How Much Bitcoin Do You Need To Retire? | Mitchell Askew

Summary

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The Mark Moss Show

Episode: "How Much Bitcoin Do You Need To Retire?" | Guest: Mitchell Askew

Date: June 24, 2026
Host: Mark Moss / Jake Roquet (interviewer for this episode)
Guest: Mitchell Askew (Blockware Solutions, author of "The Conservative Case for Bitcoin")

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the provocative topic of “How much Bitcoin do you need to retire?” and broadens into a robust conversation on retirement philosophy, Bitcoin’s role in generational wealth, macroeconomic trends, mining industry dynamics, quantum threats, and the intersection of Bitcoin policy and American geopolitics. Mitchell shares practical, technical, and philosophical insights—from myth-busting clickbait Bitcoin headlines to deconstructing national policy strategies and offering career advice for the Bitcoin-curious.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rethinking Retirement and Bitcoin Wealth

• Retirement as a Concept (04:05, 05:46)

  • Mitchell challenges the traditional notion of retirement.

    "Retirement itself is kind of a silly concept to me. We are created in God's image, and God created the earth in six days and he rested one." (05:46 — Mitchell Askew)

  • Emphasizes continued value creation over passive consumption.

• Bitcoin Needed to Retire — Not Clickbait! (05:07, 06:44):

  • Clickbait headlines like “0.1 Bitcoin will make you rich” are misleading.

  • Realistically, for Gen Z aiming for financial independence (by age 65), Mitchell proposes holding 2-5 BTC is prudent.

  • Extreme bullish scenarios (Bitcoin at 10-24 million USD per coin) still mean 0.1 BTC ($1–2.4M) might not be enough to retire comfortably as a young person.

    "The clickbait headlines that a fraction of bitcoin is going to retire your bloodline, you have to ignore them. Got to have a little more of a realistic perspective." (09:27 — Mitchell Askew)

• Market Cap Math (08:00):

  • Even in wildly bullish worlds (Bitcoin as 50% of global assets), the numbers aren’t unlimited.
  • Don’t be complacent—keep stacking.

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2. Quantum Computing: Separating Signal from Noise

• Debunking Immediate Quantum Threats (10:24–16:13):

  • Quantum attacks require ~500,000 qubits, but current hardware sits around 120.

  • Main risk: Exposing your public key on-chain, not Bitcoin’s core hashing.

  • Adopting best practices (unique addresses, BC1Q) protects your coins.

  • Most quantum threat hype is premature; if a real breakthrough happened, it would likely be governments or tech giants, not rogue hackers.

    "Quantum computing exists entirely in the hypothetical realm. It doesn't actually really exist at any meaningful scale… to break Bitcoin's encryption, you'd need about 500,000 qubits. Right now, the best are at like 120." (10:24 — Mitchell Askew)

• Possible Response to Quantum Threat (15:20–16:13):

  • Bitcoin can upgrade on short notice; backup plans involve moving to quantum-resistant addresses and pausing the chain if necessary.

  • Quantum is not a “game-over” threat.

    "Everybody has a copy of the blockchain...you would have an opportunity to perhaps at that point in time just migrate to a new...If we had the quantum resistant tech ready at that point in time, everybody could be like, okay, here's a copy, maybe it stops, you stop processing transactions for a second, everybody migrates, you start up again." (15:20 — Jake Roquet)

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3. The Golden Era of Mining and the AI Pivot

• Changing Mining Landscape (17:38–23:25):

  • The next epoch (2028–2032) is predicted to be “the golden years” of retail Bitcoin mining.

  • Public (big) mining companies are pivoting to AI hosting; profit margins are higher and contracts more stable for AI than BTC mining right now.

  • As big players leave, mining difficulty drops, benefiting smaller miners with higher BTC yields.

    "I really think the next six years are going to be probably the gold rush for retail size bitcoin miners because you've got a few tailwinds working in their favor." (18:15 — Mitchell Askew)

• Mining Difficulty Dynamics Explained (21:25):

  • Mining reward per block decreases over time; as big miners unplug, difficulty goes down.

  • Historically, difficulty trends up, but the AI pivot is causing the first structural downtrend—a rare window for retail and mid-sized entrants.

    "We're seeing the first structural downtrend in mining difficulty because of this AI pivot. I don't think it will last forever, but it's a headwind for difficulty, which is a tailwind for retail bitcoin miners..." (23:01 — Mitchell Askew)

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4. Macro Trends, The Fed, and U.S. Policy

• Bottom in the Bitcoin Market & On-Chain Analysis (23:45–26:08):

  • Long-term holders capitulated in early '26, marking a probable market bottom.

  • "Coin days destroyed" shows the most patient holders finally panic-sold during sharp dips, characteristic of cycle bottoms.

    "Coin days destroyed spiked when the price dropped. And what that tells you is there was capitulation for selling." (25:15 — Mitchell Askew)

• Fed Policy, Inflation, and the National Debt (27:56–32:30):

  • Markets expect no further rate cuts; Mitchell sees high probability of cuts resuming—bullish for Bitcoin.

  • Kevin Warsh, the likely new Fed Chair, has deep tech/bitcoin experience and a nuanced data-driven view of economic deflation stemming from tech/AI advancement.

  • Deflation is bad for debtors (e.g. U.S. government); the “release valve” is currency devaluation.

  • With $39 trillion U.S. debt and constant deficit spending, devaluation is all but certain.

    "If you have technology that allows you to produce goods and services with fewer input costs, that's ultimately going to lower the price for everyone else... But it creates a force that's actually bad for the government who's $39 trillion dollars in debt." (29:33 — Mitchell Askew)

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5. U.S. Bitcoin Policy—Speculation & Strategy

• Trump, American Bitcoin, Miners, and National Policy (32:30–45:45):

  • Trump family (via American Bitcoin) is stacking sats and structuring mining/data center operations to maximize flexibility and patriotism.

  • U.S. government’s stance is more muted than expected, but the strategic accumulation of Bitcoin by major players (possibly in tandem with the government) is discussed.

    "I think there's a non zero possibility that Strategies Bitcoin holdings are the US Government's holdings... He could be the guy that saves the US Government from going bankrupt." (43:52 — Mitchell Askew)

• Jason Lowry’s “Kinetic vs. Electric” Defense Thesis (38:36–41:51):

  • Bitcoin as cyberspace defense: Rather than defending wealth with “blood and bombs,” the system defends it with electricity and computation.

  • Increasing recognition at military/government levels.

    "By transposing monetary premiums into cyberspace using a digital synthetic commodity called satoshis, we replace the cost of human life with the cost of an electricity bill for defending our wealth... Not having to waste human life to defend monetized wealth is worth every watt." (40:24 — Jake Roquet, quoting Lowry)

• Nationalizing Strategy’s BTC? (43:52–45:31):

  • Open speculation: MicroStrategy’s BTC stack could serve government interests if quietly nationalized or equity-purchased.

  • Potentially a way for U.S. to re-anchor global dominance in new “sound money” reality.

    "There's a giant pot of close to a million bitcoin that is held with a publicly traded U.S. company that has to abide by U.S. securities laws... I think it's a non zero possibility." (45:09 — Mitchell Askew)

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6. Investment Products: The STRC & Strike Debates

• Stretch (STRC) Product—Yields, Risks, & Misconceptions (48:39–54:10):

  • STRC offers an 11.5% yield (“bitcoin-backed bond”), but this rate is dynamic and will decrease as the market matures.

  • Not a Ponzi scheme (contrary to some critics), but also not a “risk-free” magic product—best suited for treasury or business cash reserves, not retirement nest eggs.

    "They have, I think it's 10 to 1 coverage on Stretch... So if bitcoin doesn't go to zero, they're going to pay stretch. That being said, 11 and a half percent is not locked in in perpetuity." (50:22 — Mitchell Askew)

• Preferred Equity: Why 'Strike' May Be Superior for Some (54:57):

  • Fixed payment ($8/share) makes Strike a stable, “older investor”-friendly way to get BTC upside without volatility.

    "My favorite of their preferred equity vehicles is Strike, the first one, the OG... because it's a fixed payment, that yield is going to stay the same if you buy it now and hold it for the next 10 years." (55:16 — Mitchell Askew)

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7. "The Conservative Case for Bitcoin" & National Policy

• Book Reflection and Update (56:04–59:27):

  • Mitchell’s thinking has evolved from “Conservative Case” to a more “Nationalist, America First” framing.

  • Sound money improves family formation, economic stability, and national well-being.

  • The book is still apt for newcomers but could be refocused in future editions.

    "The really, the thing I would change is it wouldn't be the conservative case for bitcoin. It would be the nationalist America first case for bitcoin... So conservatism has, I feel like, kind of lost its meaning." (57:00 — Mitchell Askew)

• Bitcoin Policy Done Right (62:53–65:35):

  • Pro-Bitcoin is pro-America: imposes fiscal discipline, reduces foreign wars, empowers citizens, restores value.

  • Specific policy ideas: Bitcoin in 401(k)s, legal tender status, deregulation for BTC businesses, government BTC holdings.

