really hard to wrap your head around.
- [45:10]
Jesse
Yeah, millions is what that starts to look like. Yeah, I love this topic. It's one of my favorite topics in bitcoin because I've written a couple articles about this to try to hit on this theme. And the overarching thing that always pops up for me is the trajectory of the American west, you know, and you asked, like, where are we in terms of demarcation right now? We're somewhere around the California gold rush, like 1849 for Bitcoin. You know, the Louisiana Purchase happened in 1803, suddenly opens up the west for westward expansion, and then Manifest Destiny sort of becomes the prevailing theme for the next hundred years for the US and at first it was mountain men exploring, and there was absolutely no infrastructure. And then the mountain men start to make, like, the very earliest infrastructure, trading posts and sort of trails. And that's like the cypherpunks, the super OG Bitcoiners who started Kraken and other companies like that. And that early infrastructure allows for early settlers to start moving across the country on the Oregon Trail and then the California Trail and the first few years of the Oregon Trail. If you got to Oregon, you were gifted 640 acres for every married couple of, like, prime farmland. And then a few years later, that was cut to 320, and then a few years later, it was cut to 160, and then they ended the program a few years after that. You had to come. You had to buy your land after that. And it's just a perfect analog for, you know, the experience of being early to bitcoin and then a little less early to bitcoin. The first pioneers to Oregon, like, half of them died. So you're taking a lot of risk. And if you got there, you got this huge reward. And then as time goes by, the frontier becomes de risked. Little by little, as infrastructure builds out and more and more, it becomes accessible to more and more people. And that means prices get bid up for land. And that's the story of the American west sort of developing as a frontier. And we're living through, I think, an analogous frontier development with bitcoin as the digital frontier. Digital real estate that is cheap still, but it was cheaper in the past. But I think people now who are in the 0.2% of adopters who have arrived already on the frontier will look back on this as the golden age when you could buy a ranch for cheap. You know, in bitcoin equivalent terms, you can you can, you can get to a whole coin. You know, like that's possible still. And it's probably not very accessible in a, you know, five, 10 years. It's probably unthinkable for most people.
- [48:45]
Unknown
I love the idea that in Oregon they literally had like a having schedule.
- [48:51]
Jesse
Yes.
- [48:51]
Unknown
Of land allocation. That's just kind of, that really is a perfect example there. And yeah, it is. I mean, I think the sentiment I've seen out there right now, and like, I get this because I haven't been in bitcoin that long, but I remember, you know, bitcoin after buying all the way to the 69k top, Bitcoin crashing down to like 16k, I think is where it bottomed out. Like, that was, that was rough.
- [49:18]
Jesse
That's very painful.
- [49:18]
Unknown
Yeah, it was, it was extremely painful. Like I was feeling like a genius feeling. And then all of a sudden I'm like, I'm a big dumb, dumb. I have those thoughts for a second. And then you kind of, you remember what you know and you reorient yourself and you look at it as an opportunity. But for people who are maybe just getting into bitcoin right now, like we're minting new class of 20, 25 bitcoiners. Right. From a news perspective, it's been a very positive start. If you're from an ngu, what should be bullish news perspective. But from a price action perspective for measuring in fiat petrodollars, it's perhaps been quite disappointing. And so I'm curious, do you see, like given everything you just said, given how early we are, given the inevitability of this nation state adoption that we're, that we're seeing, given the fact that there's 21 million Bitcoin and we can't print more, and there's what, 55 million millionaires like in the US alone, I think. Or no, not in the US globally, I think 55 million US maybe like 23 or something. So given all that, do you just view this as a massive asymmetric information problem where it's just people, majority people still just don't know what's going on?
- [50:42]
Jesse
Yes.
- [50:43]
Unknown
And is that where we're at right now?
- [50:45]
Jesse
Yeah, that's exactly how I would describe it. Bitcoin is just a massive information asymmetry. It really, it's an understanding asymmetry and it's hard to get over that. That's that whole worldview stuff. It's hard to really consider this radically inverted worldview from what everyone's accustomed to with you need 2% inflation sort of perspective. So right now, to me, in bitcoin, right now feels like it did in Q3, 2020. And that was, you know, I had just gotten very active contributing to bitcoin, was writing stuff and, and putting out a lot of analysis. And that was the time when Michael Saylor suddenly popped up on the scene. My first awareness of it was he suddenly was following me on Twitter and I was like, who's this guy? He was doing his homework and getting plugged into bitcoin Twitter, which is a badass way to approach it, by the way. He was just lurking and learning about bitcoin as he probably has some non account that he was doing his learning with. But yeah, and we had had the halving six months before that and Covid hit and they printed a bunch of money. Everyone was at home and the price of bitcoin was still 9k. And it was just so obvious that there was just a delay between reality and market price and that we were about to go a lot higher. And everybody in, you know, all the bitcoin maximalists seemed to. There was an energy around that at that time where it was like very clear that we were about to take off because the world had changed. You know, we had gone from, you know, from not having any company buying bitcoin, suddenly microstrategy, incorporating it as part of, you know, going to a bitcoin standard. And in large part because Saylor read the bitcoin standard and as he said, it was a good book. You know, totally, totally bet his company that he spent his life's work on. On this good book and the thesis of it. Yeah. And compare that time period and what was going on in that moment versus 2017 when the price was first at 9k and there was total lack of clarity. Bitcoin cash was trying to rip apart bitcoin. There was no corporate adoption and that next having had not yet occurred yet. So yeah. And so 2020, Q3, 2020 felt like it's just a matter of time until the market price is in the new reality. And that's an information and understanding asymmetry that we are privy to. And 99.8% of the world, then 99.95% of the world do not understand. So that that's. It feels like that right now because of the strategic bitcoin reserve and what that will do geopolitically and in terms of game theory for accumulating bitcoin all over the world. Just a matter of time now for another big Leg up.
- [54:49]
Unknown
Just going off of that kind of geopolitical game theory. How do you see this playing out? What is your thesis? As you correctly said earlier, the President of the United States, Donald Trump just issued an executive order saying that they're going to stock, have a strategic bitcoin reserve. They're going to look at budget neutral ways of getting more. You said this is going to the desk of every world leader. This is going to every investment manager. This is going to every wealthy person. A lot of us plebs also read this, you know, and how quickly do things start to move? Are there conversations happening, you think, in kind of, you know, in, in other equivalents of Oval offices around the world right now where people are saying, hold on, the US Is doing something here. Do we need to be doing something right now too? Like, is. Is that what you think? Like, is there some scrambling happening at this moment?
- [55:48]
Jesse
Yeah, I think so. I think there's probably quite a few countries who have had their eye on bitcoin but haven't felt a sense of urgency. And now there's probably some urgency. And the way I've thought about nation state adoption is I think RFK made this point at Miami two years ago. No, I was in Nashville. He, he spoke in Miami and then he, and then he added these points in Nashville. But he pointed out that the US has 19 of the world's gold. And if the US wants to match that, you know, that position that they enjoy being one of the largest, if not the largest holder of gold in the world with digital gold, well, then they have to accumulate. So what's 20%, 4 million? Bitcoin, that's the equivalent. And you better get started right. Like that's going to be very hard to find, first of all. And the price would go through the roof if they started to try to do that. What I took from that point was that this is an opportunity for every country on Earth, that if we're moving into a future state, a digital store of value neutral reserve currency, monetary regime for the world, this is your opportunity to get a good slice of that pie and better your position versus where you've been on the pecking order in terms of, you know, how much gold you control as a country. And I think that's probably especially relevant and motivating to like, Gulf countries in the Middle east, oil rich countries who have only become rich in the petrodollar era. And now here's your opportunity to jump a few pegs in terms of your geopolitical standing, because you could suddenly become a major player because you own a lot of bitcoin. That's very appealing. And then there's other countries who are sort of newly rich, like Singapore or, or, you know, a handful of others in the world. And so I think that it's probably very motivating to those players, like, here's your chance. Here's your chance to enter the digital future with, like, a disproportionate amount of the world's digital wealth. And so I think that's, that's how I see this playing out, is like that. That will drive accumulation by sovereign wealth funds quite, like, quietly behind doors. And it's probably, it's. It is definitely happening already that these players will be scooping up bitcoin whenever there's a 25 dip. I think that's kind of what we saw last year and, and are seeing right now, too. We went sideways for eight months last year, and anytime there was a 25% dip, suddenly there was a bunch of buyers who were happy to accumulate. You know, no idea who those buyers are, but it's, it's. It's weird to have that amount of stability in bitcoin historically. And I think that that probably speaks to, like, accumulation going on from, from big players. So I see that, like, continuing to play out. And, and then, you know, like, some of these are, some of these moves are public. Most of them are not public. You know, I've heard, I've heard the rumor. I'm pretty sure it's public, but at least I've heard the rumor that Abu Dhabi is, like, accumulating bitcoin and adding it to their sovereign wealth fund. You know, who does that inspire? You know, so now you've got El Salvador, Bhutan, Abu Dhabi, who's like, shit, I'm not going to get left out of that. And they're going to be the ones to announce next year that they quietly accumulated 100,000 bitcoin. We'll see.