    "Being pro bitcoin is pro America. It is American citizens first... one component, second, it ties back to the average person being able to support their family." (62:53 — Mitchell Askew)

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8. Career Advice & Future Outlook

• How to Break Into the Bitcoin Industry (67:04–69:01):

  • Offer work for free, bring results, build social/in-person connections, and target infrastructure/A.I./mining sectors.

  • The biggest opportunities are where Bitcoin and AI intersect.

    "The advice I would give and this worked for me, offer to work for free. In fact, take it one step beyond that. Just start doing the job for free and bring them tangible results..." (67:04 — Mitchell Askew)

• Looking Forward: Macroeconomic Catalysts (69:17–70:47):

  • Next “quantitative easing” (QE) cycle will be a major accelerant for Bitcoin; expect price to surprise to the upside.

    "Historically, each round of QE is bigger than the previous on an absolute and relative basis... I think this gradual increasing in the Fed balance Sheet over the next couple of years is really going to start to compound and bitcoin always does what people least expect." (69:28 — Mitchell Askew)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Retirement itself is kind of a silly concept to me...not simply being a passive consumer, which I feel like is the default perception of retirement. So kind of pushing that to the side."
  — Mitchell Askew (05:46)

• "Even in the most aggressive scenario, 0.1 bitcoin is maybe $2.4 million. Maybe you could retire, but that's going to depend on your lifestyle...the clickbait headlines that a fraction of bitcoin is going to retire your bloodline, you have to ignore them."
  — Mitchell Askew (09:14, 09:27)

• "Quantum computing exists entirely in the hypothetical realm...you need about 500,000 qubits. Right now, the best are at like 120."
  — Mitchell Askew (10:24)

• "We're seeing the first structural downtrend in mining difficulty because of this AI pivot... it's a headwind for difficulty, which is a tailwind for retail bitcoin miners..."
  — Mitchell Askew (23:01)

• "If bitcoin doesn't go to zero, they're going to pay Stretch...But 11.5% is not locked in in perpetuity."
  — Mitchell Askew (50:22, 50:43)

• "Being pro bitcoin is pro America. It is American citizens first."
  — Mitchell Askew (62:53)

• "If you have technology that allows you to produce goods and services with fewer input costs, that's ultimately going to lower the price for everyone."
  — Mitchell Askew (29:33)

• "The natural state of a free market is deflation. Things should be getting cheaper, we're getting more efficient, technology is progressing."
  — Jake Roquet (30:39)

• "Bitcoin is more American than the dollar for sure. The founding principles, I think bitcoin is much more aligned with."
  — Jake Roquet (65:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:06 — Start of core discussion: "How much bitcoin do I need to retire?"
• 05:07 — Gen Z & realistic Bitcoin expectations for retirement
• 10:24 — Quantum computing and Bitcoin safety
• 17:38 — Mining industry, AI pivot, miner shake-out
• 23:45 — Bottom in market, on-chain analysis
• 27:56 — Fed policy, Warsh as new Fed Chair, macro forces
• 32:30 — Trump, American Bitcoin, national strategy
• 38:36 — Jason Lowry’s national defense thesis on Bitcoin
• 43:52 — Speculation: MicroStrategy as stealth U.S. BTC reserve
• 48:39 — STRC ("Stretch"): Bitcoin-backed bond, risks, rewards
• 54:57 — Strike: Preferred equity product, fixed-yield option
• 56:04 — Book reflection: Conservative to “America First” case for BTC
• 62:53 — Pro-Bitcoin policy: What it could look like in government
• 67:04 — Career advice for entering the Bitcoin industry
• 69:17 — Forward outlook: Anticipating the next bitcoin bull run/QE cycle

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Takeaways and Action Points

• Don’t fall for clickbait — stack more Bitcoin than the headlines suggest if you want a secure future.
• Quantum threat: Stay calm, practice good security, watch for industry upgrades, but don’t panic.
• If you’re interested in mining or working in Bitcoin, now may be the golden window—especially for retail/minority entrants.
• Bitcoin is deeply intertwined with U.S. macro trends and could become a cornerstone of a new sound-money America–but policy will be quiet until the bag is packed.
• Career in Bitcoin? Add value first, network at conferences, aim for infrastructure or AI.
• Sound money (Bitcoin) is the foundation for family, prosperity, and national resilience.

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Find Mitchell Askew on X (Twitter): [@MitchellAskew]
Blockware Mining/Consulting: [blockwaresolutions.com]

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For further exploration:

• "The Conservative Case for Bitcoin" by Mitchell Askew
• Jason Lowry’s security thesis on Bitcoin
• Blockware's Q1 overview market report

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This summary skips advertisements and focuses exclusively on content-rich, high-signal sections of the episode.

Transcript

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[Mitchell Askew]

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[Mitchell Askew]

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[Jake Roquet]

So how much bitcoin do I need to retire?

[Mitchell Askew]

It's not 0.003 or whatever, right? You see all these clickbait headlines.

[Jake Roquet]

Point one, Bitcoin.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

You should not be complacent with the amount of bitcoin you stack.

[Jake Roquet]

If we had the quantum thing happen, it would be a single wallet at a time that would fall.

[Malcolm Glauble]

You have to.

[Mitchell Askew]

All right, let me unpack. Who would have that technology first?

[Jake Roquet]

If they came out and were overtly pro bitcoin, started stacking a bunch of SATs, treasury demand would plummet. Dollar would probably die immediately. It'd be a massive problem.

[Mitchell Askew]

I think there's a non zero possibility that strategies Bitcoin holdings are the US Government's holdings. He could be the guy that saves the US Government from going bankrupt.

[Jake Roquet]

You're telling me about how you think the bottom is in. What are you looking at? That's telling you it's in already. Welcome back to Market Disruptors. I'm joined today with the great and powerful Mitchell Askew. We're getting back into it. Happy to have you back on. You got a big week going on this. This week. Few panels you're on. Tell me, tell me about what you're up to here.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yes, sir. Thanks for having me, Jake. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm gonna be speaking every day of the conference. So first up later today is how much bitcoin do you need to retire? Which Mark has talked about that a lot, and I really enjoy his perspective. And I'll definitely unpack it on this show. But retirement itself. Got to throw the whole concept away. Right? You don't want to be a passive consumer that just sits on your hands and doesn't provide any value. So that's kind of where I plan to take that. And then I'm going to be speaking tomorrow with Adam back and the guy from Project 11 and one other person about quantum computing. Really excited for that one. That's part of the bitgo. They have their own kind of mini conference within the conference. And then on Wednesday, I'll be speaking with a few of the manufacturers for Bitcoin mining rigs and be talking about technical specifications and mining hardware and what's coming up in the pipeline for some of those companies.

[Jake Roquet]

Mm. Mm. So how much bitcoin do I need to retire?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, so for Gen Z, I would say probably like 2 to 5 bitcoin. Okay. Depending on. Let's, let's. So we have to define our terms, right? What is retirement if you weren't working, no more income, how much bitcoin do you need to just live off of that stack? And in this scenario, I mean, I imagine 40 years from now, when we're at that age, Bitcoin is going to be a lot less volatile than it is today now.

[Jake Roquet]

So we're talking, like to retire at 65. How much do you need today, not

[Mitchell Askew]

how much you need to retire, like at time zero. Yeah, that would be a couple hundred Bitcoin, I would imagine.

[Jake Roquet]

All right. I mean, yeah, yeah. Big spender.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, maybe. But yeah, like I mentioned before, retirement itself is kind of a silly concept to me. So we are created in God's image, and God created the earth in six days and he rested one. And I think that's generally a structure we should follow as humans. Now, that doesn't mean you slave away at a nine to five, six days a week, but creating something of value, spending your time doing something meaningful, not simply being a passive consumer, which I feel like is the default perception of retirement. So kind of pushing that to the side, if you just simply want. How much bitcoin do you need to not ever work again if you don't want to, and spend all your time, you know, kayaking or doing art or whatever you like to do in your fun time. That's creative. Your free time. That's creative. It's not 0.003 or whatever.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

You see all these clickbait headlines. 0.1 Bitcoin 1 Bitcoin is generational wealth. And I hate that framework. I absolutely despise it. Because you should not be complacent with the amount of bitcoin you stack. Moreover, I am incredibly bullish on bitcoin. But when you simply look at the total addressable market and then divide by 21 million, you realize quite quickly how ridiculous it actually sounds. So let's say there's about a quadrillion dollars worth of stuff out there in the world, which is the kind of most recent number for all asset classes. So if you take gold, real estate, bitcoin, stocks, bonds, money, oil, other commodities, it's about a quadrillion dollars Worth of things we use as store value assets. Right Now, Bitcoin is 1.5 trillion, ish. So very much like, barely scratching the surface. Let's be super, super aggressive with our bitcoin forecast. Let's say bitcoin, which is the only thing that humanity cannot make more of, right? You can make more gold, build more houses. Dubai shows us that you can build more land, you can create more companies, make beachfront properties. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if bitcoin's the only thing you can make more of, what's a realistic market share for store of value? Is it 50%? And everything else is worth the other half? Probably not. Is it 20%? Is it 30%? I don't know. But let's. Let's pick a number out of thin air and do some. Do some napkin math. Let's say bitcoin gets half of everything. If we want to be really aggressive, bitcoin's half of everything. All the real estate in Miami, New York, Dubai, Tokyo, everywhere, plus all of the companies, plus all of the gold, plus all of any other asset is the other half. This is obviously a great scenario for bitcoin, right? It's got half of the world's stuff. So that would be $500 trillion. Let's ask Gemini. 500 trillion divided by 21 million. Off the top of my head, I think it's around like 3 to 4 million per bitcoin. So. And that would be in real purchasing power terms, this number's going to grow, right? Fiat currency is going to grow.

[Jake Roquet]

Sounds low to me. Even that sounds low. We got Mike getting us a fact check over there.

[Mitchell Askew]

Let's double check the math, but I'm

[Jake Roquet]

pretty sure I'm feeling like 10 million, something like that. 20 million.

[Mitchell Askew]

All right, let's say it's 10 million. All right, you have 0.1 Bitcoin. So you have $1 million. You can't retire on $1 million.

[Jake Roquet]

24 million. Okay, so I wish it was 21. Yeah, we're close.

[Mitchell Askew]

So if you have 0.1 Bitcoin, that would be about $2.4 million. Maybe you could retire potentially. It's going to depend on some variables.

[Jake Roquet]

How much expense, crafty with your borrowing, continue to grow. Yeah, right.

[Mitchell Askew]

So point one bitcoin, I mean, maybe it depends on your time horizon, but that's the most aggressive scenario, right? Bitcoin captures half of everything. If we're being realistic, companies and real estate are still going to have value. So if bitcoin captures a fourth, then you're looking at 10 million, 11 million of bitcoin, 0.1. You know, a million dollars in purchasing power. So the clickbait headlines that a fraction of bitcoin is going to retire your bloodline, you have to ignore them. Got to have a little more of a realistic perspective, I think, for Gen Z, like, if you had one whole bitcoin, you're going to be fine by the time you're 65. But that doesn't mean, you know, you get to.

[Jake Roquet]

That's one. Sailing the rest of your life.

[Mitchell Askew]

Stop. Right.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

You need to continue to produce value.

[Jake Roquet]

Right, right, right, right. That's a good answer. That's a good answer. We're doing. You're doing this panel, Adam back, you and a couple other guys. You were saying that you feel like you might fall on one end of this with Adam and the other guys might fall on a little on the other end. Tell me about what's going on.

[Mitchell Askew]

So the panel is on quantum computing. And I've been diving down the rabbit hole the past couple of weeks to try to wrap my head around it because you see a lot of headlines and it can be difficult to distinguish what's signal and what's noise. And my initial inclination that was most of it was noise. And after kind of doing a deep dive, I confirmed that. And actually more of it is probably noise than I previously expected. So right now, quantum computing exist entirely in the hypothetical realm. It doesn't actually really exist at any meaningful scale. And so the very simple explanation of quantum computing is instead of bits where it's binary 0 or 1 on a computer, quantum in theory could be both 0 and 1 simultaneously. And so you could do far more permutations at once. But it. It exists at the very physical hardware level. So it's not software that enables this. And so you need qubits, which can exist in this perpetual state of being both 0 and 1. To break Bitcoin's encryption, you'd need about 500,000 qubits. Right now, the best top quantum developers in the world are at like 120. So you're a couple of order magnet orders of magnitude away. And that's point one is all right. It's very hypothetical. It doesn't even exist. It's not even close to being enough to crack Bitcoin. Point number two, this is more anecdotal. Everything would be at risk if we had quantum that could crack Bitcoin. The New York Stock Exchange, The Federal

[Jake Roquet]

Reserve, SHA256 protects the nuclear codes as well.

[Mitchell Askew]

It's the same sort? No, it's actually not the SHA 256 that's at risk. It's the public key, private key payers. Okay, so the bitcoin miners and the SHA 256 algorithm, that's just pure brute force and energy inputs. Okay, so Quantum has really no impact on that. It impacts your private. If you send a bitcoin transaction on chain, your public key is exposed. In theory, Quantum could reverse engineer from your public key and find your private key and take your bitcoin.

[Jake Roquet]

So would it be wallet by wallet hacks? Like if we had the Quantum thing happen, it would be a single wallet at a time that would fall, is that right?

[Mitchell Askew]

So if the technology existed to do that, they would. You have to. All right, let me unpack. Who would have that technology first?

[Jake Roquet]

Most likely the government.

[Mitchell Askew]

The government or Google or Facebook or Microsoft. Right. A tech powerhouse in the United States. Google put out a report recently on Quantum, kind of fluffing up its potential.

[Jake Roquet]

They had 2029 was the date they were talking about their Willow chip right now can do was is the most sophisticated we have.

[Mitchell Askew]

And so it's. The point is it's not going to be some dude in his basement, right. That just come stumbles across some mathematical formula while he's goofing around with Grok and figures out Quantum.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

Probably it's. Yeah, it's going to be one of these large tech companies in the United States if this actually plays out. And we're starting to add a lot of caveats here. So you can see, you know, if, if we were a jury, and I was presenting a case to a jury, the evidence is going to start to rack up that this is not a threat. So it would be a Google.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

So what's the, the doomsday scenario with Quantum is that Satoshi's million Bitcoin are going to be vulnerable. They're going to get taken, sold in the market. Bitcoin price is going to crash. That's like what people are saying. But if it's a Google or the US Government or someone else that takes it, they are going to be subject to due process in the law. Right. And they. They're stealing coins. Right. It is theft. And so you're not going to be able to steal a million bitcoin from Satoshi, send it to Coinbase and just tank the market. That's functionally not how that would play out. So there it's going to go through some type of legal process and then let's add another Caveat, let's say they do just take it and they sell it on the market. It would be painful in the short term, but ultimately Bitcoin would recover. People like Michael Saylor would put in their bids at a dollar and they would buy all those Bitcoins. So the worst potential outcome from Quantum is that some more Bitcoin gets sold. But Bitcoin's endured cell pressure in the past. Demand will continue to persist, and there will be ample opportunity for you and I to upgrade to quantum resistant addresses as those come out. It's some of the older addresses that are a little more vulnerable, but it's constantly referred to as this doomsday type scenario. That means it's game over for Bitcoin. Even if you give it the most generous outlook, it's still not that. It's still not an imminent threat to end Bitcoin entirely.

[Jake Roquet]

And if you were to even imagine that that day does come, Q day or whatever people are calling it,

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

we

[Jake Roquet]

could identify that that threat has emerged if it does ever. Everybody has a copy of the blockchain at that exact moment in time. You would have an opportunity to perhaps at that point in time, just migrate to a new. If we had the quantum resistant tech ready at that point in time, everybody could be like, okay, here's a copy of the blockchain where it is. Maybe it stops. You stop processing transactions for a second, everybody migrates, you start up again. In theory, it could be like, okay, we have a little bit of downtime, which would be the first time you'd really have seen something like that in a very, very long time, at least. And then, you know, it is just a network of people being like, I got a copy here, I got a copy here, I got a copy here. All right, let's sync back up and keep it running. You know, I mean, if you were to see something as catastrophic as that,

[Mitchell Askew]

it would sort itself out. And even more importantly, if you use the BC1Q address types, your coins are actually already safe. So they have to take the X, Pub, and RE from that. They can reverse engineer if Quantum existed and get your private key. But if your, your XPub doesn't get exposed until you send Bitcoin out of the BC1Q address. So if you sent it, this is why you don't want to reuse Bitcoin addresses. So if you're paying me for whatever service and I give you my address and I send you some coins back and I'm still using that address, my XPub for that address has been exposed, the coins in that address are vulnerable. But if, whenever I send bitcoin out of an address, if I send the whole balance and then reuse a fresh address every time, you'll be fine.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, that's a good tip. Third panel you're on is called Lord of the Rigs. And there might be a couple interesting things to talk about relating to this, what you expect there. But I also wonder a little bit broader. You know, you're more of an expert in the bitcoin mining side of things. How do you expect that in this next epoch? Let's say, how do you expect the mining dynamics to be changing? What are you guys preparing for now? How do you think, like the manufacturing of the rigs that's going on? Yeah. How do you think all that's going to play together in this next epoch?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, I really viewed the next epoch from 2028 to 2032 as likely the golden years of bitcoin mining. After the 2032 having the block subsidy will be less than 1 bitcoin every 10 minutes. It's going to be very minuscule. You're going to need likely incredibly low cost power, more so than already presently exists, to mine profitably. But we're still in this window with the block subsidy. Right now it's about three point something Bitcoin and it's going to be one and a half Bitcoin from 2028 to 2032.