- [60:28]
Unknown
I think your point about nations that are perhaps lower on the totem pole right now geopolitically seeing this as an opportunity to quickly elevate their status, especially if they're nations where, depending on the political power structure, they're able to move more quickly than somewhere like the United States can't move super quickly. I mean, again, I'm surprised and impressed with how quickly this strategic reserve executive order came out. But the executive order was probably never going to be. We're going to smash by, you know, a trillion dollars worth of bitcoin tomorrow just because that's you know, that's going to need to go through Congress like just in a nation like the U.S. now, not all nations function that way. And especially if you're, you know, like a Gulf country monarchy, you can certainly move a heck of a lot faster and deploy capital very quickly at your discretion. You know, just, just make the call like so it'll be really interesting to see. It feels like this next year and couple of years is just going to be kind of wild and we're at this weird calm before the storm place where bitcoin's chilling down in the 80k range. I don't know, maybe it'll stay there for a while. It doesn't feel like it's going to stay there for that long. And maybe we dump back to 58k. Who knows, maybe the prophecy will be fulfilled one more time before we go up from there. I, I would. As much as that would be painful, I would also kind of love that just because the 58k meme is just so strong. I don't know. I don't know if we end up going there.
- [62:14]
Jesse
Yeah, I agreed. Yeah, there's, and there's a lot of support at 70k because we have spent collectively like close to a year there between the tops in 2021 and, and then pretty much all of last year. So yeah, like there's not a lot of downside from here I think until, until from like a, you know, a game theory of markets perspective. People are like, well there's a lot of support here, so I'm going to buy. You know, we may have already even hit that by getting into the high 70s. Yeah, it, it feels, feels like a matter of time. It feels like, like a matter of time right now. And I think we will look back on, on like I look back on my, my impulse buys on Cash app in 2020 in the summer in Q3 where I was like getting rid of all of my dollars, the, the whatever dollars I had remaining, buying a hundred, a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin at a time and, and getting over a million sats for that. And you know, I remember being like this is just ridiculous. I, I shouldn't be getting this much bitcoin for $100. And I think that folks who are stacking sats right now will probably look back on those buys the way I look back on, on summer 2020.
- [63:43]
Unknown
Yeah, it's. Bitcoin is always feels expensive in the moment and then really, really cheap in retrospect. At least over a long enough time frame. Like you know, it felt very cheap at 16k and very, you know, after crashing from 69k. But that's a. That's a short time frame. Right. But I'm curious too, because, okay, nation states kind of aside, going back to Saylor there, I know you had a thread about this recently about the strike, the STRK and what's kind of going on there. And this feels like this news. I mean, it made the rounds in bitcoin Twitter. I feel like a lot of what Saylor is doing is even as much as he's on CNBC and everything else. Again, we're still very early, and it feels like a lot. The market hasn't really digested this. Can you kind of walk through what's going on with that and what it means, why it matters in a larger scale?