[Jake Roquet]

Okay. Yeah. So we got like, that's like six years from now.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

So I really think the next six years are going to be probably the gold rush for retail size bitcoin miners because you've got a few tailwinds working in their favor. One pretty dagum bullish on bitcoin over the next two, three, four years. Right. We've seen what's likely the bottom. We're entering a new regime of quantitative easing. All the long term holders that capitulated are out of the market. Right. There's really not any more supply. We're kind of reaching this consolidation level. You've got all of these institutions continuing to buy bitcoin. From a structural standpoint, price is probably going to readjust higher over the next couple of years. So that's one point. But two, and this is more relevant to mining specifically. The large players are getting out of the game and they're doing so not because mining is necessarily bad, but because the opportunity cost of AI is so high. So all of the billion dollar publicly traded bitcoin mining companies, they're kind of trend Followers. If you, if you've been paying attention, right when DATs were hot and bitcoin treasury companies were the thing, they all rushed to like flaunt their bitcoin treasury. Now that, that's not really the thing anymore, they're pivoting to AI, which coincidentally is also probably really good for their businesses because the, the contracts for them are incredibly lucrative. So for reference, even if bitcoin were to go back to its all time high of about $126,000 based on some of the recent AI hosting deals that these data center companies have signed, they're still making more money by doing AI hosting versus mining bitcoin.

[Jake Roquet]

And that's, that's a temporary premium too, right? Because a lot of why they're paying so much for that right now is because it's hard to get the chip production that you need and all getting all that compute online.

[Mitchell Askew]

There's a lot of bottlenecks and the

[Jake Roquet]

energy infrastructure at the same time too.

[Mitchell Askew]

So, and so these mining companies already have that in place. They are in the position to offer that to the market. And the demand to run those, those graphic cards and AI models is so much higher and it's growing faster than we can manufacture new chips, build new facilities, build new data centers. You can't spin up a data center overnight. So we're seeing a trend where each of these subsequent AI hosting contracts is at a higher rate than the previous. And so if you're a publicly traded company and you're the CFO and you've historically been a bitcoin miner, you have quarterly earnings to beat, right? You can't necessarily tether your earnings to the bitcoin price when you can take the same infrastructure, host AI servers and lock in rates for 10 years, right? Some of these contracts are a decade long, so you're locking in high free cash flows for the next 10 years. There's no variability, there's no volatility with the bit like with the bitcoin price. So even if you're a bitcoin bull, if you're in the position of a public company and you have shareholder obligations, it's pretty difficult to turn that down. So what happens? All these large companies stop mining bitcoin and difficulty adjusts down which makes the smaller or medium sized miner earn more bitcoin.

[Jake Roquet]

Can you explain if someone is brand new to learning the dynamics of mining, what is the difficulty adjustment and why is it important?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, great question. So bitcoin has a finite supply of 21 million. And in addition to that there's a predetermined distribution schedule. So what this is in effect, if you were mining gold, if Jake had a gold mining operation and I had a gold mining operation, my gold mining operation wouldn't mean you mine less gold. But bitcoin mining is the opposite. So if you're mining bitcoin and I start mining bitcoin because there's this finite supply and only three point, I think it's 1, 2, 5 Bitcoin get mined every 10 minutes, I'm going to cut into your share. So the way the network enforces this is by lowering the mining difficulty. If miners unplug, if miners plug in, the difficulty increases and it keeps this stable distribution rate. Otherwise all 21 million Bitcoin would have been mined in the first year. And so there's this sort of dog eat dog world where bitcoin miners eat into each other's revenue. But when they're turning off and especially large miners that are billion dollar companies with gigawatt sized data centers turn off, difficulty has come down substantially. And historically difficulty has been up. Only bitcoin's price goes up. It becomes more profitable to mine. People build new sites, manufacturers invest in new mining technology that's more efficient. And so generally difficulty has been up and to the right with small bumps here and there. But we're seeing the first structural downtrend in mining difficulty because of this AI pivot. I don't think it will last forever, but it's a headwind for difficulty, which is a tailwind for retail bitcoin miners or even medium size. Anybody else who's mining bitcoin that's not one of these companies turning off your revenues in bitcoin terms are going up.

[Jake Roquet]

You're telling me about how you think the bottom is in. I think blockware. Put out a Q1 overview report of everything you've seen taking place so far. And that was kind of around. You put out that report around when you think the bottom was in basically, or I think it was a little bit before that. Why, what are you looking at that's telling you that you might think it's in already?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, so we put that out, that report out early April and always hesitant to call a top or bottom, but I think there's enough data in that the 60k crash in early February was, was almost certainly the bottom. One of the main indicators we're looking at when you look on chain, there's different types of holders. So based on how long since a coin last moved on chain, you can categorize them as a short term holder or a long term holder. Generally the threshold that most on chain analysts look at is about 155 days, just about six months. Typically when coins are held for longer than six months, the behavior changes a little bit. They're less likely to sell. If they sell, it's typically only after bitcoin's price goes up to a certain degree or capitulation during sell offs. So one thing we saw from the long term holders is they sold into the crash. When Bitcoin dropped to $60,000 in early February, they capitulated. And you can look on chain, you can see there's a metric I like to look at called coin days destroyed.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Mm.

[Mitchell Askew]

Essentially it measures trading volume multiplied by the days since those coins last moved. So it gives more weight to coins that have been held for a long time and perceivably have a lower cost basis. Right. They're sitting on more realized gains. If you've been holding bitcoin for a thousand days versus ten days. Right. So coin days destroyed spiked when the price dropped. And what that tells you is there

[Jake Roquet]

was capitulation for selling.

[Mitchell Askew]

It could be forced selling, it could just be fear. Hey, the four year cycle is, oh, it's still intact. I need to sell now. Right away, right away, fear was at an all time high. You saw a lot of signs of capitulation on chain from coin days destroyed, the long term holder supply and certain other metrics. Now the way bottoms form in the bitcoin price is really interesting. You could have a bottom and a price in two ways. You could have less supply or more demand. Right. Because the price of any asset is the change in supply and demand. So bitcoin's primary use case is a store of value. And you don't get more people excited to use bitcoin as a store of value. And it's down 50%. You probably experienced this anecdotally and I'm sure a lot of the viewers have all the texts you get from people you try to orange pill come in the bull market.

[Jake Roquet]

Right. Generally just after all time highs, as they start doing the all time high,

[Mitchell Askew]

you don't get new demand in the bear market. So the way the price floor actually gets set is just a lack of supply. It's like when the dust settles, only the hardcore orange pilled bitcoiners are still actually holding the coins. At some point they stop selling, the capitulators run out of coins. And so some of the signs you look for are low trading volume, low activity, on chain, a consolidation of, of coins into these addresses that historically don't sell their bitcoin and we've seen exactly that over the past two months. So these long term holders, their, their holdings right now are about 14 million Bitcoin, which is approaching an all time high. They've been just aggressively accumulating for the past two months. You saw a lot of signs that the weekends capitulated back in February. And so all of these indicators have lined up with other bitcoin bottoms. And then on top of that, we're starting to see some clarity on the macro side of things. So this war and the conflict in the Middle east seems to slowly be unwinding itself. The Federal Reserve is printing money. Quantitative easing is back on. You're getting a new Fed chair in probably two or three weeks from now. So a lot of things, what do

[Jake Roquet]

you think people are missing about the Fed chair? Because Warsh is someone who's talked about the importance of fiscal responsibility in the Fed. He's kind of had more hawkish language. Yet Trump has made very clear we want lower rates, we want them right now. And he's had beef with Powell over this for quite a while. Warsh is someone who interestingly enough, seems to understand Bitcoin quite well. A lot of people who understand bitcoin are critical of Fed overspending, yet he's the guy Trump picked to take the spot. So what do you make of that? What are you seeing there?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, there's a few different things to unpack here. Firstly, the market is pricing him in as being somewhat of a hawk. So right now if you go to the CME fed funds futures, last I checked, it's about a 60 to 70% chance that the Fed will not cut rates at all this year. So first things first, I'm going to take the other side of that bet. And that's what makes a market. Right. I think they are going to cut rates and when they do and those expectations shift, I think risk is going to pump, Bitcoin included. Now with Kevin Warsh, there's a couple of things that are of note. Firstly are some of his investments. SpaceX, Palantir, Bitwise, a lot of tech and bitcoin related investments. You have to consider where his personal benefits, you know, might come into play. It's certainly not going to be risk off environment. Secondly, of course, when you consider all of the beef between Trump and Powell, it's difficult to say he would put in another hawk given how much conflict and tension that he's had with Jerome Powell over the past two years now, and then even kind of predating his inauguration, there was certainly tension there. It's difficult to imagine Trump would put in someone who's not going to immediately work towards a dovish policy. And then additionally, Kevin Warsh has spoken kind of extensively on the importance of AI as something to accelerate economic growth, but also that it's a deflationary force. So I'm sure you've probably talked to Jeff Booth or listened to him.

[Jake Roquet]

We're talking to him next week. Yeah, perfect.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, you should ask him about this because his whole thesis can be boiled down to technology is deflationary. And that's absolutely right. If you have technology that allows you to produce goods and services with fewer input costs, that's ultimately going to lower the price for everyone else. You can see this very clearly when you look at the price of TVs or iPhones or other very like tech computer type devices. Those prices have actually come down over the last 15, 20 years, despite the currency becoming less valuable. So it creates a force that's actually bad for the government who's $39 trillion in debt.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

Because the way they pay that debt, one of the ways is taxing the population. And if prices are coming down, the tax base shrinks. And so deflation is, as traditional academic type economists would put it, is disastrous for an economy. In a sound money world, it would be great, right? Because things get, everything gets cheaper. Imagine if things over the past five years didn't get, you know, twice as expensive in price if they, the price actually got cut in half. Everybody would love that, right?