- [64:40]
Jesse
Yes, I think it's the most interesting story going on in global finance and certainly in public companies right now. Yeah, MicroStrategy Strategy has now figured out a new and better way to source money from the bond market and convert that value into bitcoin. That's the net of it. And what they've done is, you know, they've been issuing convertible notes and that it's a discrete process for each individual convertible note. You draft up the document, the proposal, you send it out to the market, you gauge demand, you set the pricing, you then sell to the buyers, and then, you know, you collect all that, all that money, and then you close the round and then you announce to shareholders all the details that have happened. And it's a process, and it takes weeks or months to do each individual one. And now they came up with this strike STRK preferred stock offering that is basically a repackaging of a convertible note structure that is perpetual and uncapped in terms of its upside, which are both improvements on prior convertible notes. And it makes it way easier for strategy to issue new convertible note debt, basically, and then take that money and buy bitcoin with it. And so they've said that they've created this program to do $21 billion of preferred stock offering, which is really convertible notes packaged as a stock. And side note, they will not stop at 21 billion. That's just them having some arbitrary and, of course, meaningful number that they chose as a starting round. And so I think that they will absolutely try to raise as much of that as they can, as fast as they can, as fast as the market will allow, will absorb and buy as much bitcoin as they can, and maybe it takes them a year to get through that 21 billion moving as fast as they can. And then they'll say, okay, great, we're going to double it. And then they'll just keep doing that. So the reason it's pretty damn appealing and very interesting is that this is convertible debt that issues a 8% dividend on a face value of $100 per share for STRK. So, and, and, and then the value of STRK trades on the market and right now it's trading below $100. So the, the actual yield of that to holders is if you buy it now, you're getting better than 8% annual dividend because that's, that's, it's $8 per share every year that's issued as a dividend. And if it's trading at $80 right now, now you're getting a 10 yield. And so you have a, it's, it's basically it's debt that pays 10% right now every year in perpetuity until it's exercised or retired. And it includes a call option. So if the stock price of MicroStrategy goes to $1,000 per share, then STRK owners can exercise a call option to convert their strk into MicroStrategy stock. So it's just upside there. You have an opportunity to convert to stock if those conditions are met. But until then you get paid 10% dividend, which is really like interest expense, but it's repackaged as a dividend here every year. And that's pretty irresistible to the bond market, the fixed income market, and also the convertible note aspect of the bond market. So they have no choice. Basically, like if you, if you're in fixed income, this new vehicle becomes so appealing that you have to start incorporating it into how you're allocating, I think, especially if the price trades down at all. So, you know, right now it's effectively a 10% dividend. If you buy now, if the price goes down a bit, maybe it's 12, 15% annual dividend. You can't not buy that if you're managing a fixed income portfolio. And what buying that amounts to is handing over your bond dollars to Saylor to convert into Bitcoin. Saylor and strategy has, has created this, it's a pump to pump capital out of the bond market and into Bitcoin. And this is just the latest and greatest improvement on that mechanism that MicroStrategy has been for some time and just keeps getting better at being a pump. And so this is a big upgrade, I think, for strategy as a pump of capital. From the bond market into bitcoin.
- [70:57]
Unknown
Is this the moment where all of the dividend hero bros on Twitter are finally like, oh wow, here's a high yield dividend stock. You know what, maybe this whole bitcoin thing's not so bad. Maybe I'll get myself some strk. Is this what finally brings the Dividend Bros around?
- [71:19]
Jesse
Maybe. I think, yeah. I think that this just broadens the appeal of what MicroStrategy was already doing. They were issuing convertible notes, I guess you would call them sort of private placement convertible notes where you'd have to be a big capital allocator on the buy side, I guess in the debt market to be aware of and have access to their convertible notes in the past. And now anybody can access, can hand over their dollars that they want to get, you know, that they think of as this is my fixed income allocation and you're going to hand over those dollars in exchange for STRK shares which pay this incredible dividend. But Saylor is going to take those dollars and buy bitcoin. So it just like greatly expands the, the, the portion of the bond market that Saylor now has access to entice away from holding U.S. treasuries and other stupid paper and now like attract away to a better bond that has all these incredible benefits and it happens to be powered by bitcoin.
- [72:55]
Unknown
You know, switching gears a little bit. I love that the name of your blog is Once in a Species because I think that's it reminds people of the importance of that and people should definitely check it's onceinaspecies.com. yeah, yes, it should definitely check that out. And you know, I feel that with everything we've discussed here, like we are so early to this. We also see like if you are even paying attention a little bit as a pre coiner, not a no coiner but a pre coiner because you'll get bitcoin eventually. There is so much happening like all at once. You know, Saylor's been doing his bitcoin strategy for a while. It's now accelerating. Other companies are jumping on board. The US has a strategic bitcoin reserve executive order. We're going to see other nation states jump on board and you know, already have, you know, Kingdom of Bhutan, maybe Abu Dhabi, El Salvador. There's a lot happening. How do you, if somebody is looking at all of this and still somehow isn't convinced, how do you convince them that this is a once in a species event? How do you, how do you bring somebody about to this? How do you make them realize like this is something that, that really does matter to you, that can help you, not just. It doesn't just help individuals, doesn't just help the, the OGs, doesn't just help nation states. Like this helps you and you need to pay attention.
- [74:28]
Jesse
Yeah, I don't think anybody's cracked that question. And I think that's part of my continuing frustration with the world I come from. It's hard to get through to people. I have started saying more recently that I can't convince you, only you can convince yourself. I can share with you information, but you know, you're going to make up your mind and you know that. I think that's been a kind of nice attack for myself personally, at least, because people are immediately, you know, they put up their wall and they expect you to convince them. And no, I, it's not how it's going to go. How it's going to go is you're going to get FOMO because you're going to watch the price of bitcoin go to a million dollars and at some point along the way you're going to wish you owned some and then it's going to keep going up without you and then you're going to say, okay, I should own some. And that's how it goes for everybody. Except, you know, the times, the scale is different for some people, you know, they thought about it at a dollar and then they bought at $10. And you know, for me, I, I thought about it in 2013 and missed it. And then I was like, oh, what's this new Ethereum thing? It's supposedly going to be better than bitcoin. All right, I don't want to miss that. And then I, you know, went through the way of paying through altcoins to end up with the amount of bitcoin that I have. You know, probably better to avoid that step. But you know, I think, I think the reality is that the number go up. Properties of bitcoin is what convinces people ultimately. And it convinces people by inducing pain, fomo, cognitive dissonance, doubt, self questioning, and then finally some degree of either through capitulation or through greed, okay, I'll buy some. And then you end up watching that portion of your portfolio outperform everything else with a ton of volatility along the way. And then people are on team bitcoin and then they start to learn about it in earnest and then, you know, they make it a bigger portion of their portfolio. So, you know, I think that's just the human nature of it. I. I don't think there's a great way to convince somebody of bitcoin. I think that the information that's available out there has gotten better. You know, like before 2018, there's. There wasn't the bullish case for bitcoin. There wasn't the price of tomorrow. There wasn't the bitcoin standard. Now we have a bunch more awesome bitcoin only books. And then, you know, the other information that people are receiving is all this social proofing from, from Wall street titans, but also from Trump and government and in general now. So, you know, everybody has their, like, activation barrier, their activation energy that you have to overcome before they're going to finally buy a little bit. And I think that the information out there and the social proofing lowers that threshold little by little, year by year, and until finally, you know, it's low enough that it can be cleared and then people start buying. So, you know, I wish there's a better answer. I wish there was a better way. But I think. I think that's just the reality of this asset and it's the opportunity still for people who have gotten over that barrier already. You still have time. And I think this is going to be a slow and painful process for the world. I don't think there's. I think things speed up and that's the nature of, you know, the early parts of an S curve, which is what this is. And that's what moving through the bell curve of technology adopters amounts to, an S curve of monetization. And the early portion of that is parabolic, and that's what we're going through. So it will accelerate and continue accelerating for 10, probably 20 years, and then it'll start to slow down into maturation after that. But it'll still be fast for quite a while. So, you know, it's going to be painful for people and it'll be slow for people to get on board. And all that matters is that every four years we onboard some incremental slice of that bell curve of technology adopters. And, you know, then the. That means we have a positive viral coefficient for the properties, the value of bitcoin. And that's all it takes. So, you know, I think, I think it will be slower than people hope. You know, like at any point in the last 16 years, people have thought that a lot. A large portion of bitcoin holders thought that there would be some magical moment in time soon where you'd have the God candle and the world would wake up all at once. And I don't think that's how this goes. I think it's a process of moving through the bell curve slowly.
- [80:21]
Unknown
I love the point that you made just about different people having different activations. And it just made me think of two of my very good friends who had basically kind of brushed off bitcoin every time I told them about it for a number of years. And then once they saw that, like, Trump was talking about it, they were like, oh, all right, cool. Yeah, I'm in. And I'm like, all right, you know, cool.