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

Except for the people that have debts to pay back.

[Jake Roquet]

People never think about this. I was at a poker night last night chatting with some buddies. They're sharp guys, commercial real estate. They're understand the financial world. And I gave them the Jeff Booth line. The natural state of a free market is deflation. Things should be getting cheaper, we're getting more efficient, technology is progressing. There's every indication from the progress that we're having that things should be getting cheaper, yet everything's going up. Why is that? And they're all kind of like, huh, that is kind of strange. These guys who are in this all the time, they never think about it. And then it's like, okay, why does that need to happen? What would it look like otherwise? Yeah, thinking about Fed policy, how that's going to play into that.

[Mitchell Askew]

And so you got a guy who understands that and you have an administration that's been very vocal that we are Going to support AI infrastructure build out. And so the, you have the deflationary

[Jake Roquet]

pressure pushing on that. When they can't have deflation, you got to let it.

[Mitchell Askew]

So where's the release valve? It's devaluing the currency.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

And I think he understands that. And I think when you look at a lot of the actions of the administration, there's an implicit understanding of that as well. With some of the things that Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary has said, some of their policies really early on, like Doge and the tariffs and all of this, if you really kind of unpack it, it seems like they are trying to work around the debt. $39 trillion in debt. That problem's not going away. Ultimately that, you know, they, they tried to throw the kitchen sink at it. Right. Let's cut spending with Doge, let's increase revenue with tariffs, let's accelerate the growth of the economy. But none of it really works because the, the debt is so high. You spend all this money on war and interest payments and Medicare fraud to Somalis and like all this stuff, our money's just being wasted. They're going to make up for that difference by just devaluing the currency.

[Jake Roquet]

We were talking a little bit about Eric Trump is here at the conference. We got cash Patel, you were over at him talking. Nobody showed up to hear him talk, which was interesting. We got a lot of Fed related people. CFTC chair is in. He's going to be on the show tomorrow. I think he's got some interesting things to say about bitcoin. But what do you make about the Trump family? American btc? We were talking also too about Admiral Samuel Paparo and he was quoting some Lowry stuff. Let's start with the Trump side, then we'll get into maybe some of the Lowry stuff. But what do you make of American btc? What the Trumps are up to exactly. They had some funny things going on with their coins they made on World Liberty Fi and you know.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, interesting. I'll start. I did not mean to go watch Kash Patel. That was an accident. I was actually looking for the lavatories and I was like poking my head in there. I was like, wait a second, what's

[Jake Roquet]

this quiet little thing going on here?

[Mitchell Askew]

Someone's having their cute little panel and it was actually the director of the FBI and there's nobody in there listening to them. Pretty funny.

[Jake Roquet]

That's appropriate. That's good.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah. I mean, what does he have to say about bitcoin? You know, I don't know what's up

[Jake Roquet]

with the samurai wallet guys. Where are they at? I think he's on a panel later called Code is Free Speech, yet we have guys who wrote some code and got locked up for it. So that's a bit strange. FBI raid, right, Mike? That was an FBI raid. Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, certainly strange. But the Trump family in particular, I'm a big fan of what they're doing with American bitcoin, actually, from kind of a financial standpoint. You know, push the World Liberty Financial and polymark stuff to the side. We'll come to that. American bitcoin I really like. So the way they structure this business is they've separated the bitcoin mining from the data center infrastructure, so they their subsidiary of Hut 8. And to mine bitcoin, you need the bitcoin miners. You accumulate bitcoin on your balance sheet, of course, but you also need transformers and land and containers and power contracts and all of this other stuff to do it profitably. Now, that other stuff doesn't have direct exposure to bitcoin's upside versus the miners, the actual units that do the mining. And the bitcoin, of course, does. And so it gives you the choice, if you're an investor, do you want maximum bitcoin upside or do you want exposure to the data center side of it? So if you want maximum bitcoin and bitcoin mining upside, you can buy the American bitcoin stock. And if you want access to the data center side of it, you can buy the Hut 8. So I like what they've done with that. And of course, the branding is awesome. It's patriotic. And it's interesting that they have really climbed the ranks in terms of bitcoin holdings from public companies. So you had all of these bitcoin treasury companies spin up in 2025, and when the market was in a. In a bull state and they had premiums on their equities, they could issue aftermarket offerings and stack bitcoin. It's been crickets from a lot of them, but here's American bitcoin. They're running machines that is quietly stacking bitcoin, kind of following the stay humble stack sats mantra. They're doing it with machines that produce the bitcoin. So I don't. I don't know where they're at now. I think they're in the top 15. They've got a few thousand bitcoin. So I think it's worth noting throughout all the noise in the bear market, the miners just continue to stack sats, which is is encouraging to me.

[Jake Roquet]

That is the right long term strategy. If you really understood what was going on. That's what you just keep stacking stats

[Mitchell Askew]

and that's what a lot of our clients at Blockware have been doing. And you know, I don't want to get you down that path when you talk about it later, but that's. We allow people to take that model. Right. Where you segment out all of the infrastructure and you just have the machines and just mine the bitcoin. That's what we were able to offer with bitcoin mining as a service. Now, aside from American bitcoin, which I appreciate and I'm definitely a fan and I interviewed their president, Matt Prusack, the World Liberty Financial and all the other stuff that the administration is doing. I mean, I think it's pretty safe to say it's been an utter disappointment. The market, as soon as Trump won in 2024 shot up from 65k to 100k. We were pricing in a lot of bullish policy. I think the policy has been good from the standpoint of running a bitcoin business. We're not getting rug pulled by banks and running.

[Jake Roquet]

They're not coming after you at the very least. There hasn't been a lot of bitcoin specific support. A lot of it's focused on stablecoins. Yet it's a big shift from choke point 2.0.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, it's been better, but it hasn't been what I think many people expected it to be.

[Jake Roquet]

Not what a lot of bitcoin, they're

[Mitchell Askew]

not smash buying with a strategic bitcoin reserve.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah. Although.

[Jake Roquet]

Which we had RFK out here talking about a couple years back and I remember being like, do they really get it? Have they really?

[Mitchell Askew]

And Cynthia Lummis signed that bill like where the government's gonna buy a million bitcoin. Like what happened to that? I don't know.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah. Eventually one day.

[Malcolm Glauble]

Although.

[Mitchell Askew]

And you brought this up, the four star admiral.

[Jake Roquet]

Yes.

[Mitchell Askew]

Mentioned that the US government is running a node.

[Jake Roquet]

Probably the most important. Yeah. Running a node. We suspect maybe some mining stuff. Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

He said explicitly we're not mining bitcoin. I don't buy it. I certainly.

[Jake Roquet]

Who's we? You know who's we?

[Mitchell Askew]

You might not be mining bitcoin, but someone else that you're involved with is. I thought that was very interesting. Jason Lowry, for those that aren't aware, he put out this thesis back in 2023 that Bitcoin has military applications and people straw manned his position. They framed it In I think, a very disingenuous way. He had a lot of haters, for lack of a better word, a lot

[Jake Roquet]

of people who didn't understand what he was saying, going after him. That's what I notice on. He's got a lot of people goofing on him. And you look at it and they're like, they clearly have not understood what his thesis is.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, exactly. Total vindication for him. He was spot on. He. It was very ominous. In 2024, he posted a picture at the Pentagon and then he, like, didn't post on X for a year. I don't know, maybe. Maybe he had something to do with this, maybe not. Either way, his thesis is playing out.

[Jake Roquet]

You know, I actually have. He's one of the few people I have his notifications on, and he'll. Every now and then he'll drop a little something, leave it there for a second and delete it, you know, and just a few people will catch and be like, oh, there's an interesting little update. He'll give some little teasers.

[Malcolm Glauble]

You.

[Jake Roquet]

You retweeted this famous napkin scratch. I remember this was something. I remember the day he posted this. Actually, I screenshotted it and put on my Instagram, you know, and that's like, you know, Instagram's more personal for me, you know, but there's a few things where every now and then I'll drop it over there and be like, hey, people that I care about, you know, like, this is important. Maybe just. Just think about it. You know, I have it up right here. We'll put it up on the screen so you guys can. Can read the whole thing as I go through it. But it has a few. It's a simple illustration. It shows a few different assets and how they're protected. I'll read the sections of it. So number one, it says every one of these assets carries a monetary premium. Monetary premium being you have your value, let's say for gold, you have like the utility value of gold, which maybe is around now that it's 15 trillion. It might be a couple trillion for that utility value. Then you've got like 13 trillion. That is the monetary premium that people attribute that value simply to use it as a store of value. They expect it to maintain its value or increase over time. So that's the monetary premium that we defend with human lives. So land, real estate, gold, oil, equities. The chain of custody for these assets is written in blood. They're protected and defended with military power and rule of law. So kinetic Energy kinetic force is typically what wars are fought with traditionally. At the very least, nuclear weapons kind of introduced this kinetic stalemate that we've sort of been inching around a bit lately with. We've managed to have wars that have been popping up where no nuclear weapons are used. So I guess it's kind of been.