- [80:46]
Jesse
Chop liver over here. Walking.
- [80:47]
Unknown
Yeah, okay. You know, I, I, I, you know, fine. I'm, I'm happy that, you know, like, either way, I just wanted you guys to get some exposure. Great. But, you know, I probably should have just, just showed them this chart from your site because I think this is, and this is the one you were mentioning earlier in the show that Saylor has really picked up on as well. And I think this one is maybe slightly, this is a little bit older one just given bitcoin's market cap. But this is such a powerful, powerful visual to realize.
- [81:21]
Walker
Holy shit.
- [81:22]
Unknown
Like, bitcoin is tiny compared to the global pool of capital that's available. It's mind blowing.
- [81:30]
Jesse
That's. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, so this, this chart, yeah, was a few years ago that I made this. Bitcoin's now almost 2 trillion, call it 2 trillion. And still 0.2% of the world's assets, which, which goes hand in hand too, with that, you know, 99.8% of the world have, has not woken up to what bitcoin is. So checks out there. Yeah, this, this was part of the full potential valuation piece that. It's kind of the starting point that was missing. And I went through the exercise of trying to figure out, like, how much value is there in the world sitting in these different buckets and a piece together through a bunch of different data points. This, this view and that, that's what Saylor latched onto as, like a, as a great visual for setting the stage, I think, for, you know, how, how Bitcoin. This tells the story of, like, how early bitcoin is, but it also hints at how much capital sits in analog assets. And there's one digital asset on this page, and it's tiny because it's brand new. And the implication there is, well, will some of the analog capital osmotically flow into Bitcoin because it has superior properties and capital seeks out the best store of value over time? Once it understands what that is. So, yeah, it's been really cool to have Saylor use that and then build his whole Bitcoin24 valuation model on top of that, which I'm doing some analysis right now to try to shine a light on the assumptions and the math that he included in that Excel model which they put out, which is really deep and really cool. So if people are interested in that, you can find that probably. I don't know how soon you're releasing this episode, Walker, but might be on my Twitter already, so check that out.
- [83:49]
Unknown
Oh, all right. Yeah, Depending on when I get this out the door, I will link that as well. And I just realized I have multiple substacks and I just realized I wasn't subscribed on this one, so I'll have to throw you in to boost you out in there.
- [84:05]
Jesse
I haven't been posting a lot the last year or two, but I will start figuring out how to get that engine going again.
- [84:17]
Unknown
Yeah, it's, you know, I just, I love looking at that visual like, you know, pictures worth a thousand words. Right. And it's such a, it's such an incredible thing to look at that and just realize what a little, what a little. Even at 2 trillion. Because obviously those other pools of capital have inflated as well.
- [84:35]
Jesse
Yeah.
- [84:35]
Unknown
In, in the years since you first created that.
- [84:39]
Jesse
But it's, there was a, there's a visual metaphor from Trace Mayer. I don't know when he started saying this, but he talked about bitcoin as a blueberry that's infinitely inflatable and you can, and now we're going to be able to hook up the city water main of global capital to the blueberry and start pumping capital into this little blueberry and watch it expand. And I was thinking a little bit about that when I put that, that visual together because it, it does sort of paint that picture.
- [85:21]
Unknown
We are, it feels, feel very fortunate to exist at this moment and be aware. And if you are listening to this and you are aware and you have been staying humble hopefully and stacking sats like it's a, you know, good on you. Like you're still, you're ahead of 99 plus percent of the world, which is a wild thing to think about. Jesse, this has been, I want to be conscious of your time here. This has been absolutely fantastic. Where, where do you want to send people anything you want to shill besides the substack? I'll make sure to link your, your X account. I'm going to get you on Noster as Well, so I can link that as well, but where else do you want to send people?
- [86:02]
Jesse
Yeah, follow me on, on Twitter if you, if you haven't already. That's where I put out any new analysis. Yeah, Once in a Species.com is my blog also. And then we didn't even, we didn't even talk about On Ramp, but if people are interested in, if you got.
- [86:21]
Unknown
A couple of minutes. Yeah, please, like, sure, we can do that too.
- [86:26]
Jesse
Yeah, I love getting into like the classic bitcoin stuff.
- [86:30]
Unknown
So yeah, I got distracted. I had it on my list. All good, you know. Yeah, all good.
- [86:36]
Jesse
So I guess for, for people who aren't aware, On Ramp is, is a, it's a multi institution custody provider and multi institution custody is a variation of multi sig custody where in this format there's three keys, as with most multisig setups, but each of the keys are held by three separate institutions and the end user doesn't have to set up and maintain a key of their own. So in that way, multi institution custody removes the security and technical requirements of engaging in multisig for the end user and has some other benefits too of making inheritance quite seamless because there's no treasure map of what to do in the event that you die and where the key is located and all that. Instead, it's an easy legal process of. Okay, now there's a new beneficiary for the existing institutional key holders to engage with. Yeah, so, you know, that's, that's the project, the company that I've, we launched two years ago and have been growing ever since and, and yeah, it's a, it's a very exciting new part of how bitcoin custody is evolving. And I think, I think it's a, it's a, a great solution for a lot of the bell curve that is yet to arrive into bitcoin. And also I think a good idea for a lot of people who have all their eggs in one basket currently, you know, because you can have, you can put a portion of your stack in this custody and know that it has different risks and in my opinion, greatly mitigated risks versus, you know, a DIY multisig or even a collaborative custody multisig. And yeah, so that's kind of my overview of what it is and who it appeals to.
- [88:47]
Unknown
No, I love it because I think I am all about optionality for people. Give people as many. There's no one size fits all solution for people wanting to own bitcoin. And just because, you know, you or I Or somebody else may want to have a completely, you know, quote sovereign way of, of holding things. A lot of people do not care about that. And they want something that is, they can, that they know that they're not going to screw up because they don't trust themselves or they can't even figure out how to, you know, open up a PDF correctly or they click. They think every spam email is, and I'm not trying to disparage anyone, but you know, they like every spam email they think is a real thing and they're, you know, calling the customer support line that's, that's listed there. Like you need different options for different people. And so I think it's, it's really been cool to see just in the short time that I've been in Bitcoin, see kind of these different options across the board blossom from different collaborative, you know, collaborative multi sig to I know like what Anchor Watch is doing to what you guys at Onramp are doing. Like it's cool that there are so many different options popping up for people and they're each going to appeal to a different subset of users or to your point, even a very hardcore, you know, I want to hold my own keys type of person. Maybe they want to put some in a collab or a multi institutional custody specifically for inheritance so that if something happens, you know, like it's. I like options and I think we should have many more of them. So where can folks find that?
- [90:29]
Jesse
Yeah, if you're curious about that model, just want to get the overview of it. Check out onrampbitcoin.com and yeah, if you're interested in learning more about it, hit the schedule a consultation button and we'd be happy to talk you through it.
- [90:46]
Walker
Nice.
- [90:46]
Unknown
Well, Jesse, I want to thank you again for your time here. This was a blast. Anything else we didn't cover? You want to close with or did we. Did we do a pretty good job of run the gamut?
- [90:57]
Jesse
No, yeah, we covered the things I wanted to hit in terms of like where I really wanted to talk about how this feels like middle of 2020. And I think we, we got that point through. I think it's an exciting point in time where there is a lag between what bitcoiners know about the world and what the world has realized about bitcoin.
- [91:23]
Unknown
A great way to put it and I think a perfect note to end on. Jesse, really thank you for your time. Hope we can do this in person sometime. That would be fantastic. But really enjoyed this. And yeah, looking forward to seeing where things go in these, these next few months, years, decades. It's going to be a wild ride.
- [91:41]
Jesse
I agree. Thanks for having me, Walker.
- [91:43]
Unknown
Take care.
- [91:52]
Walker
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin Talk episode of the Bitcoin Podcast. Remember to subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening and share it with your friends, family and strangers on the Internet. Find me on noster@primal.net Walker and this podcast at primal.netcoin on X, YouTube and Rumble. Just search @walkermillion America and find this podcast on X and Instagram at Tcoin Podcast. Head to the Show Notes to grab sponsor links. Head to substack.com walkeramerica to get episodes emailed to you. And head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else. Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to the Bitcoin Podcast Podcast. Until next time, stay free.