[Mitchell Askew]

I have my own theories about nuclear weapons. I'm not sure they actually exist, but maybe that's a topic for another time. That's an interesting take.

[Jake Roquet]

That's an interesting take. Yeah, maybe. Maybe another time. So we're. So we're number two here. Says by trans. This is the most important part. By transposing monetary premiums into cyberspace using a digital synthetic commodity called satoshis, we replace the cost of human life with the cost of an electricity bill for defending our wealth. So instead of defending the monetary premium attributed there with bloodshed and warfare, we defend it with compute and electrical energy. And so he summarizes this here, saying not having to waste human life to defend monetized wealth is worth every watt. So when we're talking about an admiral, I believe, of the United States giving a briefing to all of Congress, quoting Lowry, and Lowry's been. He's brought. Been brought into the administration. He's been promoted a few times. If you connect a few dots there, you realize that the military implications of bitcoin are being considered at that level. What do you think? So let's say that they do understand. What do you think? What moves do you think they'd be making behind the scenes? And when would it make sense for them to become a bit more overt about it? Because when you're stacking sats, if you don't want price to pump, you're kind of quiet about it until you've got your bag packed, you know?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

So what. Yeah.

[Jake Roquet]

What do you think that might mean for what's going on right now that they're not talking about?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, if I were running the US Government and I saw the strategic military implications of bitcoin and bitcoin mining, like you said, you wouldn't necessarily want to be very explicit and public about that. So what I would do is I would want to build a large bitcoin position and I'd also want to build a large bitcoin mine. Now, you could potentially. We were having this conversation off camera, but I think, you know, it's probably worth having the discussion on camera. Strategy and Michael saylor have about 750,000 bitcoin at time zero. And this is all very Speculative, but I think it's worth considering they rapidly began increasing their Bitcoin position in November of 2024, after the President Trump won his election. So that's one data point, data point number two. Michael Saylor, if you ever listen to him, which I've listened to thousands of hours, huge history buff, big time in history, legacy finance, all sorts of rabbit holes, mainly historical. He doesn't have a wife, he doesn't have children. This would be his legacy also. And this is the most important thing. His headquarters are in Northern Virginia and MicroStrategy's enterprise software that they were selling for decades, the US government was one of their largest clients. And so I think there's a non zero possibility that Strategies Bitcoin holdings are the US Government's holdings. And even if this hasn't been the explicit plan, they could certainly nationalize it if they wanted to. And this isn't like a bad thing, Right. He could be the guy that saves the US Government from going bankrupt. If you see all of this, if you have the foresight to see the $39 trillion in debt that's continuing to compound a broader shift away from the dollar as the global reserve asset and to shift towards something neutral, well, you should probably build a big position in that neutral thing. How would you do it? You can't sign a check as the U.S. secretary of the treasury to coinbase and buy a bunch of bitcoin on the market. The price would skyrocket immediately. You would need some sort of.

[Jake Roquet]

Because it would be the signal of we've given up on the reserve on U.S. treasuries being the reserve asset on the dollar backing everything. Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

You would need to find some sort of partner in the business sector that could stealthily accumulate it on behalf of your. Of the government. And all signs point to that possibly being strategy.

[Jake Roquet]

But what would you know? So Intel. Mark was explaining this to me a bit because I don't, you know, there was this intel deal right, where Trump went and like sort of nationalized, slash, took a piece of that 10%, I believe, of intel as a company as a whole. And Mark was explaining to me that this was a little bit more of like a. They set up. It wasn't just like an outright grab. Exactly. He was sort of saying that there was some deals that the United States government helped orchestrate for them in exchange for a share of. Of the company as a whole. What would, what would it look like for them to nationalize a section of strategy, you know?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, it could look something like that. Where it's an equity deal rather than receiving the bitcoin outright. That I guess would be to be determined. But there's a giant pot of close to a million bitcoin that is held with a publicly traded U.S. company that has to abide by U.S. securities laws.

[Jake Roquet]

Close to a million bitcoin.

[Mitchell Askew]

They have a headquarters in Northern Virginia and I don't know you connect the dots from there, but I think it's a non zero possibility. And then American Bitcoin as well could potentially be like the hash power behind that.

[Jake Roquet]

That's really interesting. You know, Sailors Saylor's a friend of the show, right. We've, we've had him on here. We both hold microstrategy or we both hold, you know, strategy, common shares, you know, so we're rooting for the guy. I think it's good to keep an eye on everybody that's like, you know, in, in important positions and everything like that. You talk to him about whether or not you asked him a question about why they don't share proof of reserves. We have a close relationship with River. I talked with Sam and Leishman from there and they're really upfront about that. I think it's one of the great things about them, all their financials. They publish in a very transparent manner where all their outflows inflows go exactly how many bitcoin they have at every point in time. Why did you want to ask Saylor about proof of reserves and yeah, what do you think is going on there with them?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, likewise. I'm a fan of river and I appreciate they do the proof of reserves and I'm a strategy shareholder and one of the things that they were talking about quite frequently around that time was transparency with their shareholders, publicizing the on chain addresses. To me there's no security risk in doing that and it can only make investors more secure that they have all that bitcoin. Now obviously they have like public audits and I don't doubt they have the bitcoin and most of it has been accounted for on chain by on chain analysis. That being said, companies like river do it bitwise, Meta Planet, it's to me it's low hanging fruit that could ease a lot of the fud people put out about strategy. And also, you know, as I say all this about their company, I do hold the stock and I'm a sailor fan and like I want them to succeed. And honestly this might make me sound like a spook. I would kind of not be opposed to the government Nationalizing some of that Bitcoin, I love America.

[Jake Roquet]

It could help facilitate a peaceful transition. Right. Instead of there being like a you're coming after what we have, we have to fight over it now. It could be like, how about we don't fight about it and we all move along together? You know, that could be nice.

[Mitchell Askew]

I want America to remain the dominant global empire for my lifetime. And a huge part of that is being in control of things financially and that financial control is slipping away. And I think by America leading the charge on bitcoin can help maintain the top of the financial hierarchy. And one way to do that while

[Jake Roquet]

relinquishing the control over it too. You know, we could still maintain that strength and the purchasing power, but saying, okay, now we're going to not have this base level theft on our global monetary game. Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

It would be better for the American people if this transition were to happen. And it doesn't have to be American people versus the American government slash empire.

[Jake Roquet]

Right?

[Mitchell Askew]

They can, if they have a good chunk of bitcoin and they have hash power, they can still continue to lead the charge financially while not devouring the currency and robbing all of the citizens every single day.

[Jake Roquet]

Talking about strategy, STRC is an interesting product. I think it's a beautiful product in a lot of ways because it's so simple, it's so clean, it's sleek, it doesn't take all of this explanation to it. You can tell people, yeah, it's like a bitcoin backed bond. It's going to pay you 11 and a half percent. It's great. Not a lot of things are stable and pay 11.5%. A Sharpe ratio is unheard of for the most part. How does stretch work? You've talked about where you think the yield will go, some of the risks associated with it. The blow up risk is quite small from what I can see now. But yeah. What are your general thoughts about stretch? What do you like?

[Mitchell Askew]

Not like it's a mixed bag for me. So if we take one extreme end, you have coffee Zilla calling it a Ponzi scheme. Totally incorrect there. And he misses the mark wildly. And then on the other end you have people that think this is the best thing since sliced bread. They're going to fully port their grandparents retirement fund into stretch. I think that's a terrible idea as well. And the third lens would be a little more pragmatic. I love it as a strategy shareholder because they're able to raise funds without diluting the common stock and buy more bitcoin but for all the talk it gets most people, it should probably not be a significant chunk of your portfolio. We were talking about a few applications for Stretch. One of them would be if you were a business owner and you wanted to keep six months of payroll in cash on hand. Stretch is a great product for that. It's better than T bills. It's going to give you higher yield. If you don't believe bitcoin is going to zero, it's going to be a stable product and they're going to pay those dividends like point blank.

[Boost Mobile Advertiser]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

They have, I think it's 10 to 1 coverage on stretch. I don't remember the exact number, but all of the bitcoin they have can pay all of their stretch liabilities to

[Jake Roquet]

a significant 45, 50 years, something like that.

[Mitchell Askew]

So if bitcoin doesn't go to zero, they're going to pay stretch.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

That being said, 11 and a half percent is not locked in in perpetuity.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

You can't take $10 million by stretch and get 1.1 million every year for life. That's not how it works. And so I see a lot of people online talking, you know, kind of viewing it through that framework. The yield, if we're right about bitcoin, the yield for stretch is going to go down over time and that's what strategy wants and that's what common shareholders want. Right. Because you should want them to borrow

[Jake Roquet]

well, especially if they can draw in that capital. They can draw in massive amounts of capital at 11 and then be like, okay, now it's 7 5, which is still way better than you get with T bills. But then they've, they've got a lot of flexibility in terms of, they've gotten that capital in there. You know, people will move in and out over time, but.

[Mitchell Askew]

Right. And so the reason the yield would come down, there's, there's a couple of different components. One they can lower in accordance with the drops in the fed funds rate. And so we're talking earlier, the Fed's probably going to cut, so the stretch rate can come down with that, as all short term kind of debt instruments do, which for lack of a better word, that's what this is, it's a T bill with a better yield. So you've got that aspect. And then you know that the 10 to 1 coverage ratio or whatever it is, if bitcoin's price goes up, let's say bitcoin doubles. All right? Now all of a sudden that's 20 to 1 and the investors who are not as confident about bitcoin as you and I, that product will become more safe in their minds. So I know that they have plenty of bitcoin to back it. But the reason there's a premium, the reason it's 11 and a half percent instead of whatever T bills are, 3 or 4%, is because there's that uncertainty. Investors view it as risk because it's backed by bitcoin, even though, really, if you break down the math, it's not that risky at all.

[Jake Roquet]

The treasury bills scare me a lot more.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, likewise, likewise. But as that bitcoin stockpile increases in value, that coverage ratio will increase and it will be less risky in the minds of those investors. You'll get more demand, the yield will come down, they'll be able to borrow at a lower rate to buy more Bitcoin. Like it's all this is the design of how it works. You just shouldn't buy this expecting you're going to get eleven and a half percent in perpetuity. And even if you did, one of, one of the things I do have kind of a nitpick about it with, and I think this will change, but right now it's about, I think, 85% retail holdings. And the big narrative that's created around this product is bond funds and money market funds and large institutional capital that has to buy fixed income is going to buy stretch instead. Right now, it's retail. And I can't help but think it's all the people that are at this conference and love talking about it all the time that make up the vast majority of the holdings. And right now, bitcoin's down like 40% from its high. Bitcoin's at a big discount. You've got a lot of other assets that have asymmetric upside right now. Do you want to take 11 and a half percent? I don't. I think bitcoin's going to go up hundreds of percent over the next couple of years. So to me, you're leaving a lot of gains on the table if you just buy this just because it's the shiny new thing and people can say that's not why they're doing it. I know somewhere out there someone's listening to this, and because everyone talks about Stretch, they're thinking, I should get some of that. Bitcoiners have a history of chasing the next new thing, right? You had altcoins, you had ICOs, NFTs, Bitcoin, treasury companies. And now, I think Stretch, while fundamentally different from all of Those other things way less risky. It is another thing that's not bitcoin. And sometimes you should just stay humble and stack sats.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, especially right now. I got a little creative with some of the leverage game in the last cycle and everything we got up there and I took some profits on mstr. I started buying a little bit of Stretch as like a hedge against further drawdown and then kind of push when we had that, that big liquidation day, I sold all of it that I had and converted it to stuff that was higher volatility.

[Mitchell Askew]

See, that's the way to do it. Everyone needs to follow what Jake's doing. You buy Stretch after bitcoin's gone on the bull run. You don't buy it now while we're in the bear market and you have all of this upside ahead of you.

[Jake Roquet]

I do think Mike knows you shouldn't exactly follow. It's Jake, what Jake's doing. I'm always, as soon as we get excited and I'm like, we're going up forever. Let me get a little more leverage, you know. But I've made, I've made some good plays in there too, at least.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

My favorite of their preferred equity vehicles is Strike, the, the first one, the og because unlike Stretch, where that yield you get is going to go down over time, the way Strike works is it's a fixed payment of $8 per share. So right now I think it's, last I checked was like 75.

[Jake Roquet]

Really, I thought it was 8%. It's $8 per share.

[Mitchell Askew]

$8 per share. So effectively if you bought it now, it's like 11%. So it's like almost the same. But because it's a fixed payment, that yield is going to stay the same if you buy it now and hold it for the next 10 years. So you're always going to get that dividend, same amount and it has bitcoin upside and it's not nearly as volatile as bitcoin or the common stock. So if you. This is honestly like what I recommend to like older people in my life that want some bitcoin exposure. They can't stomach a 50% peak to trough drawdown and they like dividends because there's something psychological about having that free cash flow. Even if the capital appreciation, you're leaving some of that on the table. So Strike is a really great product. I think for a lot of people. You get the bitcoin upside and you get those fixed payments.

[Jake Roquet]

Last little section to talk through with you. So you wrote a book called The Conservative Case for Bitcoin. I like it. I think it's a great book. I think we were talking about some of the things that you might change. I feel like when you're in the bitcoin space for a while, some of the introductory stuff starts to feel so boring to you. Yet if you were to show that book to either of us five years ago, if you were to show that book to people who have been out of the conversation completely, there might be sections of that book that they read and they're like, whoa, I never thought about that. I never thought about how the family was affected. I never thought about these things. We can get into some of the things that you like about that book, too. But you were saying you feel like sections of it feel a bit dated to you at this point in time, or you would maybe slightly adjust your take about what you're talking about in them. What would you change if you're writing that book again today? What are the primary things that you think you'd shift and want to present differently now versus when you wrote it three years ago?

[Mitchell Askew]

Maybe, yeah, I published it in 2024, but most of the writing took place in 2023. And that. That's a helpful perspective.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

And sometimes it takes a good. You have to kind of zoom out and look back because. Right. If I was new to bitcoin, that probably would blow my mind, and that would be the book I needed five, six years ago. But as people who have lived and breathed this for years, Right. It's a beginner book, so we probably don't get much out of it. Now. The really, the thing I would change is it wouldn't be the conservative case for bitcoin. It would be the nationalist America first case for bitcoin. So. So conservatism has, I feel like, kind of lost its meaning.

[Jake Roquet]

Right. Conserve what?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, conserve what exactly? And the Republican Party doesn't necessarily represent my values. They're certainly not about limited government and lowering government spending. They're, you know, just as bad as the other side when it comes to a lot of those things. So I would probably change the entire, like, framework. And you know what? I'm appealing to the audience I'm appealing to with the book. But that being said, I stand by pretty much all of the content in the book. Bitcoin and sound money will help restore the family. Right. A lot of people, you know, they wait to have to get married and have kids because it's difficult, because prices go up, because the economy is hard out there. For young people, sound money and bitcoin can fix that. So that's really the main takeaway I hope people get from the book because there's a lot of finger pointing around the population crisis and different things to blame. I think the money is really the primary catalyst there because everyone, at least most people I talk to actually wants a family. People don't want to not get married and have kids and build a long lasting legacy. But it's difficult when the currency loses value, when having just an average job, which by definition 50% of people are average or below average, having an average job doesn't pay the bills. You can't buy a house, you can't send your kids to college, buy two cars, like all that stuff versus 60 years ago. There was problems in the world then, but at the very minimum, you could work at wherever in town. Just your normal, you know, we could be a mailman or garbage man or work at the mill or cut hair or a normal job that is needed for society and you could make ends meet with income leftover. Can't do that now. And it's because of fiat currency.

[Jake Roquet]

This is interesting. This was a last minute interview we did together. We just saw you out in the hall and I said, let's rip one. This will be fun. So I got my AI generated outline in front of me and there's something that stands out to me. You wrote in 2024, September 2024, you publicly broke from the Trump administration. So you put on, I don't know, AI here. Right. But I don't know that you're exactly connected at the hit. But it was over the shitcoin launch, basically the Trump shitcoin launch that you basically said like, like would. Would make you regret your vote. And that the fact that they haven't made a point of distinguishing between crypto and bitcoin is something that felt like a betrayal of where they came from initially. Yeah. Just what do. What is. What do you think it would look like if a president was approaching it. Right. To be going through having a pro bitcoin agenda, considering the things we've talked about. Right. The reality of if they came out and were overtly pro bitcoin, started stacking a bunch of SATs, treasury demand would plummet. Dollar would probably die immediately. It'd be a massive problem. How would you strategize it if you were in that position right now?

[Mitchell Askew]

Well, I forgot about that post, but

[Jake Roquet]

September 2024, total vindication, right? Yeah. At least he called it early.

[Mitchell Askew]

I did, apparently. Yeah. Actually I did not vote. And that was the primary reason why obviously, I wasn't going to vote for the other candidate. But I saw what was going on. It didn't seem like. It seemed like bitcoin was just a means for getting votes rather than they actually really wanted to support the industry.

[Jake Roquet]

That seems right.

[Mitchell Askew]

The obfuscation between bitcoin and everything else was pretty clear that, all right, they're kind of more in it for the. Everything else make money. Insider trading on polymarket and Melania Coin and all that stuff. And so, yeah, you know, my buddy,

[Jake Roquet]

I hate to say it, a distant acquaintance, someone who is my buddy. Me and him were here. We were at the bitcoin conference in 2021, I believe, in Miami. We went and saw Jordan Peterson and Breedlove have a chat. This was before I was working on the what Is Money? Show. And we were just, like, psyched about it. We were having a great time, me and him, and we're chatting a bit afterwards. And he. I could tell he was a sharp guy, an interesting guy. We hung out a few times afterwards. And then he launched the Melania Coin, Trump Coin, and the Malay. The. The whatever. The Libra. The Malay coin. And he just probably made it back. Yeah, he had a chat with Coffeezilla about it. I don't know, man. It seemed a little sketchy, bro.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, that's when you go to.

[Jake Roquet]

You could have been great, you know, like, you could have done something awesome, and instead you launched a bunch of shitcoins with, you know.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

Yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

What a waste of intellectual capital.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, Right, right, right. And you don't. Man, you just don't get away with anything. I've never in my entire life seen anybody get away with anything, you know, and these people who. There's a lot of different iterations of it. I don't want to call everybody out exactly. But it's just like, if you try to cut corners and you take advantage of other people and like, like, siphon off the people who trust you the most, you, like, steal all their wealth. It's like you just don't get away with it, you know? Yeah, it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

See, that's coffee. Zillow's take on Stretch was disappointing because he's done a great job covering.

[Jake Roquet]

He's had some great little. Yeah. Some great criticisms of the crypto world as a whole.

[Mitchell Askew]

But I really appreciate your question about what would a pro bitcoin administration really look like? And the framework I view it is pro being pro bitcoin. Is pro America. It is American citizens first. It falls under that umbrella. So like that would be first and foremost is, is this pro America? Is this an America first position? And bitcoin, in my mind, absolutely would be. So one thing that's not America first is fighting wars for other countries, which is enabled by having a current money printer.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

And being able to devalue the currency despite the broader population not being in favor of that war. So if you read history books about the American Revolution and other wars, if you wanted to go to war, you had to get the population to support it because you had to open up their wall.

[Jake Roquet]

Who are we killing and why? Okay, here's the money. Not just right exactly.

[Mitchell Askew]

Now, they don't have to do that. They can just print the money and go to war even if the broader country doesn't support it. So that's one component. Second, it ties back to the average person being able to support their family. So a pro Bitcoin administration could enable that through a variety of different ways. I mean, you know, Bitcoin matching 401ks or Bitcoin grants, or making Bitcoin legal tender and encouraging and facilitating transactions in the economy in Bitcoin, more deregulation for bitcoin businesses. There's really no limit to the things they could do to facilitate Bitcoin adoption within the country specifically and with the United States government. Even if Strategies holdings aren't their Bitcoin, they still have like 130,000 bitcoin. So they'd be more than fine.

[Jake Roquet]

Right.

[Mitchell Askew]

And at some point, it's best for the American people if we let the central banks go, if we stop trying to be in control of the financial system, abusing the Swift Rails and freezing other countries reserves and really weaponizing the financial system, freezing bank accounts of political dissidents, all that stuff. Bitcoin is vehemently opposed against that. And it's also like a weapon that can't be stopped. Maybe weapon isn't the right word, but it's a tool that, it's a shield

[Jake Roquet]

that can't be stopped.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, right. We, we get to use that and there's nothing they can do to stop it. So it is in the best interest of the American people if there's not resistance towards us using that. Rather, there's different ways to encourage us to use Bitcoin and really build our economy around something that's, that's steadfast and aligned with the laws of nature and God and physics and doesn't steal from people, doesn't create Value, quote, unquote, out of thin air.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, I really do think, I've heard people say this before, but I really do think bitcoin is more American than the dollar for sure. And the, the princip, the principles of what it means to be an American, the founding principles, I think bitcoin is much more aligned with.

[Mitchell Askew]

And so yeah, the founding fathers were not fans of central banking.

[Jake Roquet]

That's right. That is right. They left us some very stark warnings about that and we didn't listen. So we're going to sort it out. We got it everybody. We're going to be okay. Last, last question for you. So we met in Miami. This was probably 2023 maybe, I want to think. And we had 2024. We were on a yacht in the, you know, out in the coast. Beautiful night, lovely place. Yeah, we had a great time.

[Mitchell Askew]

I totally do that all the time.

[Jake Roquet]

Well, yeah, we're always on the is, me and Mitchell. We, you know, we managed to make the. We both had like dreams of working in the bitcoin space, I imagine at one point in time. And we managed to pull it off, bring it together. It's been a lot of fun. It's like an interesting adventure. It's cool working on something that is, is mission oriented. We're not just like clocking it and taking a paycheck. We're going somewhere doing thing that, doing something that we're passionate about. If somebody was new to bitcoin, say like in a similar, similar position to you before they were starting and they, let's say not just new but they started to understand it, they started to develop that passion for it and they wanted to work in the space. What advice would you give them and where do you think there's the most demand right now for people looking to move into the space, work wise?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, great question. The advice I would give and this worked for me, offer to work for free. In fact, take it one step beyond that. Just start doing the job for free and bring them tangible results. So tailor it to whatever position you're applying for. I got my foot in the door by doing social media and running a bitcoin Twitter account. So before I was even hired for the role, I just made a bunch of posts. I'm like, here, you can have them, use them if you want. Whatever. That's like low hanging fruit. Another piece of low hanging fruit is come to these conferences. You don't have to buy the whale Pass, like find another young hustler and split a hotel room and you know, be Frugal. Right. If you're a young person, you don't have to spend all your sats to come to a conference, but like you probably should and just meet people with no expectations. Just talk, post online and meet people on the Internet and then the best space to get into right now. And maybe this isn't even bitcoin specific, but it's AI, undoubtedly, like the physical infrastructure of bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence. Because I've been in the industry like four or five years now, companies come and go. I can name a handful of companies that were at the top of the game in 2021 or two or three or whatever. And you don't really hear as much from them these days. Some of them have completely blown up. But the physical infrastructure isn't going anywhere and the demand for these data centers is increasing faster than you can actually build them. And that's really where the puck of the economy is going, is towards AI. And I think there's close integration with bitcoin. So honestly, like, the infrastructure side of things is where I would start to look. Either bitcoin mining directly with the servers or, you know, at one of the data centers. Anything to do really with all of the physical, tangible aspects of bitcoin.

[Jake Roquet]

Last question. Looking forward to this next epoch. Let's say what's the most exciting thing to you? Like, where do you see the opportunity? Or what's something that just makes you think, like by 2030, 2031. Something in that range? Like, I'm excited to see this come to fruition.

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah. And this is going to sound terrible, but I'm excited to see more qe. So for most of my time.

[Jake Roquet]

About time, we've had a dry spell out here.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

We have.

[Mitchell Askew]

Dude, it's been three years.

[Jake Roquet]

Anybody got some liquidity? You know?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, let's. Let's get some liquidity into the markets, which it's been. It was QT from 2022 until the end of 2025. So for most of the time I've been in bitcoin, we've actually been in like money vacuum territory from the Fed balance sheet standpoint. So I'm curious to see how bitcoin really performs during the next round of qe. And historically, each round of QE is bigger than the previous on an absolute and relative basis. And we saw what they had to do in 2020 with the QE Bazookas. I don't know if we'll get that explosive of quantitative easing, but I think this gradual increasing in the Fed balance Sheet over the next couple of years is really going to start to compound and bitcoin always does what people least expect. So we could see some bitcoin prices that are much higher in the next few years with that being one of the primary catalysts.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, yeah. Larry Lepard, you know he's had some great charts he's been talking about on X on the past couple months. You know, he's, he has a compelling case to make that the big print, the big kahuna would be here around the corner for us this time.

[Navy Federal Credit Union Announcer]

He does.

[Mitchell Askew]

I tend to think it'll be more

[Jake Roquet]

of a, the big gradual print, a continual big printing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Mitchell Askew]

But yeah, he's, he's put out a lot of good research on this.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah. Shout out to the great Lawrence. Thanks for coming on man.

[Mitchell Askew]

Dude, thanks for having me. I'm glad I walked by.

[Jake Roquet]

Happenstance that worked out.

[Mitchell Askew]

Got this going on.

[Jake Roquet]

Yes sir.

[Mitchell Askew]

Thank you.

[Jake Roquet]

Yeah, where can people find you too? Mitchell.

[Mitchell Askew]

Mitchell ask you on X and then if you're interested in mining bitcoin. We didn't talk about it too much today, but you get a hundred percent bonus depreciation on the machines. I work for Blockware. We can help you set it all up. We can source the machines, host them at our facilities. You can produce bitcoin for around $50,000 a coin right now. So 35% discount to the spot price. If you're a high income earner and you need a tax deduction, this is a no brainer. So Blockware solutions dot com.

[Jake Roquet]

Right on. And they can just shoot you a DM or what's the best way to contact you?

[Mitchell Askew]

Yeah, you can DM me on X. I try to shift through the fake Chinese profiles that are always in my DMs. But yeah, shoot me a DM there. Or you can email me mitchellockwaresolutions.com yeah, right on.

[Jake Roquet]

Sounds good, sounds good. And if you want to work in bitcoin, you can also shoot me a message on X at Jakeroquet Underscore. And like Mitchell was saying, shoot me a message. We always could use help around here. So if you're something you're passionate about, shoot me a message. We'll talk. Thanks for coming on Mitchell. Appreciate you bro.

[Mitchell Askew]

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